Some of the snapshots from Chile’s ongoing student movement depict a lighthearted mobilization. Led by the charismatic Camila Vallejo, the students have used Twitter and Facebook to stage kiss-a-thons and superhero-themed costume protests. But other images have been more violent.
The recent failure of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (JSCDR) to reach an agreement on the reduction of the federal deficit may turn into a full-blown military budget crisis with enormous, unforeseen consequences for national security if the United States does not act soon.
Antarctica is home to more than emperor penguins and a few dozen humans with science citizenship barricaded in small hermetic bases. It is also host to an estimated 200 billion barrels of hydrocarbons, alongside large quantities of gold, silver, uranium, and many other rare metals underneath a pristine ice cap still virgin of commercial exploitation. Securing a territory with such a rich underground, in whole or in part, would bless any country with durable energy security and, thereby, increased political independence in the international arena.
Consider the flying toilet. The term comes from the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Within the slum, there is often less than one latrine per 50 shacks, with each 12-foot by 12-foot shack containing, on average, eight people. Kibera sits on government land that never fully transferred legally to its pre-independence residents, and, as such, the government treats residents as squatters with no right or entitlement to legal, social, or economic protection. A complete lack of governmental presence within the slum means that at night, with no street lights and collections of roving thugs (and, at times, predatory policemen looking for a shakedown), using toilets can become dangerous. In response, shacks stock up on plastic bags, defecate or urinate into them after dark, and fling them from their windows out into the streets to bake in the morning sun.
In April 2009, Columbia University’s Task Force on Undergraduate Education released “An Agenda for the Future,” a cheery strategic document, which, translated into two words, read: excelsior, Columbia! On pages 16 and 17, the report rejoices in and urges forward the internationalization of Columbia – not just the establishment of foreign outposts vis-à-vis Global Centers and the development of the [...]
We have learned by now to expect and to fear the masked army of the internet: Anonymous.
While public concern about global warming has waned in recent years, ever-more scientific evidence shows that climate change is a grave and growing nightmare. Among problematic signs are the melting of glaciers and polar ice caps at an increasing rate, and the corresponding rise in sea levels. While perhaps a distant concern both geographically and temporally for much of the [...]
In 2008, President Barack Obama had a clear idea for Latin American foreign policy. The Bush administration, distracted by events in the Middle East, had pursued a harmful hemispheric policy of blustering unilateralism and neglect; Obama, conversely, would pursue a “new partnership” with the Americas, one marked by cooperation and mutual interests. His subsequent election was heralded throughout Latin America as [...]
The relative peace that has followed the Korean War ended with an explosion in March of last year, when North Korea torpedoed a South Korean naval ship.
“I don’t want the country of my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to be largely Muslim, or for Turkish or Arabic to be spoken in large areas, that women will wear headscarves and the daily rhythm is set by the call of the muezzin. If I want to experience that, I can just take a vacation in the Orient.” Enter Thilo Sarrazin, [...]
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