What does President Putin hope to gain from hosting the Winter Olympics? There is a grave danger that the messages behind the Kremlin’s rebranding exercise could boomerang against the government.
Every conceivable attempt to mobilise all the extremes has been used to beef up recent French demos. With some success.
The de-regulation of financial capital threatens to bring us back to capitalist authoritarianism that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. But this time it gathers strength with no strong popular movement in the United States or any European country to challenge it.
The political deployment of corporate wealth has escaped not only the constraints of constitutional rules but even the debates over those rules. Doesn’t the removal of corporate decisions into the hands of judges and corporate lawyers challenge individual freedom as much as a ‘nanny state’?
It is a good time to reflect on how the City of Culture in Derry, the cradle of political creativity in the 1960’s, reckoned and grappled with, rather than skirted over or denied, the recent past - as there was much pressure to do.
The recent conclusion of the National Dialogue Conference in Yemen might seem to point to progress in that fractured state. But the absence of the rule of law and impartial authority is allowing violence to fester and the international community needs to act decisively.
Mr. Kejriwal’s supporters now begin to question the legality of his conduct,his utterances about there being no real democracy in India, and about the futility of celebrating Republic Day.
The Kingdom of Thailand, and the wider region in which it stands, resembles a global political laboratory. It is a 21st-century testing ground, a place where the future of democracy is being decided, slowly but surely. So watch what happens there, carefully.
If long-term climate disruption is a reality, so is the prospect of short-term benefit for states such as Canada and Russia. But their governments' denial of climate change looks back not forward.
Gazans fear another Israeli military offensive is imminent, as Israel flexes its military muscle and Egypt joins the band, beating the drums of war.
Faced with high unemployment and widespread social ills, South Africa’s youth are ambivalent towards the state, and emerging as increasingly independent of it. What does this tell us about the present climate and possible outcomes of South Africa’s fast approaching elections?
