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Government debt is mounting all across the developed world.  While Emerging Market countries such as China have low debt levels, and Brazil and India are beginning to grow out of their debts, the next crisis (or even the second half of this one) could be a fiscal shock — perhaps even a government bond default — in the industrialized […]

On April 15, 2010 Oxfam released a new report, “Now, The World Is Without Me”: An investigation of sexual violence in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.  The report, which was commissioned by Oxfam and conducted by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, is an extensive study of rape victims in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).  The […]

Silence = Death That anti-AIDS slogan should be heeded worldwide but perhaps even moreso in Malawi. The singer Madonna traveled to the country, one of the world’s poorest, in 2006 and wrote and produced this documentary. It is about children growing up without parents who have died from AIDS and who have AIDS themselves. Out […]

Veteran advisor on Arab-Israeli negotiations, Aaron David Miller, details in a Foreign Policy article why he has lost his once-steadfast faith in America’s ability to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Comparing the peace process to a “false religion,” Miller reflects on the fact that each U.S. president since the October 1973 war – most recently President […]

Bill Maher gave some sound advice to the Tea Partiers over the weekend.  If you really care about the deficit, he said to them, you’ll start talking about cutting our country’s largest jobs program: defense spending.  This advice should also have been considered by the group from the Industrial College for the Armed Forces that […]

The Washington Post recently noted some of the challenges that stand in the way of the Obama Administration’s goals for the upcoming Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) review.  The Post’s analysis highlights a number of cases that illustrate the deeper, underlying strategic threat to President Obama’s vision for a Nuclear-Free World: the unchanged calculus that membership […]

In today’s CSFB column on China (see below), Dong Tao and Christiaan Tuntono report that PBoC Governor Zhou Xiaochuan commented that China would like greater monetary policy flexibility in order to combat inflation.  Not that inflation is so high in China, but the Asian giant’s return to breakneck rates of growth (11.9% growth year-on-year in 1Q10) may push prices higher.  […]

In the midst of Israeli accusations that Syria has been sending long-range Scud missiles to Hezbollah, Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, Jeffrey Feltman, testified last week in front of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, pushing for U.S. diplomatic efforts in Syria. In a hearing entitled “Neither Appeasement nor Improvement? […]

An article by Robert Guth in the Wall Street Journal last week highlighted the theory that I posed in last Thursday’s post, that our global health system is designed to be reactionary and emergency-focused: That question goes to the heart of one of the most controversial debates in global health: Is humanity better served by […]

American’s are quite used to shopping and having few issues returning unwanted or defective merchandise for a refund or exchange, it’s in some sense a cultural norm. However what happens when the same logic is applied to a child? Can one adopt a child and then decide this is not what they thought they were […]

After being shut down last month under the pretense of having no valid operating license, Nativity TV is still not back on the air. Nativity TV is the only Christian television station in the Palestinian Authority (PA) and operates out of Bethlehem. Last month, after the TV station was shut down by the PA, an […]

The year was 1996 and I was in the process of learning the ropes at my new job at United States Strategic Command, the keeper of the nation’s strategic nuclear triad (submarines, bombers, and land based ballistic missiles).  One day I ran into an acquaintance in the hall that I hadn’t seen for a number […]