With so many failed terrorism prosecutions to cover — see, for example, here, here, and here — the media can be forgiven for overlooking one here or there. Still, it's a shame that the Bush administration's most recent failure, the baseless prosecution of Dr. Steven Kurtz on bioterror charges, has not received more attention. It's an ugly story. Kurtz,...
I know it's not international law, but this site is too cool not to mention: Just enter your address and it will calculate your "Walk Score" — how walkable your neighborhood is. It even maps all the interesting businesses that are nearby. I entered my old address in Athens, Georgia, and my walk score was 75, walkable enough not...
Financial intermediation is a dicey proposition these days, and 'asset securitization' a downright dirty word in a world in which securitization allowed the obfuscation of risk - purses from sows' ears, but actually just fancy looking sows' ears, it turns out, everywhere you looked. Nonetheless, one of the important longterm issues for microfinance (and for the whole, newly emerging...
Wednesday’s NY Times had a good essay by Thomas Friedman on the current evolution of the global distribution of power. He argues that there are actually three shifts taking place: The first shift is due to our “oil addiction”:Let’s start with the most profound one: More and more, I am convinced that the big foreign policy failure that will be pinned...
My colleagues have often discussed the dangers of globalization in these pages. Nevertheless, I fear they have overlooked one of the most pernicious: embarrassing car names. There are 2,261 different written languages in the world, essentially guaranteeing that at least some car names will mean something untoward in one of them. Witness the Ford Pinto, Portuguese...
Fifty years ago, in the late 1950s, C.P. Snow published that famous essay decrying the gap that had grown up in his day between the culture of the humanities, on the one hand, and the physical sciences, on the other. The professors of the humanities were ignorant of science and basic facts about the technology of their own day,...
In today’s Washington Post, a front page article titled, “Multitude of Forces Drains the Spirit of Giving,” by staff writer Philip Rucker. Compared with the tsunami of 2004 and Katrina, the natural disasters of Burma and China have not produced anywhere near the outpouring of American charitable aid donations: In the weeks since a cyclone laid waste to Burma's delta...
(Last post on battlefield robots.) An issue of battlefield robots that has not received, so far as I can tell, sufficient attention is what happens when battlefield robots are deployed against the US. The assumption seems to be that robots are going to be so complicated and expensive that only the US, and maybe a handful of others, such as Japan, will...
(I fear wearing out my welcome at Opinio Juris and wearing out its readers' patience with so many posts on battlefield robots. So I will post this and one more short one, and then move on to some other topics.) Among the reasons why the US military seeks to develop battlefield robots are (as noted in my first post on...
I rarely agree with Public Citizen, but I think they have a point when they argue that the United States should reveal the details of its multi-billion dollar settlement agreement with the European Union over compensation for failing to comply with the WTO Appellate Body US-Gambling decision. (Hat tip: IELP). This from the Public Citizen website: The Bush...
Everyone loves microfinance. The Wall Street Journal editorial page is super enthusiastic, but so is the World Bank, so are all those private equity kids who now want to do politically progressive 'venture philanthropy' with their gazillions, and so is Natalie Portman, peering winsomly from the cover of the NYT Magazine a couple of months ago. Muhammad Yunus...
1 In my last post about battlefield robots, I quickly breezed through the ethical and legal priors that technology would go through before reaching the fundamental issues of autonomous battlefield robots - autonomy in decisionmaking in the use of weapons on the battlefield. Leaving aside the questions of exactly how that can be achieved as a matter of actual program...
