Global Challenges

1. How can genuine democracy emerge from authoritarian regimes? 2. How can the threat of new and reemerging diseases and immune micro-organisms be reduced? 3. How can population growth and resources be brought into balance? 4. How can sustainable development be achieved for all while addressing global climate change? 5. How can
policymaking be made more sensitive to global long-term perspectives? 6. How can the global convergence of information and communications technologies work for everyone? 7. How can ethical market economies be encouraged to help reduce the gap between rich and poor? 8. How can everyone have sufficient clean water without conflict? 9. How can the capacity to decide be improved as the nature of work and institutions change? 10. How can shared values and new security strategies reduce ethnic conflicts, terrorism, and the use of weapons of mass destruction? 11. How can the changing status of women help improve the human condition? 12. How can transnational organized crime networks be stopped from becoming more powerful and sophisticated global enterprises? 13. How can scientific and technological breakthroughs be accelerated to improve the human condition? 14. How can growing energy demands be met safely and efficiently? 15. How can ethical considerations become more routinely incorporated into global decisions?

In New York City, land of the ubiquitous yellow taxi, cabbies and other motorists find themselves with a bit less room to operate these days.
The city closed several blocks of Broadway in 2009 to create a pedestrian plaza around Times Square—a much-publicized experiment that in February became permanent policy, even though it did not improve traffic flow as much as hoped. The Big Apple has also dabbled in shorter-term but larger-scale street closures, barring cars on a stretch of streets leading from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park on a series of summer Saturdays in 2008 and 2009. And on June 7, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a somewhat less sexy but nonetheless significant change in the city's infrastructure, instituting dedicated bus-only lanes on Manhattan's East Side to speed transit up and down the island.