As video of protests in Havana circulates on social media, many are wondering about Cuba’s future. Why now? What’s changed for everyday Cubans? And, most importantly, what do the protests mean for the island nation’s communist government and its grip on power? “The basic economic situation is what’s pushing people to go out and raise …
Continue reading “Cuba Protests Could Presage Brighter Regional Future”
The teenage boys of Gaza, some of whom are still in junior high, are learning how to shoot guns, launch anti-tank missiles and protect themselves while peering around walls. The boys are attending summer camp, but it’s not the swimming and softball, hiking and cookouts that many of us fondly recall. It’s camp as run …
Continue reading “Western Silence as Gaza Summer Camps Train Future Terrorists”
With Tehran making significant progress on the nuclear front, Washington and its European allies seem engaged in an increasingly desperate effort to revive the 2015 global nuclear agreement with Iran, mirroring the earlier eagerness that helped produce the problematic agreement in the first place. The operative question is whether – in reversing President Donald Trump’s …
Continue reading “U.S., Allies Too Eager to Resume Nuclear Deal with Iran”
“The politicization of sports will damage the spirit of the Olympic Charter and the interests of athletes from all countries,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said recently about calls for the United States and other nations to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing over China’s human-rights abuses. That’s a bit rich because, frankly, the …
Continue reading “Move the 2022 Beijing Olympics or Shun Beijing”
“Israeli authorities do face legitimate security challenges,” Human Rights Watch acknowledged after accusing Israel of committing two “crimes against humanity” – apartheid and persecution – against Palestinians. It was a grudging, and altogether disingenuous, admission in a new 217-page report about Israeli actions in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem that ignores history and …
Continue reading “Human Rights Watch did a one-sided takedown of Israel”
More than once of late, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has declared that America’s “original sin” of slavery “weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles.” The problem isn’t just that Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a career diplomat who served as President Barack Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, is …
Continue reading “The New UN Ambassador’s Misguided Shot at America”
It was 60 years ago this week that an uncertain new president launched an ill-conceived military venture of astonishing naivety. The scheme was straightforward and audacious: 1,400 U.S.-trained Cuban exiles would land at the Bay of Pigs and ignite a populist uprising that would topple a Soviet-backed communist revolutionary by the name of Fidel Castro. …