This post will conclude this blog's three-part discussion of Senator Obama's trip overseas. Rather than look at the foreign reaction, let's consider what effect the trip had here at home. Here's what the Senator said he took away from his travels upon arriving back to the US: “One of the key insights that I come […]
France, who assumed the six-month European Presidency on July 1st, is pushing its own strict immigration agenda onto Europe. Amnesty International, alarmed at some of France's proposals, is calling on the European Parliament to respect its human rights mandate. Meanwhile French President Nicolas Sarkozy's historically low home approval ratings and less than stunning attempts at […]
Yesterday, August 9, 2008 marked the first International Day of the World's Indigenous People, The first event of its kind to take place, thanks to the landmark adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the General Assembly in September 2007. The convention and the event seeks to promote the culture and […]
If you want to step back and look at some of the basics, here are some good sources: This from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. From the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Summary for Policymakers of the Synthesis Report from the Fourth Assessment Report. From the United Nations Framework Convention on […]
Some 2 million people die each year of AIDS, and around 33 million people around the world are infected with HIV. A shortage of healthcare providers, access to treatment facilities, high cost and often unavailability of ARVs , and a lack of adequate education, has lead the disease's spread to continue climb. Therefore the HIV/AIDS epidemic of […]
In a delightful series of articles from across the United States, Frankfurter Allgemeine's Washington correspondent Matthias Rub has been taking the pulse of the United States three months before the election. Rub shows that not all reporting from rural America has to be marred by popular stereotypes and old clichés. Starting from Washington D.C., Rub […]
As the Olympics begin today all eyes are on China. This is really China's big coming out party, their “we have arrived” moment. China has already arrived though, in military and economic terms China has been a great power for some time now, pop culture is merely catching up to the reality. The rise […]
It's not too late to dig into some summer reading. If you have a hankering to read something intellectually dense, the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) can help. At the request of the Undersecretary of State for Public Affairs, has put together a “Foreign Affairs Professional Reading List.“ The list aims “to serve as a […]
"Children find everything in nothing; men find nothing in everything." – Giacomo Leopardi (1798,1837), Italian poet and philosopher, from Zibaldone Scelto. It is true that as we grow our eye's seem to change, we seem to lose the wide and open vision that we had in childhood. Our eye's no longer see everything with hopefulness, […]
Ending his three day tour of Asia in Beijing, US President George Bush chided China on its dismal human rights record. In July, Amnesty International released a report claiming human rights violations in China have increased in the lead up to the games. Just hours before the Olympic ceremony is to kick off, Bush, standing […]
The jury in the U.S. war crimes trial of Salim Hamdan delivered a sentence Thursday of 5 ½ years in prison for providing material support to al-Qaida. With time served, the sentence amounts to slightly less than 5 months in jail. The Pentagon had sought a 30-year term for the former driver of Osama bin […]
MOZAMBIQUE: HIV-positive children still not getting treated ‘ According to provincial data, more than 15,000 children are living with HIV, but only 2,000 of them – 13 percent – are being treated, an extremely low percentage compared to HIV-positive adults: more than half the women who need treatment, and 42 percent of the men, are […]
This is the second installment of an overview of global reactions to Senator Obama's recent travels abroad. In this post I’ll gather some commentary about the European leg of the Senator trip. First, Peter Schmitz of the German news magazine Der Spiegel describes literally the play-by-play of the Senator's arrival in Berlin and his now […]
How should Americans act upon arriving in Beijing for the Olympic games? Should they be like members of the U.S. cycling team (Reuters – U.S. cyclists fly into China with face masks): Some members of the U.S. cycling squad arrived for the Olympic Games on Tuesday wearing black respiratory masks, apparently concerned over reports […]
The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank devoted to "issues of particular concern to African Americans and other peoples of color," recently launched the Commission to Engage African Americans on Climate Change (CEAC). "There is a fierce urgency regarding climate change effects on the African American community," according to the CEAC's […]