The Urban Green Council is the NYC Chapter of the US Green Building Council. The New York City folks are very active, extremely creative and progressive, and forging true global leadership in green building and design. I attended their inaugural Urban Green Expo last year, and went again this year. The theme this year of […]
Watch Jon Stewart talk to Linda Polman, the author of “Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?”
Farmers in Uganda have started to use human urine as fertilizer for their crops. They have found the urine to be “first rate” in aiding plant growth, and especially handy for getting rid of banana pests. And fetilizer in Uganda can run $70 a bag, where pee costs nothing! Rose Nabirye, a farmer from Mayuge in […]
You may have noticed that one of the post categories for this blog is “U.S. Aid” and posts under that category are devoted to news and commentary about U.S. efforts to provide financial and humanitarian assistance to other countries. I see this as one of the pillars of the traditional U.S. role in the world. […]
Why do countries act like big babies? I bring this up in reaction to the U.S.’s walkout during Ahmadinejad’s UN speech last week. Now I know, he was suggesting that the U.S. government’s explanation of 9/11 might be inaccurate, and many Americans may view this as “hateful and offensive,” as Obama said. But Ahmadinejad was […]
Last week the United Nations held a summit on the Millennium Development Goals. This is a set of venerable aims laid out in 2000 and intended to be accomplished by 2015. They include things like improving gender equality and ending extreme poverty. While some people indeed treat them as something to strive for, the goals […]
As noted here in my last post, Avner Cohen has drawn an important contrast between Israel’s strategic position with respect to Iran today and its position when it first confronted the danger of an Iraqi bomb, thirty years ago. In 1979-80, Cohen correctly observed, Israel stood essentially alone: Though Saddam had started to mess with […]
Iran’s first nuclear power plant in Bushehr will not be up and running until next year, according to reports from the Iranian atomic energy chief Ali Akbar Salehi. Iran began loading Russian-made fuel rods into the plant in August with the expectation that the plant would be connected to the national power grid by October. […]
From the African Development Bank: Tunis – The Board of Directors of the African Development Fund (ADF), the concessional window of the African Development Bank (AfDB) Group approved on Monday, 27 September 2010 in Tunis, a UA 63.369-million* (U.S.$ 95.6 million) loan to fund the Nacala Corridor Phase II Road project (NCRP) in Zambia The […]
In the morning as that alarm clock blares I shoot out of bed like bullet with a sudden, mysteriously founded burst of energy, as I quite literally whack my alarm off and scramble to my morning routine. But that sudden burst of energy goes as quickly as it came and I know the only thing […]
Read the article here. The majority of U.S. aid is being held up in Congress by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK). The AP found that $874 million of the funds pledged by other countries at the donors conference was money already promised to Haiti for work or aid before the quake. An additional $1.13 million wasn’t […]
According to the most recent Gallup Poll of people’s ever increasing distrust in the mass media. From 46% in 1998, the percentage of people who indicate they have “not very much/none at all” trust in mass media has grown to a stunning 57% currently. This is an all time record, as the general public perception toward the MSM has flipped over the past decade.
Coming from me, a defense of Barack Obama may surprise my readers. That’s because they may not have read the fine print! Some of his policies I haven’t exactly agreed with (principally, the expensive health care reform, which at a time of rapidly rising sovereign debt, was imprudent). I reluctantly supported Obama for president in 2008 […]
Hezbollah’s leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah has openly stated that he expects some members of his political party will be indicted, but he vows not to hand them over to be prosecuted. Pro-Syrian Christian politician Suleiman Franjieh recently stated in a television interview on September 23 that if Hezbollah members are indicted “there will be war in Lebanon.”
There are more than a few problems in the People’s Republic of China, to be sure, but the one to which I’m referring here is pollution. I went to an event last week sponsored by the Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation (ICET) and hosted by the India China Institute as part of Climate Week […]