Online Journal of Politics and Foreign Affairs
Cross-posted from La PolÃtica Colombiana: Via the BBC: Colombian rebels spurn jail deal Colombia’s biggest rebel group insists it will not release any hostages even though the government has announced plans to free some 200 jailed rebels. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, said the gesture by President Alvaro Uribe was a “farce”. [...]
London Times U.S. editor Gerard Baker assesses Jimmy Carter’s claim that George W. Bush’s presidency is the “the worst in history” and judges that, while it is bad, “it’s not Jimmy Carter bad.” For the younger reader, perhaps already infused with a nostalgia that recalls the 1970s as a time of peace and prosperity, a [...]
Keith Olbermann’s most recent Special Comment was indeed quite special. Watch the video: He has accused the Democratic leadership of “betrayal” for caving in on the Iraq supplemental. The Democratic leadership has, in sum, claimed a compromise with the Administration, in which the only things truly compromised, are the trust of the voters, the ethics [...]
The Russian embassy in Costa Rica has been taken over by some guy with a gun. An armed Uzbek man took Russia’s ambassador and seven other people hostage Friday at the Russian Embassy in Costa Rica, police said. Security forces quickly surrounded the building in San Jose, the capital, police spokesman Francisco Ruiz told The [...]
I read this post by Greg Mankiw awhile ago and found part of it amusing. The part I found amusing was his use of Eugene Volokh’s argument against slippery slopes. If you accepted this slippery slope argument, then you’d end up accepting the next one and then the next one until you eventually slip down [...]
Fred Thompson (or, more likely, a staffer) made his blogging debut at Redstate yesterday afternoon, warning of the dangers of the propaganda victory Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got from taking 15 British marines hostage. He is disgusted with the weakness shown by the international community in this affair: “The UN Security Council summoned its vaunted multilateral greatness [...]
Sky News reports that the British marines taken hostage by Iran two weeks ago were “gathering intelligence” on Iranian activities. The captain in charge of the 15 marines detained in Iran has said they were gathering intelligence on the Iranians. Sky News went on patrol with Captain Chris Air and his team in Iraqi waters [...]
Noah Schachtman: This won’t exactly come as shocking news. But it’s interesting, nonetheless: The latest British hostage letter wasn’t actually written by a native English speaker. Its combination of "out-of-tune" phrases and awkward syntax leads to University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman to believe that Leading Seaman Faye Turney’s "confession" was "largely dictated by [...]
Thomas Harding, the London Daily Telegraph‘s Defence Correspondent, argues that the British government has few viable options in its attempt to force Iran to return the 15 marines it is holding hostage. “Military action is unfeasible without American support and so is a military blockade of the Gulf. Unless the United Nations shows more rigour, [...]
Matthew Yglesias asks, If George W. Bush vetos the Iraq supplemental the Democrats passed, isn’t that him cutting off funding for the troops in the field? I mean, here’s congress, appropriating some funds for the troops, and instead of letting the troops get the funds Bush is saying, no, he’ll hold their well-being hostage to [...]
A video of American hostage Ahmed Qusai al-Taayie has been released. A Shiite militant group has issued a video of an Iraqi-American soldier who was kidnapped nearly four months ago while visiting his wife in downtown Baghdad, a U.S. television network reported Wednesday. The U.S. government has offered a $50,000 reward leading to the recovery [...]
Four Americans and one Austrian kidnapped in November appear on a newly released video. Four Americans and an Austrian abducted in November in southern Iraq spoke briefly and appeared uninjured in a video believed to have been recorded nearly two weeks ago and delivered Wednesday to The Associated Press. The men — security contractors for [...]
David Axe gets the cover of this month’s Popular Science for an interesting piece about the Marine Corps’ novel way out of dealing with negotiating overfly rights and other inconveniences: The proposal, part of the Corps’s push toward greater speed and flexibility, is called Small Unit Space Transport and Insertion, or Sustain. Using a suborbital [...]
During a recent hostage/shooting situation in a Chicago law firm a SWAT team did the job that such units were originally created for: killing a rampaging psycho who is a danger not only to himself, but those around him. Armed with the revolver, as well as a knife and hammer he hid in a manilla [...]
Slate’s Jack Shafer argues that journalists’ cries about cuts in the news budgets dire impact on our democracy miss some fundamental changes in technology: The idea that a newsroom should employ X hundred staffers because it has traditionally employed X hundred staffers ignores the changes technology has made in the news market. For instance, Tribune [...]
Timothy Burke argues that the debate over the accuracy of the numbers in the recent Lancet (or, as Kieran Healy insists, Burnham et al) study of excess deaths in Iraq misses a crucial point: [A]s I understand the declared objectives of the American effort in Iraq, the exact number of civilian casualties is not altogether [...]
A longstanding controversy at the nation’s only college for deaf students reached its inevitable apex yesterday as dozens of protesters at Gallaudet University were arrested. At least two dozen people were arrested Friday night as students continued to block the entrance to the nation’s only liberal arts university for the deaf and hearing-impaired in a [...]
Charles Krauthammer laments the fact that the Foley scandal and Woodward book have moved the National Intelligence Estimate that said the Iraq War has made us less safe out of the spotlight, leaving that conclusion to “remain an unrebutted charge long after Foley is forgotten and Woodward is remaindered.” Aside from the fact that the [...]
The U.S. Embassy in Damascus came under attack this morning. Islamic militants attempted to storm the U.S. Embassy in Damascus on Tuesday using automatic rifles, hand grenades and at least one van rigged with explosives, the government said. Four people were killed in the brazen attack, including three of the assailants. No Americans were hurt, [...]
The noted expert on US-Iranian relations, Jimmy Carter, has agreed to host talks with former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami to help iron out the differences between the two countries. For an event that would turn a page in American history, former president Jimmy Carter has agreed in principle to host former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami [...]
Kidnapped FOX News journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig have been released unharmed. Two Fox News journalists were released Sunday, nearly two weeks after being seized by militants, ending the longest-running drama involving foreign hostages in the Gaza Strip. American correspondent Steve Centanni and cameraman Olaf Wiig of New Zealand were dropped off at Gaza [...]
Rusty Shackleford has strong reason to believe that the group behind the kidnapping of Fox News journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wigg are an “al Qaeda 3.0″ group that sees Abu Musab al Zarqawi as a source for inspiration. Given that Zarqawi got on the map by personally beheading hostages on videotape, that’s bad news [...]