Because its members have managed not to mangle each other for a few decades, the European Union received the Nobel Peace Prize last year. But all is not pacific in peaceful Europe. If you look at Europe's borders, it’s hard to conclude that Europe much cares about the...
GMO Wars: The Global Battlefield
This article is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus and TheNation.com. The GMO wars escalated earlier this month when the 2013 World Food Prize was awarded to three chemical company executives, including Monsanto executive vice president and chief...
The Merkel Phone Tap: Obama as “Unilateral” in His Own Way as Bush?
While some would argue that the United States and its allies routinely spy each other, it’s one thing to bug the Germany embassy in Washington, but another to tap into the phone of the leader of the country, as well as other officials. As we recently posted, spying by...
Surveillance on Merkel’s Phone Demands a Scapegoat
As you have no doubt heard by now, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was informed by German intelligence that her phone was subjected to American surveillance. Predictably she reacted badly and called President Obama himself to ream him out. At the New York Times,...
The Expansion and Contraction of the Fourth Estate in East-Central Europe
Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com. When Communism collapsed in 1989 in East-Central Europe, many industries collapsed with it. Factories closed, workers were out of jobs, and economies shrank. But one sector of the economy grew: the media. Where there had once been a...
Turkey and the Middle-East Realignment
Cross-posted from the Colorado Progressive Jewish News. The news broke less than three weeks ago, on October 3, that Turkey, a longtime, staunch NATO member, just broke an unwritten rule of that global military alliance: it has announced it is considering a major $3.2...
Social Control Not Just Aim of Drone Surveillance, But of Drone Strikes, Too
In a Boston Review article titled The Sound of Terror: Phenomenology of a Drone Strike, Nasser Hussain attempts to … provide a phenomenology of drone strikes, examining both how the world appears through the lens of a drone camera and the experience of the people on...
Letter From Sofia: Old Tanks and Modern Mayhem
The military museum in Bulgaria's sprawling capital city consists of a tiny building and a huge outdoor display of weapons that look as if they had been wheeled in fresh from the battlefields and parked, higgledy piggledy: mountain howitzers that shelled Turks in 1912...
Applied to Nuclear Weapons, Realism is the Road to Ruin
In an op-ed at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists titled Why nuclear realism is unrealistic, Benoit Pelopidas writes that “adopting the point of view often called nuclear realism—the notion that technology and careful management will keep us safe—is a dangerous...
President Obama’s Meeting With Malala Yousafzai Was Riddled With Irony
To one Nobel Peace Prize winner from one who isn’t: “Drones are fueling terrorism.” So spoke Malala Yousafzai to President Barack Obama. She’s the 16-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban for daring to urge the schooling of girls. She was...