Latest in Opinion Highlight
Latest in Opinion
The unexamined crisis
By Luigi Zingales CHICAGO: Three years have now passed since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which triggered the start of the most acute phase of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Is the financial world a safer place today? Within days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the US had erected new and enormous security measures at …
Nigeria’s homegrown terrorists
By Ike Okonta LAGOS: Nigeria’s sparkling new capital, is a city under siege. In August, Boko Haram, a shadowy and violent Muslim sect operating in the northeastern part of the country, bombed a building housing staff of the United Nations in the central part of the city, killing 23 people and seriously injuring 86. It was …
The Amazon or oil?
By Eric Chivian and Rigoberta Menchú BOSTON: Charles Darwin would appreciate the irony of Yasuní National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Yasuní, home to one of the highest concentrations of biodiversity in the world, is itself engaged in what Darwin called “the struggle for existence.” A proposed drilling project in Yasuní’s Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) oilfields would tap …
Using the King memorial to live out his legacy
By Nadra Kareem Nittle LOS ANGELES, California: Scores of celebrations will take place in Washington, DC in conjunction with the 16 October dedication ceremony of the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial. However, 43 years after King’s assassination, his dream has yet to be fulfilled. As we dedicate his memorial, each of us should look back …
The decline and fall of America’s decline and fall
By Joseph Nye CAMBRIDGE: The United States is going through difficult times. Its post-2008 recovery has slowed, and some observers fear that Europe’s financial problems could tip the American and world economy into a second recession. American politics, moreover, remains gridlocked over budgetary issues, and compromise will be even more difficult on the eve of the …
Lebanese women fight revolution through football
By Juul Petersen BEIRUT: Lebanese women are fighting a silent revolution on the football field through the popular club program of the Cross Cultures Project Association (CCPA) in Lebanon, which provides educational activities for those in post-conflict countries. Farah and Mirna are two young women on an important mission: they want to change Lebanese society by …
Pakistan’s cultural heritage not for sale
By Syed Mohammad Ali LAHORE: At the behest of UNESCO, the world-famous fine arts auction house Christie’s has halted a planned auction this month of a fasting Buddha, a nearly 2,000-year-old statue from the Gandhara civilization, which was believed to have been stolen from Pakistan and sold to a private collector in Germany in the 1980s. …
Reciprocity, mutuality – keys to Mid-East peacemaking
By Gershon Baskin JERUSALEM: Dear President Abbas and Prime Minister Netanyahu, Welcome home. You both did a fine job at the UN and represented the cause of your peoples’ struggle for existence and peace with great honor. You can both claim victory and come home to a hero’s welcome. Much parallelism can be drawn from understanding …
The Steve Jobs factor
By Esther Dyson NEW YORK: Normally, you need a distinctive first name not to need a last name, but in this — as in everything that he did — Steve Jobs was different. He was always just “Steve.” In the personal-computing business — which moved from the bulky Apple II to the sleek and intelligent iPhone …
Whither the Egyptian revolution?
By Olin Wethington WASHINGTON, DC: Egypt’s revolution toppled a dictator in February, but the country’s future as a stable, functioning democracy remains uncertain. The West is, of course, limited in its ability to shape the transition process. Nonetheless, the potential for constructive influence remains considerable, and it should be responsive to those in Egypt who favor …
Mubarak’s Odious Debts
By Saifedean Ammous NEW YORK: A glance at Egypt’s public finances reveals a disturbing fact: the interest that the country pays on its foreign loans is larger than its budget for education, healthcare, and housing combined. Indeed, these debt-service costs alone account for 22 percent of the Egyptian government’s total expenditures. The impact has become impossible …
Free media in Tunisia, from illusion to reality
By Mourad Teyeb TUNIS: Immediately after the 14 January uprising, Tunisians experienced the illusion of a free and prosperous society. Tunisian journalists have enjoyed newfound freedom in print and broadcast media, which under President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali had been tightly controlled. Although we accomplished much to be proud of, the illusion of what this newfound …
Protecting the US-Bahraini relationship
By Cole Bockenfeld WASHINGTON, DC: The United States has maintained a key security relationship with Bahrain since 1947, demonstrated most visibly by the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet located in Manama. As the political situation in Bahrain continues to deteriorate, however, the United States needs to re-energies its diplomatic efforts toward Bahrain, and priorities …
The ‘asset crisis’ of emerging economies
By Yu Yongding BEIJING: In theory, the difference between capital inflows and outflows in developing countries should be positive — they should be net capital importers, with the magnitude of the balance equivalent to the current-account deficit. Since the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis, however, many East Asian countries have been running current-account surpluses — and hence …
Globalization’s government
By Jeffrey Sachs NEW YORK: We live in an era in which the most important forces affecting every economy are global, not local. What happens “abroad” — in China, India, and elsewhere — powerfully affects even an economy as large as the United States. Economic globalization has, of course, produced some large benefits for the world, …
Bleed the foreigner
By Harold James PRINCETON: Today, the world is threatened with a repeat of the 2008 financial meltdown — but on an even more cataclysmic scale. This time, the epicenter is in Europe, rather than the United States. And this time, the financial mechanisms involved are not highly complex structured financial products, but one of the oldest …
Big reform in small packages
By Jean Pisani-Ferry BRUSSELS: France, which now holds the presidency of the G-20, has chosen reform of the international monetary system as its main priority for the Cannes summit in November. But is the issue worth the time and energy officials will devote to it? And where can such discussions lead? When French President Nicolas Sarkozy …
Europe’s high-risk gamble
By Martin Feldstein CAMBRIDGE: The Greek government needs to escape from an otherwise impossible situation. It has an unmanageable level of government debt (150 percent of GDP, rising this year by 10 percentage points), a collapsing economy (with GDP down by more than 7 percent this year, pushing the unemployment rate up to 16 percent), a …
Israel’s brick wall — and beyond
By Larry Derfner MODI’IN, Israel: Whenever things take a turn for the worse in Israel, whenever I think this country has become too filled with fear and aggression to ever be ready to make peace, I remind myself: the way we’re going leads to a brick wall, and one day we’re going to run into it. …
The power to end poverty
By Ban Ki-moon NEW YORK: Growing up as a child during the Korean War, I knew poverty first hand. I saw it around me every day; I lived it. One of my earliest memories is walking up a muddy track into the mountains to escape the fighting, my village burning behind me and wondering what would …
The consequences of Angela Merkel
By Robert Skidelsky LONDON: Germany has been leading the opposition in the European Union to any write-down of troubled eurozone members’ sovereign debt. Instead, it has agreed to establish bailout mechanisms such as the European Financial Stability Facility and the European Financial Stabilization Mechanism, which can lend up to €500 billion ($680 billion) combined, with the …
Religiously motivated violence is not religious
By Inayah Rohmaniyah YOGYAKARTA, Indonesia: This Sunday, a suicide bomber attacked a church in Solo, Indonesia, killing at least one congregant and injuring many others. Indonesia, a secular nation, has had a long history of religious tolerance when it comes to minorities. But since the 2002 attacks in Bali, which were religiously motivated, questioning the relationship …
Using the media to amplify Saudi women’s voices
By Maha Akeel JEDDAH: Social media was abuzz with excitement at Saudi King Abdullah’s recent decision to appoint women to the Shura (consultative) Council and to allow them to vote and run in the 2015 municipal elections. The right to vote and hold public office has been at the top of Saudi women’s demands for the …
A gender divided
By Naomi Wolf OXFORD: The top and the bottom of the list of countries in Newsweek’s recent cover story, “The 2011 Global Women’s Progress Report,” evoke images of two different worlds. At the top of the list — the “Best Places to be a Woman” — we see the usual suspects: Iceland and the Scandinavian countries, …
Has Palestine won?
By Shlomo Ben Ami TEL AVIV: The somber spectacle of Israel’s isolation during the United Nations debate on Palestinian statehood marks the political tsunami that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s critics warned would arrive if Israel did not propose a bold peace initiative. But, more importantly, the speeches at the UN General Assembly by the two rivals, …
Gently drifts the river in paradise
By Philip Whitfield ASWAN: Are we entering an epoch, experiencing an enigma, or engaging in an episode? Ismail Sawi’s brushstrokes lovingly anointing a canvass in the nook of a courtyard could be preserved for posterity, cover a crack on the wall or fetch a bob or two from passersby seeking keepsakes. History be the judge. Journeymen …
Editorial: See no evil, hear no evil, talk no evil
By Rania Al Malky CAIRO: Unfortunately Egypt’s three wise ones turned out not to be as wise as they seemed. While in Asian culture the proverb “see no evil, hear no evil, talk no evil” is associated with the notion of being of good mind, speech and action, in Egypt, the Western interpretation of the phrase …
Yemen on the brink
By Bernard Haykel As I write this, gun battles are raging in Sanaa between military units loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh and other units that have joined the opposition. Yemen now teeters on the verge of civil war. During the last nine months, a significant populist movement has formed and has demonstrated peacefully in Sanaa …
Price to be paid
By Ghassan Khatib This past week witnessed the culmination of the Palestinian political move to the United Nations. We have seen key speeches by US President Barack Obama, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in addition to the submission of the Palestinian application for state membership to the United Nations and, finally, …
A global agenda for seven billion
By Ban Ki-moon NEW YORK: Late next month, a child will be born — the 7th billion citizen of planet Earth. We will never know the circumstances into which he or she was born. We do know that the baby will enter a world of vast and unpredictable change — environmental, economic, geopolitical, technological, and demographic. …