Haiti housing concerns mounting Haitian authorities and aid groups are in a race against time to ensure earthquake survivors have shelter before the rainy season begins in March. Aid groups are hoping to encourage the use of transitional shelters that can later be reinforced into more permanent structures over tents. Some food aid sold via […]
People like the analogy. The rise of Germany after 1890, mismanaged by Germany and its adversaries, and the rise of China today — mismanaged or well-managed? A NYTimes article today discusses the conflicting claims over rich offshore oil resources in the South China Sea among China and its much smaller neighbors, notably Vietnam, with which China fought […]
Someone I know at NYU has co-written a paper positing an interesting theory on why some countries sign, ratify, then violate the Convention Against Torture (CAT). The theory: authoritarian leaders sign and ratify the CAT, then violate it, to show their domestic opponents how committed they are to suppressing opposition. Read about it at The […]
After the U.S. made a heroic effort to help the people of Haiti recover from their recent major earthquake, events on the ground have taken an odd turn. Even after millions of dollars in aid money was donated by American citizens, corporations and the federal government, and direct on-the-ground help from private U.S. aid groups […]
Russia does not do the overt Internet censorship that China does. That’s good. They still do plenty of stuff to interfere with the Freedom to Connect. That’s bad. The heroic Russian paper Novaya Gazeta* was just subjected to a massive DDOS that knocked their main web site off the air. Here’s their Livejournal parallel site […]
I hate to keep poking at China but… OK, that’s a lie. Their government acts like thuggish authoritarians online, and so I like poking them. Unlike equally nasty but more impoverished countries like, say, Turkmenistan, they have the cash to actually make bad stuff happen.* The government – or “patriotic” hackers – DDOSed a bunch […]
I had a good time the other night talking about climate change policy and politics with Amanda Little on The Hyperbole Hour. We’re on the same wavelength. (You can download the show as an mp3 file and listen in from around 29 minutes.) One of the points we made was that we really need to […]
Following Nicolas Sarkozy’s statement last summer that burqas are “not welcome” in France, the French Parliament recommended a partial ban last week on any veil that covers the face. For now, that ban would only cover public transportation and public buildings such as school and hospitals, not women generally on the streets. It also only […]
Christiaan Tuntono and Dong Tao of CSFB reported today on the only health care reform taking place in the G-2 at the moment, this one in China (see article below). In the workers’ paradise in East Asia, such welfare state fundamentals as health care, social security, and unemployment insurance are not provided extensively by the state. […]
Jack Goldsmith wrote a provocative op-ed in the Washington Post from Monday suggesting that if Hillary wants to stop cyberattacks across the Internet, she needs to look a bit closer to home. As in, America is a leading cyberbully. The bulk of the piece is a ridiculous attempt at creating a moral equivalence between America and […]
This year marks the 15th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women, which was held in Beijing, China in 1995. With one hundred and eighty-nine Member States adopting the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which laid out a comprehensive agenda for women’s political and economic empowerment and the foundations for gender mainstreaming. The […]
The U.S. is working with allies to increase pressure on Iran leading up to a possible imposition of new sanctions over the issue of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. This news-wire report from Reuters notes that the U.S. is in the preliminary stages of drafting a new sanctions resolution: France and the United States have both […]
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