Over at the UN in New York, where it's the annual jamboree that is the General Assembly, Nicolas Sarkozy has been calling on world leaders to hold a summit...
Alex Evans
Alex Evans is a Senior Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation (CIC) at New York University, and the author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren't Enough? (Penguin, 2017), a book about the power of deep stories to unlock transformational change. He lives in North Yorkshire and is currently working on political polarisation and learning dry stone walling. Full biog here.
Labour Conference keynotes in times of meltdown
Listening to Gordon Brown's speech today, Philip Stephens notes that "Mr Brown kept his audience in its comfort zone": Though he set out the challenges...
A trillion dollar bailout?
Via Steve Clemons, this excerpt from a speech by Leo Hindery - an Obama economic adviser and Chair of the New America Foundation's Smart Globalisation...
The rising cost of end of the world insurance
Donald Mackenzie in the LRB back in May: Last November, I spent several days in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, in banks’ headquarters in the City and in the...
Sarah Palin: ANWR is “God’s will”
Via Small Precautions, a vintage video of Sarah Palin in her natural element: [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG1vPYbRB7k]
Pirate utopias
Yet another ship was hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia on Sunday, bringing the total of ships seized there to over 30 this year alone. The current...
Observations on the meltdown
I'm not even going to try to form any kind of overview while things are moving so fast, but here are a few observations in no particular order: First, just...
China vs United States bad debts showdown: who’s the commie now?
I'm out in China, where I've just spent a couple of weeks visiting Hong Kong, Beijing and the rural province of Yunnan. Some observations on China and...
Ex Africa semper aliquid novi
H/t Chris Blattman.
Sarah Palin: climate change not man-made
From a Newsmax interview done before her nomination as McCain's running mate: What is your take on global warming and how is it affecting our country? A...
John McCain has a very large barbecue
At the start of the month, Richard pointed out the interesting fact that Nicolas Sarkozy has a very large television. The picture he supplied proved that...
Paul Collier’s dubious vision for developing country agriculture
Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion, is amusing himself by taking shotguns to sacred cows on agriculture and development again. This time, as Owen...
Texting rebels
From BBC Focus on Africa, via the excellent Chris Blattman: Each morning the 36-year-old powers up a small United Nations radio transmitter and starts...
Brits abroad
This is the third most emailed story on the NY Times site today. Great.
Oil prices are going to go back up
I've been banging on about this, I know, but two more signals pointing in that direction from last week are worth noting. One was an FT piece by Nick Butler...
The High Court Judgement on Binyam Mohamed: what now?
Yesterday afternoon, I waded through the full 75 page High Court Judgement on Binyam Mohamed v. Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. It's...
MI5: Islamic terrorists “lack religious literacy and could be regarded as religious novices”
Today's Guardian leads with a restricted MI5 report they've seen on radicalisation. The standout finding: Far from being religious zealots, a large number of...
Virtual thirst
Full marks to WWF for their report on virtual water use today, which finds that when imports of virtual water - the water used to grow or manufacture goods...
The IOC on the spot
Looks like the British press corps in Beijing is pretty pissed off about the manhandling of ITN's China correspondent yesterday, at least if accounts of...
Great moments in Chinese public diplomacy (part 2194)
As regular readers will know, we're always on the lookout for lessons from China on how [not] to do public diplomacy. So we're happy to be able to pass on...
More from Global Dashboard
Slay it Loud and Slay it Proud: Lessons from the Fourth Wave
Guest post from Helen Elliot from Save the Children UK, on a talk by Maria Neophytou of the GREAT Initiative, as part of the #changehistory series of talks. You can listen to all the previous talks here. [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kza5509iZqI[/youtube]...
Austerity’s defendent turns witness for the prosecution. The turning of Iain Duncan Smith
The media and political classes in Britain are in shock at the dramatic resignation of the minister in charge of welfare, Iain Duncan Smith. He had been seen as a hawk for austerity. Now he says it has gone too far, is politically not economically driven, is hurtful,...
Lessons from the LGBT movement
Guest post from Vic Langer, Campaigns Director at Save the Children UK, on a talk by Ruth Hunt, CEO of Stonewall, in the latest in Save the Children's #changehistory series. You can listen to all the other talks in the series here....