I’ve been lauding the good folks of California for their progressive views – expressed at the polls last Tuesday – on climate and energy. I should toot the horn for my own state, New York, too. I worked for 11 years for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and came to have a […]
Tablet and Pen edited by Reza Aslan For anyone who is interested, Reza Aslan, who wrote “Beyond Fundamentalism” which I wrote about in my last entry, is currently on tour for his new book “Tablet and Pen.” He will be in Washington, DC tomorrow (Thursday November 11th) and in New York City from November 15th […]
The execution of crusader “Reynald Krak” by Saladin On October 29th two packages containing explosive devices were sent from Yemen to the United States. They were addressed to synagogues in Chicago, Illinois and are now believed to be the work of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). One detail of the plot which we would never have known […]
Last month, Gail Harris of the FPA U.S. Defense blog expressed some skepticism about the claim that the United States’ problems in Afghanistan arose because the U.S. was too focused on Iraq: Like many, I’ve wondered why we didn’t do something earlier to counter the Taliban resurgence before it got out of hand. The conventional […]
Among the many significant aspects of President Obama’s trip to Asia this week are the agreements and programs that are being announced relative to climate and energy. In India, the headline news was his endorsing India’s quest for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. But with India being one of the fastest growing […]
Two articles appeared in the last few days that caught my attention, both on Al Qaeda: one about Yemen and the other about Morocco and the Western Sahara. The New York Times had a piece last week titled Yemen’s Drive on Al Qaeda Faces Internal Skepticism and The New York Post ran an article on […]
Been spending a lot of time blogging about Afghanistan, thought it was time to look at what’s happening in Iraq. The impetus for me was press reports of increasing numbers of insurgent attacks against Iraqi citizens and the continued inability of Iraq to set up a functioning government in the aftermath of the March elections. […]
UN attempts Haitian tent camp evacuation A few hundred of the estimated 6,000 residents of a tent camp in Haiti outside Port-au-Prince were evacuated by UN workers because of the threat of floods and mudslides from Hurricane Tomas. Moore, Kutcher add star power to UN trafficking effort Celebrity couple Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher have […]
David Cameron and Nicholas Sarkozy this week signed a historic 50-year treaty designed to vitalize defense and security cooperation between Britain and France. As previously noted, the impetus for the treaty originates from Britain’s need to redress foreseen “structural” defense procurement shortages within the Ministry of Defence. (see: “When Great Powers Decline…” http://powerpolitics.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2010/10/27/17/) At the […]
Rob Portman, United States Trade Representative under George W. Bush, was perhaps the most successful person to hold this job after Robert Zoellick. Last week he was elected to service in the Senate representing my home state of Ohio. He was hammered hard for his support of free trade during the campaign but managed to win by […]
The UN has released the the United Nations’ Human Development Report. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the report and it has taken on a historic milestone as it charts human progress some 20 years before that first reports publication. The first Human Development Report, was released in 1990, for which its basic and […]
In a display of the increasing role that financial, trade and economic policy holds in US foreign policy, President Obama in the first leg of his Asian tour announced a host of new trade deals with India supporting tens of thousands of US jobs as he began a 10-day trip through Asia — demonstrating the importance of global trade to the sluggish US economy.
The Executive Director of the World Food Programme Josette Sheeran recently outlined a 10 point strategy for ending hunger. According to a WFP press release, the “world is making headway on fighting hunger – the first Millennium Goal — but not as fast as is needed. The proportion of hungry people in the world has […]
The Word Food Programme has started the Women’s Empowerment Fund, a new initiative which recognizes the importance of women in the global fight against hunger. The Fund envisions helping women in four areas. One is in business leadership, since, as the press report writes: “women in Africa re-invest about 90 percent of their income back […]
by Deborah Fallows The village of Xizhou is nestled in a verdant strip of land in China’s southwestern Yunnan Province. To the east lies Erhai Lake, where cormorants play. To the west, hills rise to the Tibetan Plateau, where herders graze their yaks. During World War II, Xizhou offered a first radio contact point for […]