The key to crafting effective counterterrorism policies depends on balanced judgments between democratic principles and security policies.
Metal surrenders to the heat, slinking away to dust. The remnants, lumped on the floor, are loomed over by an audience of intelligence agents — dispatched to watch the burn and all too pleased with the task – and journalists confounded by the absurdity of the scene. As if ripped from the old celluloid of […]
Many things could be said about the past year, but at the very least it could not be considered boring. Within two weeks of the new year, protests over government corruption in Tunisia ousted its long standing dictator, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. That event, which took many observers by surprise, triggered a wave of protests […]
Reactions to the so-called twitterspat between Rwandan President Paul Kagame, Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo and British journalist Ian Birrell that I posted on Monday is still in full swing online. The reactions I posted then pretty much summed up general opinion about the incident with most people siding with Birrell. And while I am […]
Today in Tunisia, amid government blackouts and Western apathy among the press and government bureaucracy, social media and second generation journalism through blogs is emerging as one of the only methods for demonstrators to tell their tale for those willing to listen.
For decades, being tough on crime has been a go-to mantra for American politicians regardless of party affiliation. Frequently that means increasing prison terms and choosing retributive justice over rehabilitation in the treatment of prisoners. Over the weekend prisoners in Georgia staged a peaceful strike in protest of these conditions. It appears that the strike […]
There is one piece of breaking news this afternoon that sent both my Twitter and Facebook feeds into a frenzy: Federal Judge Vaughn Walker has ruled that Proposition 8, the bill that amended the Californian Constitution to prohibit granting marriage licenses to same sex couples, is unconstitutional. From the ruling: “Proposition 8 fails […]
Over the last couple of months, news has been in pouring in about ‘honor killings’ in the northern States of Punjab and Haryana. Numerous couples have been killed mostly by family members on the orders of the ‘khap panchyats’ because they eloped, married outside their caste or within the same ‘gotra’. The problem is not […]
The last few days have seen significant uproar in the Indian parliament and media about the alleged wire-tapping of four senior politicians in India. The Outlook Magazine reported that telephones of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, CPI(M) General Secretary Prakash Karat and Congress General Secretary Digvijay Singh were tapped by […]
On the heels on the announcement that Latin America is forming a new regional organization without the US and Canada to rival the Organization of American States, it looks like the current Inter-American system is coming under fire. Or at least it is from Venezuela. After the release of a 300 page report by the […]
In the fight against terrorism, not everything is about violence. That is the general idea behind material support provisions included in anti-terrorist legislation, first introduced in 1996 and strengthened in the US PATRIOT Act. Such provisions prohibit providing any support to groups designated as terrorist organizations by the Secretary of State, regardless of whether the […]
A state news agency in China confirmed today that nine people have been executed for their role in the rioting that overtook the northern city of Urumqi in July. As reported earlier on this blog, the rioting had a long simmering ethnic component to it that pitted the majority Muslim Uighur population against the growing […]
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