This week, The WorldPost streamed live Chelsea and Hillary Clinton's virtual dialogue, "Girls: A No Ceilings Conversation," about how young people can prepare to meet life's challenges. In our One-On-One series, historian Niall Ferguson discusses the degeneration of America's institutions. In a HuffPost Live interview, economist Thomas Piketty talks about his new book, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" and growing inequality. Novelist and Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer describes her disillusion with post-Mandela South Africa. Actor and activist Robert Redford appeals to President Obama to keep oil drilling out of the Arctic. Sergio Munoz Bata remembers his long-time friend and colleague, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (continued)
When a friend dies, you are left with deep pain and a multitude of memories of the moments you shared. After all, as Gabo wrote: "Life is not the one you lived but the one you remember and how you remember it to tell it."
The leadership in Beijing must be secretly delighted watching the struggle between Russia and the West. The Ukraine mess can seriously poison Moscow's relations with Washington and Brussels for a long time to come, thus reducing their mutual ability to coordinate policies on the major issues in world politics. One such issue, perhaps the most important, concerns geopolitical risks associated with China's rise and its impact on the global economic and military balance. The Western push to "isolate" Russia may prove self-defeating. Rather than forcing Moscow to withdraw from Ukraine, it will draw it closer to Beijing.
"There's a lot of anger out there, there's a lot of frustration. One minute people are bored and apathetic, the next minute they're in the streets burning cars. We are seeing that already in some European cities, it's really urgent that we change the conversation in such a way that young people start to listen instead of just assuming, 'Ah, this doesn't apply to me, it's all bullshit.'"
"I am afraid that, in South Africa, we have not done with our freedom what we said we were going to do. And that makes it now the worst of times because it is a great disillusion."
Provocation, intimidation and propaganda are intended to create a pretext which is followed by invasion and occupation. That's the pattern that Stalin made notorious, just as Hitler had done when plotting his invasions around Europe. Camouflage with no insignias and masks are elements peculiar to Putin himself. They reveal the mindset of a man who was, after all, a KGB colonel skilled in subterfuge.
Those laws should prevent or bust up concentrations of economic power that not only harm consumers but also undermine our democracy -- such as the pending Comcast acquisition of Time-Warner.
The single most important step the US government can take to reverse discouraging economic trends is to mount a concerted, large-scale program directed at renewing our national infrastructure.
The interplay among many interconnected and interdependent "small units" that operate in a transparent environment and on a leveled playing field, where none is allowed to dominate, is a fundamental requirement for pragmatism, prosperity and resilience in both economics and politics. This insight is ancient to Judaism and has been highlighted by modern thinkers such as Nasim Taleb in Antifragility.
Four years ago this week, BP's Deepwater Horizon drill platform exploded. Eleven workers died that day. Their bodies were never found. Over the next 87 days, 210 million gallons of oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico. It fouled fishing grounds, ravaged the coastline, and shut down tourism. The world got an ugly look at some of the terrible hidden costs of fossil fuels. Spill-related health problems plague the people and the wildlife of the Gulf to this very day. I personally hoped that we, as a nation, would quickly learn from this tragedy and move swiftly to prevent a repeat disaster in our most vulnerable coastal environments. So it boggles the mind that Shell Oil is still determined to drill in one of the most fragile and remote ecosystems on Earth: the Arctic Ocean -- the last bastion of America's polar bears, endangered bowhead whales and other rare wildlife.
There are signs that Brazil's already hyper-militarized culture of public security provision is becoming even more securitized. Nowhere are the risks more evident than in Rio de Janeiro where 4,000 federal forces were deployed this month to occupy the city´s most violent favelas, including Maré.
Currently, India's labor laws only apply the 20 to 25 million workers in what is called the "organized sector," which includes registered corporations and businesses. New higher minimum wages must also be made to apply to the other 175 million workers who work in the unorganized or unincorporated sector, as farm hands, pushcart vendors, construction workers, private security guards, household help, drivers, shoe shiners, waiters, shop help etc. Currently, this is not happening.
For 30 years, I have advocated accepting Turkey into the European Union, once the country has fulfilled the Copenhagen Criteria: institutional stability as a guarantee of democracy, the rule of law, respect for human rights and minority rights, a functioning market economy, and finally the pledge to embrace the goals of the political, economic and monetary union. If Erdogan continues as he has over the past two years, he will not fulfill these criteria. There is no place in the European Union for this Turkey.
Our extended family and community would continually challenge her investment in me, my mother brazenly, if not defiantly, went to great lengths to support me and protect my opportunity for a different future to the one they all expected.
The future of Europe depends on taking into consideration the needs of future generations; I have dubbed this elsewhere positive economy. And this will require in Europe the creation of instruments of patient capitalism, in the service of democracy. Today, no one takes this element into account. Will voters be able to engage politicians and help to build the political will to act for their children's sake? If they fail to do so, they will have no one to blame but themselves.
Complaints about the imposition of a "teutonic regime" and appeals for German leadership seem to contradict each other - a kind of continent-wide cognitive dissonance. In fact, the complaints and calls for leadership are mutually reinforcing. The implementation of austerity policies in the periphery has caused these countries to ask for help and request that Germany take the lead by putting more money on the European table. Nobody would deny that Germany has an interest in preserving the euro. So why shouldn't it support its partners with financial help to overcome the crisis?
A new multi-polar world has emerged over the past 30 years that has shattered the post-WW II paradigm and structure, and the near hegemony of the US whose economic, financial and military power is waning.
A generation of frustrated citizens and protest voters is calling the whole notion of European integration into question. The abstract idea of "power or oblivion" is as appealing to a 22-year-old unemployed in Greece as a look into the crystal ball of a fortune teller. Europe needs to offer more than its lofty tales of peace and prosperity. This is the time to act, not to deliver empty promises.
In the run up to the European parliamentary elections next month, anti-Europe populists, such as Marine Le Pen's National Front in France, have been fanning the nationalist flames by telling voters that two leading left-of center Nobel laureates in economics -- Amartya Sen and Joe Stiglitz -- oppose a more united Europe.