Politics
It was as good as Daily Mail headlines get. “The Guardian has handed a gift to terrorists.” Paraphrasing a speech by new MI5 Chief Andrew Parker, in which the top spy took aim at the paper for publishing Edward Snowden’s leaks, the catchy language, though designed to pimp newsprint, testified to the gravity of Britain’s GCHQ crisis. (More…)
Chris Christie is bracing himself for what is likely a landslide re-election Tuesday. Almost on cue, another video has been circulating that portrays the governor at his most infamous: rude, and confrontational, against a schoolteacher who was critical of his education reform strategy. As analysts turn their attention to New Jersey, it’s important to evaluate how Christie got to this point, and why he’s so popular. (More…)
President Lukashenko appealed to the apparatchiks. They were fearful of the literati calling for human rights reforms, and raising the divisive issue of whether or not Russian should be Belarus’ official language, an issue that rankles to this day. He also seemed to rise above the intrigues of the post-1989 legislature, with his anti-corruption agenda, though post-mortems of his first campaign show that it was light on actual investigations, but high on image management. (More…)
It was my second visit to the town of Sittwe, in Burma’s western Rakhine state this year, and my third visit to the country itself in six months. Prompted as much by what seemed like fate as opportunity, I had journeyed once again to this part of the world in order to write about the plight of the Rohingya ethnic minority, a stateless people whose suffering and increasing proximity to disaster are not well-known in the West. (More…)
Nuclear weapons negotiations between the United States and Iran are looking increasingly likely to portend a seismic shift in the Middle East. That shift, though, is not the one that was hoped for in some quarters. Especially in Riyadh and Jerusalem, who fear being sidelined by an ending of hostilities between Washington and Tehran. (More…)
Idle No More is back. After a lull, the movement has been reinvigorated by a march at a shale gas field in Rexton, New Brunswick last week that turned violent. Now that discussions of the group are once again making headlines, it’s a perfect time to discuss what led to the movement’s creation, as well as how it functions within the broader context of Canadian multiculturalism. (More…)
One of the more absurd international crises could be coming to an end. The word out of Geneva this week is that the P5+1 (which consists of the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France plus Germany) was impressed with the presentation made by the Iranian delegation. It’s only the beginning of what is sure to be a difficult process. (More…)
Perhaps the only thing more frustrating than the government shutdown for those of us living in the United States has been the mainstream media’s coverage of the shutdown. Day after day, pundits speculate about how much the Tea Party-led campaign to defund the Affordable Heath Care Act by holding the nation hostage will hurt Republicans in the next election cycle. But they ignore the obvious: the ideologues responsible simply do not care. (More…)
“The two-state solution is the only viable option to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” So goes the familiar refrain. Lately, I’ve noted a couple of instances where the cliché has been accompanied with mockery of those who advocate for one secular, democratic state in all of the land Israel now controls. There’s a lot of arrogance and condescension in that attitude. (More…)
Somalia’s PR strategy is violence. Or so one might be inclined to think, based on press coverage of Nairobi’s spectacular Westfield mall attack by al-Shabaab gunmen (and apparently women.) The last time that Somalia fanned comparable ripples in US media culture was during the Battle of Mogadishu, a highfalutin moniker for the botched commando raid in 1993, in which 18 American soldiers and an estimated 1000 Somalis were killed. (More…)
It wasn’t until I was stretching as far as I could towards the ceiling, my hand inching towards the smoke detector, that I realized how high up I was. For many people, standing on a ladder, twelve feet above the ground, is no big deal. But for me, the boy who had almost failed out of Cub Scouts for not being able to climb half that high, it surely was. (More…)