Hillary Clinton is reaching the end of her trip to Africa. Her last major stop came in Nigeria, where she predictably encouraged Nigerians to clean up their political system, most notably the way the country runs its elections. Some have claimed that Clinton made a gaffe when she referenced the 2000 election fiasco in the […]
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is a titanic figure for freedom in not only South African but also global history. It is hard to overstate his courage during the 1980s when South Africa exploded in violence as the opposition movement that revitalized itself after the Soweto Uprising met up against an increasingly intransigent and desperate South […]
CNN is reporting that U.S. President Barack Obama will attend the 17th APEC summit in Singapore on November 14 and 15 of this year. No further travel details have yet been released.
A female soldier in the IDF reportedly witnessed the forced abduction of a male soldier into an automoble by two men, Israeli news is now reporting. The IDF is still investigating if any soldiers are unaccounted for and initiated the road blocks as a precaution. The “Al-Quds Army,” a perviously unknown group, claimed responsibility for the […]
The Facts: Police security checks in central Israel are leading to severe traffic jams. The intensive police pressence focusses on Petah Tikva, the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road, and Ben Gurion Airport. The checks, occuring since the afternoon, involve police searching each car and asking who is inside. The Rumors: Some Israelis are saying that a terror […]
The H1N1 virus doesn’t seem to be going away in Israel or in Palestinian controlled areas. The rate of infection in Israel has risen 3.6 percent in two weeks, infecting a total of 2,148 people in the entire country thus far. In order to combat the spread of the illness, the rabbinate is taking measures […]
Considering that in his last op-ed for the New York Times, Mr. Luttwak stated that the Muslim world will not accept Obama due to his “conversion to Christianity” (Muslim countries’ approval of U.S. leadership has increased under Obama’s presidency), it is no surprise that his op-ed published today in the Wall Street Journal on why […]
While many, including myself, have advocated getting rid of the term ‘AfPak’, the Foreign Policy website has decided to take it full boar…devoting a whole page to ‘The Af-Pak Channel: Inside the War for South Asia‘. Though I haven’t had a chance to dig deep into the site’s contents and intriciacies, one can quickly see […]
On Monday most presidents of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) met at a summit in Quito to discuss issues of regional interest. Notably, President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia was not in attendance due to his country’s strained relations with Ecuador. One topic not on the official agenda but raised during discussions was the […]
– The Thai courts refused a request to extradite Viktor Bout (aka The Merchant of Death) to the United States. Bout, an notorious global arms dealer, is accused by the U.S. of attempting to sell more than 700 surface-to-air missiles, a massive cache of automatic weapons, and airplanes and helicopters to the Revolutionary Armed Forces […]
Hillary Clinton moved on from the Democratic Republic of Congo and particularly her trip to Goma and is now in Nigeria where she is continuing the balancing act between proclaiming alliances and demanding accountability, with heavy emphasis on reducing graft. Clinton’s Goma trip, which actually was quite remarkable given the tendency of outsiders to swoop […]
This World Politics Review piece is less an article and more of an indictment of American policy toward Somalia, which most recently featured the mind-bogglingly bad decision to sell 40 tons of arms to a government that might not sustain itself long enough to jimmy open the boxes. Of course the article is long on […]
Most people, if they think of Madagascar at all, know it only as the backdrop for a bunch of cartoon critters from a zoo in New York City who, through a serious of hijinks, end up stranded on that African island nation. But Madagascar has more difficulties with governance than a monomaniacal (though generally harmless) […]
Kenya has formed a new anti-terrorism unit, the Ranger Strike Force, as part of major reforms in the military. According to Kenya’s The Nation newspaper (via allAfrica): Formed with the assistance of the United States Government, the new unit has been behind a number of security operations on the Kenya-Somalia border to prevent terrorist infiltration […]
Well, the recount of votes for seats on the Fatah Central Committee shook things up a bit. Notably, the recount pushed a prominent supporter of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, At-Tayyib Abdul Rahim, onto the panel, extending the elected part of the committee from 18 to 19 seats. Abdul Rahim previously said he would not seek […]