Latest in Opinion Highlight
Latest in Opinion
Why is America’s budget deficit so large?
By Martin Feldstein CAMBRIDGE: America’s enormous budget deficit is now exceeded as a share of national income only by Greece and Egypt among all of the world’s major countries. To be sure, the current deficit of 9.1 percent of GDP is due in part to the automatic effects of the recession. But, according to the official …
Analysis: A new kind of Uprising: Egypt & Climate Change
By Saima Raza A chorus of voices has expressed concerns regarding Egypt’s vulnerability to climate change; yet there remain misgivings as to whether Egypt can confront the epic environmental challenges to come in the not too distant future. Environmental challenges bought do not exist in a vacuum; instead the state and population would be plagued with …
Doublespeak, duplicity and diplomacy
By Philip Whitfield CAIRO: Before getting ahead of ourselves, remember the canard was uttered a long time ago: Ambassadors are men of virtue sent to lie abroad for their country. Secondly that’s only half the sentence. A news writer is a man without virtue who lies at home for himself Sir Henry Wotton (1568 – 1639) …
Washington and the Art of the Possible
By Raghuram Rajan CHICAGO: These days, the United States media are full of ordinary Americans venting their rage at the incompetence and immaturity of their politicians. Even though the US government’s debt limit was raised in the nick of time, the process was — and remains — fraught with risk. Why, the public asks, can’t politicians …
China’s inflation muddle
By Yu Yongding BEIJING: Even as the debt crises in Europe and the United States loom large and the global economic recovery falters, inflation is making a comeback worldwide. Indeed, emerging-market economies are bracing for a serious bout of it – together with the dire political consequences that it will bring. China’s headline consumer price index …
No honor in ‘honor’ killings
By Rasha Dewedar CAIRO: Women in Arab countries have become increasingly visible in demonstrations for democracy, especially in Egypt and Tunisia. However, they still face hurdles, many of which were discussed at a recent training program in Stockholm for opinion makers from the Middle East and North Africa. As a journalist from Cairo, I had the …
Mubarak’s last laugh?
By Omar Ashour CAIRO: August 3, 2011, will be remembered as a historic day in Egypt. Former President Hosni Mubarak was put on public trial, together with his two sons and his ex-interior minister, General Habib El-Adly. The repercussions for Egypt, indeed for the entire Arab world, will be profound. This is not the first time …
Democracy’s drama in terrorism’s theater
By Joseph Nye CAMBRIDGE: President George W. Bush was famous for proclaiming democracy promotion as a central focus of American foreign policy. He was not alone in this rhetoric. Most US presidents since Woodrow Wilson have made similar statements. So it was a striking departure when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified to Congress earlier …
A bad deal for America’s future
By Michael Mandelbaum WASHINGTON, DC: The painfully negotiated US budget legislation that President Barack Obama signed on August 2 combines an increase in America’s government debt ceiling with reductions in federal spending, thus averting the prospect of the first default in the 224-year history of the United States. But the agreement has three major flaws. Two …
The Euro’s crisis of democracy
By Miguel Maduro FLORENCE: In the end, as always, Europe acted. But will it be enough? Financial markets, no doubt, will be skeptical about the eurozone members’ solemn commitment that the de facto Greek default will remain the exception. Verbal assurances have been the European Union’s preferred currency in tackling the euro crisis, but words now …
Tropics of Cancer?
By Henry Miller STANFORD: Cancer is sometimes thought of as a disease of wealthier countries, but it is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in poorer ones as well. Indeed, by the end of this decade, about 150 million people worldwide will have cancer, with approximately 60 percent of them residing in developing countries. Although …
The storm after the calm
By Michel Rocard PARIS: Could the financial crisis of 2007-2008 happen again? Since the crisis erupted, there has been no shortage of opportunities — in the form of inadequate conclusions and decisions by officials — to nurture one’s anxiety about that prospect. Over the course of the three G-20 summits held since the crisis, world leaders …
Muslim moms in Canada, more than full-time housewives
By Daood Hamdani OTTAWA: In early July, Canadians engaged in an online conversation with the aim of increasing their understanding of Muslims, the main non-Christian faith community estimated by government demographers at 1.1 million in 2011 or 3.2 percent of the total population. It was an initiative of the national daily newspaper, The Globe and Mail, …
Comics for peace in South Asia
By Masud Alam ISLAMABAD: Tough times demand tough measures, right? Not so for a new wave of development workers and peace activists in South Asia who think that doodling rather than bamboozling might finally yield some results. Afghanistan is ravaged by a civil war that shows no signs of ending any time soon. Pakistan and India …
The Middle East’s new game
MADRID: Whether or not the Arab Spring will usher in credible democracies across the Arab world remains uncertain. But, while the dust has not yet settled after months of turmoil in Tunis, Cairo, and elsewhere, the Arab revolts have already had a massive impact on the strategic structure of the Middle East. Until recently, …
America’s locust years
By J. Bradford DeLong BERKELEY: It is hard right now to write about American political economy. Nobody knows whether the debt-ceiling tripwire will be evaded; if so, how; or what will happen if it is not. If no deal to raise the debt ceiling is reached by August 3, interest rates on United States Treasury bonds …
Europe’s sovereignty crisis
By Joschka Fischer BERLIN: Finally, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has accepted a new form of European Union. More than ever, the EU must combine greater stability, financial transfers, and mutual solidarity if the entire European project is to be prevented from collapsing under the weight of the ongoing sovereign-debt crisis. For a long time, Merkel fought …
Mubarak: A Cautionary Tale II
By Rania Al Malky CAIRO: Under the scorching August sun on the third day of Ramadan, a couple of hundred protesters cheered as a helicopter flew over the New Cairo Police Academy. I was there. I saw it. But until a large TV screen outside the court showed state TV footage of Mubarak being transferred from …
All the world’s a stage
By Philip Whitfield CAIRO: Comedy or tragedy, the bane of Shakespeare’s enthralling drama “Much Ado About Nothing”. As in the Cairo performance deception is the heart of the matter. Deceit is weaved so closely into Shakespearean drama that it becomes second nature to its characters. Egyptians have waited interminably to watch Hosni Mubarak arraigned in court. …
Talking about religion after Norway
By Julie Clawson AUSTIN, Texas: The recent tragedy in Norway, the worst attack the country has experienced since WWII, shocked and pained the world. It has also forced us as a global community to look more closely at religion, identity, and how we see the “other” — as well as ourselves. In the West, religion is …
Famine and hope in the horn of Africa
By Jeffrey Sachs NAIROBI: Yet again, famine stalks the Horn of Africa. More than ten million people are fighting for survival, mainly pastoralist communities in the hyper-arid regions of Somalia, Ethiopia, and northern Kenya. Every day brings news of more deaths and massive inflows of starving people into refugee camps in Kenya, across the border from …
Israel’s anti-boycott law forces Israelis to take a stand
By Mairav Zonszein TEL AVIV: Last summer, a group of prominent Israeli actors and artists signed a letter declaring their refusal to perform in the newly built cultural centre in Ariel, the largest Jewish settlement situated deep in the West Bank. The letter ignited a debate in Israel about the right to publicly express and act …
Who stole the strawberries?
By Philip Whitfield CAIRO: Egypt prepares for its star-chamber global TV production. Humphrey Bogart’s penultimate Hollywood role portrayed the despotic Commander Queeg in Stanley Kramer’s 1954 production of the “Caine Mutiny” comes to mind. We’ll believe it when we see it: Mubarak in the dock with his co-defendants. Like Mubarak, Queeg isn’t the central figure standing …
When the Yankees go home
By Shahid Javed Burki ISLAMABAD: Relations between the United States and Pakistan have continued to fray since a US Special Forces team killed Osama bin Laden in a comfortable villa near a major Pakistani military academy. But the tit-for-tat retaliation that has followed the raid reflects deeper sources of mistrust and mutual suspicion. The latest round …
America’s reactionary feminists
by Naomi Wolf NEW YORK: It is obvious that the left and the media establishment in the United States cannot fully understand the popular appeal of the two Republican tigresses in the news — first Sarah Palin, and now, as she consolidates her status as a Republican presidential front-runner, Michele Bachmann. What do they have that …
The perverse politics of financial crisis
By Luigi Zingales CHICAGO: In trying to understand the pattern and timing of government interventions during a financial crisis, we should probably conclude that, to paraphrase the French philosopher Blaise Pascal, politics have incentives that economics cannot understand. From an economic point of view, the problem is simple. When a sovereign borrower’s solvency has deteriorated sufficiently, …
Climate change as a business problem
By G. Truett Tate LONDON: Some political problems can be solved overnight; others take years to tackle. But, in the distant future, when the financial crisis and the euro’s troubles are long forgotten, we will still be facing the consequences of climate change. A challenge of this scale and depth demands an unprecedented level of cooperation …
The new grammar of power
By Javier Solana and Daniel Innerarity MADRID: Humanity’s main concerns today are not so much concrete evils as indeterminate threats. We are not worried by visible dangers, but by vague ones that could strike when least expected — and against which we are insufficiently protected. There are, of course, specific, identifiable dangers, but what worries us …
Ambushed in Tahrir Square
By Philip Whitfield CAIRO: Harry Potter fans revere the wisdom of Professor Albus Dumbledore, headmaster at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards. He found value in everyone according to Elphias Doge, a Ministry of Magic jurist. Harry Potter’s engaging honesty, his trust in his friends and the …
Salafobia
By Khalil Al-Anani The new boogeyman of Egyptian politics is Salafism. A false assumption has been fabricated by Egypt’s liberal and secular currents who tend to exclude Islamists, particularly Salafis, from the new political scene in Egypt. Last Friday’s mass demonstration in Tahrir Square, which was led by Islamist groups and dominated by Salafis, has proven …