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Friday Spotlight: Ushahidi

Friday Spotlight: Ushahidi

Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, is a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Ushahidi’s roots are in the collaboration of Kenyan citizen journalists during a time of crisis. The website was used to map incidents of violence and peace […]

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Liberian Men Convicted of Stealing WorldVision Aid

The United States federal court convicted two Liberian men on Tuesday of conspiring to steal more than $1.4 million in U.S. aid from World Vision. Prosecutors said the two Liberians had sold nearly all of World Vision’s food aid; auditors said a third of it was allocated to towns that did not exist.

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The "Security Dilemma" of the Caucasus

The "Security Dilemma" of the Caucasus

Having largely gone unreported by the Western media in general, a burgeoning arms race between Azerbijan and Armenia has steadily crystalized over the past few years.  Predominantly concerning frictions over the disputed regions of Nagorno-Karabakh drawn across ethnic and geopolitical lines, the two nations have begun acquiring military hardware at a frantic rate. Emboldened by the rapid […]

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Nuclear Nonsense from the NYT

Newspaper editorials that recommend policies to foreign leaders and governments are almost invariably pointless and patronizing – in short, a waste of time. Do European publications, for instance, really think that President Barack Obama will be influenced by their views in dealing with the new Republican-led House of Representatives – or that Chancellor Angela Merkel […]

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Where Eagles Dare

Where Eagles Dare

Being a lifelong and avid NY Giants fan, I am not generally given to blowing the horn for the Philadelphia Eagles.  However, there was a great story in the NY Times yesterday about how the Eagles’ stadium, Lincoln Field, is going to be tricked out with a particularly impressive array of renewable energy upgrades.  This […]

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U.S. Asst. Secretary of Defense Affirms U.S. support for Georgia's NATO aspirations

U.S. Asst. Secretary of Defense Affirms U.S. support for Georgia's NATO aspirations

LISBON – The U.S. Assistant Secretary for Defense for international security affairs, Ambassador Alexander Vershbow, affirmed U.S. support for Georgia’s aspirations for NATO membership here at the Young Atlantacist Youth Summit taking place alongside official deliberations over a new Strategic Concept for the transatlantic alliance. Vershbow said that NATO partnerships with Russia, Ukraine and Georgia […]

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Video: Searching for a New NATO Strategy

Video: Searching for a New NATO Strategy

FPA fellow Sarwar Kashmeri, author of NATO 2.0: Reboot or Delete, spoke to Euronews’ Paul Hackett ahead of today’s NATO summit in Lisbon about the future of the alliance. You can watch the video here. The war in Afghanistan and the relationship with Russia are just some of the issues NATO is trying to grapple with […]

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Central Europe, NATO and Homo Atlanticus: A Polish Military Perspective

Dominik P. Jankowski from Poland’s J5 Strategic Planning Directorate and Tomasz K. Kowalik, Military Assistant to the Chief of the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces, offer a military perspective on Central Europe’s efforts to mend rifts and manage strategic capabilities inside NATO at the Center for European Policy Analysis.  I met Domink in […]

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PIMCO's El-Erian disagrees with his boss

PIMCO's El-Erian disagrees with his boss

Thank God he does!  Earlier this week I wrote a piece (click here) about money men who don’t understand country risk writing investment letters prescribing economic policy to the US government.  Bill Gross, founder of mega-bond fund, Pacific Investment Management Co. (PIMCO) out of sunny Newport Beach CA, criticized the Federal Reserve and its policy […]

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Will UN Women Succeed?

by Elizabeth Samson On November 10, 2010, the United Nations took an important step towards committing itself to female empowerment with the election of 41 member states to the board of a new agency—the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. Known as UN Women, the new body brings four organizations that […]

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Lower Gasoline Consumption = Lower GHG Output

Lower Gasoline Consumption = Lower GHG Output

An article from Reuters yesterday flagged the fact that the US fleet has been averaging more miles per gallon thus reducing gasoline use and fewer carbon dioxide emissions.  The President made an announcement on raising the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards last April but the trend to more MPG and fewer GHGs has been […]

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Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates on eve of "historic" NATO summit

Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates on eve of "historic" NATO summit

LISBON – Portuguese Prime Minister José Sócrates opened up the Youth Summit here with remarks on NATO’s new Strategic Concept, which he modestly branded the “Lisbon Concept.”  Sócrates said the two lasting legacies of the summit would be an affirmation of NATO’s partnership with Russia and the start of a “new transition phase” in Afghanistan […]

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Tuberculosis under tents

I recently published a piece for PlusNews about the Tuberculosis epidemic that has long been endemic in Haiti and could worsen with the living situations of over a million Haitians still living in tents ten months after the January 12 earthquake.  As with most issues in post-quake Haiti, the earthquake merely brought to light and […]

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Live Blogging: Lisbon Summit

LISBON – Lisbon is a city that has been on the tongues of many a European multilateralist in recent years.  Not only is it the namesake of the European Union’s most recent governing agreement, the Lisbon Treaty, that lays out a number of ambitious goals in creating common foreign and security policy for the body, […]

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Cyber Isn't Just for Geeks

Saying “I’m writing my master’s thesis on cybersecurity” is akin to saying “I’m writing my thesis about the United States.” It is often quoted that the internet was developed more for interoperability than to address security concerns. The silver lining? Russia is still expanding its tech industry. The field is still growing and evolving. New technological developments, such as the adoption of iPv6 have yet to take hold. This means that there is still room (to a certain extent) to get in at the ground level.

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