RSSDispatches

Canada could host global tribunal

| January 20, 2021 | 0 Comments
Canada could host global tribunal

When global human rights activists and international affairs strategists campaigned for a new international tribunal to help to prevent future Rwandan genocides and other outrages, Canada was in the vanguard of those writing and creating the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). Likewise, when a similar cohort of important parties gathered together […]

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What Biden should do in Africa

| January 20, 2021 | 0 Comments
What Biden should do in Africa

U.S. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Tony Blinken have not yet decided who will be in charge of Africa policy-making, but we already know that the nations of Africa will be respected, befriended and hardly consigned to the lavatory and schoolboy lavatory talk. Biden has travelled to Africa multiple times. Blinken, on Biden’s […]

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The COVID crushers

| January 20, 2021 | 0 Comments
The  COVID crushers

The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV2, COVID-19, has taken lives, disrupted our days, ruined businesses, spread fear and birthed a plethora of conspiracy theories. In that, it is very much like earlier pandemics. A disease becomes a pandemic when it becomes prevalent over a whole country or the world. Pandemics have included smallpox, leprosy, influenza, cholera and […]

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This millennium’s major innovations

| January 20, 2021 | 0 Comments
This millennium’s major innovations

Looking past 2020’s annus horribilis, Wolfgang Depner presents the 21st Century’s Top-10 major innovations and technologies. When 2020 dawned, various media organizations whetted the appetites of their readers with lists of things to come, ranging from major sporting events and the release of new movies and musicals to pending breakthroughs in medicine and transportation. As […]

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Shifting alliances

| November 4, 2020 | 0 Comments
Shifting alliances

Joe Varner looks at the ways in which allies have shifted their priorities, and therefore their allegiances, in the time of COVID-19. Time does not stand still in life and certainly not in international affairs. The year 2020 has been one of change for the world’s foremost military alliance and NATO’s relationship with Turkey. The […]

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COVID disrupts fight against TB

| October 31, 2020 | 0 Comments
COVID disrupts fight against TB

6.3 million people will develop TB by 2025 due to COVID-related diversions of health-care services; another 1.4 million will die. Editor’s note: The TB/COVID-19 Civil Society Organizations working group wrote a report titled The Impact of COVID-19 on the TB epidemic: A community perspective. We excerpt the executive summary and key findings here. Tuberculosis is […]

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Two steps forward; one step back

| October 31, 2020 | 0 Comments
Two steps forward; one step back

Autocrats, even democrats, always find it hard to give up office — especially in Africa. Likewise, no matter how often the African Union condemns military coups and sanctifies elected heads of state, soldiers oust politicians and refuse to stay in their barracks. Equally, there are authoritarians who abuse and assassinate their opponents, squelch those who […]

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Estonia’s e-government revolution

| August 2, 2020 | 0 Comments
Estonia’s e-government revolution

The tiny country of 1.3 million has put itself on the global map with innovative e-government programs, one of which allows foreigners to establish companies there, from afar. After Estonia finally gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, following 51 years of occupation and poverty, then-prime minister Mart Laar was searching for a way […]

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Lost UN seat could be a win

| August 2, 2020 | 0 Comments
Lost UN seat could be a win

Many Canadians were disappointed at Canada’s recent loss in the “Western Europe and other” regional race for a two-year seat on the United Nations Security Council. The late start aside, errors abounded in our campaign. Kaveh Shahrooz, a Harvard-educated lawyer formerly at Global Affairs Canada, criticized it for omitting such issues as Beijing’s mass human […]

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COVID-19 hits Africa

| August 2, 2020 | 0 Comments
COVID-19 hits Africa

Despite a woeful medical infrastructure, widespread disease, food insecurity and crowded urban slums, much of Africa — compared to the Americas and Europe — has largely been spared a wrenching public-health disturbance from this year’s raging coronavirus. So far. At the same time, economies throughout the continent have tanked and Africans have been thrown back […]

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