WEC Articles

The modern history of Iran, from the aftermath of World War II to the present, is marked by dramatic shifts in governance, ideology, and regional influence. The country’s trajectory has been shaped by both internal dynamics and persistent foreign intervention, with consequences that continue to reverberate across the Middle East and beyond. In the immediate postwar years, Iran became a stage for Cold War rivalry. One lesser-known episode was the 1946 crisis in Azerbaijan and Mahabad, where Soviet-backed separatist states briefly emerged in northern Iran. With American diplomatic pressure, the Soviets withdrew, and Iranian forces reasserted control, but the incident underscored Iran’s vulnerability to foreign interference. This vulnerability was exploited again in 1953, when the CIA and British intelligence orchestrated a coup to remove Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh after he nationalized Iran’s oil industry. The coup restored the Shah’s autocratic rule and left a legacy of deep mist...

SDG`s The Sustainable Development Goals are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. They address the global challenges we face, including poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice. Learn more and take action. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/ We can break these down into three main challenges–  instability, implementation, governance . Increasing global instability, including the recent financial crisis, the political turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa and around the world, and the problems caused by changing climate conditions has brought about growing insecurity. These key challenges are: Instability, such as conflict between nations Implementation, such as ensuring programmes fit the local context Governance, such as political will to transform development programmes into sustainable long-term practices Sustainable Development: A Win-Win Situation for Every...

  What else could meme coins be? Ten years ago, two weeks before the Ethereum project was publicly announced, I published  this post on Bitcoin magazine arguing that issuing coins could be a new way to fund important public projects. The thinking went: society needs ways to fund valuable large-scale projects, markets and institutions (both corporations and governments) are the main techniques that we have today, and both work in some cases and fail in others. Issuing new coins seems like a third class of large-scale funding technology, and it seems different enough from both markets and institutions that it would succeed and fail in different places - and so it could fill in some important gaps. People who care about cancer research could hold, accept and trade AntiCancerCoin; people who care about saving the environment would hold and use ClimateCoin, and so forth. The coins that people choose to use would determine what causes get funded. Today in 2024, a major topic of disc...