International

Economists used to admire scientists. Now they ignore them at our peril. Katherine Trebeck for openDemocracy Back in the 1800s, scholars in the field of economics cast an envious glance at their colleagues in science. They envied physics, with its…

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies It’s a new year, and the U.S. has found a new enemy—an Iraqi militia called Kata’ib Hezbollah. How tragically predictable was that? So who or what is Kata’ib Hezbollah? Why are U.S.…

Being a universal city, any conflict happening somewhere on the planet usually ends up on New York’s streets. During the year we have been covering some of them, but while working on this article we were surprised by the scale…

The world will welcome more than 392,000 babies on New Year’s Day, according to estimates from the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).  The agency believes 2020’s first baby will be born in Fiji and that globally, over half of all births on…

Nir Oren, University of Aberdeen for The Conversation It’s not hard to find echoes of the late 1990s in the zeitgeist. Now as then, impeachment is on many peoples’ minds, and films such as The Matrix and The Sixth Sense…

By Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD. “We have let the government’s evil-doing, its abuses, power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, immorality, greed, corruption, debauchery and tyranny go on for too long. We are approaching a reckoning. This is the point, as the…

Conflicts around the world are lasting longer and claiming more young lives, UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore said on Monday, as the agency reported that over this ‘deadly decade’, there has been a three-fold rise in verified attacks on children since 2010 – an average of 45 violations a day. “Attacks on children continue unabated as…

By Petur Gudjonsson A little while ago we wrote about a new mental landscape appearing in Chile. And we said that this positive phenomenon will happen everywhere, within a few years. There are protests all over the planet but they…

Heather Alberro, Nottingham Trent University; Dénes Csala, Lancaster University; Hannah Cloke, University of Reading; Marc Hudson, University of Manchester; Mark Maslin, UCL, and Richard Hodgkins, Loughborough University for The Conversation The climate breakdown continues. Over the past year, The Conversation…

By Dr Ted Trainer The prize has gone to three people studying how the poor can derive more benefit from existing “development” practices. It sees no reason to question the existing market and growth-driven economy and its derivative, development theory.…