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This month was the biannual International Anti-Corruption Conference, which took place this year in Bangkok. The conference is an opportunity for a large portion of the world’s people who are thinking about corruption to get together, share ideas, learn what’s new, and of course schmooze (a bit). The theme of the conference this year was […]

Seeking to limit fallout from the latest North Korean uranium enrichment disclosures, Obama officials have been implying they kind of knew about it all along, which is kind of true inasmuch as concern about the subject reached well back into the previous administration. But Siegfried Hecker, hands-down the leading authority on North Korean nuclear activities, […]

This past Tuesday, Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) came out against the consideration of New START during the lame duck session stating his desire for greater assurances of support from the Obama Administration for the modernization of U.S. nuclear labs and protection from limitations on U.S. missile defense programs.  That same day, Vice President Biden and […]

The critics of the Federal Reserve don’t get it.  Here are two articles in the WSJ and NYTimes that describe the withering ideological attack the US central bank has sustained since the onset of the global financial crisis.  In recent posts, Nov. 15 and Nov. 18, I have argued that deflation risk is real and requires unorthodox thinking and action by […]

Latin America appeared in force at the G-20 Summit in Seoul.  Two of the three Latin American presidents there were women, Presidents Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina, who likewise represented half of the female leaders at the G-20.  Unprecedented.  Latin interests in the G-20 are diverse, given Argentina’s heavy […]

Further to my post from yesterday in which I noted that researchers were recording ever-increasing carbon dioxide emissions from China and, to a lesser extent, India, there have been some articles recently on the rapid rise in China’s coal consumption. The graphics here are from Elisabeth Rosenthal’s article yesterday in the NY Times about how […]

“To get rich is glorious.” That phrase, uttered by the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, seems to fly in the face of conventional communist philosophy. So, too, does the democratic election of a third grade class monitor in Wuhan. This documentary shows how three children vie for votes in a cutthroat election. While novices to […]

We can be pretty sure Stuxnet targeted Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant, and we know, because of its enormous complexity and sophistication, that large resources went into its development. But did those who built and launched it achieve their objective? The New York Times concluded one of two recent articles on stuxnet with a skeptical […]

Or, as my grandmother used to say:  “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”  So, with that in mind, here are two stories representing the bad and the good. First, the bad news:  2009 carbon emissions fall smaller than expected is the headline from the BBC.  In a letter to “Nature Geoscience,” leading researchers […]

As Patrick Frost of the FPA Afghanistan blog noted last week, the Asia Foundation recently released a report on Afghan public opinion.  It paints a seemingly optimistic picture of the prospects for an ISAF success.  The most newsworthy finding is that a majority of Afghans now show no support for armed insurgents.  Only 40% say […]

I wouldn’t be the first person to analogize Americans’ thirst to fossil fuels to an addiction.  The arch-environmentalist George W. Bush said the US was “addicted to oil” in his State of the Union address in 2006.  What we do for the Mexican drug gangs in terms of addiction to their products while advancing their […]

Senate ratification of the renewal of the START nuclear arms reduction treaty may be stalled by domestic politics. As you will recall, the old treaty expired in December and the U.S. and Russia worked to put together a new treaty that will continue their decades-long commitment to draw-down their nuclear arsenals. The heavy-lifting has already […]