In the early morning hours on January 7, Brazilian city officials arrived in the favela slum of Metrô-Mangueira in Rio de Janeiro to forcibly evict the families living there. In total 12 homes, some of which still had their residents' belongings inside, were...
World news headlines over the last few months have featured more diplomatic initiatives than body counts. Ongoing conflicts in Syria, Egypt, Central African Republic, and elsewhere still provide violence vultures with ample stories. But high-stakes negotiations with...
Since its independence in 1804, Haiti has suffered from a multitude of ailments—poverty, corruption, instability—common among the developing countries of the world. However, cholera was not one of them. Cholera is an infection of the small intestine that is contracted...
In a State of the Union address that stretched upwards of 7,000 words, President Barack Obama devoted around 1,300 to issues of war of peace. When there's not an axis of evil to confront or an open-ended war on tyranny to proclaim (and thankfully, there was neither),...
President Barack Obama brimmed with optimism after he met with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos in the White House last December. Obama lauded Colombia’s “tremendous progress” over the past decade and praised Santos for his peace talks with the Revolutionary...
This article is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus and TheNation.com. Honduras’ new president, Juan Orlando Hernández, takes office on January 27. However, given ongoing questions about his victory in November’s election, the legitimacy of Hernández’s...
On January 12, 2010 a 7.0-magnitude earthquake rocked Port-au-Prince and the surrounding suburbs for 35 seconds, killing hundreds of thousands of people and displacing approximately 1.5 million. Immediately after news of the earthquake reached global airwaves, an...
The struggle for food sovereignty in the Pacific got a major boost last December when Billy Kenoi, mayor of Hawai’i's Big Island, signed a law that prevents farmers from growing any new genetically engineered crops (with the exception of papaya). This follows a...
In his highly acclaimed book World Without Us (Picador, 2008), Alan Weisman speculated on how the earth would fare in our absence (even worse … then much better, thank you). In his most recent book, Countdown (Little, Brown and Company, 2013), Weisman chronicles the...
The beginning of a new year is when optimism courses through the blood. Even in the foreign policy realm of dreary realism and apocalyptic musings, January is when pundits and policymakers entertain temporarily vaulted hopes that wars can be stopped, deals negotiated,...