PlanetNext

Something has changed in the world. Something fundamental, if names actually mean anything. As of the start of this month, Internet browsers find the name “Palestine” when they google anything related to what has long been known as the Palestinian Territories. This is in line with “the lead of the U.N.,” Google’s managers point out. [...]

Enhancing cooperation between ASEAN and the EU in the name of sustainable development and prosperity was the focus of the third EU ASEAN business summit held in Hanoi in-mid March and attended by ASEAN Secretary-General Le Luong Minh, EU Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, Minister of Industry and Trade Vu [...]

A country at war: since 8 March the ceasefire between North and South Korea, signed in 1953, is no longer valid, unilaterally cancelled by Pyongyang. All connections have been cut: the red phone, installed in 1971 for emergencies, has been disactivated.

A proposed free-trade agreement (FTA) between the European Union and Vietnam promises to bolster already fast-rising bilateral trade. While both sides agree an FTA would on the whole be mutually beneficial, negotiations will likely be complicated by the potential socio-economic impacts a pact would have on Vietnam’s fragile transitional economy. Negotiations, which started last June, [...]

Quick: what do ping-pong, baseball and basketball have in common? Of course they are all sports, but the point is: they are sports used at crucial times in contemporary history for major US diplomatic offensives. It was after some ping-pong matches – until then unheard of – that in the early 1970s the American administration [...]

Vietnam’s Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong paid official visits to Belgium, the European Union (EU) institutions, Italy, and the United Kingdom from January 17 to 24 with the aim to forge and reinforce economic and political relations. Among the others, Trong was accompanied by Vietnamese Minister of Planning and Investment Bui Quang Vinh. During [...]

The Mekong is at risk. The world’s 12th-longest river and the 7th-longest in Asia, vital for millions of people living in Tibet, China’s Yunnan province, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam is threatened by the energy needs of the South East Asian region. China began to build its first dam on the Mekong River in [...]

Last month’s Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit held in Phnom Penh opened with high expectations and closed with an ambivalence that has cast new doubts on the 10-member grouping’s common destiny. While the controversy over competing territorial claims in the South China Sea issue was the most obvious point of tension, the lack [...]