China’s state-run Global Times newspaper, reacting to a recent meeting between the Dalai Lama and British Prime Minister David Cameron.
-
Contributors
When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) meets next week at a summit in Chicago, expect a lot of self-congratulatory rhetoric about the alliance’s bombing campaign in Libya last year. Backed by a U.N. Security Council mandate, NATO charged in, citing its “responsibility to protect” civilians threatened by the bloody rampages of the late Libyan tyrant Muammar Gaddafi. The near 10,000 sorties launched by NATO strike craft helped push back Gaddafi’s forces; targeted attacks on the regime’s arsenals and defenses allowed rebel fighters on the ground to eventually sweep into Tripoli and bring down Gaddafi. Not long thereafter, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron were greeted raucously as heroes in Tripoli and Benghazi.
With the endgame in Afghanistan dragging along and financial woes dogging many NATO member states, the relative success of the Libya mission lets the grand old alliance feel good about itself. But then read this question posed recently by a Libyan: “I just need an answer from NATO: Why did you destroy my home and kill my family?” Read More
Arming Rebels - The Washington Post reveals Syrian rebels battling President Assad’s regime have begun receiving “significantly more and better weapons in recent weeks.” Opposition activists and foreign officials say the arms are paid for by Persian Gulf nations and coordinated in part by the U.S., according to the newspaper. But, “Obama administration officials emphasized that the United States is neither supplying nor funding the lethal material,” it notes.
Sunni Axis - Foreign Affairs writes about the growing improvement in relations between Turkey and Saudi Arabia. “As an important regional power, a member of NATO, and predominantly Sunni, Saudi Arabia saw Ankara as a valuable bulwark against Iran,” it says. “Riyadh would normally be worried about a non-Arab power’s presence in the region undermining its own position, but it considered Turkey a lesser evil compared to Iran.”
Free Press - Burma’s exiled Irrawaddy publication reports that media censorship will be abolished in the country “once the new Myanmar Press Council is formed in June.” However, the Thailand-based outlet cautions that: “veteran Burmese journalists who have read a draft of proposed press council regulations said they doubt that Burma will enjoy true freedom of press.” Read More
A flurry of gestures toward the Palestinian leadership suggests that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his new role as leader of a center-right government, is warming toward the resumption of peace talks — or at least giving the appearance of warming; call it a rosy glow rising from a pair of announcements on Monday. One was about Palestinian prisoners who had been carrying out a mass hunger strike for weeks inside Israeli prisons. With several prisoners near death, Netanyahu approved an agreement that improves prison conditions and permits visits by family members in the Gaza Strip, the heavily guarded enclave that Palestinians have been allowed out of only for medical emergencies. Greeted by Palestinians as a victory, the deal eased concerns that a prisoner’s death might combust what are usually routine protests planned for Tuesday’s commemoration of Nakba Day, the “catastrophe” of Israel’s 1948 victory over Arab forces trying to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state. Read More
Protesters challenge Israeli troops in the West Bank while commemorating the Nakba, or “day of catastrophe” in Arabic, which marks the day when Israel declared its statehood in 1948—an act which forced thousands of Palestinians out of their homes and into a life of exile
The convoluted saga of the British phone-hacking scandal seems to have been dragging on longer than a back-to-back performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Yet despite the demise of Rupert Murdoch‘s News of the World, the launching of a public inquiry into British press standards, three police investigations and more than 40 arrests, the scandal has yet to draw real blood. The closest it has come was a report released this month by a Parliamentary committee, which accused Murdoch of turning a blind eye to the hacking at his paper and declared him “not a fit person” to run an international company — a damning conclusion that nonetheless seems to have had little immediate effect.
Today, however, came consequences with teeth: the U.K.’s Crown Prosecution Service made its opening move in the hacking case, charging Rebekah Brooks (who ran Murdoch’s British newspaper empire before being dethroned by the hacking scandal), her husband Charlie Brooks and four others of “conspiracy to pervert the course of justice” by concealing material from the British police investigating allegations of phone hacking and corruption of public officials. The maximum sentence for perverting the course of justice is life in prison, though the average sentence is far less. Former Member of Parliament Jeffrey Archer served just two years for the crime after being convicted in 2001.
Read More
The new French leader braves the rain to greet supporters
Deal in Nepal - The Kathmandu Post reports that Nepal’s major political parties have agreed to a future form of governance, with executive powers split between a directly elected president and a prime minister elected by parliament. “Negotiators from across party lines said that though the mixed model had some weak points, including a risk of two parallel powers being created, it was the only alternative given the differing positions of the parties,” it says.
Behind the Bars - Online-only Global Post launches an in-depth multimedia series on Latin American prisons, which it labels a correctional system gone horribly wrong. “Massive jailbreaks in Mexico. Prison riots in Venezuela, and fires in Honduras. Latin America’s prisons are overcrowded, out of control and ready to burst,” the Boston-based news magazine writes.
Greek Drama - Germany’s Der Spiegel (bluntly) adds its voice to the debate over Greece’s future in the euro zone. “After Greek voters rejected austerity in last week’s election, plunging the country into a political crisis, Europe has been searching for a Plan B for Greece. It’s time to admit that the E.U./IMF rescue plan has failed. Greece’s best hopes now lie in a return to the drachma,” it states. Read More
When Bo Xilai, the rising Chinese Communist Party official who was purged in March, gave his last public comments before disappearing into detention, he was wrong about a lot of things. That bit about not being under investigation, for instance. But one line he uttered has the clear ring of truth, and it poses a serious issue for China’s leadership as it attempts to navigate this year’s political transition, the economic slowdown and the ripples loosed by Bo’s removal. Bo revealed that China’s Gini coefficient — a statistic that measures the gap between rich and poor — had entered into worrying territory. He described the number, which hasn’t been made public in more than a decade, as over 0.46. Anything higher than 0.4 is considered dangerously high and capable of fueling unrest.
Drug thugs dumped 49 bloodied and dismembered corpses on a northern Mexican highway on Sunday, May 13. We journalists are finding little new to say, few fresh insights to offer, about these all too frequent narco-massacres in Mexico and the 50,000 people murdered so far in the country’s endless drug war. That’s troubling, because one of the worst things that could happen is that the world becomes inured to the ghastly violence. But at this point, what worries us more is that the leading candidates in Mexico’s July 1 presidential election really don’t seem to have anything new to say about this crisis either.
Critics of Mexican President Felipe Calderón, whose six-year-long military campaign against the drug cartels has in many ways exacerbated the violence, often call the war “Calderón’s Iraq.” But when former U.S. President George W. Bush left office in 2009, the real Iraq War was still his successor’s problem – and the same will be true of whomever follows Calderón. (He is constitutionally limited to one six-year term.) So far, the three top politicos vying to replace Calderón have offered little more than generalities, or remedies Calderón has already put forward, about how to end a conflict that is killing its share of innocents as well as monstrous traffickers. (Officials don’t dismiss the possibility that some if not all of the 49 newest mutilated victims weren’t narcos but civilians like migrant workers who couldn’t pay narco-extortionists.) Read More
