Everyone it seems, is seeking to use ISIS for its own ends. The U.S. administration thus is between a rock and a hard place: Saudi Arabia desperately wants Assad's head on a plate and volunteers to fund the "war" effort for that end. But, for Obama to assent to Iranian-Russian conditions -- and thereby indirectly strengthen President Assad -- he will cause outrage in the Gulf and amongst the "moderate" Syrian exile insurgents. By doing as the Gulf wishes (attacking Assad's forces), however, he will almost certainly tip Russia, Iran and Hezbollah into overt opposition and escalation, which will greatly complicate the war on ISIS in Syria (and in Iraq, too).

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If we want to avoid a world where homo economicus comes first, robots second and the vast majority of humanity a distant third then we should pay close attention to what is happening today.

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Democratic Europe, as ISIS' war comes ever closer, must fight back not only with weapons, but with the strength of unity against a fantasy gone rampant, against people who would return our to the dark abyss of past millennia.

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If 150,000 U.S. troops could not stabilize Iraq in the absence of an inclusive and competent government, the limited measures on offer now simply will not suffice. And we should know by now that any Western military intervention with overtly political, rather than clearly humanitarian, objectives runs a real risk of inflaming sectarian sentiment.

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Russian leaders see the protests in Ukraine as part of a Western plot. For them, color revolutions are not manifestations of popular will but a new form of warfare invented by Western governments seeking to remove independently minded national governments. They have argued that this is part of a global strategy to force foreign values on a range of nations around the world that refuse to accept U.S. hegemony, and that Russia was a particular target of this strategy.

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Let us send a clear and unequivocal signal that failure to act will have consequences at the ballot box for politicians and for the bottom line of businesses. If leaders are unwilling to lead when leadership is required, people must.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

UNITED NATIONS -- California very strongly supports the efforts of states and cities to do their part to combat climate change. In California, we have emphasized in recent years building standards and appliance standards and a renewable energy goal. But now instead of just asking how many solar installations we have or how many wind installations or geothermal, we are putting the emphasis on our climate footprint.

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If elites have preferential access to technologies such as genetic engineering and brain-computer interfaces, the result may well be the translation of social inequality into biological inequality.

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The challenger countries will once again try, as they did last December in Dubai, to wrest control from the coalition of stakeholders that has been governing the Internet under a contract with the U.S. government. If they succeed it will be the end of the world as we know it. There will be no Internet. There will be many nets: ChinaNet, Euronet, maybe Deutsche Net and France net and Brazil Net and Russia Net. It will resemble the world before the Internet with many private networks and a constant challenge of interconnection.

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This week I was joined by over 500 youth advocates for education and education activists to launch the #UpForSchool petition in New York. World leaders including the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, have backed the petition. So, too have major faith-based organizations, including the World Evangelical Alliance and Sojourners -- both members of Global Faith Coalition on Education.

Alex Bellini

In order to become once again the owners of our destiny and future, we must implement a profound transformation of thought: we need to create a new relationship between the power of human beings and the ecological system of our planet.

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Committed to building a city that is safe from the threat of power crises, self-sufficient in energy and responsible for its energy use, we are exploring ways to generate energy in an eco-friendly and sustainable way. For example, we are installing mini-photovoltaic power stations on the rooftops of school buildings, apartments, and other structures, taking the maximum advantage of our high population and building density.

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Every new ton of oil, coal or gas we burn, or forest we destroy, means more stress for the Arctic and higher risks for us all. Every ton takes us closer to the tipping point, beyond which impacts start spiraling out of control, and action will no longer matter.

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Forests are also the lungs of our planet, and play a critical role in regulating our climate. They are second only to the oceans as the largest global store of carbon.

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Our earth was supposed to have been a "Garden of Eden" and has been made a "Lost Paradise" in the past one hundred years through climate change, largely due to human economic activities.

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People often mistakenly get the impression that modern economists care deeply about individual choice. Instead, robots are increasingly used to supersede human choices.

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Alibaba puts China on par with the United States in the rapidly increasing global competition for technological innovation and economic transformation. The GSK case reminds me of a popular book "China Can Say No," first published in China in 1996 and which signaled a new era for growing Chinese nationalism.