The Guardian (London)

Rebecca MacKinnon, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a founder of international blogging site Global Voices Online, told the meeting, sponsored by the Washington lobby group Progressive Change Campaign Committee: "We need to ensure that ...

It is reflected in the eagerness of Americans to find a foreign war to escape from domestic troubles – a cycle of confidence, over-confidence and expensive failure well described in Peter Beinart's book The Icarus Syndrome. ...

A dilemma raised in 1980 by the UK academic David Collingridge was the chosen topic for technology writer Evgeny Morozov. "Collingridge's basic insight was that we can successfully regulate a given technology when it's still young and unpopular and ...

I was struck by something that one respondent, Evgeny Morozov, said about his fear of a chasm opening "between the disengaged masses and the overengaged elites". The elites, he goes on, "continue thriving in the new environment, exploiting superb ...

It seems a hard time to be confident about the state of the country – or the state of the planet. We are still facing the aftershocks of the worst recession since the great depression and a significant risk of dipping back into it. Europe's economy looks increasingly old and enfeebled compared with the virile young tigers of Asia. Terrorism strikes fear at home while war drags on in Afghanistan and violence is used against protesters in Syria and elsewhere. And the condition of the global environment appears fragile at best.

Joining the discussion from Washington DC is Charles Kenny, the economist and author of Getting Better, an optimistic look at global development. And down the line from New Delhi, economist Jayati Ghosh provides insights from India. ...

Yet, as Flynt Leverett, a former Middle East analyst for the US National Security Council and the CIA, has observed: "It is far from clear that the Assad government is actually imploding ... Moreover, no one has identified a plausible scenario by which ...

The Israeli government has come under criticism from both the Obama administration and American Jewish communities over the past week – the latter focused on a bizarre advertisement campaign aimed at the US diaspora.

At the same time, Peter Beinart suggests that we view the high-volume discussions in Israel as democracy in action. Iran watchers have been darkly murmuring that the political calendar gives a six-month window in which Israel could conceivably act ...

Writer Charles Kenny's book, Getting Better, was published this summer and examined positive trends in global development. Kenny argued that the worldwide effort to get hundreds of millions of people out of poverty is working. Statistics on health and ...