by Jim Lobe
via IPS News
Responding to growing criticism by human rights groups and foreign governments, U.S. President Barack Obama Thursday announced potentially significant shifts in what his predecessor called the “global war on terror”.
In a major policy address at the National Defense University here, Obama said drone strikes against [...]
via Lobe Log
by Omid Memarian
Traditionally, a few months before a presidential election in Iran, the government opens the public sphere, giving more freedom to the press, more space for activists to speak out and even loosening social restrictions like the one on women’s clothing and hijab. But less than two months before [...]
via Lobe Log
by Jasmin Ramsey
This week was marked by Iraq war commentary, but the status of women in the country was noticeably absent on the 10th anniversary of the invasion. Enter the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN), which released a brief on the topic — particularly relevant when [...]
by Emile Nakhleh
via IPS News
Despite the start of a government-inspired dialogue with the opposition Sunday, the Bahraini government continues to jail dissidents, arrest demonstrators, and use a rigged judicial system to convict them.
Although the Al-Khalifa regime officially is not a party to the dialogue, Western governments welcomed the justice ministry’s call [...]
via Lobe Log
Since Saturday, more than a dozen young journalists working for five reformist newspapers and journals, one news agency (Iranian labor News Agency or ILNA), and one website (Baztab), have been arrested mostly at their place of work on order from the Iranian Judiciary. Little is yet known about the reasons for [...]
via Lobe Log
Justice is a fiction in much of the Persian Gulf. Nowhere is this truer than in Bahrain, a place where torture and state terror have become the norm. The country’s political elites talk frequently about freedom and the need for legal and political order. The reality, however, is that Bahrain’s judicial [...]
via Lobe Log
The UN High Commission for Human Rights now believes 60,000 Syrians have been killed since March 2011 (far more than claimed by the Syrian opposition) and that death rates have been rising more sharply of late. Given the situation on the ground and the continuing failure of diplomacy, the bloody human [...]
via IPS News
Rabbi Brant Rosen leads a congregation in Evanston, Illinois and is author of the new book, Wrestling in the Daylight: A Rabbi’s Path to Palestinian Solidarity.
Speaking with Mitchell Plitnick, Rosen, co-chair of the Rabbinical Council of Jewish Voice for Peace, stressed that the views both in his book and [...]
via Lobe Log
George Washington Political Science Professor Mark Lynch in Foreign Policy:
With military action in the background but not imminent, and sanctions taking a real political and economic toll inside of Iran, now seems to be the right time to begin a serious effort at real talks with Iran over [...]
via Lobe Log
The Guardian is reporting that a ”reformulated” proposal including “limited sanctions relief” will be launched by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (p5+1) after the US presidential election.
Earlier this week Al-Monitor reported along the same lines and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made
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