As I wrote in the recent post, The Joy and Burden of Motherhood, “The greatest joy of motherhood is seen as the sheer gift of bringing a life into this world and helping to shape them from the moment of birth and then to watch them grow into a happy, productive and successful member of […]
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has announced his decision to restart two nuclear reactors in western Japan. As I noted in this blog a month ago, all of Japan’s nuclear reactors are offline. Before the Fukushima meltdown, 30% of the nation’s electricity came from uranium fission reactors. As a result of these shutdowns, there is […]
Last Friday, Stanford’s Policy Review published a feature written by global health luminaries Mark Dybul, Peter Piot, and Julio Frenk entitled Reshaping Global Health. The article reads as a call to action, urging the global health community to “give up a lot of turf” and assemble a Bretton Woods-style conversation to reshape the Global Health […]
The following piece was originally published in on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. by R. Scott Kemp R. Scott Kemp is an associate research scholar with the Program on Science and Global Security at the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Before this, he was science advisor in the Office […]
I just watched a fascinating video from Reuters TV about a tiny town in Afghanistan named “Little America.” Located in the Helmand Province in Southern Afghanistan, “Little America” was the largest development project in Afghanistan’s history. First populated by Americans during the Cold War, it was developed to counteract Soviet influence in the region. The US spent hundreds […]
Biogas saves Kenyan school money, conserves nature A school in the rural Rift Valley of central Kenya is a model for successful small-scale response to climate change, according to this article. The school cooks with biogas produced from latrines, eliminating fuel and sanitation costs while reducing harmful carbon emissions and sparing surrounding forests some 150 […]
At risk of tooting the horn for my former employer, IEEE Spectrum magazine, I want to commend my former colleagues and fellow bloggers for sharply raising the question of whether the U.S. government considered the global consequences when it decided to unleash Stuxnet and, most likely, Flame as well. In a Monday post, Robert […]
The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) has released a report on food, agriculture, and sustainability ahead of the Rio+20 Earth Summit. Although “Food and Agriculture: The Future of Sustainability” focuses primarily on environmental issues, it draws attention to the health implications related to the current global food system. More than one […]
In my last blog, I ended with a quote from a 2011 Foreign Affairs magazine article written by former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn III. In the article he stated the Department of Defense has a five pillar strategy for operating in cyberspace: “…treating cyberspace as an operational domain, like land, air, […]
It is abundantly clear that if we are going to conquer our climate change demons, then we’ve got to radically reduce the burning of coal on our splendid but increasingly stressed planet. Carbon dioxide is still the primary driver of warming and coal is still the primary source of carbon dioxide from fuel combustion. Of […]
Two decades after achieving independence from the Soviet Union, Lithuania is still struggling to achieve energy independence. It appears to have taken some significant steps in that direction recently. First, it managed to get the foreign shareholders of Lietuvos Dujos, a Lithuanian natural gas company, to agree to divide the utility into three separate […]
It’s a pretty provocative title, no doubt about it. Unfortunately, “The very best predictor of how insecure and unstable a nation is not its level of democracy, but the level of violence against women in society” is just not quite catchy enough. Sex and World Peace was published in April of this year (available here), […]
Recently I’ve focused on democracy issues on a pretty grand scale: the nation of Egypt’s first open presidential elections, Greece’s struggle to form a government and how it might impact the global economy. Yet one of the remarkable things about democracy is that you don’t need large numbers to make a difference. Sometimes all it […]
Upon hearing of Flame, the recently discovered computer malware sometimes described as the most insidious and sophisticated ever, one’s first thought is bound to be of Stuxnet. Upon discovery of that virus a year and a half ago, analyses by top cyber-security firms soon yielded smoking-gun proof that Stuxnet was custom-made to knock out uranium […]
One of the biggest international news stories of May, which will continue into June, directly concerns democracy. Last week the Egyptian people voted to elect a president for the first time. This landmark event has been anticipated since last year’s Arab Spring, when hundreds of thousands demanded change in leadership and how the government operated. […]