September 28 - How Much Does the Islamic State Threaten Russia?; Criticism and Adulation for India's PM Modi; Did VW Damage the Environmental Movement?

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the dueling speeches at the U.N. from President Obama and Russia’s President Putin where each blamed the other for the mess in Syria. Gordon Hahn, a Professor and Senior Researcher at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies in Monterrey and author of “Russia’s Islamic Threat” and “Russia’s Revolution From Above”, joins us. We discuss Putin’s call for “a genuinely broad international coalition” to fight the Islamic State, and the extent to which Russia is threatened by the Islamic State given that most of the jihadists in Russia’s Caucasus have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and that two of the top commanders in the Islamic State are brothers from Russia.

Part 2

Then we go to London to speak with a specialist on India, Cleo Paskal, who is a visiting Trudeau Fellow at the University of Montreal’s Center for International Studies and a Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, London. We discuss India’s Prime Minister Modi’s remarks to the U.N. today that were preceded by a trip to the Silicon Valley where Modi pushed his “Digital India” project and met with the leaders of the giant tech companies, many of which are headed by Indians or Indian Americans.

Part 3

Then finally we get an assessment of the damage done to the environmental movement by the massive deceit carried out by the world’s largest car manufacturer, Volkswagen. Joe Romm, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and the Founding Editor of Climate Progress where he has an article “We May Have Just Bought Ourselves an Extra Decade to Avoid Catastrophic Climate Change”, joins us. We discuss the bad news in terms of VW’s cheating, but the good news today with Shell abandoning its plan to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean and India’s pledge to join in global efforts to reduce greenhouse gasses, following the recent announcement by China that is was adopting a cap and trade CO2 reduction regime.