On the scorching summer morning of Aug. 19, 2009, I was walking from my home in Baghdad‘s Mansour district to Ahmed Chalabi’s residence, just a few houses away, for our routine morning meeting. As I made my way down the street, I suddenly heard a massive explosion in the distance. Moments later, the blast wave […]
HOMER CITY, Pa. — Eighteen months ago, Shawn Steffee stood in a field in Indiana County and watched the smokestacks of Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power plant fold into a cloud of dust, then told anyone who would listen that the wreckage was not a funeral. “This isn’t the end, this is the beginning,” said the […]
On Oct. 5, the Supreme Court will hear Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. Boulder, Colorado, wants money from Suncor and Exxon Mobil because the companies produce the fuels that power modern life and, Boulder claims, contribute to a warmer climate that raises local costs for wildfire risk, flooding, and infrastructure. The county […]
This summer, cancer patients in India discovered that a chemotherapy shortage can begin far from a pharmaceutical factory, with a disruption in the supply of a metal. Cisplatin and carboplatin are decades-old generic drugs that remain a backbone of chemotherapy for many cancers. Both depend on platinum. When platinum prices more than doubled, Indian manufacturers […]
A quiet, painful break is happening in homes across America, and it started in a courthouse. As the country fixates on the Massachusetts trial of Lindsay Clancy, the argument has left the courthouse and entered our own relationships. Recent media analysis highlights show couples breaking up, engagements being called off, and marriages straining over one […]
Conventional wisdom insists that artificial intelligence has the worst public relations ever. This is ironic, given that AI is supposed to be curing cancer, yet it can’t even come up with a PR plan to make itself less hated. Perhaps the failure is inherent to the product, not its communications strategy. We see this with […]
Every new client who opens an account at my firm hands over a driver’s license, a passport, or a certified trust document before a single dollar moves. Federal regulators call it Know Your Customer or KYC for short. I call it common sense: verify who someone is before you give them access to something valuable. […]
President Donald Trump stands before a supreme geopolitical opportunity in the Balkans. Decades of State Department bureaucratic inertia have locked American foreign policy into a failed, artificial construct known as the Dayton Accords. This obsolete framework sacrifices American strategic flexibility on the altar of “democratic” diplomatic nostalgia. Rather than propping up a dysfunctional Bosnian state […]
The global bond market is throwing a massive tantrum, and the fallout is heading straight for your wallet. Investors are aggressively dumping U.S. government debt. This global bond market rout has driven long-term borrowing costs to heights not seen in nearly two decades. The most immediate casualty of this panic is the American home buyer. […]
Presidents love to make promises they don’t keep. Think back to the last guy in the Oval Office. Joe Biden vowed to connect rural Americans to broadband internet — the gateway to so much employment, education, and healthcare in the 21st century. But after spending more than $40 billion, not a single person was connected […]
Two years ago today, the international adoption community was shocked by the news that China terminated its international adoption program. As a Chinese American adoptee, the news brought back images taken on the first digital camera my adoptive mother ever owned, purchased for her flight from Minneapolis to Guangzhou, China. The blurry prints depicted the […]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood near Gaza’s Yellow Line this week and said Israel is not withdrawing from the territory it now holds while Hamas remains armed. During his visit to an IDF position in Gaza, he put the issue plainly: Israel will remain until the work of disarming Hamas is finished. That position […]
