Current affairs

The Niger government has been found guilty of an embarrassing failure to protect an individual from the insidious practice of slavery.

NAIROBI - As a child in rural Kenya, I was a secret admirer of female genital mutilation. I was swayed by talk of friends and elders about how once a girl undergoes "the cut," she gains respect and grown men consider her suitable for marriage.

As senator Obama is heading for his election victory, the expectations for him in Europe could not possibly be more unrealistic and without foundation.

Conventional wisdom has it that one of the few ways left for John McCain to win the presidency is for a national security crisis to intervene before election day.

NEW YORK - This global economic crisis will go down in history as Greenspan's Folly. This is a crisis made mainly by the United States Federal Reserve Board during the period of easy money and financial deregulation from the mid-1990's until today.

Shanghai-When scholars from all across China gathered here recently to assess their country's role in the afterglow of the Olympics, their pride shone as bright as the waxing Autumn Festival moon.

Now that the rock bottom of the global financial crisis has been visited, it is time to stop running with the lemmings and start thinking.

One of the best places to do this is the OECD.

NEW YORK - The winner of America's presidential election will inherit a perfect storm of problems, both economic and international. He will face the most difficult opening-day agenda of any president since - and I say this in all seriousness - the man who saved the Union, Abraham Lincoln.

The free market apostates continue to battle the market. The corporate sector has beaten a hasty retreat. Credit, frozen globally, is being edged out by capital injections into various financial institutions.

Wang Hui, China’s leading “new left” intellectual and the former editor of the prestigious journal, Dushu, is author of The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, the seminal historical work on the subject.

In a world of unexpected crises and unanticipated consequences, the new president of the United States is as likely as his predecessors in the past to face almost immediate and overwhelming crisis or crises come January.

The recovery of the earth's climate from the little ice age started about 200 years ago, but the concentration of the atmospheric carbon dioxide started to increase significantly as late as in the 1950s, probably due to rapidly increased burning of fossil fuels.

The US presidential candidates are warbling about what strategies will best suit Afghanistan in a post-Bush world. Both Barack Obama and John McCain promise that the interminable conflict will be of "top priority" come 2009.

" The more actors there are who can read the signs of an approaching crisis, the less serious will be the consequences when the crisis breaks out."

Los Angeles-Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria has labeled the world ahead a "post-American world." I do get a very strong sense that conditions in the global economy are changing in very dramatic ways.

The late Glenn Gould made some powerful enemies in the music world when he decided to record Bach's Goldberg Variations at a slow tempo. He also made music history.

The Waki commission, charged with the task of investigating post-election violence in the aftermath of the Kenyan elections last December, has called for a special tribunal to try various perpetrators.

There are two schools of thought on what the election of a new US president will mean for transatlantic relations. The optimists argue that relations will improve significantly.