Ten years after Lehman: Can liberal democracy survive another financial crisis?
In recent weeks, media outlets across the world have marked the ten-year anniversary of a signal event in the global financial crisis: the bankruptcy and downfall of Lehman Brothers, once one of the United States’ most important investment banks. Much of the coverage has depicted the developments th…
Chagos Islands dispute: UK ‘threatened’ Mauritius
The British government has been accused of threatening a close ally in an increasingly bitter diplomatic tug-of-war over the fate of a tiny, strategic archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The dispute over the Chagos Islands – home to the US military base on Diego Garcia – is being portraye…
In Morocco, a Draft to Dodge Radicalization
Earlier this summer, there was an unusual story out of Morocco. On May 1, the government severed political ties with Iran and recalled its ambassador. That’s not the unusual part; Morocco and Iran have longstanding animosity, and the government in Rabat cut diplomatic ties in 2009 (they were reinsta…
Making plans for a new world order
Henry Kissinger was recently asked if Donald Trump could not unintentionally become the force behind the birth of a new western order. His answer: It would be ironic but not impossible. Instead of narrowing our view across the Atlantic to the ever-changing whims of the American President, we should …
Why ‘we’ got Turkey wrong (and China. And Russia. And Iraq)
In addition to warning us of the growing tide of populism and nationalism, and bashing Donald Trump, Pundits in Washington and other Western capitals have been also spending also a lot of time, debating ‘How the West got China wrong,’ as The Economist put it, which was just another way of …
Billionaires reach for the stars while world suffers
With all due respect to Jeff Bezos and other billionaires who plan to spend billions of dollars of their personal wealth on space travel, hundreds of millions of children who lack access to basic health care and schooling more urgently need help right here on Earth. The world economy is pu…
The Demographic Decay of the Modern Europe
Europe’s population is getting older and its economy is struggling due to the ageing population; that is no longer a secret. However, the lack of a coherent European (re)solution, which would tackle this issue, remains puzzling. In fact, even though each European country is aware of this problem, on…
A Romanian village feels the country’s emigration pain
The name of the village means “the return” — but these days people aren’t coming back. Like many other Romanians, people from the village of Întorsura started moving abroad soon after communist rule ended. In the early 1990s, local young people went to work in Italy, where language and weather …
2018 SDG Index and Dashboards
The 2018 SDG Index and Dashboards Report “Global Responsibilities – Implementing the Goals,” prepared by the Bertelsmann Stiftung and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), is available now on www.sdgindex.org . This third edition of the annual stocktaking of progress towards the Sust…
Trump calls for Russia to be reinstated to G7
President Trump on Friday called for Russia to be reinstated to the group of leading industrial nations meeting at the G-7 summit in Quebec, saying the Kremlin “should be a part” of the talks. “It doesn’t matter what you call it. It used to be G-8, now Russia is out,” Trump told reporters on Friday …