Augusto Pinochet has received last rights following a heart attack. Although still alive, he appears to be in imminent danger of death. If he dies, it will bring one of the darkest chapters in Chilean history to an unsatisfying end; as I have noted before, courts have only recently begun to strip Pinochet of the general immunity he...
It's been a difficult week for the new Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), which is supposed to begin work in early 2007. First, an important meeting of the ECCC's Cambodian and international judges failed to reach agreement on the Tribunal's rules, which govern every aspect of its administration, including investigation procedures, trial motions, and appeals. ...
If true, this is fantastic news:Strong hints have emerged that the Vatican is preparing to change its policy on the use of condoms in the fight against Aids, after a 200-page study on the question, commissioned by the Pope, was passed to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for consideration. "This is something that worries the Pope a lot,"...
I noted a couple of weeks ago that the Iraqi High Tribunal's failure to release the written verdict at the same time that it announced Saddam's conviction was strong evidence that, despite my earlier skepticism, the announcement was timed to influence the U.S. elections. Well, the written verdict still has not been publicly released — making the inference of...
The logical conclusion of Chertoff, Gonzales, et al.'s reactionary hostility to international law?This is where we've arrived in this country: You have the constitutional right to burn an American flag, but you can get into trouble for simply flying a foreign one. At least you can in the 30,000-person town of Pahrump, Nevada, which is close to Las Vegas and even...
I don't like John McCain, and I never fail to be amused by the media's willingness to portray him as a moderate. Still, compared to Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) -- who yesterday described a UN session on climate change as "brainwashing" -- McCain's willingness to criticize the Bush administration for stonewalling Congress about the reality of global warming is...
Germanwatch and the Climate Action Network-Europe (CANE) have released their 2007 Climate Change Performance Index. Their press release describes the purpose and methodology of the index as follows:Jan Burck and other Germanwatch experts developed the CCPI methodology, which is meant to help increase transparency in international climate policy. The Index compares the climate protection efforts of 56 industrialised and...
The moment of truth for Luis Posada Carriles is approaching: U.S. District Judge Philip Martinez held last Friday that the Bush administration has until February 1, 2007, to either prosecute or release Posada. Prosecution is looking increasingly unlikely: although the administration urged the judge in October to keep Posada in detention, it has consistently refused to bring criminal charges...
A number of commentators have noticed that the new season of Battlestar Galactica, the best show on television, is a thinly disguised attack on the Bush administration's policies in the War on Terror. Here, for example, is a snippet from an essay in Slate entitled, appropriately enough, "Does Battlestar Galactica Support the Iraqi Insurgency?": It starts with a suicide...
According to Steve Clemons at the Washington Note, Bolton's nomination is dead despite Bush re-nominating him:At 1:22 pm, the White House sent John Bolton's controversial nomination to serve as US Ambassador to the United Nations back up to the Senate. Luckily, Lincoln Chafee would have none of it — suggesting that such a nomination is clearly not in the spirit of...
News involving Saddam to report: Saddam's principal defense attorney, Khalil Duleimi, has accused the U.S. military of confining the defense team in the Green Zone since the verdict was announced, preventing them from returning to Amman. Dulemi believes that their confinement represents a deliberate attempt on the part of the military to deprive them of access to the media and...
File this one under "not such a good idea":Part of a Nazi leader's speech was played over the public address system before a high school soccer game, prompting an apology by the home team's principal. Forestview High School principal Robert Carpenter said neither he nor his team's coach knew about the speech before the 90-second excerpt was played during warmups Saturday,...
