Blogging the democratic revolution
It’s a hectic last week of school. Lots of essays that I have to B.S. for tomorrow.
Burmese officials loyal to the regime are all meeting (read: getting drunk) at a convention that is supposed to put the country on the path to democracy. At least, that’s what the government spokesman are saying. Mad about not being invited to the party are every concerned democratic country on earth, the overwhelmingly popular opposition,…
Russia, for some reason allowed to be a part of the OSCE, is fighting tooth and nail to dismember the best election monitoring team in the world. Why? Because behind Russia’s supposed concerns that the monitors are politically motivated, it is actually worried that the unveiling of more phony elections in its backyard will spark…
Here’s the untold story of the tiny country of Tonga, with a population of 100,000 spread over 171 islands and a monarchy that refuses to reform itself. The past several months have been tense. Thousands of people are organizing and protesting for democracy. The government is coming under intense pressure, but the church is serving…
You may have noticed a lack of updates today. While it’s partially due to end of semester term papers and finals (oh, you should see my last-ditch effort at putting together a piece on Lebanese consociationalism as a model for Iraq), it also has to due with a very special project I was putting together….
Publius has been nominated as a finalist for the Best Group Blog category in the 2005 Weblog Awards. You can vote by clicking here, and you can vote every 24 hours. So please do that! It’s quite an honor to be a finalist, after less than a year of blogging, and on the same level…
People are voting in presidential elections today in Kazakhstan, though the winner is a forgone conclusion. Oil-rich Kazakhstan, the most prosperous country in ex-Soviet Central Asia, voted Sunday in a presidential election widely expected to give Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has led the country for the last 16 years, another seven-year term. Amid allegations of both…
Hong Kong is like no other place on earth. It’s a sanctuary on an island, ceded to the British in 1842 and ruled by China since 1997. The city is a frothy blend of these two cultures in what has matured to be one of the most liberal economies and societies in the world. It…
With the Muslim Brotherhood gaining an unprecedented amount of seats in this month’s parliamentary elections, the authorities in Egypt clamped down to the point of surrounding polling stations with riot police and knifing down voters. These voters, in turn, went as far as using ladders to sneak into polling stations so as to simply cast…
Sorry about the lack of updates everyone. My birthday was on Thursday and people had plans for me that apparently didn’t involve a computer screen. I’ll make it up over the weekend!
A Saudi national studying at Arizona State University, a party school by all counts and from my own recollection, thinks that the school should sanction the possibility of expelling students for wearing any clothing with the ASU logo when posing for dirty, dirty magazines. The ASU Web Devil reports! If one student leader has his…
Falsifying elections is a tough job, so you need just the right authoritarian government to do it. Armenia was another country on the list to do so this weekend, with a constitutional referendum that, despite polling places being nearly empty all day, reported a relatively high turnout. But given that the opposition simply boycotted the…
Hey, why is only President Putin and his entourage of ass-kissers dancing? That’s because the first parliamentary elections in Chechnya since 1997 were held on Sunday, in what the dear leaders over in Moscow are hailing as the last legal step toward restoring the region. It’s all a flash-by cinematic sequence for those watching in…
– 15,000 people protesting incredible election results in Azerbaijan tried to set up a permanent demonstration, but we quickly beaten down. – Police in Egypt are arresting hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood members and preventing people who would vote for them from entering polling stations. Knife and gun fights are ensuing.
The big but unsurprising news out of China is that — golly gee! — the government tried to cover up the huge chemical spill in the Songhua River that has closed down water supplies for nearly four million people in the city of Harbin. The International Herald Tribune reports on the timeline of events and…
It looks like the courts in Chile may finally be getting their man once and for all. General Pinochet, who overthrew the Soviet-funded communist government and served as president until he stepped down in 1990, has been charged by the court for abused of human rights during his rule in which more than 3000 people…
The rift between Poland and Belarus continues, with the leading Polish newspapers blacking out their front pages to protest censorship in its less democratic neighbor. Could you imagine the papers here in the U.S. taking such a stand? WARSAW, Poland – Poland’s two leading newspapers blacked out large sections of their front pages Wednesday in…
Pajamas Media hosted another one of its blogjams, where in this case the editorial board members discussed ways that the company could be more “bloggy” and overall revolutionary in its approach to media. Well, after reading the whole thing, I have one big suggestion that I think the editorial board should take into account when…
Garry Kasparov, writing for Newsweek International, calls President Putin out on the misnomer that he is a true ally of the West in the war on terror, and even less so committed to building a democratic society. And he really nails it. The embattled George W. Bush isn’t going to pick a fight with Mr….
The State Duma, in all of its scary Soviet decor, has completed its first reading of a bill that seeks to essentially halt the abilities of NGOs operating in Russia. It will forbid foreign funding, force them to register with the government, and allow the authorities to monitor every last activity that these organizations undertake….
It has been ten years since the Dayton Accords ended officially ended the war in Bosnia, which killed over 200,000 people and displaced over a million more. The agreement marked a peaceful separation of nations into a loose, autonomous confederacy of three peoples who had been forced together under Soviet totalitarianism and left to kill…
It’s been one year today since the beginning of the Orange Revolution, Ukraine’s democratic movement that has solidified a prompt for change across the entire region. Genuine and copycat attempts have broken out all over, some failing and some reaching realization. This blog was started based on inspiration drawn from the Orange Revolution. With its…
Looking for a fiercely independent country in the heart of Central Asia, with a penchant for free enterprise and building a working democracy? Then you’re looking for Mongolia, a stab in the heart to all of the region’s dictators. Well, President Bush just made history by being the first U.S. president to visit Mongolia, a…
Two rounds of voting out of three have been undertaken in Egypt’s parliamentary elections, with the Muslim Brotherhood scoring approximately one fourth of the total seats. But after its initial strong showing in the relatively peaceful first round, the government took the initiative to crack down on the organization by arresting hundreds of its members…
Election results from Egypt’s first round of parliamentary elections are coming in, and due to the greater transparency and lesser violence than before, the Muslim Brotherhood took a big chunk of seats. Of course, there were instances of fraud, intimidation, and genereal irregularities, but they seem to be committed on an individual basis instead of…