WPR Blog Archive

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — On Friday, as President Bush’s five-nation tour came to its stop in Uruguay, I took the 29 bus from San Telmo to the stadium Ferro, arriving around six. First we heard the drums. Then we saw the rows of school buses used to move demonstrators around the city. Then, as the low roar of the stadium grew, thousands of flyers littered the street: “Viva Hugo Chavez.” “Afuera Bush.”By six oclock, Hugo Chavez’s Argentine anti-Bush rally was pounding with some 32,000 drum-banging, flag-waving leftists. They were dispatched to the scene with what several activists told me was […]

The Commentary Week in Review is posted on the blog every Friday.Drawing from more than two dozen English-language news outletsworldwide, the column highlights a handful of the week’s notableop-eds.The price of truth continues to rise. Bush should be thinking Brazil, Brazil, Brazil. Egypt could soon end up run by the Muslim Brotherhood. Sunni Muslims aren’t going to buy U.S. claims that Iran is out to get them. The African Union should be done away with. And don’t blame China for the currently plunging world markets. Coming on the heels of reports that Russian journalist Ivan Safronov was working on a […]

The world’s largest journalist’s group is urging the Russia to aggressively probe the circumstances surrounding the recent death of journalist Ivan Safronov, who according to news reports, was working a story about Russian weapons sales to Syria and Iran when he fell from a fifth-story window in Moscow last week. “Journalists around the world are concerned that another colleague has fallen victim in Russia to people who use violence to silence journalists,” said Aidan White, general secretary of the Brussels based International Federation of Journalists, which on March 6 called on authorities to conduct “a thorough and transparent investigation.” A […]

Wired magazine is hosting a new defense technology blog called “Danger Room.” Headed up by Noah Shachtman, formerly of DefenseTech.org, it’s worth checking out. (Occasional WPR contributor David Axe is also a regular poster.) Some recent Danger Room highlights: –Posts here and here on the U.S. military’s Active Denial System (which was the subject of a Feb. 13 WPR article). –Israel’s expanding unmanned air force. –Iran’s “space missile.”

Is Iraq’s oil-sharing agreement a giveaway to “big oil” or a necessary arrangement that will allow Iraq to begin to harvest its oil wealth? We read this Mother Jones’ piece by James Ridgeway this morning, which claimed the former. But in a piece that was supposed to show how much of a raw deal for Iraq the agreement is, this paragraph made us raise our eyebrows: While the deal, on its face, splits up control of Iraq’s oil among Kurds, Shia and Sunnis, the real power remains in the hands of international companies that will craft contracts with Iraq’s regional […]

Two interesting pieces from today’s opinion pages pertained to the Internet and politics in the Middle East. The first, by our own Guy Taylor, appeared in Beirut’s Daily Star. “Syria Today: Online and Hard-Line,” was adapted from an earlier article Guy wrote for Reason. Here’s a taste: The last six years have seen an Internet explosion in Syria. Close to 1 million of the country’s 18 million people are now online, compared with just 30,000 in 2000, when President Bashar Assad ascended to power. Syrian writers are churning out blogs, news and commentary Web sites in a fashion that – […]

The Commentary Week in Review is posted on the blog every Friday. Drawing from more than two dozen English-language news outlets worldwide, the column highlights a handful of the week’s notable op-eds. In this week’s review: Despite the 2008 Olympic games, human rights improvements in China won’t come easy; the outlook for the Darfur Peace Agreement is bleak; opponents of U.S. foreign policy are using the courts to frustrate American aims; three views on what Iraq needs; and the rise of new great powers pose a challenge to the international system. With the 2008 summer Olympics fast approaching, China “knows […]

According to this report from Foreign Exchange, the children of China’s one-child policy, now in their 20s, are expressing themselves in forms adopted from Western pop-culture, such as punk rock: Click here to watch the video if you can’t see the embedded player. For more on Reflector, check out their English-language Web site. And, yes, they also have a MySpace page, where you can listen to a few tracks. Judging by “Bie Shang Dang,” Chinese is much better suited than some languages (French, for example) to the cadences of punk. On “Your Are My Sunshine,” sung in English, the singer […]