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The Ukraine has banned Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, after he came out in support of Russia's annexation of Crimea.

Gorbachev's comments on Crimea are the latest wedge between Ukraine and Russia.

Ukraine's Security Service told CNN the ban was because of Gorbachev's "public support of military annexation of Crimea."

Trump sees the world in terms of a zero-sum game. In reality, globalisation, if well managed, is a positive-sum force: America gains if its friends and allies – whether Australia, the EU, or Mexico – are stronger.

But Trump’s approach threatens to turn it into a negative-sum game: America will lose, too.

Previous administrations have always taken seriously their responsibility to advance US interests. But the policies they pursued usually were framed in terms of an enlightened understanding of national interest. Americans, they believed, benefited from a more prosperous global economy and a web of alliances among countries committed to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

Decades of deregulation and lowering taxes for the wealthy and businesses -- with the hope of it eventually benefiting the middle and working classes -- has created a chasm between the rich and everyone else, Stiglitz told CNNMoney.

"Maybe we should be calling the American Dream the Scandinavian Dream," he told CNNMoney.

"The choices we made got us here and we must now choose a new path," Stiglitz said last month, when he released his 37-point prescription for restoring the American Dream. The report, titled "Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy," was issued by the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank where he serves as chief economist.

Technology as a revolutionizing force for good Klaus Schwab founded the World Economic Forum in 1971 to ‘improve the state of the world.’ World Economic Forum, CC BY-NC-SA

In his new book The Fourth Industrial Revolution – published to coincide with the WEF annual meeting in Davos – Schwab argues that we are at the beginning of a technological revolution that “is fundamentally changing the way we live, work, and relate to one another.”

At the heart of Schwab’s revolution is an accelerating convergence between our increasingly powerful technological capabilities. Autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, gene editing, robotics, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things – these and many more emerging trends, he suggests, are arising from an unparalleled melding of physical, biological and digital worlds

Women Have Very Little Political Power Anywhere In The World

When Canada's new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, announced he had appointed women to half of his government's cabinet positions, many people asked him why.  "Because it's 2015," he replied. 

A new report on global gender equality by the World Economic Forum, the Geneva-based nonprofit most famous for its uber-elite economic conference in Davos, Switzerland, shows that while women are inching toward global parity in education, health, and to a lesser extent economic outcomes, they are still woefully underrepresented in national governments. 

Talk of a fourth, technology-driven industrial revolution may seem like something a million miles from the minds of developing countries like Guinea. Surely we have more fundamental problems, like poverty, lack of energy or infrastructure to get to grips with. Our country has after all just come out of the world’s worst Ebola epidemic.

The reality, however, is that this often bewildering new world offers huge opportunities to countries like our own. The speed of change in innovation offers the prospect of confronting some of our biggest problems more quickly and efficiently than we would ever have done before.

Learning from the past and adopting some of the world’s best practices, some of our biggest challenges can become unique opportunities. Guinea is a resource-rich country with huge potential, but it has suffered from decades of inertia and bad governance which has condemned generations to live into poverty. Today, we have a chance to turn our unexploited agriculture and mineral wealth into truly sustainable development.

the financial collapse of 2008. The crash demonstrated the emptiness of the claim that markets could regulate themselves. It should have led to the disgrace of neoliberalism—the belief that unregulated markets produce and distribute goods and services more efficiently than regulated ones. Instead, the old order reasserted itself, and with calamitous consequences. Gross economic imbalances of power and wealth persisted.

In the United States, the bipartisan financial elite escaped largely unscathed. Barack Obama, whose campaign benefited from the timing of the collapse, hired the architects of the Clinton-era deregulation who had created the conditions that led to the crisis. Far from breaking up the big banks or removing their executives, Obama’s team bailed them out.

criminal prosecution took a back seat to the stability of the system.

When I was growing up in Gonaives, Haiti, we didn’t have a toilet. We had a latrine, an outhouse in the back of our yard where we went to the bathroom. A literal “shithole.”By Western standards of modernity, you could say the same of Haiti. Our roads aren’t great. Our politicians are corrupt. The late dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, a.k.a. Baby Doc, stole hundreds of millions. His wedding famously cost $2 million. That was a lot of money in 1980. Today, the average Haitian lives on less than $2 a day.

didn’t. We finally got through it. The next week, she cooked diri ak lalo — the best Haitian meal, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise — and brought it for me in class and thanked me profusely. It nearly brought me to tears. She was my Davos Seaworth and I was her Shireen Baratheon. It’s one of my most cherished memories, and I will take the grateful look on her face to the grave with me.

I’m not going to give you a history lesson here, but there’s a short apocryphal story that illustrates the pride and sense of righteousness of Haitians. It goes like this: In 1939, when World War II broke out, Haiti, a pioneer of freedom, having led the most successful slave rebellion in the history of the world, joined the Allied forces and declared war on Nazi Germany. When that was reported to Hitler, he picked up a map to look for this presumptuous place he’d never heard of. He couldn’t find it. Suddenly, a fly fle

it’s increasingly obvious to me that the teenagers and 20-somethings who have mastered these platforms — and who are often dismissed as shallow, preening narcissists by adults who don’t know any better — are going to dominate not just internet culture or the entertainment industry but society as a whole.

as social media expands its cultural dominance, the people who can steer the online conversation will have an upper hand in whatever niche they occupy — whether that’s media, politics, business or some other field.

“The way to think of influencers or creators is as entrepreneurs,” said Chris Stokel-Walker, the author of “YouTubers.” “These people are setting up businesses, hiring staff, managing budgets. These are massively transferable skills.”

The autocratic political culture that has propped up the Trump administration has left the nation entirely unprepared for an economic and public-health calamity.

The president of the United States is a menace to public health

I don’t mean that I disagree with him on policy, although I do

What I do regret about my virus column, though, is its dripping certainty. I wasn’t just pooh-poohing the virus’s threat; using the history of two other coronaviruses, SARS and MERS, as my guide, I all but guaranteed that this one, too, would more or less fizzle out.

In retrospect, my analytical mistake is obvious, and it’s a type of error that has become all too common across media

My mistake was that I hadn’t properly accounted for what statisticians call tail risk, or the possibility of an unexpected “black swan” event that upends historical expectation.

The Sanders campaign is a bet that the 2020 race can be won by mobilizing the Americans least committed to the political process while alienating and even offending the Americans most committed to it. It’s a hell of a gamble, and for what? To elect to the presidency a person with a proven record of accomplishing little for the causes he espouses, despite almost 32 years in the House and Senate?

The latest CNN poll showed Sanders erasing Biden’s lead among nonwhite voters—perhaps in spite of Sanders’s indifference to identity politics, or maybe, just maybe, because of that indifference.

But the constellation of issues that predominates among highly online and very well-informed anti-Trump voters matters a lot less to millions of other people who could potentially decide the 2020 election

Fissures between the White House and national health agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have begun to expand as the coronavirus pandemic spreads to more American states, creating dissonance between President Donald Trump and the professionals tasked with containing the virus further.

The cracks are falling along predictable lines. While health officials have sought to present a realistic and cautious picture of the national situation, Trump and his political allies are hoping to relay an altogether different message: that the virus is contained, Americans face little risk, and life should proceed as normal.

From its earliest days, Trump has sought to downplay coronavirus' risks and lashed out when those within his administration appeared to be doing otherwise. He told a collective of executives at the World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland, in mid-January that it would not pose a major threat to the United States, an attendee told CNN.

“Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”

A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.

Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.

As an official from one of America’s key partners in the region put it to me earlier this year: “Is this how superpowers commit suicide?” It appears the answer is yes.

While America continues to maintain a significant military edge over its closest rivals, it’s gradually losing the main battle that is defining this century: trade and investment.

Meanwhile, China is busy shaping the world in its own image with verve and vigor. In a surreal twist of events, a communist regime has now emerged as the unlikely guardian of globalization and multilateral diplomacy.

In his book, “The Ideas Industry,” Daniel W. Drezner says we’ve shifted from a landscape dominated by public intellectuals to a world dominated by thought leaders.

A public intellectual is someone like Isaiah Berlin, who is trained to comment on a wide array of public concerns from a specific moral stance.

A thought leader champions one big idea to improve the world — think Al Gore’s work on global warming.

But this polarization is not new. Mexico stopped being one society a long time ago, splitting into two countries, so to speak, that struggle to coexist where they overlap. Both sides are genuinely convinced that their approach for ​​Mexico is the one that best suits the country. And they are both correct, except that they are talking about two different countries.

More than three decades of an economic model that increased inequality has led to the fragmented and unequal Mexican society that we see today. Given that the opposition has thus far been unable to offer an alternative to this model, I am convinced that Mr. López Obrador is our only viable option.

According to the National Institute of Statistics, 56 percent of Mexicans work in the informal sector and lack social security, and not by choice. Mr. López Obrador has enacted social programs that have benefited more than 20 million Mexicans, although it’s not enough for the estimated 52 million who live in poverty.

one thing, at least, has gotten better. More than 1 billion people have escaped extreme poverty—so many, so fast, that the world might be able to declare, within a decade, the end of this most miserable form of deprivation. “The global poverty rate is now lower than it has ever been in recorded history,” Jim Yong Kim, a former president of the World Bank, recently argued. “This is one of the greatest human achievements of our time.”

Or perhaps not. In an acidic rebuke to world leaders, the outgoing United Nations special rapporteur on poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, argues that the effort to end global poverty has failed. More people live in deprivation now than two decades ago. “We squandered a decade in the fight against poverty, with misplaced triumphalism blocking the very reforms that could have prevented the worst impacts of the pandemic,” Alston wrote in his last report.

The pessimistic argument is a hard one to make when looking at the raw, headline numbers. The global extreme-poverty rate fell from 36 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2015; the number of poor people dropped from 2 billion to 700 million. But Alston believes that by focusing only on those numbers, the world is deluding itself.

Next week the BirthStrike movement – founded by women who, by announcing their decision not to have children, seek to focus our minds on the horror of environmental collapse – will dissolve itself, because its cause has been hijacked so virulently and persistently by population obsessives. The founders explain that they had “underestimated the power of ‘overpopulation’ as a growing form of climate breakdown denial”.

It is true that, in some parts of the world, population growth is a major driver of particular kinds of ecological damage, such as the expansion of small-scale agriculture into rainforests, the bushmeat trade and local pressure on water and land for housing. But its global impact is much smaller than many people claim.

The formula for calculating people’s environmental footprint is simple, but widely misunderstood: Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology (I = PAT).

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”