Mostrando resultados por narrador "Kevin Stillwell" en Todas las categorías

When it rains, it pours. As the Great Recession, eurozone crisis, stalled trade deals, increased conflict between Russia and the West, electoral revolts against European political elites, and finally Brexit followed the 2008 financial meltdown, it seemed clear that globalization was running out of steam. Yet few expected that its opponents would claim the top prize—the White House—and so soon.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s unprecedented repression of peaceful and nonviolent opposition has created a fertile environment for extremists and radical ideologies. The longer Egypt’s government maintains its repressive policies, the more radicalized and violent its Islamists will become.

Many in Israel and beyond remain convinced that the traditional model of the Middle East peace process has come very close to success in recent decades. But the model of change embodied in the Oslo Accords failed, and if tried again, it will fail again. Only a fundamentally different approach to change—call it bottom-up rather than top-down—can end the underlying conflict.

In April, I laid a wreath at the Manila American Cemetery, in the Philippines, where some 17,000 Americans are buried. Looking up at the mosaic maps of battles whose names still echo throughout the US Department of Defense - Guadalcanal, Midway, Leyte Gulf, and more - it is hard not to appreciate the essential role that the US military has long played in the Asia-Pacific. Many of the individuals buried in the cemetery helped win World War II.

On June 2, three North Korean restaurant workers who fled from their jobs in China arrived in South Korea. In April, another 13 restaurant workers made a similar escape. The workers were part of a North Korean initiative to earn cash for the regime when aid from the Soviet Union dried up and a massive famine struck in the 1990s. The regime continues to send its citizens to work overseas and bring in revenue for the state.

Over the past three millennia, China has made three attempts to project its economic pow-er westward. The first began in the second century BC, during the Han dynasty, when China’s imperial rulers developed the ancient Silk Road to trade with the far-off residents of Central Asia and the Mediterranean basin; the fall of the Mongol empire and the rise of European maritime trading eventually rendered that route obsolete.

On March 30, 2008, several hundred people gathered at the waterfront in San Francisco. They had come to witness the unveiling of a monument to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: 2,800 Americans who joined some 35,000 other volunteers from more than 50 countries to defend the Spanish Republic against fascist forces during Spain’s civil war. The conflict, which raged from 1936 until 1939, led to the deaths of around half a million people, including at least 750 Americans.

When Hillary Clinton’s career as a lawyer first drew media attention during the 1992 presidential campaign of her husband, Bill Clinton, she mused that she could have skipped law practice to stay at home and bake cookies. The comment led to a now-famous cookie bake-off between Clinton and Barbara Bush, which the upstart Arkansas governor’s wife handily won.

Ancient Rome was a village that grew into a world empire. At the peak of its territorial reach, AD 117, it stretched from the British Isles to Mesopotamia and from the Rhine to the Sahara. Its history spans more than a millennium. Before the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the late fifth century, Romans enjoyed a standard of living not seen again in the West until the mid-nineteenth century. They had flush toilets, granite countertops, indoor heating, and even cosmetic dentistry.

Just a few years ago, Latin America was on a roll. Its economies, riding on the back of the Chinese juggernaut, were flourishing. Today the picture looks very different. Latin America’s economies are grinding to a halt. Yet on one count at least, the lands south of the Rio Grande are faring better than ever: Latin Americans are denouncing corruption as never before. In decades past, residents of the region seemed resigned to the problem, treating it as an ordinary, if lamentable, part of everyday life.

During the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, Anson Baird, a surgeon for the Union Army, is on the front line tending to the wounded. As the number of casualties rises, a mysterious soldier named John comes to Anson's aid. Deeply affected by the man's selfless actions, Anson soon realizes that John is no ordinary soldier, and that he harbours a dangerous secret. In the bizarre aftermath of the Battle of Antietam, this secret forges an intense bond between the two men.

There is an emerging consensus that all is not well with today's market-centric economic model. Although it has delivered wealth over the last half century and pulled millions out of poverty, it is recession-prone, leaves too many unemployed, creates ecological scarcities and environmental risks, and widens the gap between the rich and the poor. Around $1 trillion a year in perverse subsidies and barriers to entry for alternative products maintain "business-as-usual" while obscuring their associated environmental and societal costs.

Dragged to a speed dating event by her best friend, newly separated Tacie finds herself learning more about the reasons for her own failed relationship than she bargained for.

Racial tensions have been at the center of American political debate recently, but the story of racial and ethnic division is actually a global one. So for the March/April issue, we did a deep dive into racial issues in comparative and historical perspective.

One hundred and fifty years after publication, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace still sheds light on the tensions that structure Moscow’s relations with other great powers, and in particular with the United States.

In a famous essay from 1969, the Anglo-Jewish liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin distinguished between “two concepts of liberty.” The first concept, negative liberty, implies freedom from external coercion. “By being free in this sense, I mean not being interfered with by others,” Berlin wrote. The second concept, positive liberty, is more prescriptive. It asserts that freedom lies in self-direction and self-mastery.

Hamas is becoming increasingly unpopular in Gaza. And the group itself is divided, with its moderate Politburo increasingly overshadowed by a hard-line military wing.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s seizure of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in early 2014 was the most consequential decision of his 16 years in power. By annexing a neighboring country’s territory by force, Putin overturned in a single stroke the assumptions on which the post–Cold War European order had rested. The question of why Putin took this step is of more than historical interest.

Ó Gráda argues that some very poor economies are especially vulnerable to famines. In places where the level of food consumption is already low, even small shocks - a shortfall in food production, for example, or a disruption in the supply chain - can lead to a full-scale crisis.


Last September, tens of thousands of opponents of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gathered outside the National Diet building in Tokyo, often in torrential rain, holding placards and shouting antiwar slogans. They were there to protest the imminent passage of legislation designed to allow Japan’s military to mobilize overseas for the first time in 70 years - a shift they feared would undermine Japan’s pacifistic constitution and encourage adventurism.