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We refer to the American dream.  You know how it goes:  house with a yard (with a blisteringly bright green lawn, swimming in fertilizers and pesticides), two cars in the garage, AC at a touch (freezing your brain, making you sick and drawing more and more power), that big plasma TV on which to watch the […]

President Obama traveled to Dover Air Force Base today to honor the 22 Navy SEALs, three Air Force personnel, and five-member Army air crew killed in the attack on the Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan this past weekend. As the LA Times reports: Obama led a delegation of administration and military officials to  salute the remains […]

This post is not really about global health.  However, there’s little in the news to go on (which sort of contributes to my later points) as the famine in Somalia and drought in East Africa are everywhere in the media recently, as are photos of starving children.  Apart from being a very real humanitarian crisis, […]

With America’s latest market crash, the debt debate seems so ‘last week’ (hey, it was last week!), there is still much to learn from the tumultuous process. Niall Ferguson attempts to provide an outside perspective on the whole debt limit battle. It’s a pretty important outside perspective too; China: Viewed from Beijing, it looked very […]

The debt and deficit crises driving a 2000 point decline in US Markets over the last two weeks and a credit downgrade lies at the heart of the Western financial and political system goes way beyond the debt & deficit woes currently gripping the Western world; it strikes at the very heart of the way […]

On August 3rd the White House released an eight-page strategy for countering extremism entitled “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States.” The strategy, which took over a year to produce, lays out three areas of improvement: enhancing engagement with appropriate local communities, building government and law enforcement expertise in the area […]

The U.S. Congress is not waiting for the UN Security Council to act on calls to sanction Syria for 1) attempting to build a covert nuclear facility with North Korean support, 2) brutally cracking down on protesters calling for reform and 3) assisting Hezbollah by providing it with ballistic missiles. On August 5, House Foreign […]

I’ve written about White Roofs, Green Roofs,  Solar Roofs and even Green Curtains.  They’re all good. But Gary Trudeau, in his unbeatable way, brings it all back home.

In a press statement issued on Tuesday, 2 August 2011,  United Nations Special Representative for the Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy, stated that she welcomed the decision by the UN Security Council made earlier that week, which allowed for sanctions against Somalia earlier that week. “Starting today, in Somalia, if you kill, […]

As if we needed more proof that the world is now a single market, 800 British workers will lose their jobs at the nuclear fuel processing plant in Sellafield, Cumbria, UK, because of the uncertain future of nuclear power in Japan. The plant takes used plutonium and mixes it with uranium to create what is […]

As the U.S. debt crisis moves from the summer to the fall with the convening of the Congressional “super-committee,” it’s clear that everything will be on the chopping block, including one of the most important expressions of the U.S. role in the world: foreign aid. U.S. foreign aid is an interesting topic due to common […]

For those interested in conducting research about topics in food security, the New America Foundation is now taking applications for its Schmidt Family Foundation Fellowship. “The ideal candidate is a policy-minded writer with an interest in exploring how agroecology informs, or should influence, policy debates on the right to food, resilience/adaptation to climate change, agricultural […]