“THE Security Council cannot go about imposing solutions in crisis situations in various countries of the world,” said Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, as the UN began discussing what to do about the Syrian crisis last Friday.
A YEAR ago arrivals on the outskirts to Kano had to pass a sign forbidding alcohol consumption and banning women from riding on motorbikes. Now it is gone. Kano may be the sixth-biggest Muslim city in the world — after Karachi, Jakarta, Dhaka, Cairo and Istanbul — but it is far from the most conservative.
THREE Mozambicans have been sentenced to 25 years each in a South African court for rhino poaching, according to the South African national parks body. The men were found guilty of illegally hunting rhino in the Kruger National Park in July 2010.
BEFORE the Arab Spring came the Damascus Spring. When Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father Hafez Assad in 2000, there was the promise of a modern and more democratic Syria.
THE eastern half of what used to be Pakistan narrowly escaped a military coup last month. Brigadier Masud Razzak, the spokesman of the Bangladeshi army, announced on Thursday ( January 19) that “a band of fanatic officers has been trying to oust the politically established government. Their attempt has been foiled.”
AT SOME point this year the government of Botswana and its neighbours will have to make a decision that will shape the economic future of the region and induce by far the biggest infrastructure investment in the country’s history — a new railway to the coast.
THE most important thing in Taiwanese politics is always left unsaid. When I interviewed Ma Ying-jeou in 2008, just before he won the presidency for the first time, he was happy to talk about the details of his plans for better relations with the People’s Republic of China: direct flights, more trade, and the like. But ask him about the long-term future, and all you got was platitudes.
HUDDLED amongst hundreds of people waiting for food distribution in the blazing midday sun, Labakal Kalahin cradles her 18-month-old baby as she relives the horror of fleeing armed attackers that tore her family apart.
Syrian split raises calls for foreign intervention
Thursday, 12 January 2012 15:20
By Mariam Karouny
THE collapse of a deal between Syria’s two main opposition factions shows that voices calling for foreign intervention to topple President Bashar al-Assad have gained the upper hand over those opposing it.
UNTIL recently, Hungary was deeply divided. Half of the population believed that only the socialists could be trusted to run the country’s affairs competently. They despised the current Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, as a populist demagogue.
IT’S getting harder for freelance journalists to make a decent living, so recently I’ve had to branch out into the advice column business. The people who write in seem pretty flakey, on the whole, but sometimes their letters cast a useful light on larger issues. For example:
ON one of the first days of the Egyptian revolution, Suzanne Mubarak, the president’s wife, spoke to her friend Farkhonda Hassan by phone. Cairo’s buildings were burning. The first lady, Hassan says, was “very, very calm.” Suzanne did not believe a crisis was coming. She did not know the depth of the problem. She certainly did not see that the House of Mubarak was about to fall
Gwynne Dyer: Cameron’s religious elitism insulting
Thursday, 29 December 2011 12:56
IN the US, where it is almost impossible to get elected unless you profess a strong religious faith, it would have passed completely unnoticed. Not one of the hundred US senators ticks the “No Religion/Atheist/Agnostic” box, for example, although 16% of the US population does. But it was quite remarkable in Britain.
Gwynne Dyer: Climate-change summit: An almost total failure
Thursday, 22 December 2011 15:01
THE Durban climate summit that ended on December 11 has been proclaimed a great success. The chair, South Africa’s international relations minister, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, told the delegates: “We have concluded this meeting with a plan to save one planet for the future of our children and our grandchildren to come. We have made history.”
THE outpouring of grief in North Korea after the passing on of Kim Jong-il has been fervent and widespread. So are the people sincerely feeling this loss or are they behaving as they think they should?
ONE should not mock the sexual obsessions of Islamic fundamentalists; it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. When a senior academic in Saudi Arabia, professor Kamal Subhi, declares in a report for the Shura Council, the kingdom’s legislative assembly, that allowing women to drive would spell the end of virginity in the kingdom, it doesn’t really require further comment. But let’s offer a few comments anyway.
“THROUGHOUT the day, it was like receiving reports from a war zone,” said Communist Party deputy head Ivan Melnikov on Sunday December 4, speaking about the thousands of calls he had received from regional offices about ballot-box stuffing and other violations in the Russian parliamentary elections. But despite the manipulation, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party got fewer than half the votes this time, down from almost two-thirds in 2007.
ARE we witnessing a Russian Spring this winter? This is the question my US and European colleagues have been asking me over and over again in recent days. I am not certain that developments in Russia will mirror those in the Arab world but one thing is certain — what we witnessed on December 4 was a return of live politics to Russia; a politics that everyone thought was comatose.
BURMA is the second poorest country in Asia (after North Korea), although 50 years ago, it was the second richest. It is the second most repressive dictatorship in Asia, outdone again only by North Korea. It is third from the bottom on Transparency International’s list of the world’s most corrupt countries. And the credit for all these distinctions goes to the Burmese army, which has ruled the country with an iron hand for the past half-century.
