In The News

Putin's Wary Reconciliation

Liliana Proskuryakova January 24, 2005
Although the newly elected Ukraine president Victor Yushchenko arrived in Moscow today in a gesture of reconciliation, Russia's ill-disguised attempt to defeat him in the election has left a bad taste in the mouth. It has not only soured relations between these two historically close partners giving rise to anti-Russian sentiment in Ukraine, but also further complicated Russia's...

Japan's Nuclear Nightmare

Eric Johnston January 19, 2005
A recent fatal accident in a nuclear power plant in Mihama highlighted many often neglected aspects of nuclear plant safety and power regulation in Japan. Plants are now older and inspections less thorough, as utility companies seek to maximize operations and minimize costs in an age of deregulation. Scandals and accidents throughout Japan's nuclear history have been serious problems that...

Poverty Breeds Insecurity

January 19, 2005
At the United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000, world leaders placed development at the heart of the global agenda by adopting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which set clear targets for reducing poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation, and discrimination against women by 2015. To devise a plan for implementation and recommend strategies for developing...

Uzbekistan's Democratic Smoke Screen

Paula R. Newberg December 20, 2004
Many predict a great victory for populist democracy in the Ukrainian recall elections on December 26th. That same day, writes Paula Newberg, democracy will also suffer a great blow in Uzbekistan's elections. Repression and poverty have stifled the country's economic and political ambitions since the fall of the Soviet Union. And its current president, Islam Karimov, strongly believes...

Invisible Export – A Hidden Cost of China's Growth: Mercury Migration

Matt Pottinger December 20, 2004
When an American hockey player suffered symptoms from mercury contamination, he never expected that he might have power plants half way across the world in China to blame. With its growing appetite for energy, China is finding its many coal-burning power plants hard at work generating the much needed electricity power – as well as huge amounts of air pollutants like sulfur dioxide and mercury....

Learning the Hard Way in Kosovo

Alkman Granitsas December 9, 2004
A newly released report on UN reform suggests that the path be cleared for the world organization to intervene in sovereign nations and send peacekeepers to places like Darfur or Rwanda. But before rushing the blue berets to the next political crisis, the international community would do well to learn from past missteps in other parts of the world. In the past 15 years, the nature of peacekeeping...

If UN Fails, We All Do

Fareed Zakaria December 9, 2004
The military or humanitarian “failures” of the United Nations over the years must be recognized as collective failures of member countries, argues Newsweek Editor Fareed Zakaria. The Rwandan genocide a decade ago is a case in point: Decisions made among the most powerful U.N. member nations, including the US, the UK, and France, led to completely botched peacekeeping operations. Now on the brink...