Mandela’s Fading Dream
It was the diplomatic equivalent of the age-old admonishment “I’m glad your father didn’t live to see this…” Last month Archbishop Desmond Tutu told The Guardian he was glad that at age 91, modern South Africa’s Founding Father Nelson Mandela was retired and not following day-to-day politics in his country anymore because if he was “issues such as corruption would certainly hurt him, as well as the gutter level of discourse by some politicians within the ruling party [Mandela’s own
Dispatches from Lesotho Pt. 1
Lesotho is a small, landlocked mountain kingdom in the beginnings of Winter. About 7,500 feet up in the small village of Mount Moorosi in the district of Quthing, a few major changes have arrived since my last visit in 2006: water, electricity, the possibility of obtaining access to internet; those things which so many of us in the States take for granted. The last time I stayed here was as a US Peace Corps teacher of English at Maseribane High School, then later as a visitor from Cape Town.
Haiti and the United States, A Complex Past
It’s been just over a week since an earthquake unleashed an epic wave of destruction across Haiti. And even as bodies of both the living and the dead continue to be pulled from the rubble of Port-au-Prince, conservative commentators are already using the tragedy to launch into an attack on foreign development aid programs.
The Politics of Pipelines
It’s winter in Europe, time for snow, St. Nicholas, and the annual Russia-Ukraine dispute over natural gas supplies. On Wednesday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned his counterparts in Ukraine not to try to modify a 10-year gas supply contract between the two countries.
Go, Russia!
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev covered a lot of ground in his annual state-of-the-nation address on Thursday, but the after-speech reports were dominated by talk of time zones, YouTube clips and the body language of Vladimir Putin.
