Bioterrorism should be taken as seriously as biological attacks from rogue states or a natural epidemic, says Gerald Epstein It is difficult to prove how serious the threat from bioterrorism is. True, several nations’ bioweapons programmes demonstrated, long ago, that bacteria and viruses can kill over large areas and place many thousands of lives at…
The threat of violence undertaken with atomic weapons has never been so great, Mohamed ElBaradei tells Taimur Ahmad The worries that plague Mohamed ElBaradei have scarcely been eased by the Nobel Peace Prize that he won last October. If anything, the 63-year-old Egyptian diplomat who runs the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear…
Democracy cannot take root in countries such as Iran unless individuals enjoy freedom of expression, says Shirin Ebadi The struggle in undemocratic, especially Muslim, countries to cultivate a political culture that would allow democracy to flourish has been a long one. Iranians, for example, have tried for more than a century to install democracy. Since…
Global Agenda brings you the world’s experts. India and China India has leapt in the Global Competitiveness Report rankings. Nandan Nilekani and Manmohan Singh trumpet India’s progress. Supachai Panitchpakdi says China’s advance should be welcomed, not feared. Orit Gadiesh says Chinese companies are taking on the world. David Arkless examines their growing pains. The changing…
The decline in audiences for television news is no reason to dumb down, says the BBC’s Mark Damazer. There is still hunger for serious news, albeit delivered through more and different channels It is now 13 years since a BBC boss asked me to write a paper about the decline in audiences for television news…
The growth of consumer culture for children threatens to erode the very way we assess value, warns Daniel Thomas Cook Corporate interests have succeeded in making childhood a focus for aggressive capital investment. In recent decades, a $100-billion global children’s consumer industry – centred in North America and Europe, with a presence in Israel, Egypt,…
With the right incentives from government the private sector can help lift poor areas out of poverty , says Ronald Cohen The liberalization of western economies over the past two decades has unleashed a wave of entrepreneurial activity and generated a huge amount of wealth. While welcome, this entrepreneurial success has brought with it a…
Noam Chomsky sets out his vision of fair globalization in conversation with Global Agenda’s Maria Ahmed For the record, I am in favour of globalization. That has been true of the left and the labour movement since their modern origins. That’s why every union is called an international; why there were several abortive attempts to…
Universities are becoming key recruitment agencies in the new economy, says Frances Cairncross. But this role could be jeopardized if governments try to use them for social engineering Few successful public companies have been in existence for more than a century. The world’s top universities, on the other hand, have shown an extraordinary ability to…
There is no one mastermind behind al-Qaeda, says Jason Burke. And, while its roots are centuries deep, it is a very modern phenomenon More than four years after the attacks of September 11, 2001 we are finally beginning to understand al-Qaeda. The immediate aftermath of the atrocities in New York and Washington DC was marked…
