Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
This week, the U.N. Security Council stood united in a unanimous resolution to fight what President Obama called the ISIS “network of death.” Yet, despite pleas for the world to act together on global warming, the leaders of India and China failed to even show up at the U.N. Climate Summit. India’s environment minister actually announced that his country would not cut carbon emissions and that the burden should fall on the developed countries.
As the U.S. struck ISIS targets in both Syria and Iraq, Pope Francis visited Albania, a Muslim-majority country that is one of the poorest in Europe. Writing from Tirana, Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama reports on the pope’s visit and his inspiring message of peace, hope and tolerance.
Writing from Canberra, the former head of the International Crisis Group, Gareth Evans, points out the limits of America’s anti-ISIS strategy. Former MI6 agent Alastair Crooke argues that ISIS is drawing the U.S. and its coalition further into conflagration in order to further its own aims in the region.
Reporting from a remote village in central Turkey, WorldPost Middle East Correspondent Sophia Jones tells the harrowing story of two hostages who were released by ISIS last week. “It was a fine line between life and death,” one tells her.
In this week’s “Forgotten Fact“ series, the WorldPost turns to Boko Haram in Nigeria, revealing how the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls doesn’t tell the whole story of what’s going on in that country.
As world leaders focused on climate change at the U.N. summit this week, the WorldPost gathered an array of voices to address the subject. Former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan calls for global unity to act now. California Governor Jerry Brown writes about how the climate challenge can be met “from the bottom up” at the sub-national level. Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon describes how his city is becoming eco-friendly. Writing from New Delhi, environmental scientist V. Rajamani says India is experiencing a climate “fever” caused by human economic activity.
WorldPost Beijing correspondent Matt Sheehan heads to the coal-fired heartland of China to report on daily life at ground zero of climate change. He also writes about Chinese funemployed college grads “gnawing the old.”
In an interview with the WorldPost, one of Europe’s leading statesmen, Swedish Foreign Minister and former Prime Minister Carl Bildt, ponders Putin’s motives and next moves in the Ukraine conflict. Writing from Moscow, Dmitry Gorenburg writes that many Russians, including Vladimir Putin, believe that the U.S. is out to overturn governments it doesn’t like by instigating “color revolutions” from within.
Futurist Peter Schwartz warns that “challenger” states such as China, Brazil and Germany could end the Internet as we know it and break it down into national nets where information is controlled. Writing from Jerusalem, Yuval Noah Harari, author of the new blockbuster book, “Sapiens,” fears that, with new scientific advances in genetics, social inequality could translate into “biological inequality.” Philip Mirowski worries that robots are increasingly being designed to supplant human decisions. Chandran Nair looks at the impact of robots in overpopulated Asia.
Finally, Zeng Jinyan — the wife of China’s famous environmental dissident activist Hu Jia — writes about what it is like to live under constant surveillance and harassment by China’s security police.
WHO WE ARE
EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Senior Advisor to the Berggruen Institute on Governance and the long-time editor of NPQ and the Global Viewpoint Network of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Senior Editor of the WorldPost. Alex Gardels is the Associate Editor of The WorldPost. Nicholas Sabloff is the Executive International Editor at the Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost’s 10 international editions. Eline Gordts is HuffPost’s World Editor.
CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul; Matt Sheehan in Beijing.
EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media) Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editor-At-Large.
The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.
Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the “whole mind” way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.
ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council — as well as regular contributors — to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail, and Zheng Bijian.
From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.
MISSION STATEMENT
The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.
We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.
