The 2010 Trafficking in Persons Report was released today by the Department of State. This years TIP Report includes, for the first time ever, a ranking of the United States, which is based on the same standards to which we hold other countries. “The 10th annual Trafficking in Persons Report outlines the continuing challenges across […]
With the beginning of the 2010 World Cup last Thursday in Johannesburg, a large amount of attention has been focused on the quadrennial tournament, which is being hosted on the African continent for the first time since the tournament’s founding in 1930. However, there have been some other stories relating to Africa and U.S. foreign […]
We are six months out from Copenhagen and further talks in Bonn, where the UNFCCC is headquartered, have just concluded. The release from the UNFCCC says the recent talks made “progress on fleshing out specifics” for a global climate change regime. There were 5,500 participants, including government delegates from over 180 countries, and reps from […]
In an earlier post, I discussed a theory I developed that democratic countries with divided, often coalition, governments generally produce weaker public finances than countries where two dominant parties alternate in power. India is the posterchild for the former, with government debt at about 80% of GDP, very high for an emerging market economy. In order to […]
Things are very bad in Kyrgyzstan right now. The Central Asian republic recently underwent a dramatic political upheaval that resulted in the replacement of a sitting government for the second time in five years, and it is now experiencing violent ethnic riots targeting Kyrgyzstan’s Uzbek population. The riots have spiraled out of control to the […]
The power of the pen is most obvious when dictatorships try to silence writers and journalists. Ms. Jila Baniyaghoob, a 39 year-old Iranian journalist, is a sad case of this. On June 9 she was sentenced to one year in jail and banned from writing for 30 years by the Iranian government. Baniyaghoob’s sentence came […]
A few months back, I noted the shocking statistics on tuberculosis, highlighting that one-third of the world’s population are infected and 1.7 million people die from the disease each year. This month’s tuberculosis (TB) conference, held in Durban, South Africa, highlighted the need for integration of TB and HIV care. I met Prof Harry Hausler, the chair […]
The NYTimes has written a vivid account of how the US approach to tuberculosis care has changed as the disease has virtually been eradicated. They describe the last TB sanitorium, which still exists in Florida “where strangers live together for months with boredom, pills, pain, contemplation and the same ancient disease that killed George Orwell, Franz Kafka […]
This documentary focuses on what is probably a mostly overlooked group of people persecuted by German Nazis between 1933 and 1945: male homosexuals. The title of the film refers to the law, enacted in 1871, that was largely overlooked until the reign of Adolf Hitler. It claimed sex between two men was illegal; lesbians, however, […]
Today much of the world is flocking to their TVs to as the World Cup in South Africa kicked off. However while the joy of the game and international sportsmanship ensue, much of the World Cup and sport have been tainted by child labor, via sex trafficking and labor…including the stitching of soccer balls. Soccer […]
When Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski proposed a change in how the Clean Air Act is administered, I was shocked but not surprised. See The Reaction from January. Thankfully, her resolution was defeated in the US Senate yesterday. This was an attempt at a radical reconfiguring of how environmental law has been practiced in this country […]
Much of our chocolate comes from the Ivory Coast, which according to the International Labor Organization (ILO) produces 43% of the worlds cocoa. According to the ILO, over 132 million children, aged 5-14 years old, work in agriculture around the world, they are just a segment of an the estimated 246 million child laborers around […]
Rai al-Shaab (Opinion of the People), a Sudanese newspaper run by opposition leader Hassan al-Turabi, published an article earlier this month describing a secret weapons factory run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on Sudanese soil. Sudanese officials have since arrested and tortured al-Turabi and several of his staff members and shut down the […]
My PC suffered a massive failure last week keeping me from the blogging scene. Currently traveling but wanted to pass on some thoughts on President Obama’s nomination of retired Air Force General James Clapper as the new Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the latest round on UN sanctions against Iran. I first became aware […]
One of the recurring leitmotifs in this past winter’s hyper-inflated media coverage of the “debate” about climate science was that the public doesn’t care about the issue anymore anyway, and that the snow in Virginia and the stolen emails from the Climate Research Unit had soured people on the science, even though it has been […]