Israel has a comparative advantage in medical care and specifically in treating trauma victims, which comes not only from its advanced human capital, especially in technology and health care, but also from vast experience treating victims of terror and war. Read the NYTimes article published yesterday on the subject. Israel has been treating Haiti’s earthquake victims […]
…even under Barack Obama. Nice piece in the FT on European angst about American power, and the continent’s inability as yet to offer a unified foreign policy with punch. Ideally, EU foreign and defense policies could serve as a counterweight to the G-2, read: China and the U.S. The latest flare-up of this angst involved a […]
Greetings and salutations, gracious readers! My name is Chris Doten, and I’ll be your guide as we tour the networked wilderness of international relations in the Internet age. I’ve spent years working with computers, networks, and web applications, got myself a foreign policy degree from Tufts’ Fletcher School, and have bummed around in China and […]
I wrote here a while ago about food miles – see under Transportation of Food. I looked at two arguments: that the long distances we transport food has a discernible impact on the production of greenhouse gases – and that it doesn’t. From what I’ve been reading over the past couple of years, the weight […]
Finally capitulating to voter outrage, and the very kind of “Change” he campaigned on last year, President Obama proposed tough new financial industry restrictions under what he called “the Volcker Rule” – named after Paul Volcker, the former Fed Chair.
As you’ve probably heard, the Supreme Court finally issued its opinion on the Citizens United case. Read the full opinion here. And for a good round-up of commentary, I recommend SCOTUSBlog. One interesting point made my Lyle Denniston there is this: Another question, and this one the Court explicitly said it was not deciding, was […]
The news media is awash with reports on the first year anniversary of the Obama presidency. Take a look at this assortment on Google News and you will find that the assessment is grim. The Economist, for example, offers this rather dismal analysis of President Obama’s foreign policy: Mr Obama has been on a goodwill […]
Yesterday Human Rights Watch released their annual World Report for 2010, detailing the state of human rights affairs around the world for the previous year. Many of the stories they focused on were also covered and editorialized here throughout 2009, from government abuses in Eritrea and Sri Lanka to increased civilian casualties in the Democratic […]
The New York Times published an editorial yesterday analyzing the Republican win in Massachusetts this week and offering advice to President Obama. I’m not sure why the “gray lady” of American journalism is joining the chorus in this country calling for populist policies as a result of the Massachusetts election — sticking it to the banks […]
The excellent “Green Energy Reporter” had an item noting a new study on mountaintop removal mining and Stephen Colbert’s take. There are huge environmental and health impacts associated with coal mining, as I’ve noted a number of times, here and here, among others. Now a group of scientists, led by the University of Maryland’s Dr. […]
As millions of dollars in aid and other resources flow to Haiti, it is inevitable that someone will raise the specter of waste through corruption. Often such words come from those who oppose aid on ideological grounds, swaying public opinion by exploiting our natural aversion to corruption. But genuine abuses unfortunately do occur, and their […]
This report in the World Politics Review suggests that the U.S. and our allies have lost a contest you may not have realized we were engaged in. The contest was over energy resources in Central Asia and those of you who believe that much of what happens in world affairs is linked to the competition […]
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