November, 2007

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China’s involvement in Af

Recently awarded the Asian Innovation Award 2007 by the Wall Street Journal Asia, Biolytix Water has developed a wastewater treatment sy

With the ever-expanding range of applications for nanotechnology, issues of its safety, and the lack of knowledge we have on it, are coming to the fore, as an Western Union: Middleman to the World’s Migrants

Recovering from bankruptcy to boast five times as many locations worldwide as McDonalds, Starbucks, Burger King, and Wal-Mart combined, Western Union has become ubiquitous in the realm of global migra

The latest installment in the Washington Post’s Green Corruption?

Many businesses and corporations are eager to participate in the ‘green’ revolution, and they are shelling out millions of dollars to jump on the bandwagon to brand themselves as environmentally f

The latest edition of the New York T

In honor of International Education Week, check this out...

Yesterday, CSIS released Global Forecast: The Top Security Challenges of 2008, its first annual compi

It appears that Honda will be the first company to achieve what many call the “holy grail” of greener driving. The car manufacturer announced at the end of October that it will begin producing the world’s first hydrogen fuel cell car in 2008, years before most estimates on the viability of such a project would have predicted. Hydrogen fuel cells enable silent drives with zero emissions and are therefore widely held to be crucial to help solve motoring issues in the future. Unfortunately, hydrogen fuel still faces a significant number of hurdles. First of all, it is less energy efficient than gasoline, which means that any given amount of hydrogen required to travel a certain distance will take up more

This week, November 12-16, is the 8th annual International Education Week (IEW), a joint initiative of the U.S.

Not surprisingly, the Nordic countries of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland top the gender gap index in the World Economic Forum’s

The World Bank jus

Imagine walking to a podium before an audience of hundreds of young, top-gun academics hungry to engage you on whatever issue you raise. Imagine looking out on a group of women and men representing 85 countries and virtually every major geographic region of the planet. And imagine engaging such a diversified group of academics at a time when all the polls suggest that America’s standing in the world is taking a serious beating. What would you say to them?

Under normal circumstances, I would opt instead for dental surgery or—far worse—a protracted budget meeting here at CSIS. But a few months ago, at a moment of profound weakness, I agreed to address the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellows at an annual meeting in the nation’s capital organized by our friends at the International Institute of Education (IIE) and supported by the State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

The truth is that I have been invited to speak before the Humphrey Fellows for the past four years, and I have done it every single time no matter how gracious the invitation. Why? In my view, both then and now, the whole exercise represents what is good and right about the United States—that we place Humphrey Fellows in various academic settings across the country and let them come to know us, warts and all, in such a way that they can appreciate the unvarnished nature of who we are. Another reason is that each of the four years that I have participated in the workshop, the discussion has been extremely open—even if it meant that the Fellows criticized U.S. policies and positions. It makes me recall the wise words of Hubert Humphrey: “Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent and debate.”

The World Politics Review (WPR) blog features an interesting post on the future of journalistic liberty and safety across the world in the face of technological privacy incursions. In November 2004, the Chinese government sentenced journalist Shi Tao to a ten-year jail term for “disclosure of state secrets.” Shi had sent a government memo aimed to stifle reporting on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre to various foreign websites. Yahoo, the e-mail service that he used to send out his information, revealed his identity to Chinese law enforcement authorities upon request.

As proof of the variety and

Here’s yet another way Google Earth can be creatively employed: to monitor countries’ progress toward the United Nations Millennium D

In study after study in recent years, the United States fares relatively poorly in public opinion polls across the world. And we all know that our military actions overseas and our policies at home contribute to this erosion of the U.S. image abroad. In an age where anyone can log into an online chatroom and talk with people in Afghanistan, opponents of public diplomacy claim that cross-cultural communication programs are no longer needed. I argue that now, more than ever, the U.S. needs to invest more time and funding into a coordinated, robust public diplomacy effort using educational exchanges, television and radio programming, and more. The recently released CSIS Commission on Smart Power report, “A Smarter, More Secure America,” touts a similar line. Check out Part II, Section 3 for some tangible policy recommendations regarding public diplomacy.

Today the CSIS Commission on Smart Power u

It is a basic tenet of offshoring economics: the production of your clothes may shift to Chinese manufacturers, but Chinese workers won’t be able to provide you with a haircut.

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The Columbia University Center for Climate Systems Research has created a map documenting population change out to 2025.