HUFFINGTON POST 08/01/13 By Michael Shank and Kate Gould The Senate and House Intelligence committees’ about-face decision last week to arm the rebels in Syria is dangerous and disconcerting. The weapons will assuredly end up in the wrong hands and will only escalate the slaughter in Syria. Regardless of the […]
HUFFINGTON POST 07/13/13 By Michael Shank Rarely does one turn to Congress for innovation. That is certainly the case with energy efficiency. Congress may be a go-to on oversight and accountability but not innovation. The Pentagon, in contrast, while not a leader in oversight and accountability (with no audit planned […]
HUFFINGTON POST 06/24/13 By Michael Shank President Barack Obama must go big on climate change this Tuesday primarily because there will hardly be a better political moment available to him. If President Obama uses his speech to go soft — with meager caps on carbon emissions, weak investments in renewable […]
HUFFINGTON POST 06/22/13 By Michael Shank and Cassidy Regan This week, as President Barack Obama travels to Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania, he will miss much of America’s mission creep into the African continent. Not merely in the more obvious military interventions into Libya, Mali or Somalia, or military bases […]
HUFFINGTON POST 06/17/13 By Michael Shank and Kate Gould Iran’s presidential elections offered a rare opportunity for the world’s media spotlight to shift from focusing on Iranian officials, donning white lab coats flanked by metallic centrifuges, to the Iranian people. Tens of millions of Iranians headed to the polls to […]
HUFFINGTON POST 06/13/13 By Michael Shank and Sabina Dewan A high-level panel appointed by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon released its recommendations last month for a global development agenda when the Millennium Development Goals expire at the end of 2015 and when approximately one billion people will still […]
HUFFINGTON POST 04/21/13 By Michael Shank While the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the G20 meets in Washington DC this weekend to discuss economic growth, a completely different, and much more diverse, group of stakeholders met in Delhi, India, to discuss a model that turns the IMF, World […]
HUFFINGTON POST 03/13/13 By Michael Shank The District of Columbia’s poverty problem received much-needed attention recently with reporting on how D.C. General has become a home for hundreds of homeless parents and children. The over-crowded and abandoned hospital-turned-homeless shelter has become a testament to D.C. benevolence, ushering in an outpouring […]
Huffington Post 11/11/2011 By Michael Shank Rick Perry’s inability to recall three US government agencies is indicative of this country’s equivocal commitment to “high levels of education”, one of eight factors essential to a stable and peaceful society, as reported recently by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP). Without […]
Huffington Post 10/05/2011 By Michael Shank As US Congress continues to quack its way through the Super Committee quagmire, a seemingly non-germane offshore issue has surfaced vis-a-vis Iraq. The connection between the two is anything but inconsequential, despite receiving scant review in Washington. If one wonders how US debts and […]