Abkhazia

post-soviet roundup

Posted by jfb on May 6th, 2009 | 0 comments

Haven’t checked in on Georgia for a while. What a mess.

The European Union has finally decided that it can’t accomplish anything in the Middle East, so maybe it should pay some attention to, y’know, Europe:

European Union to Reach Out to 6 Former Soviet States in Meeting

“There are new priorities on the agenda which were not so obvious last year, including the need to stabilize these countries, which are moving from one crisis to another,” said Nicu Popescu, a research fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The focus is less on structural adjustments or institution-building and more on crisis management.”

And file this one under “what could possibly go wrong?”

Russia Plans to Power Arctic Oil Drilling With Floating Nuclear Plants

abkhazia . arctic . georgia . nukes . ossetia . politics

geopolitics

Posted by jfb on March 26th, 2009 | 0 comments

Been a long time since we checked in on the remaining Republic of Georgia, eh? Long story short: Georgians stuck by President Saakashvili during the war and immediately after, but now that it’s clear that Georgia got pwned, the opposition is heating up. Can the government remember it’s on the side of democracy, or will it crack down? Meanwhile, the Russians (I almost typed “Soviets”) are digging in in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Liquid War: Postcard from Pipelineistan

Global financial crisis or not, oil and natural gas are the long-term keys to an inexorable transfer of economic power from the West to Asia. Those who control Pipelineistan — and despite all the dreaming and planning that’s gone on there, it’s unlikely to be Washington — will have the upper hand in whatever’s to come, and there’s not a terrorist in the world, or even a long war, that can change that.

And this:

Russian subs ‘to back Arctic claims’

abkhazia . arctic . georgia . ossetia . pipelines

news keeps on happening

Posted by jfb on November 16th, 2008 | 0 comments

Once again, I wish I had a tag called “awesome.”

The Alternate History Theme Park Where Dinosaurs Fought in the Civil War

Hubble snaps planet orbiting distant star: First visible-light image of gravitationally-bound world

The Hubble space telescope has captured the first visible-light image of an exoplanet orbiting a star – a body no greater than three Jupiter masses, gravitationally-bound to Fomalhaut in the constellation Piscis Australis.

Mission Accomplished: India fifth in world to reach moon
High-Performance Ares Rocket Engine Passes Review
Shuttle Endeavour links with space station