Blogging the democratic revolution
Source: AP, via Yahoo! Kuwaiti election volunteers in Salwa, Kuwait, during yesterday’s first-ever municipal election that allowed women’s participation. Draw your own conclusions.
Alvicho at Off Topic has some interesting thoughts about the symbiotic relationship between resource-hungry China and resource-rich Latin America, a topic that too frequently gets drowned in the paranoia of anti-Chinese sentiment. The relationship doesn’t bother me, as a matter of fact, I think Latin American states, especially those run by demogogues and populists, could…
The U.S. trade embargo against communist Cuba is frequently criticized, and with some good arguments, as an ineffective instrument against the Cuban dictator. But there’s more than one reason for this embargo, and Castro’s attitude toward paying his bills has a lot to do with why it’s in place too. Naturally, you ask yourself, why…
Breaking news… Source: ETNA The Thai prime minister announced he would quit after the messages from the streets and apparently because the King told him to. A shame, because just 14 months ago, he was very popular and I liked him in some ways. But amid public perceptions of shamelessness and corruption after a $2…
Polls can be unreliable but this news is truly radical: Goldman Sachs, in its daily emerging market report, says: Grupo GEA Reports Calder????n Ahead of AMLO in the polls According to GEA (a consulting firm), in a poll conducted between March 18 and 21, Felipe Calder????n (PAN) overtook AMLO in the opinion polls. According to…
Fill up your tank now, because oil prices are about to go higher. Three more international oil companies are out of the game in Venezuela, an unprecedented exit from an energy-hungry industry. They just can’t do business with a thug. Venezuelan dictator has sent his agents to seize control of the assets of two major…
You might not have guessed this right off, but Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has been watching Ukraine’s Orange Revolution intently. This Sunday, for the first time, he made a statement about his fear and loathing of it. On his weekly Sunday television variety show, ‘Alo President’ he made this following remark, addressed to his opposition….
One hundred thousand people gathered in Rome to remember the first anniversary of the death of John Paul II, the Polish pope who helped liberate Eastern Europe from communism. Thousands of others gathered in Krakow and around Poland. John Paul was a democratic revolutionary in the purest sense of the idea. Many of us know…
Thailand’s got snap elections today for prime minister, a manuever by the prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, to take advantage of a disorganized opposition that wants him out but doesn’t have much of an alternative to present. Vast protests have been taking place in Bangkok over the past six weeks. Prominent leaders of the 1992 democracy-now…
Writing a sophisticated analysis on Babalu blog, Robert M explains a new movie from Cuba about dumpster divers in Havana. Like any such movie under the control of the Cuban censor, it doesn’t directly criticize the 46-year communist regime, but the point is clear enough: Cuba under supposedly egalitarianism is now producing dumpster divers. My…
Rich Karlgaard makes an original and forceful argument in favor of global free trade by insisting it promotes human creativity and development. He cites the marvel of human achievement in different areas and the great human good of developing one’s talents fully, something that doesn’t always happen because it’s a huge threat to oppressors. In…
Liberian ex-dictator and accused mass murderer Charles G. Taylor Source: AFP, via Yahoo! One of the continent’s grisliest mass murderers, Liberia’s ex-dictator Charles G. Taylor, was apprehended in northeastern Nigeria yesterday and shipped back to face justice in a Sierra Leone court run by United Nations prosecutors. He’s charged with 17 counts of crimes against…
Thousands of Mexican campesinos in the impoverished southern state of Chiapas have taken to the streets to protest the government’s neglect of their poor state. This isn’t the Subcommandante Marcos blond-haired, blue-eyed internal Sandalista crowd at work, but a spontaneous protest by the poor to seek concrete action from the government to improve their lives….
Daniel Duquenal is a French Venezuelan with strong ties — and insights — to both countries. He is also a fervent believer in democracy as a man of the left. Daniel has written a spectacular essay describing the similarities between France’s angry antirevolution and Venezuela’s under the emerging Hugo Chavez dictatorship. Daniel sees similarities between…
The Dutch are deeply concerned about Venezuela’s renewed threats to take over the nearby island of Curacao as its dictator, Hugo Chavez, flexes his military muscles with an unprecedented arms buildup and condemns the Dutch for their colonialism on the island. Seeking to add more territory of his own, his stated aim is “regional integration,”…
Over 40 bloggers have mulled and mused about German-American relations in a new carnival feature put together by the secret diplomats who once ran Daily Demarche, that late lamented cool blog that exposed the seamy underbelly of pinstripe diplomacy. German-U.S. relations are currently seen in a tattered state over the Iraq War, but Germany is…
A very brave independent Cuban journalist is on his 57th day of a hunger strike for the right to Internet access in Cuba. Guillermo Farinas Hernandez’s case has gotten little media attention, but it’s an important struggle for freedom of information inside news-starved Cuba. Castro knows very well the power of the Internet and its…
It was sometime in the 1970s. I was a kid in a public school in Southern California. I had to report a news article in front of my class on that day. My mother in her bathrobe and coffee that morning picked out the article and cut it out for me. I read it. I…
I’ll never forget him. Fabrizio Quattrochi, the brave Italian man in Iraq who told his brutish Islamofascist kidnappers at the moment of his murder that he had no intention of dying with a hood on his head and tried to tear it off, saying he would show them ‘how an Italian dies’ struck a fearsome…
Sunburnt and exhausted, I return from the biggest rally for immigrant rights in the history of Los Angeles. Five hundred thousand mostly Latino, mostly young, and mostly protest-babe-caliber people marched in the streets of This Proud Capital Of The Third World to demand a halt to various immigration control measures in Congress – like building…
Is there anything fouler than Daniel Ortega? The former Nicaraguan strongman, dubbed by the great Ronald Reagan as “the little dictator,” is poised to seize power again in Nicaragua next November. Unlike the last time, when he shot his way into power, this time he’s trying to seize power via what may be a rigged…
Jorge Rodriguez, the chairman of Venezuela’s supposedly independent election agency, the CNE, has said he’d step down. Rodriguez is one hell of a shameless chavista, the man who brought us Venezuela’s empty elections I witnessed on Dec. 4 last year. He reduced confidence to such a low that virtually no one wanted to vote in…
Like it or not, THE story for the coming week is immigration in the U.S. This weekend, vast crowds of hundreds of thousands of Latinos will take to the streets in support of immigration rights for illegal immigrants. Given the negative sentiment in other, non-Latino parts of the U.S. (thank you Hugo Chavez, clown and…
From today’s Wall Street Journal editorial page, edifying news that Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution is still blooming one year later: ‘Island of Freedom’ By ROZA OTUNBAYEVA March 24, 2006 BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — As protesters in Belarus demand a rerun of last Sunday’s presidential poll, and the people of Ukraine enjoy their recently won freedom at parliamentary…