Throughout 2004 and 2005, Haiti’s unelected de facto authorities, working alongside foreign officials, integrated at least 400 ex-army paramilitaries into the country’s police force, secret U.S. Embassy cables reveal.
Source: Al Jazeera
The trial of ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has become the iconic emblem of the Arab Spring: a repressive US-backed dictator, suddenly brought down by popular mobilisation and displayed behind bars in the defendants’ cage of a Cairo courtroom. It’s an image most Egyptians, most Arabs, most people around the world never thought we would see.
And now come the scolding lectures. The trial is illegitimate, it may not meet international human rights standards. “The Mubarak cage is entirely gratuitous … The visual suggests a show trial, with the verdict already decided – which is, of course, the last thing the new Egypt needs”, writes a Denver Post columnist.
Perhaps there is no better way to sum up the tragic odyssey of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention than by invoking the old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Source: Truthout
“It is a common theme” that the United States, which “only a few years ago was hailed to stride the world as a colossus with unparalleled power and unmatched appeal is in decline, ominously facing the prospect of its final decay,” Giacomo Chiozza writes in the current Political Science Quarterly.
The theme is indeed widely believed. And with some reason, though a number of qualifications are in order. To start with, the decline has proceeded since the high point of U.S. power after World War II, and the remarkable triumphalism of the post-Gulf War ’90s was mostly self-delusion.
Six Republican senators in Wisconsin were targeted for recall on August 9 after backing Governor Scott Walker's union-busting bill this spring.
Source: The Nation
And so they played beach volleyball in small bikinis; on imported sand; while the world burned.
It aint exactly Shakespeare, but it is actually what happened earlier this week as the London Olympic Committee staged a beach volleyball exhibition as fires engulfed the city.
Opening Ceremonies for the London Olympics are in less than a year and this week’s explosion of bottled fury has the International Olympic Committee on edge.Even worse for Tory Prime Minister David Cameron, the riots took place as representatives from 200 Olympic Committees across the globe visited the city, just in time for the days of rage. Can you imagine the scene? It would be like Michele Bachmann and her 197 children visiting New York City and walking straight into the Gay Pride Parade.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019