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…
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 …
Ukrainian elections: Poroshenko and proliferating populists
Ukraine is already in election mode. The president and parliament that came to power in the tumult of 2014 will run for a new term in 2019 – the president in March; parliament in October. However, President Petro Poroshenko is currently trailing in fourth or fifth place in the polls. He also has the…
Europe is on the verge of a big new crisis, just six years after the last one
Could it be that Europe is facing yet another existential crisis, six years after financial meltdown threatened the eurozone’s collapse? This week the third- and fourth-largest economies in the eurozone — Italy and Spain — experienced political earthquakes. Italy will now have a government of insu…
Warsaw to Trump: Let’s make a military deal (without NATO)
It’s the kind of HUGE deal that Donald Trump promised would be a hallmark of his presidency: Poland wants a U.S. Army armored division permanently stationed on its territory as a deterrent against Russia, and it’s willing to pay up to $2 billion to make it happen. Warsaw’s pitch,…
Abe expresses hope for peace treaty progress as he departs for summit with Putin
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe left for Russia on Thursday to hold a summit with President Vladimir Putin and to attend an economic forum, with bilateral economic cooperation likely to be high on the agenda. Prior to the flight to St. Petersburg, Abe told a group of reporters that he hopes to make progre…
5 takeaways from EU’s big Balkan get-together
SOFIA – It wasn’t a renewal of the wedding vows because the big ceremony never happened. It was two partners declaring they still want to be engaged — even though one is now playing hard to get. Fifteen years ago, EU leaders told their western Balkan counterparts at a summit in Thessaloniki tha…
A Reckoning for Obama’s Foreign-Policy Legacy
Embedded in any policy is some theory of victory—some explanation, no matter how inchoate or ill-considered, that explains why this might work. So too with President Trump’s decision to walk away from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the agreement with Iran so ungainly that even the acronym J…