The New York Times (Continuación)

MundoAméricaEuropa, ,

The three jailed female members of the punk group Pussy Riot have not only captured the world’s attention, but have also drawn a spotlight on the Russian government’s broader crackdown on political dissent. Over the past year, it has become significantly more difficult and even downright dangerous for Russians to organize or participate in any political activity not sanctioned by the authorities. This is a turn for the worse that surely deserves attention.

But a rising tide of anti-Russia rhetoric from Washington and Russia’s bristling response underscore the difficulty of balancing human rights and democracy with other vital national interests in an important international relationship.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia, ,

While anatomically illiterate politicians in America babble about “legitimate rape,” a Filipino legislator opposed to birth controlhas been shedding crocodile tears in Parliament and plagiarizing speeches to bolster the case against reproductive rights.

On Aug. 13, the Senate majority leader, Tito Sotto, wept while addressing his assembled peers. The former actor told the Senate that birth-control pills, used by his wife in 1974, had led to the death of their newborn son a year later. The emotional scene shut down the day’s debate. It was the latest obstruction to passing a reproductive health law that has languished for 14 years.

Proponents of the reproductive health bill say it will address poverty, women’s rights, infant and maternal mortality, and overpopulation in a poor nation crowded with 94 million people.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoÁfrica,

President José Eduardo dos Santos, whose party will no doubt win Friday’s election, has ruled Angola for 33 years. He once declared that democracy and human rights “do not fill up bellies.” But he has not even given ordinary Angolans bread as a substitute for freedom.

In 2002, after emerging from nearly three decades of civil war, Angola’s government began an ambitious national reconstruction program carried out and financed by China. As the state’s coffers filled with oil wealth, there was general optimism that millions of impoverished Angolans would share in the peace dividends. But hope was short-lived.

Mr. dos Santos hasn’t relied on Angolan workers for national reconstruction, which would create jobs and spur the economy.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia, ,

After months of riveting testimony, a war crimes tribunal in Cambodia is struggling to continue its own Nuremberg-style trial of former senior Khmer Rouge leaders Khieu Samphan, Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary.

It is inconceivable that the international community would imperil this historic trial midstream and undermine justice for the estimated 1.7 million Cambodians who perished under Pol Pot’s rule from 1975 to 1979.

The survivors have not forgotten what they endured. An astounding 150,000 Cambodians have visited the trials of the tribunal in Phnom Penh — a number that exceeds the public spectators of all of the other war-crimes tribunals combined.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoÁfrica

The 34 miners killed by the police earlier this month in a wildcat strike at a Marikana platinum mine, in northern South Africa, were immediately engaged as bit players in various morality tales. Marikana reminded some of the 1960 police massacre at Sharpeville; suggested to others that poverty and division had survived apartheid; or foretold a sharp confrontation between capital and labor. To many, it either predicted or confirmed the political and moral disintegration of the ruling party, the African National Congress.

I hesitated in choosing among these fables because a writer’s single item of professional knowledge is that a story is a speculation about the world, composed under the sign of luck rather than of law or reason.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial

Hurricane Isaac, which made landfall in Louisiana last night, has not only disrupted the Republican National Convention but also brought back painful memories of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast seven years ago this week.

In August 2005, my wife and our small children and I evacuated to Houston just before the storm destroyed the New Orleans home we had moved into six weeks earlier. We took with us just a bag of toys and a suitcase. We applied for federal aid, but especially in the immediate aftermath, it was family, friends and friends-of-friends who came through for us.

As a political scientist (I taught at Tulane at the time), I decided to study how communities respond to natural disasters.…  Seguir leyendo »

Internacional

In his poem “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost challenges that truism that “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.

Over the past decade, some of the world’s leading democracies built walls and fences on their borders. The United States, India and Israel — often respectively described as the world’s oldest democracy, the world’s largest democracy, and the most stable democracy in the Middle East — built 3,500 miles of walls and fences; enough to stretch all the way from New York to Los Angeles.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

Most technological advances are actually just improvements. One thing builds on the next: from shoddy to serviceable, from helpful to amazing. First you had a carriage, then a car, and then an airplane; now you have a jet. You improve on what is there. Technological advances are like that.

Except for the one that involved landing on the Moon. When a human went and stood on the Moon and looked back at the Earth, that was a different kind of breakthrough. Nothing tangible changed when Neil Armstrong’s foot dug into the lunar dust and his eyes turned back at us. We didn’t get faster wheels or smaller machines or more effective medicine.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión EuropeaEconomía

Last week, European leaders met in Berlin amid new signs of an impending recession and an emerging consensus that Greece could leave the euro zone within a year — a move that would have dire consequences for the currency’s future.

There are many reasons behind the crisis, from corruption and collective irresponsibility in Greece to European institutional rigidities and the flawed concept of a monetary union without a fiscal union. But this is not just a story about profligate spending and rigid monetary policy. The European debt crisis is not just an economic crisis: it is an escalating identity conflict — an ethnic conflict.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoÁfrica, ,

President Omar al-Bashir’s 23-year rule in Sudan has known almost ceaseless civil war, the recent secession of South Sudan and an indictment for genocide by the International Criminal Court against Bashir himself. Currently, his government is under attack by various rebel armies with an estimated combined strength of 60,000, as well as protests sparked by the withdrawal of gas subsidies, massive budget deficits, failed harvests and steep increases in food prices. Bashir’s days may be numbered.

Yet his removal would not end the conflict; it could even trigger a new civil war. The groups challenging Bashir are united by their common hatred of him and his party rather than by a shared vision for Sudan’s future.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

The Nonaligned Movement’s much-heralded summit meeting next week in Tehran — featuring dozens of leaders from the developing world, including President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, as well as the U.N. secretary general, Ban Ki-moon — will elevate Iran as the movement’s new president for three years and enhance Tehran’s regional and international clout.

Tehran wants to seize this opportunity to neutralize Western-imposed isolation over its nuclear efforts and to defend its program, which has been consistently supported at past Nonaligned Movement summits as well as by Nonaligned countries in the International Atomic Energy Agency.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia,

Last week, anti-Japanese protests swept nearly a dozen Chinese cities. Angry demonstrators overturned Toyotas while Japanese restaurants and businesses were vandalized. In the central Chinese city of Chengdu, where thousands protested, some banners declared, “Even if China is covered with graves, we must kill all Japanese!”

The immediate cause for the demonstrations was a flare-up over a few disputed, uninhabited islands controlled by Japan. (China calls them the Diaoyus; Japan calls them the Senkakus). On Aug. 15, Chinese nationalists landed and planted flags on the islands before being deported. Japanese nationalists retaliated by swimming ashore from nearby boats, further inflaming Chinese passions.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaInternacionalTerrorismo Internacional,

On Friday a Norwegian court will hand down its verdict on Anders Behring Breivik, who, on July 22, 2011, detonated a bomb in central Oslo, killing eight people and wounding hundreds more, then drove to Utoya Island, where he shot and killed 69 participants in the Norwegian Labor Party’s youth camp.

The world’s attention is focused on whether the court will find Mr. Breivik guilty or criminally insane, and there has already been much debate about how the court handled the question of his sanity. But there is far more to it. Because it gave space to the story of each individual victim, allowed their families to express their loss and listened to the voices of the wounded, the Breivik trial provides a new model for justice in cases of terrorism and civilian mass murder.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says the international community shouldn’t get hysterical over the two-year prison term handed to three members of the punk band Pussy Riot. Some European countries, like Germany, France and Austria, he argues, have laws that impose prison terms for antics offensive to believers.

I pity our esteemed minister. His job in this (and not only this) case, which has undermined Russia’s international prestige, is to find ways of justifying something that cannot be justified.

Pussy Riot struck at the sorest spot in modern Russia — which is why the group deserves praise, and not condemnation. The blow fell on the active merger of church and state into a single ideology, on the attempts to create a model of “Orthodox civilization” in Russia.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesTestimonios

The death of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi deprives Ethiopia — and Africa as a whole — of an exceptional leader.

We both knew him from his days as a guerrilla in the mountains of Tigray, northern Ethiopia, fighting against the former Communist government in Addis Ababa. “Comrade Meles” (he was christened Legesse but took the nom de guerre Meles in his early revolutionary days after a colleague who was killed) rose to become first among equals of the rebel fighters who took power in 1991.

His ascendancy was due to force of intellect: In those days of collective leadership of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, Meles was best able to articulate a theory linking state power, ethnic identity and economic policy, making Marxist-Leninism relevant to the demands of winning a guerrilla war.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

Wars are not always won through decisive battles; they are often contests in which any action breaking an adversary’s will to fight leads you one step closer to victory. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are targeting the will of the international community and the Karzai government by systematically infiltrating and undermining Afghan security forces.

These “green-on-blue” attacks — episodes in which Afghan soldiers and policemen turn their weapons on their coalition partners — are not isolated incidents. Rather, they reflect a Taliban strategy with deep roots in Afghan history.

Since the beginning of the year there have been 31 green-on-blue attacks, resulting in 40 deaths.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

Since 9/11, America’s priority in Central Asia has been to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. But as the United States and NATO pull out, there is a new danger: that the West could become entangled in regional rivalries, local strongman politics and competition with Russia and China.

Central Asian governments have sought for years to manipulate foreign powers’ interest in the region for their own benefit. In the summer of 2005, the United States military was evicted from its facility at Karshi-Khanabad in Uzbekistan after American officials criticized the Uzbek government’s slaughter of hundreds of anti-government demonstrators in Andijon; Russia and China, which have both been expanding their footprints in the region, publicly backed the crackdown.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente PróximoInternacionalTerrorismo Internacional,

The group of 30, mostly Jerusalemites, watch one another self-consciously as they wait in the summer heat for their guide to take them on a tour of terrorist attacks along Jaffa Road, the main drag in West Jerusalem.

Terror isn’t something Jerusalemites talk about any more. We prefer to think that we’ve recovered from the fear and dread that took over our lives from 2000 to 2005, when terror attacks throughout Israel began to subside. The period that Israelis — in a combination of desperation and fatalism referred to as “the situation” — began on Sept. 28, 2000, when the then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited the Al Aqsa mosque on the holy site in Old Jerusalem known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, setting off the wave of violence that came to be known as the Second Intifada.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa

From Madonna to Bjork, from the elite New Yorker to the populist Daily Mail, the world united in supporting Russia’s irreverent feminist activists Pussy Riot against the blunt cruelty inflicted on them by the state. It may not have stopped Vladimir Putin’s kangaroo court from sentencing them to two years in prison on charges of hooliganism, but blanket international media pressure helped turn the case into a major embarrassment for the Kremlin.

Yet there is something about the West’s embrace of the young women’s cause that should make us deeply uneasy, as Pussy Riot’s philosophy, activism and even music quickly took second place to its usefulness in discrediting one of America’s geopolitical foes.…  Seguir leyendo »

Internacional, , ,

We have spent our careers as filmmakers making the case that the news media in the United States often fail to inform Americans about the uglier actions of our own government. We therefore have been deeply grateful for the accomplishments of WikiLeaks, and applaud Ecuador’s decision to grant diplomatic asylum to its founder, Julian Assange, who is now living in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.

Ecuador has acted in accordance with important principles of international human rights. Indeed, nothing could demonstrate the appropriateness of Ecuador’s action more than the British government’s threat to violate a sacrosanct principle of diplomatic relations and invade the embassy to arrest Mr.…  Seguir leyendo »