Asiatica Association

From the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (MiBAC): We are proud to announce the opening of the IsIAO Library, Room of the African and Oriental Collections, thanks to the collaboration between the National Central Library of Rome and the Association of International Studies on the Mediterranean and the East - ISMEO.

Info on the Ministry site.

India and Pakistan decades of tensions have been escalating since the suicide car bombing that happened in Pulwama on 14 February 2019. In the bombing, a militant from Jammu and Kashmir killed 40 Indian Central Reserve Police Force members. The terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed claimed responsibility, while Pakistan's government condemned the attack. Reacting to the attack, on 26 February the Indian Air Force conducted airstrikes inside Pakistan. Since then, India and Pakistan have retaliated one another with a series of actions, while most nations worldwide expressed concerned, and Turkey and Iran offered to mediate the crisis.

I am happy to announce that Prof. Gianluca Pastori has accepted to contibute to our Asiatica homepage. Dr. Pastori is currently Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan (Italy).

He has contributed to the IJTS 9/1 (Sept. 19, 2013) with the paper "Shaping the Italian Policy on the North-West Frontier: Giuseppe Tucci and the Limits of the Strategy of “Peripheral Destabilization” (1936-1943)".

Mangalyaan, the spacecraft of ISRO, the Mars Orbiter Mission, today Sept. 24, 2014 successfully entered the Martian orbit. The news is that, according to a blog of The Wall Street Journal - India, it has been the world's cheapest mission to Mars.

Congratulations, India!

The 7th general convention of ruling UCPN (Maoist) party, which was attended by over 4,100 delegates, began on February 2 and concluded today electing a 98-member central committee.

"I am proud to be a regional leader of Gujarat. Rahul is not a national leader but an international leader and he can contest elections in India as well as in Italy". Last Monday Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi (BJP), addressing the Swami Vivekananda Youth Convention in Rajkot, said that the Congress general secretary Rahul is such a global leader to be able to contest election even in Italy.

The Taliban released a video produced by the Haqqani Network documenting the June 1 suicide assault on Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost province, Afghanistan.

Wikileaks, Syria Files: Thursday 5 July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files – more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies, dating from August 2006 to March 2012. This extraordinary data set derives from 680 Syria-related entities or domain names, including those of the Ministries of Presidential Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Information, Transport and Culture. At this time Syria is undergoing a violent internal conflict that has killed between 6,000 and 15,000 people in the last 18 months. The Syria Files shine a light on the inner workings of the Syrian government and economy, but they also reveal how the West and Western companies say one thing and do another.