China’s leading dissident, Liu Xiaobo, yesterday lost his appeal against his conviction and 11-year sentence for inciting subversion.
Outside the court, US and European diplomats called for the immediate release of the 54-year-old Liu, a writer and one-time professor who was first detained in December 2008 after co-authoring a manifesto calling for political reform in China.
US [...]
Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych yesterday called on his opponent and longtime rival, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, to concede defeat in Sunday’s presidential runoff after he secured a slim victory at the polls. With more than 98 percent of the ballots counted as of Monday evening, Yanukovych had captured 48.5 percent of the vote, with Tymoshenko [...]
International attorney and Corporate Foreign Policy founder Robert Amsterdam took to the podium on Wednesday, February 3rd at the CATO Institute in Washington DC to discuss in brief the role of the ‘reset‘ button in contemporary U.S.-Russia relations and the precedent it sets by both besmirching rule of law at home and abroad and indeed [...]
Power and the titles that accompany it are difficult to let go of, even within the ranks of established international and geopolitical communities. Mugabe has had a stranglehold on power for decades, even when it hinders progress for a Zimbabwe he claims to love. Omar Bongo rather silently ran Gabon for nearly the same amount [...]
Marifeli Pérez-Stable is vice president for democratic governance at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, DC and a professor of sociology at Miami’s Florida International University. Dr. Pérez-Stable chaired the Task Force on Memory, Truth, and Justice which published the report, ‘Cuban National Reconciliation‘, in April 2003. On both the website of the Inter-American Dialogue and indeed [...]
Free and fair elections are a pillar for tangible change in government. Many have long strived to see the fruition of democracy in all of its values reach contemporary Latin America, more recently in the Arcadia Foundation taking to task the former Honduran government of dubious dealings and questionable practices. Their anti-corruption campaigns shone a spotlight [...]
Venezuela’s narcissist-Leninist President Hugo Chavez is not getting his money’s worth for the billions of dollars he is spending in public relations abroad: According to a new poll, his approval ratings in Latin America could hardly be worse.
The Miami Herald’s Andres Oppenheimer has published a newly-released poll of 20,200 people in 18 Latin American countries originally [...]
Writing currently from Canada, the following piece by Peter Worthington in the Toronto Sun caught my eye. It is truly rare that Canadian media takes a gander at the nation of Zimbabwe, and in this brief perspective, I feel Mr. Worthington is hitting a major point which needs to be further examined in order for Zimbabwe [...]
Billionaire Sebastian Pinera led Chile’s presidential vote and is seen the favorite to win a run-off and lead a political shift in Latin America’s most stable economy after 20 years of leftist rule.
Pinera, an airline magnate who ranks No. 701 on Forbes’ global rich list, won 44 percent in Sunday’s voting, shy of the more than [...]
Last week may have been the most important one of the year for troubled Honduras. It brought a number of important decisions both in and outside of the country, each of which will have implications for years to come.
The first decision was that of the majority of Hondurans in Sunday’s presidential vote to elect Porfirio “Pepe” [...]
