Black History Month — 28 days of inspiration “I don’t want a black history month. Black history is American history,” Morgan Freeman says. Over the next few weeks, you will see no shortage of functions…
Category: Canada
“The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so…
Are the Arab League and Organization of Islamic Cooperation targeting Syria’s civilian population? Damascus– One powerful image from Damascus that has become seared into this observers mind these days is when I walk by a…
The US-announcement not to arm the opposition in Syria does not absolve the USA from its full responsibility for what is taking place in Syria or the practices of the opposition, said Russia´s permanent representative…
Tahrir Square is dark, and all of a sudden endlessly sad. There are still countless tents in the middle of the roundabout, banners carried by the wind, even a small and provisory ‘Museum of Revolution’….
Through a Department of Justice legal finding, President Obama now has the power to determine whether an American citizen has the right to live or die. The President has been determined by a secretive «Star…
Part I: Africa’s New Thirty Years’ War? Mali at first glance seems a most unlikely place for the NATO powers, led by a neo-colonialist French government of Socialist President Francois Hollande (and quietly backed to the hilt by the Obama Administration), to launch what is being called by some a new Thirty Years’ War Against Terrorism. Mali, with a population of some 12 million, and a landmass three and a half times the size of Germany, is a land-locked largely Saharan Desert country in the center of western Africa, bordered by Algeria to its north, Mauritania to its west, Senegal, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso and Niger to its southern part. People I know who have spent time there before the recent US-led efforts at destabilization called it one of the most peaceful and beautiful places on earth, the home of Timbuktu. Its people are some ninety percent Muslim of varying persuasions. It has a rural subsistence agriculture and adult illiteracy of nearly 50%. Yet this country is suddenly the center of a new global “war on terror.”
General Petraeus, the head of CIA, resigned admitting to a scandalous extramarital love affair. It made Barack Obama rush to find someone to replace him. As an intelligence veteran, John Brennan was the likely candidate….
French defense ministry officials have said that they are planning to make a withdrawal from Mali by April. Since January 11, when the French military began to bomb and launch a ground invasion into this resource-rich country, the government in Paris has declared that its operations are limited and they were only there as a precursor to the intervention of a regional force from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Although several thousand troops from various African states including Chad, Nigeria as well as the national army of Mali have entered the battle alongside the French, the former colonial power also made an appeal for the United Nations to take over the operations which are really designed to secure the resources of Mali for the benefit of western industrialized states. Earlier UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had publicly stated that direct intervention by the international body would jeopardize its personnel carrying out humanitarian work inside the country and throughout the region.
The policy you have when you don’t have a policy Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard delivered a statement about the country’s national security policy to a carefully selected crowd of defense, public service, and academic personnel at the Australian National University late last month. The 58 page paper titled Strong and Secure: A Strategy for Australia’s National Security supersedes the last one given by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd back in 2008 and is considered a supplement to the White Paper, Australia in the Asian Century presented by Premier Gillard last October. The paper outlines the country’s assessment of priorities, risks, and capabilities.