This is election year in Pakistan. Political parties are trying to keep the military out of politics. The country's civil society is pushing for free speech in a nation whose history has been shaped by military coups.
In early February 2007 the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its strongest statement yet on global warming. According to a 20-page summary of the report, the warming of the Earth will continue for centuries, even if greenhouse gas concentrations are stabilized.
Fifty years ago, Ghana was the first sub-Saharan country to achieve independence. And fifty years ago, in the fall of 1957, my father took my brother and me - just out of high school - to visit this new nation, and to interview Ghana's prime minister Kwame Nkrumah and the other shining lights of the Pan-African independence movement.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is, among many things, a Somali-born feminist and former Dutch parliamentarian. Her name gained worldwide attention in 2004 after Theo Van Gogh, the grandnephew of the famous Dutch painter, was murdered for his work with Ali on their short film Submission, an artistic statement on the status of women in Islam.
With hundreds of thousands of Latino-led immigrants marching in the streets for family reunification and legalization, and similar numbers of anti-immigrant groups lobbying their representatives, the recent "grand compromise" between Democrats and Republicans is not simply about immigration and labor policy. It deals with the heart of who is considered American.
Throughout the process of increasing voter and citizen participation and electoral democracy, the Venezuelan opposition and their allies in the U.S. press have told us that authoritarianism was just around the corner. They now say it has arrived.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019