Harry's Place

There are reasons to dislike the government of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe– not least his cavalier attitude toward workers’ rights and the murder of trade unionists– but at least one symbol of democracy, judicial independence, seems intact.
In February the Colombian Supreme Court ruled against a planned referendum which would have allowed Uribe to run for [...]

It’s not particularly hilarious, but– unlike Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League– I don’t find this joke told by President Obama’s national security adviser James Jones inappropriate or tasteless.
Clearly the fact that it involved a Jewish merchant was relevant to the story. And the joke was just as obviously on the Taliban soldier, not the [...]

In an interview with The Observer, Gita Sahgal, the former head of Amnesty International’s gender unit, has some harsh things to say about AI.

In her first newspaper interview since leaving the charity altogether, Sahgal delivers a withering critique of her former employers, describing the modern Amnesty’s leadership as suffering from “ideological bankruptcy” and “misogyny”. Although [...]

This is is a guest post by Ben Cohen
This week, I’ll be producing two live webcasts from the American Jewish Committee’s annual meeting in Washington, DC. On Thursday April 29 at 2.15 PM Eastern Time, Paul Berman and Christopher Caldwell will feature on a panel which I will be moderating, examining the future of [...]

The Total Politics people have produced a fun video to encourage (I think) people to vote.  It’s nice to know that there is still some room for the good natured in politics.

PS. “MP4″ – the cross-party rock band seen in the video - readers may recall, featured in Harry’s Place Arts a while back…

This is the first in a three-part series of cross posts by David Rich of the CST:

Edmund Standing wrote a while ago about a BNP member, Edith Crowther, who had posted a blog comment claiming that:
I realised long ago that the BNP is the British equivalent of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whom I [...]

Cross-posted from Tehran Bureau
By Sohrab Ahmari and Nasser Weddady
Recently, hundreds of Egyptians gathering in downtown Cairo were brutally repressed by security forces. Nearly 100 demonstrators were beaten and detained merely for exercising their universal rights to free speech and assembly to protest Egypt’s 29-year-old emergency law. But aside from a solitary AP dispatch, the protest [...]

This is a guest post by Peter Tatchell of the Green Party
In this election, the British people are being conned into believing that there are significant differences between Cameron, Brown and Clegg. Not so. The three big parties are part of the mainstream political establishment. They are wedded to the system as it is. Their [...]

Guest post by Graham Barral
This morning on the Andrew Marr show Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg seemed to struggle on two issues: immigration and the UK Nuclear deterrent. Of particular interest to me was his stunning display of ignorance about nuclear arms control. Clegg appears to be proposing that the US provide weapons grade plutonium [...]

Luciana Berger is the Labour Party prospective parliamentary candidate for Liverpool Wavertree.  Tony Greenstein, on his so-called anti-Zionist blog,  is not amused. Despite calling himself a socialist, he wants people to vote against the Labour Candidate.  It is a fact that Ms. Berger is a Director of Labour Friends of Israel. It is also a fact that  Greenstein [...]