Global News and Analysis

Source: Democracy Now

After a lightning fast advance by opposition fighters who poured in Tripoli with surprising ease, much of the city appears to be under rebel control although heavy fighting is underway in many areas. Al Jazeera reports that clashes are continuing in the capital, with the rebels facing off with tanks near Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s compound. Three of Gaddafi’s sons have reportedly been taken into rebel custody and the presidential guard has surrendered. We go to Tripoli for an update from Robin Waudo, an International Red Cross spokesperson, who is part of a small team able to come to their office amid fighting and distribute medical aid for as many as 5,000 people who have reportedly been wounded. read more

Source: The Nation

I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities—window smashing in Athens or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.

But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion—a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal. read more

Source: IPS News

“Dialogue is the Path” is the slogan that drew 25,000 people to this northern Colombian oil port city on the Magdalena river that has a history of social struggle. Most of the participants came from remote corners of the country where the brutality of war is experienced in daily life in ways unimagined by city dwellers.

Some people travelled with their entire families for up to 42 hours in motorboats and buses to come to the National Meeting of Rural Communities, Afro-Descendant and Indigenous Peoples for Land and Peace in Colombia, held Friday, Aug. 12 to Sunday, Aug. 14. read more

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. read more

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. read more

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. read more