A United Nations human rights agency has demanded that the Chinese government immediately release a prominent Chinese human rights lawyer who has been detained for nearly a year, according to a statement released on Monday by an advocacy group. The lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, had said he was tortured during previous rounds of detention. The New York [...]

Despite a drop-off of instability in the Delta today, oil exploration in Nigeria has slumped to the lowest in a decade after producers including Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Total SA backed away from investment until the country’s petroleum law is finally passed. Just one exploration well was drilled in Nigeria over the past two [...]

Balkanalysis.com Director Chris Deliso recently featured an intriguingly insightful interview on the domestic and foreign policy issues facing Greece in the 21st century from John Sitilides, a government relations and global public policy specialist with Trilogy Advisors LLC, a Washington, D.C. government affairs company. Mr. Sitilides also chairs the State Department’s professional development program for [...]

BusinessWeek has reported that the U.S. today revoked the visa of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s ambassador to Washington as part of a five-month diplomatic feud between the two countries. This war of words has followed a brash regime in the oil-rich country of nationalization in the form of expropriation, most notably in the name of [...]

Noted across international wires over the last few days has been the story of two former executives of Miami-based telecommunications company LatiNode finding themselves indicted on Monday, December 20th for paying more than $500,000 in bribes to former government officials in Honduras. A symbol of what was a systematic web of a corrupt former government’s [...]

The Warsaw Stock Exchange aims to be Poland’s only power trading market, Chief Executive Officer Ludwik Sobolewski said today when asked about the government’s plans to sell its stake in the Polish Power Exchange, or Polpx. The Polish government, the largest shareholder in Polpx with a 22 percent stake, is willing to sell its shares [...]

The long-standing and ongoing boom in commodity prices has given natural resources investors much to cheer about. It’s also revived a leviathan once thought tamed: resource nationalism or “indigenization”. Following a benign period of global deregulation, liberalization and privatization – the “Washington Consensus” of the post-Cold War era – Tim Woods reports that natural resources [...]

Its an interesting public relations tactic – Zimbabwe’s indigenization laws equate to radical political action which immediately hinders foreign investment, and to counter this clear trend, the Gov’t issues a press release that the aim of such action is to encourage investment security through indigenous participation. Why haven’t we heard this before? Why has the [...]

This year, China overtook the United States to become Brazil’s largest investor. In the first six months of 2010, FDI flows reached an estimated $10 billion, up from literally $83 million in the same period last year. The surge to many is hardly surprising given that China became Brazil’s largest trade partner in 2008. But [...]

The team at 1minutetosavetheworld have published a blog documenting the follow-up from South Korea’s Lee Myung-bak administration last year setting an ambitious goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent below “business-as-usual” projections through 2020 under its low-carbon, green growth vision. Shin Hyon-hee documents in the Korea Herald that the voluntary target, announced on the [...]