tony curzon price's Bookmarks tagged russia →  View Popular

In the run up to the Nato summit in Bucharest, Bernard-Henri Levy and Andre Glucksmann penned a joint letter to Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy to demand that they open the way to let Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance. "Is the world so kindly-disposed towards us that we can refuse to make allies of the few countries who are willing to adopt our political model at their own risk? For decades we have supported champions of human rights and persecuted democrats around the world. This one time in Bucharest the issue at hand is not to condemn a dictatorship or a boycott a tyrant, but to recognise the path of free choice of a free people and to integrate them in our political-military family. What is being demanded of us is very simple. And yet everything seems strangely complicated. The problem, once again, is that our community of nations is divided. Due to the obsessive mantra of worry about not provoking Russia, certain governments are reluctant to support the young democracies of Georgia and Ukraine."

The hardest challenge will be for economies mired in oligarchic capitalism to accomplish a similar transition. It may take nothing less than revolution – ideally peaceful, of course – to replace the elites who now dominate these economies and societies, and for whom growth is not the central objective.

A crime can never be buried. Political crimes never fade. We have not forgotten what was done to ordinary black people in the name of apartheid. Indeed, by launching the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, we know far more about the full horrors of that era than we would had we sought to prosecute people, or tried simply to move on. Literally, the truth has set us free to be at peace with ourselves. Remembrance and forgiveness have allowed our remembered nightmares to be consigned to the past. It is my deepest hope that Iraqis and other peoples haunted by the past can find a way to live in peace with peace of mind.

Президент Израиля Моше Кацав может быть обвинен в изнасиловании, сексуальных домогательствах в отношении нескольких женщин, главным образом сотрудниц своего офиса, а также в том, что удовлетворял необоснованные прошения о помиловании и незаконно прослушивал телефонные разговоры. Официальное решение о возможности судебного преследования президента будет принимать генеральный прокурор.