A reader noted that yesterday was World Refugee Day. To mark the occasion, the UN High Commission on Refugees released a report that counts over 10 million asylum-seekers this year. That’s a 14% increase over last year, thanks mostly to the estimated 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Jordan and Syria.
I’ll eliminate the suspense: I think it’s pretty silly. I understand the Clinton campaign’s desire to connect with its supporter base, develop loyalty, establish brand identity, and increase its candidate’s accessibility. Nothing wrong with that. But those goals could have been accomplished in ways that touch on issues facing the U.S. and the world, too….
I’m halfway through a report on disaster management and peacebuilding by Michael Renner and my good friend Zoe Chafe at the Worldwatch Institute. The frequency of disasters is likely to increase due to a number of factors, chiefly among them climate change.
I have no doubt that readers of this blog have noticed my more-than-occasional rants about insufficient U.S. funding for multilateral activities and institutions. Global poverty and U.N. peacekeeping are among the areas I’ve pushed for hardest through my ” day job,” but there’s another that’s just as much in need and even less noticed.
I’m back from an interesting and informative conference put on by the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation. I shared some reflections earlier and have a few more to throw out. Senator Gordon Smith delivered a keynote this morning.
I’m taking a minute during lunch at America in the World to share a question I had during today’s insightful panel on the Middle East. The panel consisted of Helene Cooper (moderator), Daniel Kurtzer, Ellen Laipson, and Daniel Levy.
I’m at the Hyatt Regency this morning at a conference jointly sponsored by the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation. The topic? “America in the World.” Madeleine Albright kicked things off this morning. A couple of takeaways: – Secretary Albright has long proposed that the U.S. is the “indispensable nation.
This morning I dropped by the launch of ONE Vote 08, a campaign to raise the profile of global poverty and health in the presidential elections. The ONE Campaign has done a remarkable job raising the profile of these issues generally over the past few years, and in a bipartisan way.
I spent my morning meeting kids at Barnard Elementary School in D.C.’s Petworth neighborhood. I talked a bit about the problems I care about and learned a good deal about the problems they see as relevant to them.
President Bush just appointed former Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman to serve a five-year term on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. Mehlman wins a few points in my book for trying to expand the reach of the Republican Party and perform genuine outreach to minority communities.