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Media Agree, The Road from Ankara to Brussels Remains Unpaved, Let Alone Gilded Britain’s new prime minister, David Cameron, has created his first policy rift with France and Germany, the backbone of the European Union, by promising aggressive help for Turkey’s bid for EU membership, which both Paris and Berlin oppose. In a visit to […]

This is the second blog I’m writing on insights gained during my participation in a series of three bloggers roundtables sponsored by the Department of Defense.  On July 21, 2010, I had the opportunity to interview Capt A. Heather Coyne the Community and NGO liaison officer for NATO Training Mission Afghanistan.  The job is a […]

Yesterday, the UN General Assembly approved a resolution to make access to clean drinking water and sanitation a human right.  The vote was 122-0, with 41 abstentions.  Why is this a bad thing?  Check out the United States’ justification of its abstention, from the UN’s summary of the proceedings: The representative of the United States […]

We pick a lot on authoritarians around here – try it, it’s fun! *poke poke* *GROWL* *ARGH MY ARM IS GONE!!!!* However, there’s a lot of unexpected players acting like bad guys in terms of internet censorship these days. Australia has draconian filtering laws. South Korea does everything possible to suppress anonymity online. (Care to […]

I had dinner last night with a friend who works for a large international development organization (which will go unnamed) here in D.C. This is her first job out of undergrad, and she was giving me a description of her first week, most of which involved sorting through resumes for several positions in the organization’s […]

Commentary about President Obama’s Global Health Initiative has been coming fast and furiously this month, not least from the White House.  The initiative is caught between a rock and a hard place, with the steady goodwill of AIDS-affected country built up over the last decade and a Congress which is hard-pressed to increase development aid in […]

*Russian spy Anna Chapman gets her own action figure in the United States. Gets serenaded by Russian President Vladimir Putin? *Colorado Senate candidate Ken Buck says that you should vote for him in the Republican primary because, unlike his opponent, he does “not wear high heels.” Maybe we should start a “Ken Buck Should Campaign […]

Earlier this month, the United Nations General Assembly made a unanimous and historic vote to establish the first United Nations (UN) entity which will be exclusively dedicated to women’s empowerment and gender equality.  UN Women is the result of years of hard work and negotiations between UN member states, international NGOs, policymakers and tireless advocates around […]

I might more accurately call this post The Catastrophe of the Senate, but that won’t get us anywhere – for the moment.  In any event, as you know by now, the concatenation of Republican anti-environmentalism and fear (and no doubt loathing), plus intransigence from Democratic Senators from states where coal and oil are king, has […]

This movie doesn’t live up to its promises. It is about a U.S. army officer in 2003 who is frustrated with bad intelligence regarding locations of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It tries to be a topical thriller but never delivers. It is slow, disjointed, and somewhat tedious. Director Paul Greengrass hits the audience […]

Patrick Frost of the FPA Afghanistan blog took a strong stand against the WikiLeaks revelations yesterday, condemning The New York Times, Guardian, and Der Speigel.  I debate him in the comments section.  Stop by and join in if you feel inclined. The revelations in the leaked documents were not revelations.  As Robert Gibbs noted yesterday: […]

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in three separate Bloggers roundtables on Afghanistan sponsored by the Department of Defense (DoD).  The roundtables were a forum designed to provide access to key officials involved in NATO’s training of Afghan Police and Army forces.  Participating via a teleconferences from Afghanistan were Dr. Jack Kem, deputy […]