The battle over and banning of women’s clothing continues, this time in Egypt. The BBC is reporting that Sheikh Mohamed Tantawi, dean of al-Azhar university, has announced that he will issue a religious edict banning the niqab. Egypt is comprised of 90% Muslims, many of whom wear religious head garments in their daily lives. While it […]
And people are still dying there. The fallout from the invasion has definitely not run its entire course yet.
A recent Facebook video has documented prisoner abuse by the Pakistani Army. This, needless to say, will not help Pakistan’s efforts to stem its Taliban insurgency in the Northwest Frontier Province, nor will it help America’s mission in the region. Regardless of the morality of torturing and abusing prisoners of war (and, to put it […]
Think California and its Governator aren’t dead serious about renewables? DOE’s weekly newsletter, “EERE Network News,” has this story: California Accelerates its Pursuit of Clean Energy. A new executive order requires the Golden State’s utilities to get a third of their electricity from renewable energy sources by 2020. This is in addition to robust energy efficiency […]
Meet the new generation of voters—same as the old generation. A British study has concluded that half of all babies born in wealthy countries will live to be 100 years old. This is certainly a good thing—more of the most fleeting resource humanity has (time) is nothing to play down. But for countries with long […]
JERUSALEM–The past few days in Jerusalem have been uneasy ones. In a city that teeters on the verge of violence on a fairly regular basis, the height of the week long Jewish holiday season of Sukkot added an element of unrest. The holiday draws a large number of Jewish visitors from around the world and […]
Sovereign risk in Turkey was once talked about in the same breath as Brazil’s. Not so anymore. One is going hat in hand to the IMF, likely to get $45 billion in the coming weeks; the other is largely self-financing. What went wrong in Turkey? Always keep your eye on the current account deficit, folks, even when […]
This article by David Axe, Malou Innocent, and Jason Reich at Foreign Policy is pretty much* spot on. The Taliban, either Afghan or Pakistani, are not a security threat to America on their own—they have neither the capacity nor the will to strike at American interests. But al-Qaeda has proven itself capable of accomplishing horrific […]
The Christian Science Monitor posted an interesting story regarding the Annual Meeting of the International Bar Association which is currently going on this week in Madrid. It raises the growing discontent of African states towards the International Criminal Court. At present, all four of the active situations being prosecuted by the court concern African conflicts: […]
Nicholas Thompson responds in this blog post to Andrew Bacevich’s article in The Washington Post about updating the Cold War doctrine of containment for the war on terrorism. He agrees that here is much in George Kennan’s original idea that could be applied to the present conflict with global jihad while suggesting that the effort […]
Recently The Future of Children, which is a collaboration between the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the Brookings Institution, published the journal; Preventing Child Maltreatment, The Future of Children, vol. 19, no. 2, Fall 2009. The full journal can be found Here. The report begins with the question; […]
In Washington last week I sat down with a group of bloggers to interview two smart and savvy foreign correspondents. The fact that they were women, representing influential media from the Middle East, made their views interesting on several levels. Nadia Bilbassy is a correspondent with MBC (Middle East Broadcasting Co.) and Joyce Karam is […]
President Obama signed an executive order today that commits the federal government to massive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The White House press release notes: “The Federal government occupies nearly 500,000 buildings, operates more than 600,000 vehicles, employs more than 1.8 million civilians, and purchases more than $500 billion per year in goods and services. […]
Next year the Obama administration will likely push for comprehensive immigration reform that legalizes millions who are currently in the United States without documentation. The US has an estimated 11 million “illegal immigrants”, representing approximately 3% of the total population. (Note: Please see a clarification on terminology below.) This is an astonishing number. Albeit the […]
In yet another useful special report at the “Financial Times” – this one today on the gas industry – there are two articles on the theme of what I was talking about recently in which natural gas is being positioned as a “transition” fuel to the low-carbon future. (See Natural Gas – to Cut GHG […]