Maxwell School News and Commentary

“I don't think COP29 delivered the way many developing countries wanted. It was called the finance COP but you could call it a cop out in terms of how well the countries pledged a fraction of the needed finance. That goal of $1.3 trillion a year becoming only $300 billion a year now,” says Farhana Sultana, professor of geography and the environment.

“The type of damage that you'll see is to property, to infrastructure, to roads and highways, but also to critical infrastructure like hospitals and power stations. And this will be devastating. It will be in the many billions of dollars,” says Farhana Sultana, professor of geography and the environment. 

“One of the things I think the split screen was able to do was to show Harris looking really composed. She was looking right at Trump and she wasn't going to let up. And I think part of the strategy wasn't really about him at all. It was about ‘I can hold the stage. I can be presidential. I can be commander in chief,’” says Shana Gadarian, professor of political science.

“This is a massive flooding event...and the floods were quite rapid in their onset. There are over 5 million people who are marooned or stranded and devasted across 11 districts, 23 reported deaths now but those figures will rise and relief cannot reach many people,” says Farhana Sultana, professor of geography and the environment. 

“It pretty clear and consistent across lots of polls that public support for the court itself has been tanking,” says Thomas Keck, Michael O. Sawyer Chair of Constitutional Law and Politics. “So, in theory, that creates some space for a capable political leader to speak to those concerns.”

Devashish Mitra, professor of economics, says that some wealth distribution “might not be a bad idea.” But, he adds, “it is a politically contentious issue, and there might be political problems in enacting any kind of means to redistribute wealth.’’

University Professor Sean O’Keefe says whoever is appointed at Boeing will need to be able to listen to the concerns of the industry. In particular, they will need to work hand in hand with its airline customers—from Alaska Airlines to United—to make sure safety issues will be the focus in the months ahead, he says.

“Really, we have 24 years of watching Putin build an increasingly repressive, authoritarian state. So the main purpose of elections like this in an authoritarian country is to show everyone that Putin is forever, there is no alternative to Putin, there's no point in resisting his state,” says Brian Taylor, director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs.

“It was definitely always a long shot and the ruling is not surprising,” says Thomas Keck, professor of political science and Michael O. Sawyer Chair of Constitutional Law and Politics. But, he adds, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling opened up larger questions about what guardrails exist to protect US democracy.

With little indication that the U.S. will attempt to assert leverage over Israel, Blinken’s latest trip to the Middle East is fundamentally “performative,” says Osamah Khalil, professor of history. “There is a face-saving domestic consumption element for [the Biden administration] and a separate face-saving element to allow Israel to claim some kind of victory,” he says.