WORLD’S “LEAST DEVELOPED” COUNTRIES MUST EMERGE TOO

The remarkable rise of emerging economies has become a commonplace in public debates. Yet, not long ago, China, Indonesia, Brazil, and Turkey, to name a few were, considered off-limits by many foreign investors.

OBAMA AND OSAMA: VIOLENT OPPONENTS

There is no evidence that Osama bin Laden planned the attacks of September 11, 2001, just as there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the pretext used for the 2003 US attack on Iraq. Osama applauded 9/11, but that falls under freedom of speech.

THE POST-NUCLEAR AGE

Fukushima marks the end of the era of atomic energy illusions and the beginning of the post-nuclear age. Now classified at level 7 on the international scale of nuclear accidents (INES), the Japanese disaster is comparable to the Chernobyl meltdown in Ukraine 1986 in terms of its "considerable radioactive effects on the human health and on the environment".

INTEGRATED COMMUNICATIONS AND CHANGE IN NORTH AFRICA

Was Al Jazeera the key factor in the fall of the governments in Egypt and Tunisia, in the protests in Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria, and Syria, and in the rebellion in Libya? I don't think you can make this claim: the changes arose not from communications but objective conditions, though communications played a powerful role.

OP-ED: Private Beliefs, Public Change

When the suicide bomb exploded as worshippers left New Year's mass at a Coptic church in Alexandria, 21 people died and 79 were wounded. It's hard to imagine a more grim, ghastly, or tragic way to ring in a new decade.

THE BOOM IN CAPITAL FLOWS TO DEVELOPING COUNTRIES CAN TURN INTO A CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

An unusual feature of the global financial crisis is that for developing countries (DCs) the financial band seems to have picked up the pace of the music. While many advanced economies (AEs) continue to encounter debt deflation, financial stringency and risks of insolvency, the financial problem for most DCs is asset inflation, credit expansion and currency appreciations. Except for a brief interruption in 2008, DCs have continued to receive large capital inflows as major AEs have responded to the crisis caused by excessive liquidity and debt by creating still larger amounts of liquidity to bail out troubled banks and governments, lift asset prices and lower interest rates.  Quantitative easing and close-to-zero interest rates are now generating a surge in speculative capital flows to DCs with higher interest rates and better growth prospects, creating bubbles in foreign exchange, asset, credit and commodity markets.

TERROR VS. CONSENT

You would have to be living in a cave in Tora Bora or North Waziristan to avoid the news of the killing of Osama bin Laden that dominated virtually all media this week. Reactions ranged from juvenile triumphalism through conspiracy theories to the scoring of cheap political points.

TERROR VS. CONSENT

You would have to be living in a cave in Tora Bora or North Waziristan to avoid the news of the killing of Osama bin Laden that dominated virtually all media this week. Reactions ranged from juvenile triumphalism through conspiracy theories to the scoring of cheap political points.

COULD A PRIMEVAL PLANT BECOME A FUTURE FUEL, FOOD, AND BIO-PLASTIC?

At a time when most conventional fuels cast ever longer shadows of unintended consequences, algae ­that lowly pond scum-- offers a pleasant surprise: a near-term, low-tech alternative with apparently few of the hidden costs of more elaborate, expensive and exploitive energy sources.

PEACE: THE ONLY SOLUTION TO HUNGER IN NORTH KOREA

On April 28, former US President Jimmy Carter and three former European heads of state landed in Seoul after travelling to Pyongyang to help reopen dialogue between the two Koreas. Known as the Elders, they carried this message to the leaders of South Korea and the United States: "Chairman and General Secretary Kim Jong-il said he is willing and the people of North Korea are willing to negotiate with South Korea or with the United States or with the six powers on any subject any time and without any preconditions."

Female Migrant Domestic Workers: A Sad Story Largely Unknown.

Migrant domestic workers often toil under difficult and abusive conditions out of sight of the world's eyes. "Individual migrant domestic worker have virtually no possibility to negotiate for better working conditions before moving to the country of employment," Martin Oelz, International Labour Organization's legal specialist in the Conditions of Work and Employment Programme told IPS.

HOW TO END NUCLEAR WHILE SAVING MONEY AND IMPROVING SAFETY AND HEALTH

The technologies exist and are in use today that could make it possible to replace nuclear power with renewable sources while saving money.

UNITED STATES: WALKING THE TRAIL OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Recently, I joined some of our nationÂ's heroes walking the trail of the civil rights movement in Alabama. No one has done more to stop hate groups in the United States over the past three decades than Morris Dees through the Southern Poverty Law Center. Morris pioneered the strategy of holding hate groups accountable through civil suits awarding damages so expensive that the defendants are forced into bankruptcy and closed. Over thirty people have gone to prison for plots to assassinate him.

OP-ED: Still no Escape from Killer Chernobyl

The accident could have served as a wake-up call to the whole of humanity. Twenty-five years ago, on Apr. 26 1986, disaster struck at the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear complex in the Ukrainian state of the former Soviet Union.

CUBA: HOW RADICAL WILL THE CHANGES BE?

The plans and agreements approved at the recently-concluded Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party has left people with a wide range of reactions, from hope, to scepticism, to fear, to satisfaction, to the sense that old ideological principles have been renounced or that such certainties are no more than window dressing. But the Congress left no one with a feeling of indifference. Cuba's magnetism -sometimes morbid, sometimes admiring- prevents that from happening.

IMPROVED CHANCES FOR ABOLISHING DEATH PENALTY IN NORTH AFRICA

Unlike the Middle East, North Africa has recently given signs it is moving away from capital punishment. The exceptions, however, are Egypt and Libya, which still have the death penalty and voted against the three UN General Assembly resolutions on a capital punishment moratorium adopted in 2007, 2008 and 2010. In Libya, at least 18 persons were executed in 2010.

EUROPE: THE FISCAL DEFICIT VS THE SOCIAL DEFICIT

President of the Council of European Finance Ministers and Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Jean Claude Junker, won sudden fame when he stated, "We all know what we have to do, but if we did it we would all lose in the next elections." This comment reflects the impotence of politics and the road that Europe now finds itself on.

THE LIBYA WAR WAS LONG PLANNED

The attack on Libya was long in the works. Since 1969, when Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, then 28, seized power in a military coup, overthrowing King Idris and forcing the American military out of Libya, the US has been planning to overthrow him.

CAN EMERGING DEMOCRACIES CHALLENGE THE MORAL HEGEMONY OF WESTERN POWERS?

Interestingly, the website of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization proudly proclaims "NATO Allies decided on March 27 to take on the whole military operation in Libya under UN Security Council Resolution 1973." This sole claim of ownership over a UN-sponsored mandate by a military alliance is indeed worrying and begs the question whether international precedents are being established here to conflate a multi-lateral UN force with a NATO force.

NUCLEAR FISSION: THE MOST WASTEFUL, STUPID, AND COSTLY SYSTEM FOR BOILING WATER

I have opposed nuclear power since my service on the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment Advisory Council, from 1975 until 1980. Even back then it was clear that nuclear power was a fearsome military technology looking for a civilian second life. President Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" was a strategy devised to subsidise this technology, despite the fact that it was never economically viable. The public was told that it would produce electricity too cheap to meter but it was never given all the facts: that there were health risks and no plans to provide storage for the spent fuel rods, which would be radioactive for centuries.

THE BOOM IN CAPITAL FLOWS TO DEVELOPING COUNTRIES CAN TURN INTO A CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

An unusual feature of the global financial crisis is that for developing countries (DCs) the financial band seems to have picked up the pace of the music. While many advanced economies (AEs) continue to encounter debt deflation, financial stringency and risks of insolvency, the financial problem for most DCs is asset inflation, credit expansion and currency appreciations. Except for a brief interruption in 2008, DCs have continued to receive large capital inflows as major AEs have responded to the crisis caused by excessive liquidity and debt by creating still larger amounts of liquidity to bail out troubled banks and governments, lift asset prices and lower interest rates. Quantitative easing and close-to-zero interest rates are now generating a surge in speculative capital flows to DCs with higher interest rates and better growth prospects, creating bubbles in foreign exchange, asset, credit and commodity markets.