Economy & Trade
President Barack Obama is under significant pressure to impose a range of restrictions on travellers coming to the United States from West African countries affected by the current Ebola outbreak. Yet public health experts and development advocates warn that such restrictions would harm the already reeling economies of Ebola-hit countries in the region, and squeeze […]
Despite the public’s persistent war weariness, the U.S. defence budget – the world’s biggest by far – may be set to rise again, according to a new study released here this week by the Center for International Policy (CIP). The 41-page study, “Something in the Air: ‘Isolationism,’ Defense Spending, and the U.S. Public Mood,” concludes […]
Lawmakers here are urging President Barack Obama to put transparency in the extractives sector at the centre of an upcoming trip to Myanmar. While the government of Myanmar has recently engaged in a series of bilateral and multilateral pledges to make its lucrative but highly opaque mining and oil and gas industries more transparent, advocates […]
Most of the world’s governments are taking measures to reduce the worst and most hazardous forms of child labour, according to a major report released here Tuesday by the U.S. Labour Department. In its annual assessment of progress toward eliminating that kind of exploitation, the 958-page report found that roughly half of the 140-some countries […]
A year after a U.S. company was accused of engaging in the systematic importing of flooring made from illegally harvested timber, pressure is mounting on federal agencies currently investigating the allegations. In September 2013, federal authorities executed search warrants of two of the offices of Lumber Liquidators, the largest specialty flooring company in the United […]
Canada’s tar sands oil boom may be in jeopardy and it appears the ruling Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper does not have any plan B in its ambition to remake this resource-rich country into “an energy superpower.” “This is one of the sectors that creates some of the most jobs, not just in […]
In a new book cataloguing the recent history of clandestine exchanges between the U.S. and Cuba, the reliance on secret intermediaries belies the common perception that the two governments rarely communicated during the decades that followed the Cuban revolution in 1959. Documents detail how Jimmy Carter acted as a secret intermediary for the Clinton administration […]
Joeva Rock is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at the American University in Washington, DC, focusing on colonial legacies in West Africa.
IPS Daily Report
