Skip to main content

Palestine

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Rise and Fall of LEHMAN BROTHERS

Lehman Brothers’ stock was selling at $86 a share in February 2007, giving the company a market capitalisation of nearly $60 billion. For the year, the company reported a new record high in net income, over $4 billion. In January 2008, Lehman Brothers was the fourth-largest investment bank in the U.S. In March, immediately after Bear Stearns (the second largest holder of mortgage backed securities, right after Lehman Brothers) almost collapsed, Lehman stock dropped by almost 50%. In June, the company reported a quarterly loss of $2.8 billion, its first quarterly loss since being spun off from American Express way back in 1994. By the end of 2008, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. had vanished from the investment banking landscape, the largest corporate bankruptcy filing (with $619  billion  in debt) in U.S. history.   The Beginnings of Lehman Brothers            Source: HBS Lehman Brothers was founded in t...

The Six-Day War

The Six Day war was the third large scale military confrontation between Israel and the Arab states which in turn was a result of the political tension that had existed for decades following the founding of Israel in 1948. Due to the territorial disputes that happened during the birth of Israel in 1948, a coalition of Arab nations invaded the Jewish state, leading to the First Arab Israeli War. The invasion failed but Israel lost territories to Jordan*, Egypt and Syria. The second major conflict was during the Suez Crisis of 1956-57 when Israel, with direct support from the United Kingdom and France, invaded Egypt in response to the nationalization of the Suez Canal. It was only the heavy pressure of the United States of America that forced Israel to withdraw from the Suez region in 1967. There was a period of relative calm during the late 1950s and early 1960s but it was only a calm before the coming storm. Arab leaders were not happy at the status-quo at the moment and so...

From Spy to President: Part-1

It was December 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and in Dresden, crowds were gathering outside the headquarters of the Stasi, the East German secret police, shouting insults and demanding access. Nearby, frantic KGB officers – the Soviet advisers whom the Stasi had long referred to as "the friends" – were barricaded inside their villa, burning papers. "We destroyed everything," remembered one of those officers, Vladimir Putin. "All our communications, our lists of contacts and our agents' networks … We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst." Toward evening, a group of protesters broke away from the Stasi building and started marching toward the KGB villa. Panicked, Putin called the Soviet military command in Dresden and asked for reinforcements. None were forthcoming. "I got the feeling then that the country no longer existed. That it had disappeared," Putin told an interviewer years later. "It was clear the union was ...