By Sam Jones1 December 2015 Tonlé Sap lake (Guardian) – Out past the floating villages, the daytrippers and the mangrove arcades, the brown waters of the Tahas river open into a vast, dull green lake fringed by forest and a seemingly endless horizon. Silhouetted by a sinking afternoon sun, distant figures fish from small boats […]
By Judith Magyar22 January 2016 (SAP Community Network) – Emerging technologies such as 3D printing and genetic engineering offer a lot of promise, but can also be double-edged swords. They can help make our lives easier, safer and healthier, but there is also potential to build weapons or dangerously modify organisms. Developments like these raise […]
By Alan Berube and Natalie Holmes14 January 2015 (Brookings) – The issue of high and rising income inequality continues to influence policy and political debates at all levels of government. Local officials, such as mayors and county executives, are increasingly finding themselves at the center of those debates given a federal government hamstrung by partisan […]
By Emmett Knowlton17 January 2016 (Business Insider) – The 2016 Summer Olympics kicks off on August 5 in Rio de Janeiro — but with less than seven months until the Opening Ceremony, a slew of problems still show no signs of improvement. Will Connors had a good, if troubling, piece in The Wall Street Journal […]
[cf. More displaced people and refugees now than at any other time in recorded history – ‘The global north must be prepared that the entire global south is on the move’] By Joe Weisenthal18 January 2016 (Bloomberg News) – As the crash in commodities prices spreads economic woe across the developing world, Europe could face […]
By Rekha Basu9 January 2016 (Des Moines Register) – One advantage of having presidential candidates come to campaign every four years is hearing from the advocacy groups that trail them in hopes of rallying support for their causes. Those might be issues we know about, like gun control, immigration or criminal justice reform, but with […]
19 November 2015 (Federal Reserve Bank of New York) – Aggregate household debt balances increased in the third quarter of 2015. As of 30 September 2015, total household indebtedness was $12.07 trillion, a $212 billion increase from the second quarter of 2015. Overall household debt remains 5% below its 2008Q3 peak of $12.68 trillion. Mortgage […]
GREECE, 22 December 2015 (IOM) – IOM confirmed yesterday (21 December 2015) that over a million irregular migrants and refugees arrived in Europe in 2015, mostly from Syria, Africa, and South Asia. Through the weekend, IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix – Flow Monitoring System counted 999,745 irregular arrivals across the Mediterranean, including migrants journeying by both […]
23 November 2015 – A new report issued today by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) shows that over the last 20 years, 90 per cent of major disasters have been caused by 6,457 recorded floods, storms, heatwaves, droughts and other weather-related events. The report, titled The Human Cost of Weather Related […]
By David F. Ruccio5 November 2015 (Real-World Economics Review) – We already knew that the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed over the past three decades. But the usual response was that they are gaming the system, claiming disabilities that “lend themselves to subjective manipulation” and being encouraged to do so by […]
