Nation & World

All Nation & World

  • Economics in the apple heartland

    A Harvard doctoral student has traveled to the wild apple’s home in the mountains of Central Asia to lend a hand to an international nonprofit working with local apple farmers to improve how they grow, harvest, and sell their crops. Plamen Nikolov, a first-year Ph.D. student in health economics, has designed an assessment survey and is leading data collection teams as they interview local households in two small villages on Kyrgyzstan’s Issyk-Kul Lake.

  • Democrats need unified message

    In 1967, Charles E. Schumer, a middle-class teenager from Brooklyn, N.Y., arrived at Harvard College with two goals in mind: to play freshman basketball and to study organic chemistry. At the basketball tryout, the would-be power forward – now New York’s senior senator – never got on court, after admitting to the coach that his dribbling was poor. As for chemistry – that was quickly submerged by a sudden new interest: politics. When Schumer discovered the excitement of getting out the vote (back then, for presidential hopeful Eugene McCarthy), he decided on a social studies concentration, followed by three years at Harvard Law School.

  • Power sees U.S. foreign policy on steep downhill slide

    On Aug. 19, 2003, the first suicide bomb to hit Iraq went off with a roar at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, where the United Nations had been encamped for a dozen years. Among the dead was a Brazilian diplomat, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the UN high commissioner for Human Rights.

  • Current U.S. renewable energy goal too low, says head of national lab

    The head of the U.S. government’s renewable energy lab said Monday (Feb. 5) that the federal government is doing “embarrassingly few things” to foster renewable energy, leaving leadership to the states at a time of opportunity to change the nation’s energy future.

  • Richardson explores what motivates ‘targeting of noncombatants’

    What do terrorists want? The question has reverberated in the consciousness of the West ever since the dreadful and unexpected events of 9/11. Were these appalling acts of violence perpetrated because “They hate our freedoms,” as President Bush asserted? Are terrorists simply insane, barbaric, nihilistic, as others have theorized?

  • Seven deadly sins on collision course with market forces

    Using the seven deadly sins to examine corporate social responsibility, Kennedy School Professor Herman “Dutch” Leonard explained that today’s market-based economy exploits behavior that is deeply embedded in man’s evolutionary history.

  • HBS models look for new markets while serving the global poor

    At $55 a copy, “Business Solutions for the Global Poor” (John Wiley & Sons, 2007) won’t be a hot seller in what economists call the base of the pyramid (BOP). That’s the informal, localized, and little-known stratum of the global market in which 80 percent of humanity – living on an average of $700 a year – does its buying, selling, and trading.

  • Terror war could strain veterans’ health, benefit systems

    The cost of caring for veterans of the war on terror could reach $662 billion over the next 40 years, while demand from returning soldiers is already clogging the two major veterans’ assistance programs, according to recent research by Linda J. Bilmes, a lecturer in public policy from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

  • Experts: Darfur peace depends on coming together of rebel groups

    Peace in Sudan’s troubled Darfur region depends on rebel groups getting stronger, not weaker, and negotiating a lasting settlement with the African nation’s government, experts on the situation said Wednesday (Nov. 29).

  • RFK Visiting Professor comes to DRCLAS

    Merilee Grindle, director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, recently announced the arrival of Cuban scholar Rafael M. Hernández Rodríguez as the 2006-07 Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Visiting Professor in Latin American Studies. Grindle, who is also the Edward S. Mason Professor of International Development at the Kennedy School of Government, welcomed Hernández, a senior research fellow at the Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Cultura Cubana Juan Marinello in Havana, and noted, “The center is delighted to welcome Rafael M. Hernández to our faculty. He is a scholar of international stature who will add measurably to Harvard’s expertise in the history and development of Cuba.”

  • ‘Ma Ellen,’ African symbol of hope, returns to Harvard

    In the Liberian capital of Monrovia, children stared in amazement. They had never seen such bright lights illuminating the streets, Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf told an audience of Harvard students and professors on Monday (Sept. 18, 2006) at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.

  • Get-tough measures suggested in Darfur

    A no-fly zone over the southwestern Sudan region of Darfur coupled with beefed-up international forces with a more aggressive mandate could go a long way toward stemming the humanitarian crisis in one of the worlds most troublesome spots, high-level participants at a Kennedy School conference on Sudan recommended Saturday (March 4).

  • Brigham pilot program connects people with family histories

    A Harvard Medical School instructor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital is spearheading a pilot project to encourage Brigham employees to gather detailed family health histories to give health care officials an edge fighting inherited diseases.