In The News

Groomed for Suicide: How Taliban Recruits Children for Mass Murder

Jon Boone May 23, 2011
Severe poverty, shortcomings in education, restraints on women appearing in public, religious extremism and ongoing war all combine to limit opportunities for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan – and all pose new dangers. Struggling to recruit adults as suicide bombers, the Taliban increasingly turn to desperate teenagers and younger children, reports Jon Boone for the Guardian. Taliban...

513 Migrants in Two Tractor-Trailers

Ioan Grillo May 20, 2011
Mexican police, screening tractor-trailers for illegal cargo with X-rays, detected more than 500 people crammed inside two trucks. US border controls and kidnapping dangers in Mexico force immigrants to turn to smuggling cartels. Each immigrant reportedly paid smugglers $7000 for passage to the US – more than $3.5 million in all. “[A]mid the drug war, Mexico's southern border has become...

What the Guantanamo Leaks Won't Reveal

Darryl Li April 27, 2011
WikiLeaks has begun publishing 779 US secret military files on Guantánamo Bay prisoners. Dated 2002 to 2008, the assessments detail US intelligence and rationales for indefinite detention of prisoners or transfer to other governments. The raw documents require context, suggests Darryl Li, who has worked on the legal defense of Guantánamo detainees, in an opinion essay for Al Jazeera. The threat...

A Tahrir Square Moment in India

Sadanand Dhume April 18, 2011
Government corruption reinforces income inequality, wastes scarce resources and destroys the public trust. After a series of high-profile corruption scandals in India – padded contracts associated with the Commonwealth Games, telecom spectrum distributed to favored bidders at a loss of $40 billion for taxpayers, and investments in plush apartments on land set aside for war widows – outrage ensued...

Fighting Imported Corruption

Devesh Kapur, Arvind Subramanian April 5, 2011
Indians are furious and astounded about recent corruption cases, where large ill-gotten funds have vanished. In an essay for Business Standard, Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian blame the ease in cross-border transfer of funds. The pair contends that as money is concentrated in fewer hands, it’s secretly transferred to tax-free domains beyond national borders and then returned as valued foreign...

What Somali Pirates Reveal About the Global Economy

Matthew Lynn February 18, 2011
Pirates off the coast of Somalia continue to target huge ships passing by the impoverished coast. Matthew Lynn, writing for the Financial Times, regards piracy as a metaphor for the global business economy – the pirates know their customers, reinvent careers, conduct research, and maintain employee loyalty by sharing profits. Somalian fishermen were left without livelihoods after foreign factory...

How to Keep the Nuclear Genie in the Bottle

Richard Weitz January 19, 2011
Following a series of agreements with the US, Russia and former Soviet states, the global stockpile of nuclear warheads has dropped from 70,000 to 22,000 since 1987, reports the World Nuclear Association. The Association says, “Highly-enriched uranium in US and Russian weapons and other military stockpiles amounts to about 2000 tonnes, equivalent to about twelve times annual world mine production...