Palestinian prisoners have ended their mass hunger strike before anyone died. Now the world needs to ask some serious questions about the mass incarceration of Palestinians as a tool to break their resistance to occupation.
Israel has managed to avert a massive problem for itself...for a while perhaps.
Obama's evolution on the rights of gays to marry has taken him to the only tenable place...the place others went not so long ago to bring to an end the crime of marrying someone of another race. Welcome to the 21st Century.
President Obama made one gutsy call this week in his backing of gay marriage. It was pragmatic, and it was opportune.
It also represents a historic move forward in civil rights and is all the better coming from a man whose parents would not have been allowed to marry in some states only forty years ago due to other civil rights issues.
Republicans are reacting badly to President Obama's apparent politicizing of foreign policy success...how extraordinary.
Last time I checked, Obama never claimed he killed Osama, but why let the facts get in the way of a good piece of Republican whinging?
It’s campaign season stateside and each political party is equally adept at taking the moral high ground when it suits (remember ‘high’ is relative as we are talking politics).
Talkshow host Rush Limbaugh has 'apologised' for his vicious, personal attack on a university student who dared to argue the case for public funding of women's contraceptive health...but it was how he did it that says so much more about him and his Republican party devotees....
It is now very clear why Republican nominee wannabe Rick Santorum disparages President Obama’s hopes that all American kids can go to university.
It is because he wants American kids to be molded in the image of that blowhard at the heart of the Republican party - Rush Limbaugh.
An Iranian movie embraced by Hollywood no less, has poignancy for the sort of belligerence Ahmadinejad and Netanyahu are embroiled in...if only they could see what the Screen Actors Guild could.
It appears Hollywood knows a thing or two about unintended consequences...particularly when Iran is involved.
In awarding Iranian Asghar Farhadi’s ‘A Separation’ the little golden statue for best foreign film, it should have done so with a ‘must watch’ advisory to a couple highly combative politicians – Iran’s Ahmadinejad and Israel’s Netanyahu.
Why?
The American economy must be on the improve, which explains why Republicans have entered the country's bedrooms in a desperate bid to demonise Obama as the destroyer of the constitutional right to freedom of religion. At least they are kidding themselves.
Just when Americans need strong political debate offering alternatives to Obama’s policies, the Republicans have locked themselves in the bedroom.
Suspicion that Iran is responsible for bomb attacks on Israeli embassies are no more - or less - credible than suspicion Israel has assassinated a number of Iran's top nuclear scientists. True or not, they should be pause for thought, not cause for war.
It is no surprise at all that Israel has blamed Iran for the bombs targeting Israeli embassies in New Delhi and Georgia.
Where it does become difficult is assessing whether Israel will consider suspicion of Iran as casus belli for launching its desperately wanted attack on the nascent nuclear state.
Russia and China are being held morally responsible for allowing the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad to continue the slaughter of its own people. By vetoing a Security Council resolution, they have been accused of handing Assad a licence to kill.
Diplomacy failed spectacularly at the United Nations this weekend.
Now Russia and China have pinned their colours to saving Bashar al-Assad, their UN Security Council vetoes have also emboldened the Syrian dictator.
In effect Assad has been given a licence to kill.
Diplomacy is failing Syrians as Russia rejects the latest UN Security Council draft resoltuion aimed at stopping al-Assad's brutal crackdown on his own people. Russia's threat of veto is within UN rules, but a rising Syrian death toll is a consequence that's tough to justify.
While the United Nations Security Council panders to Russia’s demands over what it will and will not permit be done with Syria, the killing squads of Bashar al-Assad systematically get on with the job of eliminating those who dare to question the regime.
Canada's justice system has confirmed (again) that there is no such thing as an 'honour killing', but (again) rejection of this twisted, controlling, patriachal notion of honour comes way too late for the latest four victims...all from one immigrant family.
The three month-long trial of a Montreal man, his second wife and his son has finally ended with the Afghanistan-born trio being found guilty of murdering three of the family’s girls and the first wife.
