Let's set aside for the moment the issue of whether Paul Wolfowitz's tenure as World Bank President was doomed from the start because of his role as chief architect of the Iraq war, and his apparently single-minded management style. Viewed solely from the perspective of the broad anti-poverty mission of the World Bank and its work in promoting open,...
Marty Lederman has terrific posts here and here on the import of James Comey's riveting testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this week. I link to it here for our non-American readers who might have missed it. (Maddeningly, this profoundly important story has not been afforded the wall-to-wall coverage cable news reserves for Anna Nicole Smith's baby custody...
The Floyd Landis doping arbitration that is being held at Pepperdine Law School in Malibu, California took a bizarre turn yesterday, with allegations of criminal witness tampering by the Landis camp. You can read the summary by ESPN here, from Velonews here, and detailed blog commentary here. As most of our readers know, Floyd Landis is under investigation for doping...
A story that has been getting a bit of play in Europe but not as much on this side of the Atlantic is the dispute over the placement of a war memorial in Estonia. In April the Estonian government removed from its capital a memorial to Soviet soldiers who fought in WW II. Estonia’s ethnic Russian minority—and Russia—were...
We had a ballot question in Philadelphia "urg[ing] the United States to make year 2007 the time to redeploy U.S. troops out of harm's way in Iraq," through the unusual mechanism of an amendment to the city's Home Rule Charter. The measure passed overwhelmingly (122,710 to 49,938). According to the Institute for Policy Studies (which has long promoted...
Extremely disturbing news out of Rwanda: a senior official with a Rwandan human-rights group has been arrested after being accused of complicity in the 1994 genocide by a local gacaca court:Francois-Xavier Byuma, vice-president of the board of the Rwandan League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights ["Turengere Abana"], was detained last week in Kigali and taken Wednesday to...
There is an amazing story posted over at Harvard Law School's Global Voices about how park rangers in the Congo are partnering with elementary school children in Colorado Springs, Colorado to raise money and awareness to protect endangered gorillas from poachers. The rangers blog about their experiences and the children sell pickles (50 cents each) as part of their...
President Bush has thrown down the gauntlet, announcing yesterday that he is again urging that the U.S. Senate to give its advice and consent to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. As Duncan noted earlier this week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is poised to move on this treaty, which has been awaiting ratification for over...
Excellent news for historians researching the Holocaust: the 11-nation governing body of the International Tracing Service, which oversees a massive archive of Nazi documents in Bad Arolsen, Germany, has voted to begin distributing the documents electronically to member states:The archive contains Nazi records on the arrest, transportation, incarceration, forced labor and deaths of millions of people from the year the...
At the risk of committing the post hoc fallacy, it is interesting to note that less than a week after the ICC issued its first arrest warrants related to the situation in Darfur, Rolls-Royce has announced that it will no longer do business in the Sudan:Rolls, which supplies engines to oil firms in the country, said it would "progressively withdraw"...
Richard Posner has an interesting but unconvincing post asking the question why there have been no violent, disruptive protests against the war in Iraq, as there were in 1968 over the Vietnam War. He suggests that in addition to "[t]he obvious answer that there is no longer a draft", that there are five contributing factors that explain the absence...
There is a thoughtful piece in the New Republic by David Fontana, Alex Massie, and Oliver Kamm on the legacy of Tony Blair. I think it adds some real insights on Blair's contributions that were neglected in my previous post. Here is a key excerpt: What, exactly, is Tony Blair's legacy? With Iraq at the center of the news,...
