The most senior American diplomat yet to visit the rebels in Libya is holding talks in their strongold, Benghazi, the BBC reports Monday. US Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman has met the Transitional National Council, which rules the east of the country. His visit comes after the EU foreign affairs chief, Catherine Ashton, also visited the city to open an EU office on Sunday. Some countries - including France, Italy and Qatar - have already given diplomatic recognition to the TNC rebel leadership. The Libyan rebels failed to gain full recognition when they travelled to Washington a...
Below are some quotes on self-determination from a speech by Mahmood Mamdani, professor and director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) on the independence of South Sudan . The full speech can be found here . “Let me ask one question to begin with: who is the self in what we know as self ‐ determination? In 1956, when Sudan became independent, that self was the people of Sudan . Today, in 2011, when South Sudan will become independent, that self is the people of South Sudan . “That self, in both cases, is a political self. It is a historical self, not a metaphysical self as...
The below is an extract from Human rights Watch’s open letter to Canada’s newly elected government on human rights priorities (see full text here ). In June 2010, Canada's Parliament passed the Balanced Refugee Reform Act. Human Rights Watch is concerned about the act's "safe-country of origin" provision, which allows the minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism to designate certain countries or parts of countries as "safe." The application of this provision is problematic. It is impossible to make a blanket determination that any country is safe for everyone, and the criteria by which the minister would make such a determination are unclear.
The United States has launched a high-level initiative to make its military more ready and able to respond to potential mass killings in future , the Wall Street Journal reports. A senior Department of Defense official told the WSJ that the project, which is at an early stage, would help develop "a complete set of options that the leadership can consider in the preventive area before it comes to sending in the military, or not sending in the military." The emerging doctrine is a blueprint for an interventionist foreign policy that places such ideas as "responsibility to protect" on a par with...
An Iraqi tribunal has ruled that a 1983 attack on the Barzani tribe in the Kurdish provinces of Iraq was an act of genocide , the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) said. The KRG said as many as 8,000 members of the Barzani tribe, most of them men and boys, were rounded up and killed by the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein in 1983. The reprisal came five years before the 1988 chemical attacks on Halabja in which 5,000 more Kurds were killed by Saddam’s forces. The Kurds have been waging a decades long struggle, including a campaign of armed resistance, for self-rule from Arab-dominated Iraq...
A party advocating Scotland’s independence from Britain has won a surprising majority in the Scottish Parliament in last Thursday’s elections. It is the first time the Scottish National Party (SNP) has taken a majority in the devolved national assembly which was established in 1999. The head of the SNP, Alex Salmond, who will serve another term as Scotland's first minister, pledged to introduce a plebiscite on Scottish independence within the next five years. "The SNP can finally claim that we have lived up to that accolade as the national party of Scotland," he said. "That is why, in this...
The front page of the New York Times the day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
A UN team is due to arrive in Tripoli to investigate allegations of human rights violations in Libya since the start of the conflict in February, the BBC reported Wednesday. The team was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council following the Libyan government's crackdown on protesters. The government has said it will co-operate with the inquiry. The three investigators say they will look at all alleged abuses, including those the government says have been committed by rebels or Nato forces. Separately, the UN Security Council has asked the International Criminal Court to investigate Libya on...
Fatah, the Palestinian political organisation, has reached a comprehensive agreement with its rival Hamas on forming an interim government and fixing a date for a general election. The deal was announced by Egyptian intelligence in a statement, Al-Jazeera reports. "The consultations resulted in full understandings over all points of discussions, including setting up an interim agreement with specific tasks and to set a date for election," Egyptian intelligence said in a statement on Wednesday. The deal, which took many officials by surprise, was thrashed out in Egypt and followed a series of...
Sathya Sai Baba , one of India’s most famous spiritual gurus passed away on Sunday, triggering a global outpouring of grief and tributes from devotees across all walks of life, including politics, sport and entertainment. He was 85 and finally succumbed to multiple organ failure after being in a critical condition for more than three weeks, AFP quoted his doctors as saying. “Sai Baba is no more with us physically. He breathed his last at 7:40 am and died due to cardio-respiratory failure," a statement from the hospital in Puttaparthi, in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, said. Indian...