BY PETER MANDAVILLE This is real life, engraved on my pages: families dying from starvation whilst the government’s worried about immigration. — Blind Alphabetz, ‘Concrete Landz’ Like everyone today, Young British Muslims are carrying around iPods full of the latest tunes. Despite the recent phenomenal popularity of a pop-oriented variant of nasheed devotional music—a key [...]
BY SOLON SIMMONS There is no part of the world more crucial to the strategic interests of the United States as is the Middle East. While the traditional problems of the regulation of international affairs are at play there, Arab language satellite channels have created a new force in the region, and Al Jazeera is [...]
BY TONY SAMARA In 2010 Cape Town, South Africa will host a number of soccer matches for the World Cup, including one of the semi-final matches. That same year New Delhi, India, will host the Commonwealth Games, and Shanghai, China the World Expo. Different as they are, all three cities confront an urban population marked [...]
BY NICOLE DARNALL Imagine shopping for house paint. Your local hardware store stocks half a dozen brands that meet your criteria for price and quality. You notice on one can that there is an environmental label. It looks similar to a common nutritional label seen on most food products. The environmental label provides information about the resources [...]
BY JEFFREY W. MANTZ Nobody likes to hear about blood diamonds, that something venerated as our culture’s highest token of commitment and affection comes to us haunted by specters of oppression, cruelty and murder. It took a 2006 film with Leonardo DiCaprio playing the role of a diamond-embezzling South African mercenary and a $100 million [...]
BY LISA BREGLIA Across the frontlines of energy production in the Global South, an oil crisis is long simmering. This is not an oil crisis as we already know it: in other words, a crisis stimulated by market models of supply and demand, or a crisis abstractly negotiated by giddy futures speculators, or even a [...]
BY SUSAN A. CRATE Imagine making a trip to Siberia stereotypically perceived as the Gulag and a frozen wasteland only to discover an extraordinarily diverse part of the world. Not only in terms of plant and animals—just consider Lake Baikal, the deepest, oldest lake in the world holding one-fifth of the world’s fresh water and [...]
BY KAREN AKERLOF AND EDWARD W. MAIBACH The United States has now formally acknowledged climate change as a threat, and it appears that our nation is poised to begin the process of formulating a response. Many of our peer nations reached this point years earlier. Their experiences to date may have value in helping us [...]
BY ERIC MCGLINCHEY The local impact of global climate change is suddenly acutely present in Central Asia. A coincidence of extended drought in Central Asia and Australia and the transfer of food crops to ethanol production have resulted in a dramatic spike in commodity prices throughout Eurasia. Importantly, Central Asia is not alone in confronting [...]
BY LOUISE SHELLEY Human trafficking has recently emerged as a major international policy concern. Its consequences are far-reaching and diverse affecting social, political and economic life in countries across the globe. Trafficking is part of the larger phenomenon of international migration that has assumed an enormous scale in recent decades. But it is also a [...]