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41 - 50 from 772 . In "Opinion / Editorial"
Iraq’s menacing militias
WHEN it comes to Iraqi government’s demobilization of its often lawless militias, President Donald Trump’s administration appears to be one step behind events. Mick Mulroy, soon to depart from Trump’s Defense Department team has said Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi must press on with plans he announced at the start of July to bring an end to the Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs).In fact it looks as if Mahdi has succumbed to pressure from Iran to backtrack on his scheme. There have been widespread protests at his decision to sidetrack one of the country’s more effective senior military commanders. Staff Lieutenant General Abdulwahab Al-Saadi, who was the deputy head of the key Counter-Terrorism Service has been moved to a desk job in the ministry of defense. He is not a happy man...
October 03, 2019

Iraq’s menacing militias

Turkey’s mood is changing
MANY Turks are worried and angry. Their country seems to be changing for the worse. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, arguably their most remarkable politician since the Republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is no longer the sure-footed leader who took power 17 years ago. The man who dared to make peace with Kurdish rebels, who restored language, cultural and political rights to this significant majority, who promised an inclusive politics led by his moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) and who oversaw a boom in overseas investment and major infrastructural projects, looks increasingly beleaguered and out of ideas.The well-educated middle classes welcomed his arrival after years of venal and bickering politics. They remembered his four years to 1998 as an impressive...
October 02, 2019

Turkey’s mood is changing

Austria not entirely right
THE political news from Austria is not all bad. Yes, the right-wing, anti-immigrant conservative party of Sebastian Kurz has actually increased its electoral support winning the most votes; but the brazenly Islamophobic Freedom Party, the former governing coalition partner of Kurz’s People’s Party, saw its vote drop sharply.It was a video exposing the sleaze and payola of the Freedom Party’s then leader Heinz-Christian Strache that brought about this snap general election. Strache was the victim of a sting mounted by an Austrian lawyer. He went to the Spanish Ibiza resort for what he believed were confidential talks with the daughter of a Russian oligarch. He was caught on camera offering the woman Austrian government contracts if she would fund his party or operations closely...
October 01, 2019

Austria not entirely right

Beijing’s new mega airport
THE world’s largest airport has just been opened by Chinese president President Xi Jinping. With a single building spanning an immense 700,000 square meters, Daxing International becomes Beijing’s second main airport. Beijing Capital was already straining to cope. After Atlanta in the United States, it has become the world’s busiest. Along with Daxing, it is expected to handle some 170 million passengers in the next five years.With its four runways and huge starfish single structure, it took less than five years to construct and is reported to have cost some $63 billion. Daxing is connected to Beijing, 43 kilometers away, by a new high-speed rail link that runs trains at 250 kph. Its opening by Xi came only days before China celebrates the 70th anniversary of the Communist seizure of...
September 27, 2019

Beijing’s new mega airport

British Brexit bedlam
BRITISH politics are in chaos. The country’s Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that the new Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson acted illegally when he suspended parliament for five weeks on the grounds that as a new administration he was entitled to do this in preparation for a “Queen’s speech” in which he would set out his policies for the rest of the parliamentary term.Had British MPs not met for 24 working days until Oct. 14, there would have been only 14 more sessions before Oct. 31, the date at which parliament itself had set for the UK to leave the European Union. Johnson’s opponents argued this would have been insufficient time to debate any new deal that the government might possibly have extracted from EU negotiators in Brussels and to take a view on Brexit...
September 26, 2019

British Brexit bedlam

Trump and Modi
As theater it was outstanding. As politics, it was a great deal more doubtful. Some 50,000 Texans crammed into a Houston stadium as President Donald Trump paraded with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for an event billed as “Howdy Modi!”. Trump and his guest were given a rousing welcome.Both leaders laid on the compliments to each other with a trowel. Trump said how thrilled he was to be in Texas with one of America’s “greatest, most devoted and most loyal friends”. Modi reciprocated saying of Trump: “From CEO to commander-in-chief, from boardrooms to the Oval Office, from studios to the global stage... he has left a lasting impact everywhere”.Pundits commented that this mutual backslapping benefited both leaders. Trump wants to win the Indian vote in next year’s...
September 25, 2019

Trump and Modi

A child trying to do a man’s job
The world’s climate is changing. Of this there can be no doubt. The key question is whether this increasingly dramatic shift is happening entirely because of man-made activities or is, by and large, part and parcel of a meteorological cycle that has always been happening. There is an argument that pollution created by human activities has contributed to climate change. But the concept that the seemingly radical changes to our weather are entirely due to the effusion of “greenhouse” gases is surely wrong.It is perhaps evidence of the dubiousness of this analysis that it is being championed by a sixteen year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg who held the UN climate change summit in thrall as she blasted politicians for their failure to act to reverse the phenomenon. Ms. Thunberg is an...
September 24, 2019

A child trying to do a man’s job

Egypt’s MB prisoners seek release
In the riots that followed the 2013 fall of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, dozens of policemen and many civilians were murdered and Coptic churches torched. The new government of Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi acted firmly to suppress the violence. Thousands of Muslim Brotherhood (MB) members arrested and convicted for their part in the bloody rampages were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.Earlier this month the government received a petition from 1,500 of these prisoners, who described themselves as “junior members” of the Brotherhood. Saying they wanted to end their “ordeal”, they sought to be released in return for promises to abandon the MB, play no further role in politics and give up any religious role in the country. They even offered to pay $5,000 each to end their...
September 24, 2019

Egypt’s MB prisoners seek release

The sluggish eurozone
THE 19 countries of the eurozone present the odd spectacle of a single body, parts of which are well-muscled and healthy while others are flabby and sickly, if not indeed actually diseased. With the main exception of the non-eurozone UK destined, at some point or other, to cease to be the 28th member of the European Union, economic growth is not happening. At best, eurozone growth is expected to be 1.1 percent this year, with the hope of a minute increase to 1.2 percent in 2020.The European Central Bank, (ECB) the guardian of the single currency which has now been existence for over 20 years, has been seeking desperately to stimulate economic activity. Even Germany, the EU’s powerhouse slid into recession at the beginning of year with two successive quarters of negative growth. Part of...
September 19, 2019

The sluggish eurozone

Time for compromise in Hong Kong
Hong Kong has now been roiled in increasingly ugly protests for over 100 days. It is surely time for this to end. It should not be forgotten that it was thanks to massive peaceful demonstrations of some two million people that the territory’s leader Carrie Lam withdrew a controversial extradition bill from the Legislative Council.This proposal would have allowed suspects arrested in Hong Kong to be sent to mainland China for trial, where legal standards are different from those in this former UK colony which are based on British common law. However, the demonstrations continued because the extradition bill had only been withdrawn, not scrapped entirely. It took weeks of more protests, which were becoming increasingly violent, before Lam announced that the extradition plan had been...
September 17, 2019

Time for compromise in Hong Kong

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