Harry's Place

UKIP has taken more than 140 council seats, and averaged 25% of the vote, while the Conservatives lost 335 and the Liberal Democrats lost 124. Labour failed to make any stunning gains raising more questions about its drift to the left and begging the question if not now then when?
It confirms without a doubt that [...]

Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the dictator of Turkmenistan, fell off his horse shortly after “winning” a race.
Although the Turkmenistan media were full of news about his “victory,” none dared report on the fall. Whoever got this video onto the Internet did something very brave:

(I put “winning” and “victory” in quotes because from what I know about Turkmenistan, [...]

Recently I posted about how former Republican Congressman Ron Paul had recruited former Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich for his anti-interventionist Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
It gets worse. Much worse.
Writing at The Daily Beast, James Kirchick– who in 2008 exposed poisonous bigotry in Paul-sponsored newsletters– notes:
As difficult as it was then to believe that [...]

Much sense from the Guardian leader this morning following Julian Assange’s address to the assembled supporters and reporters from the balcony of the Ecuadorean embassy in Knightsbridge where he remains holed up in an effort to avoid facing rape allegations in Sweden.
It makes the point that Assange failed to mention the case, or the two women [...]

This is a cross-post by Emily Dyer

Greater media attention has recently been brought upon the home of the world’s worst human rights abuses, North Korea, particularly for its vast system of slave labour camps – used as dustbins of society into which anyone whom the regime suspects to be disloyal are flung. Here, thousands of [...]

President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, who oversaw the first democratically-elected government in a 100-percent Muslim country and who became an outspoken advocate for action on climate change, has been ousted by a military coup.

AFP reports:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Thursday expressed anger over the death of Muammar Qaddafi, calling it an “outrage” and saying the ousted Libyan strongman was a “martyr.”
“Sadly the death of Qaddafi has been confirmed,” said Chavez, who had just returned to Venezuela from cancer treatment in Cuba.
“They assassinated him. It is another outrage,” the [...]

This is a cross-post from LGBT Asylum News
By Paul Canning
After initially trying ‘quiet diplomacy’, Ghanaian LGBT have formed an alliance with civil society supporters to oppose an increasingly vociferous anti-gay campaign in that country.
International attention has focused on the call by the Chief Minister of the Western Region for the arrest of gays but Ghanaian [...]

Watch Maajid at TEDGlobal on extremism and democracy-building in Muslim-majority nations

There is an assumption that anything that the United Nations does with respect to Israel will amount to an exercise in tossing Jews down a well. There’s a good reason for that suspicion.
Accordingly, Israel failed to engage with Goldstone. Perhaps they thought was that Israel would be condemned, whether or not they took part in the [...]