For better or for worse, the Arctic ice caps may be melting, opening up lots of virgin territory for economic development, the NYT reports. It may also raise the stakes over U.S. non-ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).There appears to be lots of money to be made from melting ice caps. A Denver entrepreneur,...
Great story in Sunday's L.A. Times about the global web of pirated movies. The amazing sequence of events outlined in the article underscores the social epidemic of piracy. The story of bootlegged copies of Spider-Man 2 after it premiered in New York on June 30, 2004 is quite alarming:June 30, 2004, one minute after midnight: A cammer illegally records Spider-Man...
Well ok, not exactly. But that is how an American television drama would portray an American version of what has happened today in Germany. Coalition governments are nothing new in Europe, but to an American ear the idea that major opposition parties will have a coalition with Merkel’s CDU cabinet filled with key members of Schröder’s team is,...
Lest it seems like the U.S. Senate is the graveyard of all treaties, it is worth noting that the U.S. Senate has recently ratified two conventions: the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and the Inter-American Convention Against Terrorism as well as a Protocol of Amendment to the International Convention on the Simplification and Harmonization of Customs Procedures. The...
I always follow the news of the Nobel Peace Prize with great interest and occasionally I find myself pleased with their choices. But this year something struck me as particularly odd. Every ten years the Nobel Peace Prize returns to the subject of nuclear disarmament, and each time it goes to a peaceful dove and not a peace-loving hawk.In 1975...
Interesting column by David Brooks in the New York Times on Sunday. Money quote:I believe that social mobility is the core of the American experience. I believe that society should be structured so that as many boys and girls as possible can work, and rise the way young Hamilton and Lincoln did.If something is going to make American society more...
It was announced today that the International Atomic Energy Agency and its director, Mohammed ElBaradei, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2005. The Committee cited Baredei and IAEA "for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way." They join...
On Thursday the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the military cannot use Palestianian civilians as human shields when entering the homes of suspected terrorists. "You cannot exploit the civilian population for the army's military needs, and you cannot force them to collaborate with the army," Chief Justice Aharon Barak wrote in the ruling. "The central tenet is that it is...
I have been travelling today, so I don't have much more energy left to respond to Peggy's post, most of which I agree with anyway. Let me just say that I think the somewhat sketchy news reports on the actual substance of the legislation passed by the Senate may have misled Peggy on the scope of the Senate's amendments. As...
The International Criminal Court has issued indictments for the five leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda. These are the first warrants the ICC has ever issued, although the ICC website has no official info on these warrants.According to a U.N. official, the notifications went out last week to the governments of Uganda, Sudan and the Democratic Republic...
Julian's post below on the bill passed by the Senate today misses a few key points. First, the standards set out in the bill will not apply to all detainees being held by the US, but only to those held by military personnel. This leaves the still troubling question of what the administration's current policy is toward non-military interrogations. (But...
The U.S. Senate has voted, by a 90-9 veto-proof margin, to establish uniform and clear interrogation policies for the interrogation of individuals detained in the war on terror. Apparently, the amendment (which would be attached to a spending bill) would require adherence to the Army's existing field manual for interrogation.I am obviously no expert in the effectiveness of interrogation methods...
