Fascist Franco may have been dead for more than four decades, but Spain is still encumbered with his dictatorial corpse. A new paradigm has been coined right inside the lofty European Union, self-described home/patronizing dispenser of human rights to lesser regions across the planet: “In the name of democracy, refrain from voting, or else.” Call it…
Sunday night Las Vegas shooting at country music concert. Shooter in a high room at the Mandalay Bay Resort Hotel, a long distance away. Deadliest mass shooting in US history. 518 wounded, 58 dead. With the body count and wounded numbers rising, and the concert shooter, Stephen Paddock, dead, here are a few questions: What…
The move risks provoking the already distraught Wahhabi clergy who fear that the monarchy is breaking its old alliance with them by sidelining the Kingdom’s most conservative religious gatekeepers in its quest for socio-economic modernization. Hardcore Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia have warned for generations that allowing women to drive would be a very dangerous development…
Syrian forces with the support of their Russian and Iranian allies, crossed the Euphrates River near the city of Deir ez-Zor in eastern Syria. The move is not only a significant step forward in restoring security nationwide and ensuring the nation’s territorial integrity, it is also a significant step toward turning the tables on the…
Arriving in Barcelona in 1938 during the Spanish Civil War, Ernst Toller wrote, “The most striking experience a foreigner has in Barcelona is that of the functioning of democracy.” In 2017 something akin to history repeating is unfolding in the Catalonian capital, where democracy has again been raised aloft as a cause worth fighting for….
The Iraqi government has banned international flights to the Kurdish capital Irbil from 6pm this Friday, isolating the Kurds in Iraq to a degree they have not experienced since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The isolation is political as well as geographical as traditional Kurdish allies, like the US, UK, France and Germany,…
