Over the past few years, the New Yorker's George Packer has provided some outstanding reporting from Iraq. (He was also the author of one of the best articles...
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.
On love, hate and the internet’s capacity to amplify both
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1TZaElTAs] Here's an excellent video with which to while away the next nine minutes and thirteen seconds. The...
Wheat up 90% in a month; US bakers demand curb on foreign sales
Javier Blas at the FT has the details: Prices for top-quality spring wheat have jumped by 90 per cent in the past month and a half, boosted by a scramble by...
Slouching towards Bethlehem?
As Charlie noted here yesterday, lots of people are having a grand old time fulminating about the Gwyn Prins / Robert Salisbury article in the new RUSI...
Palau seeks Security Council protection on climate change
The tiny Pacific small island state of Palau has just announced that it'll be formally requesting protection from the Security Council on climate change and...
Kenya in a nutshell, from John Githongo
John Githingo - Kenya's crusading anti-corruption champion, who was permanent secretary in charge of governance and ethics until he had to flee to the UK in...
How to tell if you’re becoming a tribalist
Shashank Bengali, a journo based in Nairobi, was looking for a mechanic the other day. He asked Thomas, his office's driver, who replied: "There is a man....
Whether waterboarding is torture “depends on the amount of water” – US Justice Dept
Everything else is early this spring - so maybe April Fool's Day too? Er no, they're serious. TPM Muckracker has more: The CIA's use of waterboarding was...
Dissing Michael O’Hanlon
Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber is wondering who counts as the "foreign policy community": Given the vagueness of boundaries, the best definition I’ve been...
More staff changes at Number 10
Peter Riddell at the Times has the details: Further far-reaching changes in the running of 10 Downing Street are imminent ... The two big appointments so far...
US Director of National Intelligence: terrorism “not at all” the greatest threat faced by US
Lawrence Wright has an excellent interview with US Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell in the last edition of the New Yorker. Read the whole...
Financial meltdown: your 12 step guide
Time to remind ourselves that while we've all been cooing over Obama and fretting over NATO cohesion, the small matter of the security of the world's...
Those Khalilzad / Karzai rumours, again
James Kirchik, writing in the New Republic, discusses the "admittedly bizarre rumor circulating at the United Nations and the State Department, where many are...
Open source disaster co-ordination
Via John Robb, a great story about how a local radio station in California became an open source co-ordination hub for disaster response during the...
Rice and Miliband in Afghanistan
Gideon Rachman was with the dynamic duo as they touched down in Kabul. He reports that the security was so tight that it would have been impossible for the...
What drove Europe’s C19th rise to globalism?
Jared Diamond argued in Guns, Germs and Steel that it was to do with geography and biodiversity; David Landes, in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, that it...
Too much globalisation – or not enough?
The BBC and Globescan have just published another of their epic, 34 country opinion polls, this time looking at perceptions of economic globalisation. They...
Sharia law in UK ‘inevitable’ – Archbishop of Canterbury
Rowan Williams has just been on The World At One to say that in his view, sharia law will become inevitable in parts of the UK. The interview is in advance...
FCO briefs against DFID. Sigh…
While we're on the subject of Sue Cameron's awesome Whitehall gossip network, note also her piece yesterday about DFID (or 'Difid' as she enchantingly calls...
Inside Fortress Cameron
Following up on the unhappy tales of life inside the Brown bunker, Sue Cameron now gives an insight into life inside Fortress Cameron. And, she reports,...
More from Global Dashboard
A problem for every solution on climate
It frustrates me so much that UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres was rubbishing the idea of a carbon budget two years ago, even as the IPCC was being more trenchant than ever before about the need for one ...and now here she is two years later saying...
Are we neglecting our soft power assets?
Last week saw the launch of a new global #softpower report, ranking the UK at the top of a 30-country index. Compiled by Portland, Facebook and ComRes, the report is described by Joseph Nye (who coined the term in 1990) as “the clearest picture to date of global soft...
The powerful have shown a really nasty side this month. That’s great news.
In the Addis talks over tackling tax dodging, and in the EU-IMF talks on Euro-austerity, the powerful have shown a really nasty side this month. That's great news. How can I say that when we see the suffering that this will cause? How could be I so heartless as to see...