THE GLOBAL OUTLOOK
GLOBAL NEWS.
This week’s global outlook reports on Missile Silo Confessions; Gays in the Armed Forces; Chavez on the Defense; the Ukrainian Opposition’s teeth-tight Election Win; and why China doesn’t care about America. Click Read More for the full report.
The Weekly Outlook is an editorial briefing for wejetset’s online magazine. Each week we scan international news and aggregate the stories that will likely impact their respective region and possibly the world. From economic issues to politics, we strive to deliver news links that will be useful to our readers as they navigate their local and global spaces.
Wired magazine has an interesting feature about life near Missile Silos. As they report: “Deep in the barren Sonoran Desert in the summer of 2008, Drew Reeves drove a back-hoe fourteen feet into the earth. That was as far as he could go before having to hire help and an Excavator — a construction vehicle with a giant mechanical shovel on the end of a huge boom arm. After pulling out huge blocks of concrete and piles of dirt from the hole, the Excavator operator got a little overzealous. He stretched that boom way too far out and down he went, said Reeves. Many abandoned nuclear missile sites are now owned by regular citizens trying to find a function for them.”
The Economist looks at early steps in repealing a controversial discriminatory policy. “It was Barry Goldwater, a Republican politician, who pointed out that to serve in the armed forces, you don’t have to be straight. You only have to shoot straight. Barack Obama agrees. In his state-of-the-union speech on January 27th, Mr Obama renewed his campaign pledge to end Don’t ask, don’t tell, the 1993 law that bars openly gay people from serving…”
In Venezuela, Chavez is feeling the heat. “No event on the sporting calendar gets Venezuelans more animated than the rivalry between the country’s two largest baseball teams, the Lions of Caracas and the Navigators of Magallanes, based in Valencia. But this season’s championship series had an extra — and unexpected — ingredient thrown into the mix: politics. During the seven-game play-off, fans displayed banners bearing the slogan: “One, two, three. Electricity, water, crime. President — you’ve struck out!”
The Ukrainian Opposition squeezes in a win. “Opposition leader, Viktor F. Yanukovich, appeared on Monday to have won a narrow victory in Ukraine’s presidential election, according to nearly complete results, giving him an unlikely comeback from his humiliating defeat in the 2004 Orange Revolution, when he was shunned as a bumbling Kremlin sidekick.”
Newsweek posts an interesting article about China’s lost interest in the US. “China’s America watchers have fallen on tough times. Back in their profession’s glory days, in the 1980s and ‘90s, they were able to spend years in the United States learning about the place, and both Washington and Beijing were eager for them to report home on what they’d discovered in the New World. Chinese leaders were trying to integrate their vast country into a world system dominated by America, and they took particular interest in how Washington viewed their country. But now U.S. funding for stateside field work has dried up, and Beijing shows little interest in the United States except to complain, threaten, or refuse to work together on global problems.”
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