The last plan to solve the Syrian war could certainly lead to a positive outcome – as diplomacy is always better than force – but raises serious problems: does the Euro-Atlantic community have any idea of what it want to accomplish in Syria? What is the end game in Syria? Does the West want to […]
The world continues to watch as President Obama and his administration increase their lobbying efforts to convince the Congress and the international community to support a U.S. led military strike in Syria. President Obama went on a media blitz Monday and is expected to deliver his case to the nation today to launch a “limited” […]
Elected President of Venezuela following Hugo Chávez’s death from cancer in March, Nicolás Maduro, a former bus driver who was Mr. Chávez’s foreign minister, has had a rocky start leading the country. Allegations of ballot-tampering, appointing corrupt officials to high-level government positions, and foreign policy missteps have created the impression that Mr. Maduro is little more […]
Biopharmaceutical companies have been part of the global public health workforce for decades, tackling infectious diseases and disseminating life-saving drug interventions. In the last several decades, pharmaceutical companies have played an instrumental role in combatting infectious diseases across developing nations, often donating in-kind contributions of vaccinations and treatments to the NGOs and local organizations. Now, […]
President Woodrow Wilson has long fascinated me. He is one of those presidents that is a giant in history, but few people know much about him. Steven Spielberg has never made a movie about him, you don’t hear his name referenced on the Sunday talk shows, and he seems entirely missing from pop-culture. And yet […]
As the Middle East continues to plunge in a multi-faceted and what appears to be an increasingly regional crisis, there are debates and even hope about the future of entrepreneurship in the region in the face of the Arab Spring. Corruption, the status of women, the Israeli Palestinian conflict, Iran’s nuclear program, and now the specter of […]
If terrorists entered the U.S. today to conduct a 9/11-scale attack and used the same money-movement methods employed by the hijackers in 2001, it is “possible, but not probable” that their financial activities would bring them to the attention of intelligence and law-enforcement officials. That’s the assessment of Dennis M. Lormel, who led the […]
Depending on how you are dressed, you can signal your status, identity, job and a myriad other markers which help locate you in a sociopolitical context. They can show your distinctiveness, or membership within a group. Many jobs require a uniform, from the armed forces to hospitals to customer services, and in many countries around […]
Sex trafficking. It happens all over the world but is largely invisible to most. What The Whistleblower (a drama, not a documentary) does is expose it as it occurred in Bosnia in 1999, four years after the Dayton Accord was reached. Rachel Weisz plays Kathryn Bolkovac, a police officer from Nebraska who joins the United […]
After one week of progressive securitization of the Syrian problem by the US, Britain and France, it appears that the members of the Euro-Atlantic community were getting ready to build a coalition of the willing in order to punish Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against Syrian civilians. The United Nations recently sent UN […]
With a nod to Clausewitz, sort of, the language of politics is also the language of war. Arguments promoting a certain philosophy can also justify (or condemn) military action and be another weapon on the battlefield. And so the first shots — er, sound bites — rang out Tuesday morning in the US, from entrenchments […]
If a country had the most-restrictive regulations on foreign direct investment (FDI) of 55 nations studied, where do you think it would rank among those nations in terms of actually attracting investment from abroad? If you said “First,” you obviously would be flaunting conventional economic theory and engaging in highly counter-intuitive speculation. Further, […]
It’s a rare occurrence for a nation to act altruistically in its humanitarian engagements, and even rarer when a state does so, knowing all there is in return is potentially heightened security risks in a conflict setting. I want to use this post as a brief pause from my usual focus on chronic disease care […]
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, president of the smallest oil producing and exporting member of OPEC, has committed to expanding oil drilling – from the current 513,000 barrels of oil per day. President Correa announced last week that he signed an executive decree to end the Yasuni Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tipuni (ITT) initiative. ITT are oil blocks, which house […]
On Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2013, the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 (MLC, 2006) will enter into force. The MLC, 2006 is an extremely comprehensive convention considered to be the “fourth pillar” of international maritime law. Though it enjoyed unanimous adoption within the ILO, the sheer breadth of the MLC, 2006 raised skepticism […]