High-seas fish poaching is more than just a matter of sneaking marine life out of a restricted corner of the ocean; it’s an organized industrial crime that can strip coastal fishing grounds bare and deny even subsistence livelihoods to local fishermen. Foreign ships poaching in African waters, for example, have been a problem for years in Africa, east and west, and the crime fuels piracy, as well as illegal immigration. “The high seas today are like the American Wild West of the 19th century,” said the Pew Environment Group in 2011, “only the bandits are huge factory fishing ... Read More
The Greening of Angela Merkel
August 31, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Before Japan's Fukushima disaster, in any German debate on nuclear power, Chancellor Angela Merkel played the role of a cautious and conservative mother hen. We may not like it, she said, but nuclear energy is easy on the climate, and a national shift to solar and wind power would need a long and sturdy "bridge technology." A trained physicist, she seemed to speak from professional prudence. After Fukushima, she changed her mind with dizzying speed. The results are well known: German nuclear plants will go dark by 2022, and the nation will steer a hard course for renewable power by working ... Read More
PTSD Affecting More U.S. Soldiers Than British
June 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Combat stress is still a murky and sometimes taboo element of soldiering, but one of the strangest discoveries is that the strain isn't evenly spread among vets from different countries. For example: A far higher percentage of American soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder after combat in Iraq and Afghanistan than British soldiers do. Americans involved in those wars have suffered from PTSD at a rate of 30 percent, compared to 4 percent among Brits, according to a study published by the U.K.'s Royal Society of Medicine. And researchers say the difference isn't a reflection of ... Read More
Start Slow With Bullet Trains
May 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The prospect of building new rail corridors in the U.S. must seem expensive and daunting, as it did to Europeans 20 or 30 years ago. Old American track, in many cases, is too rickety or crowded for modern electric trains to vault between major cities at speeds that compete with short-haul passenger flights. To upgrade the U.S. rail system in any significant way, there will have to be at least a few dedicated high-speed lines, on whole new rights-of-way. The cost will be staggering. And what if the people don't come? "No one will ride this train," was a refrain on message boards in Florida ... Read More
‘Shooting Galleries’ Take Aim at Illicit Drug Market
March 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In a late essay on the Reagan drug war, the Beat novelist William Burroughs gave a surprising statistic. Heroin was freely available by prescription in Britain in 1957, he wrote, so addicts could shoot up from a government stock of junk dispensed by the National Health Service. "There were about 500 addicts in the U.K.," in those days, Burroughs wrote blandly, "and two narcotics officers for metropolitan London." When the U.K. criminalized heroin in 1971, he argued, it lapsed into "the same dreary spectrum as the USA — thousands of addicts, hundreds of drug agents, some of them on the ... Read More
Enlightenment Islam?
October 26, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The Goethe University in Frankfurt will offer courses this winter in Islamic theology, which might sound to some people like damning evidence of "Eurabia" creeping into Europe's higher institutions. But the new Islamic Studies program "will educate not just theologians and the next generation of religious academics, but also specialists in Islamic theology," says professor Ömer Özsoy, who heads the department. The program belongs to a new fashion: Europe educating its own imams. Experts have warned for years that Islamic religious leaders in Europe have been trained abroad, in Arabic or ... Read More
Don’t Panic. It’s Only the Internet.
August 24, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The U.S. established a new military brain center in Maryland this year called Cyber Command, the geek soldier's answer to Central Command, where our military hackers work to protect military networks from enemy hackers abroad. Along with this year's "cybersecurity bill" in Congress, the command center belongs to a larger effort to protect the nation from "cyberwar" ... whatever that might mean. Cyberwar has become one of the "foreign frights of 2010," and not just in the U.S. Some 20 nations have been setting up cyberdefense headquarters to develop new "weapons" and steel their networks ... Read More
Betting Against the Euro
June 29, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The destruction of Greek credit on international markets this year has been framed as a drama between laissez-faire instincts in Britain and the United States on the one hand, and slower, cud-chewing, pseudo-socialist European tendencies on the other. "There is a part of the Anglo-Saxon press that no longer bothers to hide its desire to see the euro zone disappear," Jean Quatremer wrote in Libération in February, referring to Anglo-American economic areas by the traditional misleading term. Europeans like to talk about a conspiracy against the euro. But was there really some kind of ... Read More
A Right to Home-School?
April 27, 2010 • By • 6 Comments
At the start of this year, in Tennessee, a funny thing happened to Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, members of a German family that sought asylum in the U.S., based on what they said was persecution by the government in a stable, modern, democratic European country. A U.S. court granted it. A federal immigration judge in Tennessee found that the Romeikes were at risk of persecution by German authorities because they wanted to home-school their kids. Now Uwe and Hannelore can raise their five Christian kids in Morristown, Tenn., not far from Knoxville, instead of facing fines or fearing a knock on ... Read More
Who Are You and What Did You Eat?
February 25, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
One of the most schizophrenic aspects of American border policy since 9/11 is the way Washington treats its friends: "Welcome to America," the government all but literally says to people arriving from Europe. "Line Up Here for Secondary Inspection." The controversy over body scanners at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport last December — after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to destroy a plane with his undershorts — was just a powder flash in the ongoing struggle between the U.S. and Europe since 2001 over how to manage America's traditionally open borders. Individual acts of pressure to foist ... Read More
