Comparatively speaking, the UN Human Rights Council is still in its infancy.  Set up only twelve years ago by the UN General Assembly, it had one over-riding purpose – to…

It was sunny in Sydney, Australia, on Thursday morning. A guest of the city’s opulent annual writers’ festival, I was about to tape a talk show at the headquarters of…

On April 4, 2018 three national presidents met in the Turkish capital of Ankara. Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan greeted his Russian and Iranian counterparts − Vladimir Putin and Hassan…

The counter-offensive against the revolts widely referred to as the “Arab Spring” is not limited to attempts to stall the process, steer it off course, deprive it of its content,…

The biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting opened on April 16, 2018 in London.  Most of the world’s media, except perhaps those of the Commonwealth nations, gave the event less…

Egyptian general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi won a second term virtually unchallenged in what is widely seen as a flawed election. The run-up to the poll, including a soccer protest, suggests,…

The organization dedicated to isolating and delegitimizing Israel by way of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) has so far not reacted officially to the announcement that Britain’s Prince William is…

It is not easy to pigeon-hole Qatar, a stand-alone Middle Eastern state in more ways than one − geographically, politically, economically, influentially.  Itself a small peninsula projecting into the Persian…

Protests are once again shaking Tunisia. A new finance law, which imposes drastic austerity measures on the country’s workers, has sparked a wave of resistance. Put into effect on January…

China’s recent failure to shield Pakistan from censorship by an international anti-terrorism funding and anti-money laundering body suggests that the People’s Republic is struggling to balance its contradictory interests in…