Although the worst has arguably passed at Fukushima, the dangers posed by Japan’s recent nuclear disaster have not yet passed. As the world watched with bated breath, a catastrophic nuclear meltdown was closely averted, but only by pouring tons of seawater into the reactors and hoping for the best. Recently, aftershocks of magnitudes reaching 7.1 threatened to destabilize the nuclear reactors and create fissures in the containment, releasing toxic water in the surrounding environs. The worst may be over, but the story hardly ends here.
Read MoreWhen India gained its independence, the southern state of Kerala promised to be nothing but a headache for the new nation. Near the bottom in almost every indicator of development—literacy, health, general wellbeing—the state was a basket case. Yet over the span of fifty years everything had turned around, and suddenly officials in the state capital of Thiruvananthapuram could boast some of the highest scores in general well-being not just in India but in the world.
Read MoreOn November 29, 2010, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan received an international human rights award named for Colonel Muammar Qaddafi in the Libyan capital of Tripoli.
Read MoreEarly this January, international man of mystery Julian Assange held an extravagant press conference in Geneva. With cameras flanking him on all sides, the WikiLeaks founder was handed two discs of secret banking data from a disgruntled former employee of Julius Baer, a prominent Swiss financial institution.
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In 1948, the Kinsey Report was published in the United States, bringing homosexuality into the popular American lexicon and allowing the concerns of homosexuals to become a publicly addressed issue.
Read MoreOn October 7, 2010 the peace of the Sufi shrine in Karachi, a building with green and white mosaics ascending to a cupola, shattered in a double explosion from two suicide bombers, killing seven civilians and injuring 65 others. As the shrine’s tiles lay smashed in the street, the destroyed temple provided a visual symbol of a derelict Pakistani government torn apart by a new wave of violent domestic terrorism.
Read MoreChina’s recent activity in Africa goes beyond the mere muscle-flexing and oil-grabbing tendencies of an emerging global power. In the last five years, media reports of China’s growing presence in Africa have increasingly reinforced and intensified Western fears of an unrestrainable imperialist state. Articles brandishing headlines such as “China’s Economic Invasion of Africa” and “Africa: China’s New Backyard” depict Africa as the victim of China’s rapacious neo-imperialism.
Read MoreThe age of the Arab dictator is over. The current wave of unrest sweeping the Middle East has deposed two dictators, spilt much blood and fundamentally shaken the status quo. Already, the movement that began with a few street demonstrations in Tunis has led to a regime change in Egypt and threatens to overthrow the monarchy in Bahrain, a military regime in Libya, a dictatorship in Yemen and many other governments throughout the region. What could possibly have caused this stunning political shockwave across the Arab world?
Read MoreOn January 29, Egyptian journalist Ahmad Mohamed Mahmoud was shot in the head by a sniper as he stepped out on his office balcony to take video of an altercation between security forces and protesters. He died six days later.
Read MoreFor WikiLeaks' supporters, the freedom of speech is both their rallying cause and their powerful protector. However, their systematic promotion of a right to leak by their signature reliance on leaked quality of information desecrated the First Amendment as much as they advanced it.
Read MoreOne of the most difficult elements of coping with terrorist attacks is managing the emotions that it elicits from victims. It is a simple enough argument to state that another terrorist attack on U.S. soil would be unbearable to the American people, but such an attack is inevitable-if not from abroad, then from the new crop of "home-grown" extremists materializing everywhere from Portland, Oregon, to Fort Hood, Texas. The future of terrorist attacks in the U.S. is not going to be on the scale of Sept. 11.
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