In modern combat the atrocities of rape and mutilation, have become all too common strategic tools of warfare.The use of rape as a weapon is one of the most violent and humiliating offenses inflicted on the enemy, the brutalization of rape permanently scars the victim’s mind, soul and often body. The World Health Organization (WHO) […]
African Union (AU) chair Bingu wa Mutharika announced a plan to make Africa food secure in the next five years, according to IRIN. The plan, detailed in a document entitled The African Food Basket, “Requires countries to allocate a substantial portion of their budget to agriculture, provide farming input subsidies, and make available affordable information […]
Are rising global food prices here to stay? Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute thinks so, and warns that things will only get worse in the face of climate change, increasing population, water scarcity, and soil erosion. In “The Great Food Crisis of 2011” published in Foreign Policy Magazine, Brown argued the difference between […]
Like many Americans I watched the visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao this week with great interest. My original intent had been to focus on defense related issues like China’s rising Pacific naval presence and their relations with North Korea; but an item in the 20 January issue of the Washington Post unexpectedly caught my […]
by Myra MacPherson The contrasting legacies of two 20th-century American journalists, now long dead, remain fascinating. Walter Lippmann and I.F. Stone are dynamic examples of opposing approaches to journalism. Lippmann the insider, fancied the fine life of being “inside” to a degree unthinkable for most journalists. He wrote speeches for U.S. presidents. When he visited […]
As the new year is falls into place the next big spending holiday lies right around the corner, Valentines Day, the day which is to give symbolic measure to love. Millions of couples are looking for that perfect token to show how they feel for their special someone. While the day may not be exchanging […]
Another year has sped by with more change and economic uncertainty throughout the global markets. From a journalist’s viewpoint, 2010 was filled with some of the most dynamic and complex economic trends and global market events possible. For instance, the Euro zone debt crisis, the global currency war, coverage of the international currency war – announced by Brazilian Finance Minister and precipitated by Ben Bernanke’s quantitative easing monetarist policy – the perils of high-frequency trading, and the burdensome economic impact of two-front warfare on the domestic agenda are just a few issues that led the Global Markets through a year of risk, volatility, turmoil and uncertainty.
This is Part II of a two-part post on lawfare. Click here for Part I, in which I critiqued the way in which Brooke Goldstein, director of the non-profit, The Lawfare Project, envisages lawfare. In this post, I examine the solutions she proposes. d One of Goldstein’s primary concerns is the many lawsuits against people […]
The United States House of Representatives is back in full swing and with that renewed and new debates are brewing. One such debate that the House will soon vote on is a bill to repeal the health care reform, which was signed into law last March by President Obama. The repeal of the Affordable Care […]
Today we marked the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. I have to admit to certain amount of awe at that period of history called Camelot. From this more cynical present I find it amazing that there was a time not so long ago in our past in which idealism was […]
Credit Suisse today reported that a number of emerging market (EM) economies are experiencing rising inflation; and in some, central banks are countering with interest rate hikes (see excerpt below). Might seem strange to those of us who live in a country where policy interest rates are at zero and the Federal Reserve seems to be more […]
Haiti’s former “President for Life” Jean-Claude Duvalier made a surprising return to Haiti on Sunday after 25 years in exile. He stated that he hoped to take part in the “rebirth” of the nation, and aging friends said they had begged him to come back and visit. But a simple Duvalierist reunion in the luxurious […]
(For more on this graphic, go here.) The venerable Matt Wald at the NY Times reported the other day that CO2 emissions in the US peaked in 2005 and, according to the latest estimates, we’re not going back to those numbers until ten years down the road. How come? In part – and in part […]
Every once in a while, FPA Afghanistan blogger Patrick Frost emails me an article with which I very much disagree and I, in turn, write a post criticizing it. (See a post of mine from last year on preventive war.) The tradition continues with an interview, published by AviationWeek, with Brooke Goldstein, director of the […]
Getting U.S. teens to “girl up” The UN Foundation has launched a new campaign to raise awareness among teenage girls in the United States about the lives of teenage girls in developing countries. The program, Girl Up, asks American girls to “high five” their less empowered peers by learning facts (one in seven is married […]