CNN has a great new feature that publishes emails of personal stories of people experiencing the war in the Middle East. Here is a taste: I am a Lebanese American currently staying at my family's country residence in Shemlan, Lebanon, located in the mountains above Beirut. My fiance and I came here with the intentions of writing our graduate school...
Robert Wright has an interesting op-ed in the New York Times on "Progressive Realism." He attempts to argue for a new foreign policy that embraces both neo-con realism and liberal idealism. He calls it progressive realism. The gist of it is to redefine American self-interest broadly enough to morph national interest into concern for global human welfare. ...
Democracy: A Journal of Ideas has come out with its first issue. It looks promising, oriented along the lines of the New America Foundation (at least in terms of author affiliations), one of the best things to come out of the think tank world in recent years. There's substantial foreign policy content here, with a review by Michael...
The G-8 summit starts today and Russia is getting its star turn as it hosts for the first time. It has stated that issues such as energy security, the risk of global infectious disease, and international education initiatives will be on the agenda. The Russian government views this moment in the spotlight of global politcs as a chance to...
U. Chicago law prof Eric Posner has a typically effective op-ed in the WSJ($) today arguing that it simply doesn't make sense to apply Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions (the provision at issue in Hamdan) to the conflict with Al Qaeda. His argument is pragmatic rather than formalistically legal, but it is also sensibly grounded in a...
Like many of my students, I sometimes find the law's indeterminacy and disagreement over its content disturbing and frustrating. So it is a relief to return to the very few legal rules things that (almost) everyone agrees with. As the NYT's analysis today points out, there is utter and complete consensus among legal scholars that Congress could repeal...
Here is a nice summary of the present conflict and some basic information about Hezbollah from the Council on Foreign Relations website. Bottom line is this is a political organization in Lebanon that has twenty-three seats in the 128-member Lebanese Parliament and two ministers in the Lebanese government. In this sense it is clearly not like Al Qaeda,...
Yesterday the Caspian Sea pipeline opened. As noted here, the $4 billion pipeline will deliver oil from Baku, Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. With the ability to pump one million barrels of oil per day, the pipeline is over a thousand miles long and is expected to supply 7 percent of the world's oil supply....
According to a little-noticed Office of the Prosecutor press release two weeks ago, the ICTR has held that the occurrence of genocide in Rwanda is a matter of "common knowledge" and will no longer have to be proven at trial: The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on 16 June 2006 ruled that the Trial Chambers must take...
° Two rockets hit Israeli city of Haifa on Thursday evening ° Israel targets Lebanon by land, air and sea: enforcing naval blockade, bombing Beirut airport and shelling Lebanese towns ° Jets bomb Lebanese army air base at Rayak and Baalbek TV transmitter in Bekaa Valley ° Shelling from both sides is heaviest over Lebanon's southern border ° Hezbollah targets Kiryat Shmona, Nahariya and...
Number of Employees in the Ministry of Fisheries: 401 Number of Employees in the Ministry of Defence: 64 ...
The breaking story is here. She alleges that Cheney, Libby, and Rove conspired to destroy her career in retaliation for her hunsband Joe Wilson’s criticisms of the Administration’s Iraq policy after his investigation into the discredited Niger nuke connection. It will be interesting to see how much the court paper read like a standard retaliation suit or whether they will turn...
