Obama will announce his Afghanistan strategy next week. Reports indicate that troop levels will most likely be close to the 40,000 requested by General McChrystal. According to the New York Times, the three possibilities being seriously considered were: 1) Send 40,000 troops. This plan involves sending about 10,000 troops to Kandahar (where now there are […]
The International Energy Agency is out with its 2009 World Energy Outlook. Some of the revelations presented at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Monday were hardly startling: energy demand and investment down due to global recession, but demand expected to return and grow, China using more energy, etc. But a couple […]
Rumors persist in recent days that JP Morgan CEO, Jamie Dimon is being considered as the most likely replacement for Tim Geithner at U.S. Treasury, as confidence in Geithner wanes because he is too cozy with Wall Street as he insists on soft reforms for the industry.
As mentioned in my previous post, local trafficking case brings the face of modern slavery home, the recent story of child trafficking out of Fayetteville, NC, has gained a large amount of media attention. The story thus lead me to do an interview with Blog Talk Radio’s DC based show, “A Measure Of Truth”. I […]
Eric Posner accurately describes Eric Holder’s decision to try KSM in a civilian court: [T]he Obama administration has decided to offer a two-tiered system of justice. We might call them the “high-quality” (civilian) tier and “low-quality” (military) tier. The high-quality approach offers greater accuracy; the low-quality approach offers less accuracy. The Obama administration will use […]
Two leaders of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), Ignace Murwanashyaka and his aide Straton Musoni, were arrested in Germany last Tuesday. While the arrests were praised by human rights groups and the international community, many questions still remain regarding the timing, motivation, jurisdiction and even the charges being brought against the […]
Earlier this fall the Brookings Institution published a report titled “A New Way Forward: Encouraging Greater Cultural Engagement with the Muslim World,” by Cynthia Schneider (who certainly has the qualifications to write about this topic as an art historian, former ambassador to the Hague, professor of culture and diplomacy at Georgetown and fellow at Brookings). […]
A central challenge of our times: America, Europe, and countries the world over will have to figure out a way to staunch the hemorraging red ink we are currently sustaining. As a result of fiscal stimulus packages and bank bailouts, in addition to the standard generous provision of guns and butter, we will be talking a […]
The New York Times reported that last week’s UN’s World Summit on Food Security, once praised for moving developing and developed countries together towards improved aid relations, was an unabashed failure due to lack of progress on substantial issues. The UN FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), the body leading the Summit, has been criticized for […]
There are all sorts of prognoses for what’s going to happen in a couple of weeks at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP15). Some are calling this the most important international meeting of minds since the Bretton Woods and San Francisco conferences created much of the political architecture for the postwar […]
I recently re-read Martin Wolf’s, “Why Globalization Works.” I first read the book in graduate school and it shows. An abundance of neon Post-It papers are still poking out at the spine, the margins are littered with summaries and, in an effort to note the “important parts,” almost all of the text is underlined. Evidently, […]
A little over one year ago a 37-year old immigrant from Ecuador, Marcelo Lucero, was stabbed to death in Patchatogue, NY, a town on Long Island. The community recently held a vigil and called for increased understanding. One can only hope that the memorial service helps to spread open-mindedness and serve as a counterweight to […]
Last week the United Nations marked the 20th anniversary of the date when the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) opened for signature. Since then, the CRC has become the most ratified human rights treaty in the world. Out of the 194 member states of the UN, only two – Somalia and the […]
If you’ve ever wanted to be a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ in the clubby, heavily wood-paneled board rooms or the glass-encased corner offices of chief executives when the deal is being negotiated, this is it.
The book is interesting, detailed and crammed with an ‘insider’s’ perspective as the drama that precipitated the ‘Great Recession’ unfolded.
I recently posted the story, Trafficking? Not in my town…Yes, in every town, which featured the story of 5 year-old, Shaniya Davis, from Fayetteville, North Carolina. Shaniya was reportedly kidnapped and her body was later found on the side of a rural highway in North Carolina. Her mother was later charged with human trafficking for […]