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• 2004
• Global Economy
• Global Environment
• Civil Society

Recent Issues

Global Economy
Can Globalization 'Go Social'?

• In a world continuing to harden socially because of rapid and unsettling modernizations, could prevailing thinking about globalization shift toward the social?

Civil Society
Big Democracies at the Crossroads

• In a balloting year filled with surprises from India and Venezuela, and with Americans battered by the Bush-Kerry race, what do Russia and Indonesia tell us about the future character of democracy as a globally expanding project?

This October at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, an American physicist reported a surprising jump in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide. While the startling new data from Hawaii could indicate that global warming is increasing even faster than before, it was two London newspapers—The Guardian and The Independent—who broke the story to the world. The major American press or broadcast channels never mentioned it. Climate change is easily the most serious global issue of the 21st century, yet why are the US major media failing to educate Americans, blindfolding their audiences as they turn a blind eye to the world?

The US press today is in “stage-two” denial of the climate crisis. Editors acknowledge its existence even as they minimize its scope and urgency. This is evident from the pattern of coverage that provides occasional feature stories about the decimation of the forests in Alaska—but which continues to ignore the central diplomatic, political and economic conflicts around the issue of global warming. Illustration by Christopher Bing

Commentary Where there's smoke, there's media, but little more Americans miss the picture on global warming. By Ross Gelbspan Sidebar The heat is on, but the US press is off Data In reports on warming, balance is bias US prestige-press coverage of existence of anthropogenic contribution to global warming 1988-2000. By Maxwell T. Boykoff and Jules M. Boykoff Book Boiling Point: Courting public opinion amid crisis Op-Ed Underplaying the story of the century From casus belli to climate change, ideology prevails over US major media. By Peter Orne Commentary Americans were alerted about greenhouse-gas emissions in the 1970s The Mertz-Gilmore Foundation's effort to bring science to society. By Harlan Cleveland Figure War and weather: An Unlikely Cause and Effect

Global Connections
A World Times Feature
How does the everyday make the global? How does each of us create the whole? Global issues aren't just big things in the world, but what’s happening in our own lives right now. Global Connections explores the infinite number of possible pathways along which we create and remake the global each day.
• Share your perspective. E-mail editor@worldtimes.com

September 2004
The Favela Goes to the World Social Forum
A new documentary from Brazil shows just how hard it is from the poor in Brazil to attend a forum that purports to represents their interests.
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August 2004
White-collar outsourcing and a tale of two uncles
During a stay at a Best Western in France last winter, just a few miles across the border from Geneva, a colleague and I got in an especially non-neutral dinnertime debate about outsourcing and offshoring of white-collar work. Our faceoff on this sensitive issue was especially immiserating for me, an American, because I knew my Indian colleague was mostly correct. And yet the “all’s well” economic theories that support outsourcing of American white-collar jobs were simply rattling.
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