Japan has no choice but to reduce its reliance on nuclear power, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said on Tuesday, as the country battles to end a four-month-old radiation crisis at a tsunami-crippled nuclear plant.

• July 13, 2011

Boosting cooperation between countries sharing the waters of the Amu Darya, Central Asia's longest river, could be key to future peace and security in the region a new report launched today by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) says.

• July 13, 2011

Pakistan is pressing ahead with work on two transnational natural gas pipelines, and is talking about a third, as it looks to expand its regional influence after the war in Afghanistan, officials and analysts said.

• July 11, 2011

When the pro-Western national movement, the so-called revolution of “Roses,” caught fire and swept away the Soviet-style Georgian authorities in 2003, the revolutionary news captured the Lithuanian media’s front page headlines for many weeks to come.

• July 11, 2011

The U.S. nuclear industry this week gets its first peek at a roadmap for new regulations that ultimately could cost it billions in the wake of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi disaster.

• July 11, 2011

Last month, thousands of Japanese took to the streets to demand an end to nuclear power in their country. For more than half a century, Japan had been in the uncomfortable situation of being both the only nation that has suffered an atomic attack, but also one of the countries that are most reliant on atomic energy.

• July 11, 2011

Ukraine’s state-owned ore extracting company, is seeking 6.5 billion hryvnia ($810 million) in loans from state lenders to explore for uranium at the Novokonstantinovskoe deposit, Ekonomicheskie Izvestia reported.

• July 11, 2011

By Naim Ameur,
Senior Manager, Prime Ministry of Tunisia
EGF Affiliated Expert on Maghreb politics

Tunisia embarks upon the process of transition to democracy

It is now a well established fact amongst both the general public as well as the specialist of Middle Eastern politics that Tunisia under the almost-quarter century long rule of former President, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, was managed by a highly restrictive and rather authoritarian political system. The system empowered key pro-regime political instruments such as the Constitutional Democratic Rally simultaneously to ensuring that opposition political parties remained largely powerless or even being loyal to the regime. Other regime opponents, such as Tunisia’s Islamists, found themselves in exile and for the most part expelled from the country. While this is not surprising, given the dearth of democratic political culture in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), this likewise ensured that the country remained a “political wasteland” under its former president, who created what some local scholars now refer to as “political desertification”. READ MORE

• July 11, 2011