India should stop playing chicken to China’s raging dragon and promote the democratic alternative to Beijing’s authoritarianism, says Gautam Adhikari.
“A prickly nationalism has replaced communism as the driving ideology of the party-controlled Chinese state,” he writes in The Times of India, prompting anxiety amongst its neighbors, as does the “disturbing paranoia” evident in the belligerent reaction to [READ MORE]
Iraq’s parliament has approved Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s new government, ending nine months of constitutional paralysis.
The leading political blocs finally resolved fierce disputes over control of government ministries, but Maliki was unable to fill the key security posts of the interior, defense and national security. The parties agreed that an independent should run interior and defense ministries, although [READ MORE]
The crackdown in Belarus has ominously familiar overtones, according to this report from The New York Times:
It was the middle of the night when security services stormed the headquarters of Charter 97, an opposition Web site that is a rare window here onto a world beyond the control of the president and his security apparatus. There [READ MORE]
More than 600 activists have been arrested and five presidential candidates jailed in Belarus in a violent crackdown on dissent following Sunday’s disputed re-election of Alyaksandr Lukashenka as president.
Video footage posted on YouTube and similar websites by opposition activists and journalists shows police and paramilitary militia attacking peaceful demonstrators and brutally dispersing crowds after 20,000 [READ MORE]
The violent crackdown on opposition groups following Sunday’s disputed re-election in Belarus effectively ends the European Union’s attempt to engage Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s regime.
The EU hoped to seduce Minsk away from Moscow and promote a long-term strategy of liberalization by offering a version of the EU’s gravity model of democratization – offering [READ MORE]
At her 2009 Senate confirmation hearing, then-Secretary of State nominee Hillary Clinton stressed the importance of focusing on the 3 Ds she considered critical to U.S. foreign policy.
But the Obama administration’s stress on diplomacy, development and defense as the basis of U.S. foreign policy has been a sore point with some democracy advocates, [READ MORE]
The head of the African Union Commission has arrived in the Ivory Coast in an effort to end the current stalemate and prevent a repeat of this week’s violent clashes between rival political factions.
Forces loyal to incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo are patrolling Abidjan, the country’s largest city. They have clashed with forces loyal to Alassane Ouattara, the internationally recognized winner of [READ MORE]
The world’s most dynamic capitalist economy still officially reveres the twentieth century’s most murderous Communist, writes Pankaj Mishra in this must-read review in The New Yorker.
Modernizing autocrats elsewhere in Asia—Turkey’s Atatürk, Iran’s [READ MORE]
“What a woman! And what a Muslim!”
Hawa Abdi, a 63-year-old Somali doctor, personifies the “other” Islam, writes Nicolas Kristof, the alternative to the ugly ideology that inspires the Muslim militias’ atrocities.
“Equal parts Mother Teresa and Rambo”, in addition to running a 400-bed hospital, Abdi supplies 90,000 people with drinking water and started a school for 850 children, mostly [READ MORE]
Now we know.
If only the West had not been so preoccupied with arms sales and pressured the ruling autocrat to reform, while bolstering the opposition’s democratic forces, the authoritarian regime might not have given way to an even more repressive Islamic dictatorship.
Who needs WikiLeaks?
Soon-to-be-released documents from the British Foreign Office archives – previewed in The Financial Times – [READ MORE]
Why did the bright Chinese graduate student prefer to study Latin rather than English?
“I think it very important we study Romans, not just Greeks,” he told Mark Lilla. “Romans built an empire over many centuries. We must learn from them.”
China’s young intellectuals are rejecting both Marxism and liberal democracy, [READ MORE]
Omar Rassim al-Qayssi died this week of injuries sustained in a booby-trap car bomb. The satellite TV presenter was the latest journalist to be killed in Iraq, one of the world’s most lethal countries for journalists.
Imad al Ibadi, an investigative journalist working on corruption, was shot three times in his head, neck, and chest. A recipient of IREX [READ MORE]
Watch video: Emin and Adnan: We are back and thank you
Does this sound familiar?
An empty chair will represent a dissident barred from receiving a prestigious human rights prize.
Cuba’s communist authorities have denied an exit visa to democracy advocate Guillermo Fariñas after he insisted on his right to return to his homeland. He was due to receive the European Parliament’s €50,000 ($66,975) Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought tomorrow.
“The authorities would no doubt [READ MORE]
President Dmitry Medvedev’s commitment to reform Russia will be tested this week when jailed former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky appears in court to face a possible sentence of six more years in prison.
In an open letter to the Russian president, a group of prominent western politicians today urged him to “end the persecution” of Khodorkovsky and his business partner [READ MORE]