In The News

Financial Times: AI’s Rapid Advance Sparks Call for Code for Robots

John Thornhill September 22, 2017
The artificial intelligence, or AI, field has experienced great advances, with recent innovations enabling robots to become increasingly autonomous. Many AI inventions, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, are benefiting society and quickly become routine for users. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the potential for robot-induced destruction is emerging. In August, two Chinese chat bots...

Reuters: Kurds Press Historic Independence Vote Despite Regional Fears

Raya Jalabi September 22, 2017
About 30 million Kurdish people are spread throughout the Middle East in Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq, and in recent years many fought fiercely to protect their communities against extremists. Iraqi Kurds are expected to pursue independence starting with a referendum and transform their semi-autonomous region into a new country known as Kurdistan. US and United Nations officials have tried to...

The Economist: Can Political Islam Make It in the Modern World?

September 21, 2017
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Islamist parties across the Middle East and North Africa have achieved mixed results. As the Economist notes, the legacy of the Muslim Brotherhood, which began as an anti-imperialist social and educational movement in Egypt under Hassan al-Banna in 1928, gave way to Islamist offshoots, each iteration borne out of its own historical particularities and social...

BusinessKorea: Saying Good-Bye to China

Michael Herh September 21, 2017
More than 25 percent of South Korea’s exports went to China as the world’s second largest market in 2013. “However, when the THAAD Incident broke out, excessive dependence on China boomeranged against South Korean companies,” writes Michael Herh for BusinessKorea. China found South Korean products less desirable; for example, Hyundai Motor sales plummeted by 50 percent, and South Korea – despite...

The Guardian: Facebook Bans Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army’s Posts

Julia Carrie Wong, Michael Safi and Shaikh Azizur Rahman September 20, 2017
Rohingya Muslims, long marginalized, have few resources to resist the Myanmar military and flee the nation by the thousands. Social media can be a lifeline during such chaos. Yet in the midst of humanitarian crisis, Facebook is retaining the Myanmar military’s page while putting the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army on its “most dangerous” list, prompting moderators to delete posts that praise the...

The New York Times: “It’s a Slow Death”: The World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis

Shuaib Almosawa, Ben Hubbard and Troy Griggs September 20, 2017
Directors of UNICEF, WFP, and WHO visited Yemen in July and described the “world’s worst cholera outbreak in the midst of the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.” Since the start of the conflict when the Houthis overthrew the government and gained control of Sana’a in 2014, Yemen has slowly collapsed. Frequent bombings have contributed to the deaths of more than 10,000 civilians and crippled the...

El País: How Germany Is Leading Europe’s Organic Food Revolution

Laura Delle Femmine September 19, 2017
Some consumers take food for granted while others demand the utmost in safety and taste. Consumers in the latter group, joined by those who want to protect the environment, seek out organic products produced without chemical fertilizers, additives, antibiotics, pesticides and other unnatural treatments. The United States is the world’s leading organic market followed by Germany. Europe has had...