A Changing Public Health Agenda: Guiding Access to Care
September 9, 2013 4 min. read

Biopharmaceutical companies have been part of the global public health workforce for decades, tackling infectious diseases and disseminating life-saving drug interventions. In the last several decades, pharmaceutical companies have played an instrumental role in combatting infectious diseases across developing nations, often donating in-kind contributions of vaccinations and treatments to the NGOs and local organizations. Now, […]

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Strike on Syria: What Kind of World?
September 9, 2013 5 min. read

President Woodrow Wilson has long fascinated me. He is one of those presidents that is a giant in history, but few people know much about him. Steven Spielberg has never made a movie about him, you don’t hear his name referenced on the Sunday talk shows, and he seems entirely missing from pop-culture. And yet […]

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A Candid Discussion with Steve Rhodes
September 7, 2013 8 min. read

  As the Middle East continues to plunge in a multi-faceted and what appears to be an increasingly regional crisis, there are debates and even hope about the future of entrepreneurship in the region in the face of the Arab Spring. Corruption, the status of women, the Israeli Palestinian conflict, Iran’s nuclear program, and now the specter of […]

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Would the 9/11 Hijackers’ Money Trail Raise Red Flags in Today’s System?
September 6, 2013 8 min. read

  If terrorists entered the U.S. today to conduct a 9/11-scale attack and used the same money-movement methods employed by the hijackers in 2001, it is “possible, but not probable” that their financial activities would bring them to the attention of intelligence and law-enforcement officials. That’s the assessment of Dennis M. Lormel, who led the […]

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Uniform: restriction and liberation
September 5, 2013 4 min. read

Depending on how you are dressed, you can signal your status, identity, job and a myriad other markers which help locate you in a sociopolitical context. They can show your distinctiveness, or membership within a group. Many jobs require a uniform, from the armed forces to hospitals to customer services, and in many countries around […]

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The Whistleblower (2010)
September 3, 2013 2 min. read

Sex trafficking. It happens all over the world but is largely invisible to most. What The Whistleblower (a drama, not a documentary) does is expose it as it occurred in Bosnia in 1999, four years after the Dayton Accord was reached. Rachel Weisz plays Kathryn Bolkovac, a police officer from Nebraska who joins the United […]

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The Shadow of Iraq?
September 2, 2013 9 min. read

  After one week of progressive securitization of the Syrian problem by the US, Britain and France, it appears that the members of the Euro-Atlantic community were getting ready to build a coalition of the willing in order to punish Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against Syrian civilians. The United Nations recently sent UN […]

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Yes, I Speak Intervention
August 29, 2013 4 min. read

With a nod to Clausewitz, sort of, the language of politics is also the language of war. Arguments promoting a certain philosophy can also justify (or condemn) military action and be another weapon on the battlefield. And so the first shots — er, sound bites — rang out Tuesday morning in the US, from entrenchments […]

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Attracting FDI: Openness Helps, But Opportunity Rules
August 28, 2013 4 min. read

    If a country had the most-restrictive regulations on foreign direct investment (FDI) of 55 nations studied, where do you think it would rank among those nations in terms of actually attracting investment from abroad? If you said “First,” you obviously would be flaunting conventional economic theory and engaging in highly counter-intuitive speculation. Further, […]

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The Healthcare Dove with an Olive Branch
August 27, 2013 10 min. read

It’s a rare occurrence for a nation to act altruistically in its humanitarian engagements, and even rarer when a state does so, knowing all there is in return is potentially heightened security risks in a conflict setting. I want to use this post as a brief pause from my usual focus on chronic disease care […]

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Ecuador Reverses Course
August 20, 2013 5 min. read

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, president of the smallest oil producing and exporting member of OPEC, has committed to expanding oil drilling – from the current 513,000 barrels of oil per day. President Correa announced last week that he signed an executive decree to end the Yasuni Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tipuni (ITT) initiative. ITT are oil blocks, which house […]

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U.S. Prospects for Ratification as MLC, 2006 Enters into Force
August 20, 2013 8 min. read

On Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2013, the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 (MLC, 2006) will enter into force. The MLC, 2006 is an extremely comprehensive convention considered to be the “fourth pillar” of international maritime law. Though it enjoyed unanimous adoption within the ILO, the sheer breadth of the MLC, 2006 raised skepticism […]

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