This batch of links is dedicated to my friends in Washington D.C., who are home from work, staring out their windows in awe of mass precipitation. To ease your Snowmaggedon boredom, some light reading: 1. If the climate accord works, will the climate notice? Maybe. But success depends on what countries do after 2020. 2. […]
Global Engagement as a concept and component of foreign policy can often seem like inside baseball, a potentially wonky set of topics reserved for inside-the-Beltway Washington types whose jobs its is to formulate and implement foreign policy. But is should not be so limited in its scope – and it cannot if it is going […]
One of the more surprising elements of Obama’s first State of the Union address was the way in which he addressed clean energy initiatives: “To create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. That means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. […]
A committee of the Kenyan Parliament has agreed to do away with the position of prime minister as part of a reform of its constitution. The position of prime minister was created in 2008 as a way to allow for power sharing in bring an end to the bloody confrontations that followed Kenya’s national elections […]
This month, I made a donation to an interesting organization that is helping with the disaster in Haiti. We Care Solar is a U.S.-based non-profit that helps hospitals in developing regions by providing health workers with reliable lighting, blood bank refrigeration and mobile communication using solar electricity. The organization was founded by Dr. Laura Stachel, […]
At the anniversary of Obama’s first year as president, the press is predictably constructing narratives of a president who is blazing trails and one who is barely hanging on. Chatting on GPS with Fareed Zakaria this Sunday, Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan says Obama’s first year went all wrong. Here’s part of it: “One of […]
John Brown’s Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review, Version 2.0. If you aren’t reading this on a daily basis you should be. It is the best collection of everything you need to know about public diplomacy and it’s downright entertaining, too. An excellent post on putting Ottoman ghosts into proper historical context – by Patricia […]
Today is a national holiday here in the U.S., celebrating the life and achievements of Martin Luther King, Jr. There is nothing I could add to the many paeans to King (but I recommend that anyone needing a refresher look up his writings and speeches). But in thinking about the times King lived in and […]
1. Is there a silver lining to Somali pirates roaming the ocean? Yes: more fish. 2. “…if some other country solves the problem of green energy, so much the better for us.” Tyler Cowen on the fruitful economic growth, in other countries, over the past decade. 3. The Director of the Energy Security Initiative at […]
Two days ago, just before the earthquake hit, Tyler Cowen blogged encouraging news about Haiti. In an odd twist of irony, he wrote that the small Caribbean country was experiencing a “renassaince” where economic growth was expected rise by 2.4 percent in the short term. Earlier in 2009, Haiti’s Central Bank Governor Charles Castel said […]
The Economist had an interesting article last week on Muslim students studying in the West – “the West” being the UK, US and Canada for this article. The piece is written in the wake of the attempted bombing of a US airliner on Christmas Day by a Nigerian man who had, until recently, attended university […]
Broadly speaking, the U.S. government has three sets of policy options available when it comes to creating a greener global economy. Far at one end is traditional regulation, that includes initiatives like mandated energy standards for washing machines and chirpy public education reminders to turn off the water when brushing teeth. At the opposing end […]
NAFSA: Association of International Educators released a report last month on visa and immigration reform.The report is titled “A Visa and Immigration Policy for the Brain Circulation Era: Adjusting to What Happened in the World While We Were Busy Making Other Plans” and is authored by Victor Johnson, a senior advisor for public policy at […]
With the election of Andre Dawson to the Baseball Hall of Fame, I have been thinking about one way that I initially became interested in other cultures – through baseball. Let me explain: from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, Dawson played for the Montreal Expos, a major league baseball team that existed from 1969 through […]
All the usual caveats about uncertainty assumed, here are 7 climate and energy trends we’re already seeing, that will pick up speed in to 2010: 1. We’ll get better at making reasonable distinctions between solutions that are politically, versus scientifically, versus economically possible. The current debate over whether carbon emissions should be reduced to 450 […]