Tagged: International

The Senegalese are known for campaigning loudly, musically and enthusiastically, yet the country's reputation for democracy and stability in turbulent West Africa has taken a knock as it prepares for elections on Feb. 26.

When Senegal's top court gave its blessing last month to President Abdoulaye Wade's third-term ambitions, his opponents angrily took to the streets to demonstrate their disapproval.

Senegal was tense as police clashed with protesters demanding that the president withdraw his candidacy.

Opposition presidential candidate Moustapha Niasse, Wade's onetime prime minister, used strong language to describe Senegal's octogenarian leader during a recent protest march.

A new documentary explores how this vital and volatile country may be vastly different than what most Americans perceive.

Greece is broke. But there's no blueprint for a country to declare bankruptcy, so Greece's creditors are sort of making things up as they go along.

"You're taking some sort of loss," Hans Humes of Greylock Capital Management told me. "But it's like, how much of a loss do you take? There's this thing called sovereign immunity. You can't go in and take the Acropolis."

Greylock Capital Management is a hedge fund company that holds Greek bonds. So Humes is sitting across the table from Greece. There are lots of other creditors — people sitting alongside Humes — and they all want different things.

A surprising inside look at why propaganda works in North Korea.

"By 2008, the United States had become the biggest international borrower in world history, with two-thirds of its $6 trillion federal debt in foreign hands" points out Jeffry Frieden, co-author of a new book called Lost Decades: The Making of America's Debt Crisis. International borrowing has been a long-standing economic tradition -- we even funded the American Revolution this way. But, Frieden points out, more recent borrowing is massive compared to the past and encouraged debt-fueled consumption rather than sound investments. We’ll look at the roots of this, and the results, including the Great Recession. 

Guest

Today we talk with former ABC Correspondent Barrie Dunsmore about the state of international reporting today.

The World Affairs Council of New Hampshire hosts international visitors, and provides public lectures and programs on foreign affairs to promote understanding and citizen involvement. Kim Tyndall is a longtime member of the Council.

The other drug war South of the Border. And why Americans want to give to those with more, not less.

This month’s installment of our 11 for '11 series of big picture conversations on the issues of our times. Today, we talk with poet and journalist Eliza Griswold, about her book The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. Griswold spend seven years traveling the band of the globe called the 'tenth parallel,' the latitude about ten degrees above the equator where two worlds collide. She visited the mega-cities and remote villages of Central Africa and South Asia, where more than half of the world's 2 billion Christians live along with half of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims. It is here, far from the Middle East, where disputes over ethnicity, land, water, and oil are shrouded in conflicts over faith.