The bestselling survey of current events and global trends
16/01/2009
Dan Smith's new blog
Dan Smith has shifted blog-sites and is now to be found at: www.dansmithsblog.com. Dan will be blogging on the themes of climate change, peace and conflict, the economic crunch and power. Go to the...
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22/12/2008
Climate change – we need new ways of doing business
At last some good news about global warming as Barrack Obama appoints people who know and care about climate change to the key science and environment positions in his administration. It looks...
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16/12/2008
Poznan Climate Change Conference – er, what?
It’s time we started talking about climate change freshly and clearly – which means, differently. The Climate Change Conference in Poznan ended on Saturday 13th December. This was a...
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09/12/2008
Firefighters for peace and the Global Peace Index
On 10 December the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo. This year’s laureate is Marti Ahtisaari, former President of Finland and UN Special Envoy on Kosovo. He has been involved in many peace...
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29/11/2008
Letter from Nepal – time of change and challenge
Kathmandu 20-29 November 2008
This is my first visit for two years. It’s a time of change and challenge in Nepal. It is exciting and disconcerting and there are alarming risks and great...
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24/11/2008
US power declining?
The US National Intelligence Council has produced a study of the future, leading to a lot of excited headlines about the US being on the way down as a world power by 2025. Could this define...
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18/11/2008
Disposable capitalism
“Disposable Society” is a song of scorn, fear and anger about a system that uses up and discards everything – paper towels, paper cups, cars, relationships, people. Sung by Esther...
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12/11/2008
The big shake-up, the market and managed capitalism
With China having just joined in, governments around the world have now put about 3.5 trillion US dollars into recapitalising the finance sector. That’s 50% more than the UK’s annual...
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11/11/2008
Remembrance – counting the dead
Today is Remembrance Day. These two to three weeks leading up to 11 November are the only time we in Britain and Northern Ireland obey the poet’s injunction – “We will remember...
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05/11/2008
A realistic international expectation for President-elect Obama
Well done! Now what? From Grant Park, Chicago, where the President-elect held his victory rally to his grandmother’s village of Kogelo in western Kenya, expectations are rampant. Facing two...
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31/10/2008
Congo: background to tragedy
The North Kivu province of Democratic Republic of Congo is being ripped apart again by fighting and it looks as if about 10 per cent of the 4 million population have been driven from their homes or...
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28/10/2008
A green economy is still a political economy
Greening the economy is a must. Are we all aware that in this century, the average number of disasters caused by weather each year is a little over 350? Yes, virtually one a day. So let’s start...
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22/10/2008
“Under wraps” is not the same as real peace
The past two decades have been an era of growing peace, even though the world has seen some horrors as bad as anything in history: above all, the Rwanda genocide of 1994; mayhem in Democratic...
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17/10/2008
The end of two chapters – economics and US foreign policy
Two mini-eras, each reflecting a specific conservative mind-set, are coming to an almost simultaneous end. One is the almost three decades of let-the-market-rip economics, the Reagan-Thatcher...
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10/10/2008
Cold inequality
Amid the market crash – seven consecutive days of share prices falling on Wall Street, adding up to a loss of 23 per cent of share value – we are in danger of losing sight of some of the...
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07/10/2008
Thinking ahead on oil
A few months ago the economic commentariat judged the sky-rocketing price of oil to be a forewarning of doom. Now some of them see plummeting oil prices as part of the bad news on the second...
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01/10/2008
Response to crisis: reduce the ADD
Economic restructuring is the issue. But the question is: what form it will take and how much of our basic economic structure is up for grabs?
The fall-out from the credit crisis will be with us for...
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17/09/2008
Big money, big mess
As bits and pieces of the international financial system fall from the tree and governments ponder how much to shore up and how much they should let fall, it’s worth thinking about the scale of...
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