Συρία: Γενική αμνηστία από τον Άσαντ

Διάταγμα μέσω του οποίου χορηγείται «γενική αμνηστία» για όλα τα «εγκλήματα» που έχουν διαπραχθεί μέχρι σήμερα, υπέγραψε ο πρόεδρος της Συρίας Μπασάρ Αλ Άσαντ.

Ο Μπασάρ Αλ ΆσαντΗ είδηση μεταδόθηκε από το κρατικό τηλεοπτικό δίκτυο, το οποίο επικαλούμενο το υπουργείο Δικαιοσύνης υποστήριξε ότι αυτή η πρωτοβουλία υιοθετείται «στο πλαίσιο της συμφιλίωσης και της ενότητας (…) μετά τις νίκες που σημείωσε ο συριακός στρατός» επί πεδίου.

Energy Reform in Mexico Continues to Present Risks

So dear to Mexican society is the legacy of Lázaro Cárdenas’s 1938 expropriation of the country’s oil sector that it is still celebrated annually as a national holiday. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that new liberalizing constitutional reforms of the sector, which promise to reopen the sector to foreign investment, have been controversial.

Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), the Mexican national oil company, was given a monopoly over the sector subsequent to the expropriations. Mexico’s oil has historically been in conventional, easy to access reservoirs and, as such, Pemex has proven relatively stable, if inefficient, in its production of such resources.

Geopolitical Journey, Part 2: Borderlands

Stratfor's George Friedman is continuing his trip this week across the region, including the countries of Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Serbia, Turkey and Azerbaijan. This report on the same region was written in 2010, as he was returning from a similar journey that explored the geopolitical imperatives of those nations. The observations and forecasts then in many ways mirror the reality today, four years later.

A borderland is a region where history is constant: Everything is in flux. The countries we are visiting on this trip (Turkey, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine and Poland) occupy the borderland between Islam, Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. Roman Catholic Hapsburg Austria struggled with the Islamic Ottoman Empire for centuries, with the Ottomans extending northwest until a climactic battle in Vienna in 1683. Beginning in the 18th century, Orthodox Russia expanded from the east, through Belarus and Ukraine. For more than two centuries, the belt of countries stretching from the Baltic to the Black seas was the borderland over which three empires fought.

Presidential candidates, European federalism and Charles Grant

In a recent CER insight Charles Grant offers a number of criticisms of themes in my book, ‘Turbulent and Mighty Continent: What Future for Europe?’ My basic thesis in the part of the work he criticises is simple. The coming of the euro has created de facto economic federalism at the core of the EU. The eurozone countries have become irrevocably interdependent. New forms of collective economic management simply have to be set up to manage that interdependence – and to cope with the strains and conflicts it has produced. The Union is so far only in the early stages of that process, which will have to involve fiscal mechanisms, and not only a banking union. 



Economic federalism, I go on to argue, is not possible in the longer term without political federalism – in some form or other – because otherwise it has no effective legitimacy. The euro may have been set up in the usual EU fashion, as a back-stage deal between a few major states, but the consequence has been to undermine that very way of doing things. The traditional problems of the EU – lack of democratic involvement of the citizenry, and the absence of legitimate political leadership – can no longer be simply swept aside or disregarded. The surge of support for populist parties has its origin in this new situation.