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Welcome to The Global Dispatches,
This month, Peter Oborne, the former chief political commentator of the Telegraph, spent two weeks in Damascus and gives a compelling account of people’s struggles and steadfastness in government-held territory; Arthur Ituassu, a leading Brazilian scholar of social and political science looks at the difficult situation facing Brazil and its President Dilma Rousseff; Stein Ringen, Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford on how the Chinese state is now more ideological and more repressive than ever since the days of Mao and Adil Shamoo on how the US is betraying the Kurds - again... and much more |
 | Robert Arnold looks back at Italian director Ermanno Olmi's masterpiece "The Tree of Wooden Clogs" (L'Albero degli Zoccoli), winner of 14 awards including the Palme d'Or for Best film at Cannes in 1978 and the César Award in the same year for Best Foreign Film. |
 | An array of problems - economic, social, moral and environmental - is testing the political limits of Brazil's state-society relationship. The approval ratings of the President and the prospect of an impeachment put Brazilian democracy in one of the most difficult moments since the end of the military regime. |
 | Peter Oborne, the former chief political commentator of the Telegraph, spent two weeks in Damascus and gives a compelling account of people's struggles and steadfastness in government-held territory. |
 | A posthumously published book by the art historian Michael Jacobs on his long standing obsession, the Velazquez painting, "Las Meninas", that hangs in the Prado - a painting that has perplexed art historians for two centuries. |
 | An American poet from the 20s who wrote two lost and neglected Jazz Age classics, epics of debauchery and depravity, "The Wild Party" and "The Set Up". The Wild Party is the very epitome of the Jazz Age. The poem went in and out of fashion and both The Wild Party and The Set Up have been made into films. Robert Wise, in 1949 filmed The Set-Up and there was a Merchant Ivory Productions in 1975 version of The Wild Party. |
 | Discussions on the connection between the level of interest rates, incentives to search for yield, and financial stability have been prominent over the last ten years or so. More recently, Larry Summers argued in his 2014 secular stagnation address that the decline in the real interest rates would be expected to increase financial instability. What is the connection between these phenomena? |
 | The Chinese state is now more ideological and more repressive than ever since the days of Mao. The new leadership has, however, shifted the balance of rule. The new leaders put less trust in the people’s trust in them and are instead relying more strongly on controls and repression. |
 | With 2015 set to break global temperature records, this December ministers will convene at the UN meeting in Paris and the WTO meeting in Nairobi to continue climate negotiations. |
 | Hillary Clinton just laid out a hawkish foreign policy vision in a major speech. How do her views stack up against those of Bernie Sanders, her challenger from the left? |
 | David Runciman, Professor of Politics at Cambridge University examines what the Tea Party and Occupy movements have in common: the fact that they don’t accept the official version of events any more. |
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