Nick Ottens is a public affairs officer for the Dutch Animal Coalition and a board member for Liberal Green, the sustainability network of the Dutch liberal party VVD. He is a former political risk consultant and a former research manager for XPRIZE, where he designed prize competitions to incentivize breakthrough innovation in agriculture, food and health care. He has also worked as a journalist in Amsterdam, Barcelona and New York for EUobserver, NRC, Trouw, World Politics Review and Wynia’s Week, among others.
A series of Goldman Sachs executives, chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein included, were called to Washington this Tuesday to testify before the United States Senate. The firm is front and center in the Democrats’ quest for Wall Street reform, such as preventing banks from becoming “too big to fail” lest taxpayers once again be called […]
The crises in Greece sends shockwaves around the world and inspires recriminations everywhere.
Hillary Clinton sounds tough, but her approach to foreign policy isn’t so different from Barack Obama’s.
With Tea Parties and Republican opposition continuing to mount and President Barack Obama’s approval rating hovering near 50 percent, the United States are preparing for a “summer of discontent” that in all likelihood will culminate in a series of crushing defeats for the ruling party in November. The fight for the midterm elections is not […]
Former Republican House speaker chastises the Democrats’ left-wing policies.
If his party loses the election, Gordon Brown can’t stay on as prime minister.
After two years, Senator Christopher Dodd’s financial regulatory reform bill is finally moving out of committee to be brought to a vote on the floor of the Senate. Both the Connecticut senator and the banking committee’s ranking Republican, Richard Shelby of Alabama, appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press this Sunday to state their intentions. Dodd […]
Defense Tech reports that German soldiers in Afghanistan are silently protesting against the perceived ambiguity of their mission’s purpose by snapping up patches that read “I fight for Merkel.” The patches, technically illegal, are a big seller among German soldiers at Mazār-e Sharīf. The country’s ISAF forces have been hit hard in recent weeks, losing […]
Robert Kaplan points out that China’s blessed geography is so obvious that it tends to get overlooked.
Simon Johnson, former chief economist with the International Monetary Fund and currently an MIT professor of entrepreneurship, has been arguing for the forced downsizing of Wall Street’s biggest banks for well over a year. In May 2009 he fiercely criticized what he described as the country’s “financial oligarchy” for creating the 2008 crisis and subsequently […]
The leaders of the three major British political parties debated foreign policy on Sky News tonight. Questions from the audience quickly steered the discussion in a more domestic direction but the politicians were able to present their views on the European Union, the special relationship with the United States, climate change and defense.
Since Senate Republicans announced their intention to filibuster a financial reform bill, their party has come under attack from the left for supposedly being in the pocket of big banks. Even the president suggested this weekend that the GOP is taking its cues from Wall Street. The Democrats may have difficulty understanding that some lawmakers […]
In another show of Turkey emerging as a Middle East power broker, the country reiterated its offer on Tuesday to act as a diplomatic middleman toward Iran. “The solution for Iran’s nuclear program is through negotiations and the diplomatic process,” stressed Ahmet Davutoğlu, Turkey’s foreign minister, during a press conference in Tehran. Turkey, which has […]
Arianna Huffington complains about what she calls “the real Wall Street crime” at her online newspaper today in an entry entitled, “Shorting the Middle Class.” According to Huffington, big banks, for decades, have been “selling” the American people a promise of unending prosperity while in truth, they facilitated the transfer of wealth from America’s middle […]
Europe and Japan sit safely under America’s defense umbrella.
