While tackling drought and famine may be some of the top concerns for today’s developing nations, the steady growth of the demand for specialty foods in the United States over the past decade may have the potential to assist in the growth of their economies. Now making up almost 16% of U.S. food sales, the […]
Prisons are considered “hotbeds” for HIV. Some prisons in the world have HIV rates up to 65 percent, and the HIV rate of prisoners is often significantly higher than that of the outside community—Zambian prisoners have a prevalence of 27 percent, while the national HIV rate is 15 percent. This is in part due to […]
We looked in the last post at the virtually limitless potential of renewables to supply all of our energy needs: electricity, heating and cooling, and transportation. Indications are that we are well advanced on this path. I tell people that if you’d told me a dozen years ago we were going to see the penetration […]
Happy Mandela Day! The UN has adopted July 18th as Mandela Day, described as a “global movement to take his life’s work into a new century and change our world for the better”. The idea is to donate 67 minutes of your day to doing something good…in commemoration of the 67 years that Nelson Mandela […]
So I’m a bit jetlagged. I’m watching Dan Pink’s entertainingly animated talk at the RSA from April, considering the implications for behaviour change and global health. If human motivation is nuanced in the way that Pink argues, and our institutions are hardwired to consider only the most basic of our innate desires – what does […]
I’m in the US for a couple of weeks, visiting family and, importantly, experiencing the joys of speedier internet access. What will I be watching? First, I’ll be keeping up with the happenings in Vienna with the webcasts from the XVIII International AIDS Conference. I’ll also be catching up on the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival Global Health track by browsing the video […]
UNAIDS has released a report in advance of this week’s XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna with the title “Young People are Leading the HIV Prevention Revolution“. The study says: The report shows that for the first time reductions in HIV prevalence among young people have coincided with a change in sexual behaviour patterns among people. The […]
The U.S. Senate this week passed a sweeping bank regulation bill that will make major changes to the U.S. financial system. The legislation cracks down on banks and Wall Street in the hopes of avoiding another major financial meltdown.
If you’ve been closely following the best daily press or tuning into debates among professional arms controllers, you will have noticed some concern about China’s intention to supply additional nuclear power to Pakistan and South Korea’s growing determination to reprocess nuclear fuels. Just how concerned should we be? To be honest, though I recognize that […]
According to a just released ABC news report, U.S. public support for the war in Afghanistan has dropped from 52% in December to 43% today. The Taliban must be rejoicing because this shows, at least for the moment that their strategy is working. The bottom line is the Taliban knows they can’t beat U.S. forces […]
When I was at the Urban Green Expo last fall, the Energy Maha Guru Amory Lovins gave a riveting talk. He said: “The Renewable Revolution has been won. Sorry, if you missed it.” I let out a yell. Well, as I’ve been noting here, this is not mere hyperbole. Here’s more evidence. In Europe, they’re […]
On Wednesday, NATO and the Karzai government struck a deal to arm Afghan locals for defense against the Taliban. It’s a temporary measure devised to make up for the slowness of training permanent security forces. The local forces will be paid for and supervised by the Afghan Interior Ministry. But, of course, there are risks. […]
Antonio Maria Costa, the UN Drug Czar, is a modest man, so when he stands up, as he did on June 23, and tells an audience at Johns Hopkins-SAIS, in Washington, DC, that we have to start thinking about transnational crime in an entirely different way—it’s news. Costa, whose degrees, from UC-Berkeley and the University […]
Shallow piece in the NYTimes today on a modest slowdown in economic growth reported in China for the second quarter, prettily written by non-economists. For a better analysis, not so elegantly written, have a look at the CSFB note from today (below) that explains that growth has slowed due to slackening investment (in Chinese terms […]
This week, the highly controversial issue of genetically modified organisms (or GMO’s for short) was thrown into the limelight, when members of the European Union proposed a new policy meant to broaden the availability of such foods known to many Europeans as “Frankenfoods.” The flexibility of this new policy is aimed at enabling countries like […]