Americas Articles

A new age is dawning for the world. We stand on the threshold of an era in which the political, social, and economic organization will be different from anything we have known so far. In the next few decades, people from all over the world will expect the leaders of their countries to recognize the changing system and provide an appropriate collective response.

What is this new system? The economic, political, and historical data points to the emergence of a more diverse multi-polar power structure, featuring the emergence of the developing world and the consequent reordering of the international system.

The year 2007 was a special one for many international environmental organizations, as well as for the wider climate change scientific community. This was so thanks, in particular, to the successful approval of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) co-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which clearly categorized climate change as “unequivocal.” Thanks also to the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the IPCC and Al Gore in clear recognition of the fact that climate change is an issue with potential implications for world peace. If unabated, climate change will markedly increase the risk of conflicts over prime resources such as water, food, and energy.

On October 5, 2001, the Tampa Tribune published a short article regarding a flight that “the federal government says…never took place.” The flight left Tampa at 4:37 p.m. on September 13, 2001, two days after the 9/11 attacks. On board were three young Saudis (some FBI documents say four) that probably included the son of Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, now Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. In a chartered eight-passenger Learjet the youths left for Lexington, Kentucky, where they were met by security and escorted to a hotel to join relatives awaiting departure.

When the state of Iowa becomes a priority in the US presidential election, it is only a matter of time before agriculture dominates the discussion. Indeed, US presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama all brought out their metaphorical overalls to sing praises of corn farmers before the February caucuses. Such kowtowing to Iowa's farmers has become a quadrennial tradition in the United States, where federal corn subsidies totaled US$37.3 billion from 1995 to 2003.