Author: Khorrahan

(9/3 – 125) Kazakhstan is gearing up for snap elections of the lower house of parliament on March 19, and there is a sense of anticipation in the air. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who came to power in 2019, called for snap elections in the wake of the deadly street protests in January 2022. The elections are part of the president’s ambitious reform agenda, Jana Kazakhstan (New Kazakhstan), which aims to usher in a new era of political liberalization. The parliamentary elections are stage two of Tokayev’s program, following his re-election winning 80 percent of the votes last November. The coming…

Iraq has awarded a contract to a foreign consultancy firm to prepare the designs for “Sadr” residential city in the capital Baghdad, an official said in remarks published on Wednesday. The Baghdad Municipality has allocated a land with an area of around 14 square kiloemetres for the project, which comprises around 90,000 houses, said Haidar Majeed, a cabinet spokesman. Majeed was quoted by Al-Iqtisad News and other Iraqi publications as saying the project is part of several residential cities planned by Iraq to ease demographic pressure as a result of war damage to houses and a steady population growth. “We…

Despite fraying relations with Beijing, President Joe Biden is expected to forego expansive new restrictions on American investment in China, denying a push by some hawks in his administration and in Congress. According to five people on Capitol Hill and K Street with knowledge of the White House discussions, Biden is scaling back a planned executive order to oversee American investments in China to focus largely on increasing transparency of those deals. The order may still prohibit U.S. investments in at least one Chinese industry — advanced semiconductors — but will likely not block money from flowing to other parts…

Born and raised in Baghdad, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad trained as an architect but stumbled into a career in journalism when, shortly after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, he took a job as translator for a Guardian reporter. He went on to become a respected foreign correspondent covering Middle Eastern affairs; his reporting on the Syrian civil war earned him an Orwell prize for journalism in 2014. In Stranger in Your Own City, he chronicles the past two decades of turmoil with an engaging blend of memoir, reportage and interviews. It is a story of catastrophic societal breakdown, culminating in…