by matttbastard
ForaTV:
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger advocates for a high-speed rail system to modernize US infrastructure, which he considers to be on par with that of a developing country. He says, “Our trains go the same speed today as they were 100 years ago,” Schwarzenegger says. “So where is the progress?”
Complete video here.
by matttbastard
ForaTV:
Harvard historian Niall Ferguson warns that the greatest danger of the current financial crisis could be the possible collapse of economic relations between China and America.
Watch full video here.
by matttbastard
ForaTV:
Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs outlines what are, in his view, the three greatest challenges to peace the world will face over the next several years.
Complete video here.
by matttbastard
ForaTV:
Muslim-Canadian author and commentator Irshad Manji explains clerical authority in Islam, and how the religion’s lack of a unified organizational system could open the door to reform.
Click here for full video.
by matttbastard
Stanford University theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind rejects the idea of “intelligent design” as a theory for the origins of the universe.
by matttbastard
China correspondent for The Economist James Miles outlines what would be the best possible scenario for China during the 2008 summer Olympics.
Related: Kerry Brown on China, the Olympics and ‘the globalisation of sentiment’; Amnesty International report: People’s Republic of China: The Olympics countdown – broken promises (PDF); more from AFP on how “China is using the Beijing Olympics as a pretext to pursue — and in some cases tighten — a crackdown on human rights”.
by matttbastard
Big Media Matt disputes the notion that John McCain’s foreign policy record represents a departure from that of the outgoing administration.
Related: Fareed Zakaria on McCain’s “radical” foreign policy proposals:
We have spent months debating Barack Obama’s suggestion that he might, under some circumstances, meet with Iranians and Venezuelans. It is a sign of what is wrong with the foreign-policy debate that this idea is treated as a revolution in U.S. policy while McCain’s proposal [that the United States expel Russia from the G8 and exclude China from any expansion] has barely registered. What McCain has announced is momentous—that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war.
Check out the full text of McCain’s March 26th speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, which, according to Zakaria, “[alternates] between neoconservative posturing and realist common sense…like it was written by two very different people, each one given an allotment of a few paragraphs on every topic.”
