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“Lisa Jackson is doing exactly what an Environmental Protection Agency Administrator is supposed to do – thoughtfully and carefully but aggressively implementing our environmental laws to protect public health and our environment. The job of the EPA Administrator is not to make people happy but to make them and their environment healthier.”  That was Time’s […]

How do you pick an envoy for a “rescue” mission to North Korea?  Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin looked at how this question was answered in the most recent case involving former President Jimmy Carter’s mission to Pyongyang to retrieve American citizen Aijalon Mahli Gomes.  It’s a good piece that also details the insider campaigns waged […]

We know that the global banking system is riddled with corruption (‘vulnerable’ to corruption may be more polite), some authored by its own principals, some embraced opportunistically by financial insiders to snatch sudden profits, a great deal ushered into the world’s financial system by bankers in search of the commissions and corporate profits that ‘high net-worth customers’ (in many cases, money launderers) bring in. And sometimes the bad guys exploit legitimate financial service providers. But the question remains, and it turns on the distinction between deregulation and irregularity, between fair play and laissez-faire, between the right of the ‘haves’ to have still more, and the right of the people to real economic protection under the law.
At what point does financial entrepreneurship turn criminal, and how blind an eye is the US prepared to turn toward banking practices that clearly prosper the powerful and imperil the growing ranks of the poor, in the United States and across the world?

Left Foot Forward’s website is back up, posting this: “[International Development Secretary Andrew] Mitchell was quick to claim that the perception created by the leak was “total and utter bollocks” and that any new Government had the right to a “bottom up” review of existing practice. Mitchell insists that his new approach – focusing on […]

This week, Britain’s coalition government was accused of ”securitising” its international aid budget and demanding that British national security be placed at the heart of projects in the developing world. The shift in aid policy, signaled in a document prepared by the Department for International Development (DFID), suggests that the National Security Council – Britain’s […]

Few think of hospitals as hotbeds for innovation.  However, two recent postings from Harvard Business Review (‘Why Innovation Thrives at the Mayo Clinic” and “Oslo Innovation Clinic Offers Treatment for Ideas“) indicate otherwise.

Many countries in the world have constitutions based on the models of the great imperial powers of Europe. It makes sense that former colonies would model themselves on Great Britain or France, for example, and shape their systems of government to mirror the ideal of parliamentary democracy. Rarer are the countries that have modeled themselves on the U.S. system of checks […]

They live in the margins of society, the children of prostitutes in Calcutta, India. They are given time and space to discuss their lives with New York-based photographer Zana Briski. Briski, who co-directed the film with Ross Kauffman, started a photography class with several of these children. She gave them cameras and let them choose […]

By Cordelia Rizzo In 2007, Mexico City’s legislature affirmed a woman’s right to choose to terminate her pregnancy during the first trimester. Today, this remains the only pro-choice law in the whole country. In response, conservative congresses in other parts of Mexico have toughened their own anti-abortion laws. But ordinary Mexicans are just beginning to […]

I took a quick look at Heidi Cullen’s new book The Weather of the Future recently. (I still have to read it. But I’ve got an Ian Rankin and Lester Brown’s Plan B 4.0 ahead of her in the queue.) But don’t wait for me. See her here with Stephen Colbert. Then read the book. […]

There’s been some back and forth this week between Julian Ku and David Bosco about Jeremy Rabkin’s recent critique of the ICC in the Weekly Standard.  I’ll add my two cents, for to me, Rabkin’s piece seems like a ghost story told around a campfire.  Rabkin intends to make the ICC seem really really scary, […]

ProPublica reported last week that BP has committed funding of $52 million to treating mental health victims affected by the Gulf oil spill.  This has come after the publication of the Mailman School’s release of a study (“Impact on Children and Families of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill“) which interviewed over 1200 residents of Louisiana and […]