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| 1 |
ID:
119861
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In April, at an international conference in Palm Beach, I struck up a conversation with a senior adviser to ousted Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. It was barely six months after he was forced to resign in November 2011. "So what's he doing now?" I asked politely. "Oh, he's planning for his comeback," the gentleman shot back with a broad grin. "And there's no doubt he'll be back."
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| 2 |
ID:
119852
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2012.
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Uruzgan, Afghanistan-Two days before Afghanistan's election in September 2010, some 1,200 Afghans stormed a NATO coalition outpost named firebase Mirwais on a hill-side outside Chora in the central province of Uruzgan, where I was the senior military commander. Inside were 200 afghan soldiers, supported by 60 Australian soldiers and a U.S.-Australian team devoted to reconstruction and development in the province. Soldiers watched from guard towers as the crowd breached the first of two 15-foot adobe walls, opened a storage container, and set fire to a stash of U.S. and coalition military uniforms.
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| 3 |
ID:
119857
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Chubut, Argentina-In mid-June, at the onset of winter in the Southern Hemisphere, a gang of burly, masked construction workers took over Cerro Dragón, an oil and gas field 15 times the size of Buenos Aires and Argentina's most important source of hydrocarbons. Some 500 members of a union nicknamed the Dragons wrecked offices, spray-painted seditious messages on buildings, and barricaded access routes with torched cars in a scene Pan American Energy's chief executive Oscar Prieto compared to battle-scarred Baghdad. The disarray forced Pan American-majority-owned by oil giant BP, with China's CNOOC holding a 20 percent share-to halt production in the field for the first time in its more than 50 years of operations. The threat was calculated to irk a government already spending heavily on imported energy and that has demonstrated its willingness to take over companies.
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| 4 |
ID:
119856
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2012.
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Bilbao, Spain-Political violence was so rampant in the Basque Country in the mid 1980s that local journalists devised a proforma for the weekly bloodshed. Fill in the blank: policeman/soldier/ guard was killed/injured by a bomb/ bullet. The one constant was that the separatist guerrillas, Euskadi Ta Askata-suna, or Basque Homeland and Freedom (ETA), always claimed responsibility.
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| 5 |
ID:
119860
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2012.
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The seven billion humans on planet Earth consume 49,400 trillion cubic feet (1.4 quadrillion liters) of oxygen every year, enough to fill seven million Hindenburgs. About half of this oxygen comes from the ocean. Yet the recently concluded, decade-long Census of Marine Life reports that phytoplankton have been decreasing by approximately 1 percent every year since 1900. These microscopic plants produce most of the oxygen that comes from the sea. The exact causes of this decline are unknown, but rising temperatures are suspect. Ocean oxygen production is now likely about one-third of historical levels. In 2050, just as the world's population is projected to hit a peak of nine billion people, phytoplankton will be down to 22 percent of historical averages.
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| 6 |
ID:
119855
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2012.
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Abidjan, Ivory Coast-It was long past midnight when a truck belonging to the Republican Forces of Ivory Coast (FRCI) pulled up to a small, open-air restaurant in Duékoué, a town of 75,000 in the country's west. The crowd that night in March was mostly young men, many of them drinking and dancing to club tracks played by a local disc jockey. Not long after the soldiers' arrival, 16 of the men, including the DJ, were rounded up for arrest. Although no reason was given, the men went willingly, even helping to push the truck when it would not start on its own.
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| 7 |
ID:
119853
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| 8 |
ID:
119854
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2012.
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Dubbed "??? ?? ???," or "the word on the word," the May 16 debate between Serbian President Boris Tadic and challenger Tomislav Nikolic is Serbia's fourth national political debate in a month, following three rounds of televised parliamentary debates in April. This marks the final stop of the Serbian presidential campaign (votes to be cast four days later). This is only the third general election since the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 2003 and the creation of the Republic of Serbia. Cast as a "TV duel" in local media outlets, the feverishly plotted, yet surprisingly plodding, display pits the incumbent and head of the Serbian Democratic Party against the leader of the nationalist Serbian Progressive Party.
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| 9 |
ID:
119858
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2012.
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Buenos Aires-Only in Argentina. Porsche exports olives and Malbec wines. Mitsubishi has a hand in peanuts, and BMW, after an eight-month hiatus from Argentina, agreed last October to swap rice, leather, and auto parts.
Argentina's tough import restrictions, designed to help the central bank maintain a stable exchange rate by controlling the amount of foreign currency in circulation, require companies to send out as much as they bring in. Since her re-election in October, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has forced companies to repatriate profits and pay higher taxes on imported materials, interrupting the production chain and reducing trade, according to a July note by Goldman Sachs.
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| 10 |
ID:
119851
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2012.
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Paris-After the May 6 Greek elections, which saw the routing of the two major parties that have alternated power since the end of the military dictatorship, a Greek explained, "I voted against Pasok [the Socialist party], because they failed to provide a job to my daughter who holds an engineering degree." In this country known since ancient Athens as "The Mother of Democracy," the sacred concept of demokratia, or rule by the people, has been profaned. The following month, another set of elections failed to give Greece the working majority it desperately needed to form a coalition of the traditional center-right and left parties and relaunch its moribund economy, too long fed with European Union subsidies. Nor has it succeeded in restoring faith in a democratic process undermined by corruption-endemic at every level of society.
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| 11 |
ID:
119849
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| Publication |
2012.
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Democracy is more than just a buzzword of revolution. It represents hope for a better, freer, and more prosperous future in countries around the world. But all too often, it faces threats to its expansion or even to its very existence. We have asked our panel of global experts to weigh in on what they see as the biggest threat to democracy in their respective nations.
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