When Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austro-Hungary, took a wrong turning in Sarajevo in 1914 the world found itself on the road to WW1. With Donald Trump’s self-serving recognition of Israel’s illegal annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, a similar wrong turn has been taken, and it has paved the way…
When President Donald Trump moved the US embassy to occupied Jerusalem last year, effectively sabotaging any hope of establishing a viable Palestinian state, he tore up the international rulebook. Last week, he trampled all over its remaining tattered pages. He did so, of course, via Twitter. Referring to a large piece of territory Israel seized…
The day before September 11, 2001 was like any normal day in New York City. September 10, 2001 was unaware of the earthshaking events which would happen the next day. Similarly, one might think the day before the violence broke out in Daraa, Syria in March 2011 would have been an uneventful day, unaware of…
Remember the madcap scene in ‘Apocalypse Now’, the 1979 film by Francis Ford Coppola about American genocidal rampaging in Vietnam? “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”, bellows the psychotic military commander as US choppers strafe and destroy a Vietnamese village. The same kind of unhinged death-wishing is reminiscent in the Trump administration. President Trump…
There was much international news in mid-March, although little of it was encouraging for those who prefer peace to war, handshakes to sabre-rattling, and cooperation to confrontation. But there was one item of good cheer which showed that friendly cooperation between the US and Russia continues, albeit unobtrusively. It concerned the International Space Station, about…
President Putin invited his Turkish counterpart to the opening of the Central Mosque in Crimea. The offer was made over the weekend when the Russian leader visited the peninsula to commemorate the fifth year of its historic reunification with the Motherland, during which time he said in response to the idea publicly raised by the…
