Halfdan Mahler, the Danish physician who served three five-year terms as Director-General of the World Health Organization, died last week in Geneva. Mahler may not be a household name, but he helped to fundamentally transform our collective notions of what global...
Duck of Minerva is pleased to announce the second annual Online Achievement in International Studies (OAIS) Blogging Awards -- better known as the Duckie Awards -- and the second annual...
The reports about the bilateral agreement between the US and Afghanistan that would allow American troops (and other western countries essentially) have suggested that President Hamid Karzai would...
My new job as semi-weekly Tuesday linker is off to an uneven start. I am behind on link collection as I was roaming this past weekend in the cell phone sense--in the US where my cell phone is...
Happy 2008 everyone.
This weekend, the AP's Katherine Shrader wrote a fine story about the "myth" of suitcase nuclear bombs."The suitcase nuke is an exciting topic that really lends itself to movies," said Vahid Majidi, the assistant director of the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. "No one has been able to truly identify the existence of these devices."Many of the fears about suitcase bombs originated years ago in statements by a couple of Russians who may have had ulterior motives for inflating threats -- including retired General Alexander Lebed who told "60 Minutes" about missing suitcase nukes...
I'm already de facto on hiatus from blogging, so I might as well come out and say it: I'm not going to be writing much, if anything, on the Duck for a bit longer.Our regular readers may have noticed my lack of posting lately, and that I haven't contributed anything of substance in an even longer period of time. The short explanation: I'm about midway through my junior-faculty leave, and I'm swamped with work. My book is due on January 15th, and, being my normal self, I've got a lot of other stuff I need to finish. So thanks to the rest of the team--particularly Rodger and Peter--for keeping...
How much more excitement can the Senate handle? With prospect of a confirmation hearing heating up the Hill, this crosses the web-page of the Washington Post: Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested back in June and plead guilty to disorderly conduct.First, how on earth does this not come out until now? He's a sitting Senator pleading guilty to a criminal offense. A misdemeanor, yes, but still a crime. And he's now on probation. A sitting Senator, on probation. And no one knew.Second, what on earth was Craig doing in the bathroom of the Minnesota airport when arrested???Roll Call, citing a...
Posting at the Duck has been thin of late. Some quick explanations:I'm tied up by teaching responsibilities and the task of finishing my book manuscript. Patrick's similarly swamped with his own responsibilities. Peter's a new dad. Rodger's probably thick into the Grawemeyer-award process. Peter's a new father! Bill Petti is on long-term hiatus. But, if past trends continue, the fact that I've posted this probably signals an imminent avalanche of content.
China has over $1 trillion of US treasury bills. Its a well described cycle--China produces massive amounts of consumer goods, the US buys those goods, the trade is imbalanced, so China ends up with a lot of dollars, and they invest them hier in T-bills, essentially loaning them back to the US government to finance the US federal budget deficit. So far, China has been sitting on this mound of cash, content to save. That seems to be changing, reports the NY Times today: China will create a new agency to invest the country’s immense reserves of foreign currency, now totaling more than $1...
Bennett Richardson of the Christian Science Monitor reports that some LDP politicians are raising the nuclear issue in Japan. The article provides plenty of food for thought about the impact of North Korea's nuclear test on Japanese politics, but it also includes a rather strange quotation from a Japanse academicAlarmist views have been continually wrong in the past and they are wrong again now," says Shunji Taoka, a defense writer and former professor at Tsukuba University.One strategic factor against Japan acquiring a nuclear arsenal is that the country's small size cancels the principle...
If you missed IR scholar John Mueller's appearance on the Daily Show, watch it soon on the Comedy Central website.Mueller has been writing a great deal about the overblown threat from terrorism -- and he managed not only to plug his current book, but also his next one!Incidentally, that next book is going to be The Cold War as Farce. Perhaps Nayef Samhat and I will produce The Comedy of Global Politics first. Incidentally, I've been on a conference panel with Mueller, frequently assigned his writings in my class, and even hosted him in Louisville in a work-related endeavor. Thus, even though...