What is Tolerated and What Isn’t? Omar introduces bill sanctioning Brunei over anti-homosexuality law US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) this week introduced legislation that would bar any Brunei government official enforcing the nation’s “draconian” penal code from doing business with the U.S.
A recent Pew poll asked Americans to look 30 years into the future and this produced some interesting results. The American public foresees “a country in decline economically, politically and on the world stage”. [1] In contrast, inhabitants in South Asia are living with America’s waning global fortunes. According to a survey by the ASEAN […]
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has announced a policy of US visa restrictions on International Criminal Court (ICC) investigators if they intend to probe the US military war crimes in Afghanistan. He added that the US will take additional steps, including economic sanctions, if the ICC does not change its course.
Question: The US Secretary of State officially announced in the beginning of this month the withdrawal of the United States from the INF Treaty (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty- the reduction of medium and short-range missiles) signed with Russia in 1987. What are the dimensions of this American withdrawal? Did Russia really violate the treaty or […]
The Washington Post printed an article on the 12th of February entitled: “‘You can feel it now’: New Democrats push party, and 2020 candidates, to the left on divisive issues”. The story focuses upon a shift to the left in Democrat politics in preparation for the 2020 US presidential election campaign. “A new generation of […]
Trump’s bedeviled promise of a great America surrounded by a wall has led to the longest ever US government shutdown with no end in sight. CNBC reported on the 15th of January under the title: “Why Democrats are unlikely to cave on Trump’s border wall as longest government shutdown ever drags on” that the shutdown […]
The partial shutdown of the US government has become the longest ever, with no end in sight to the political standoff. On Saturday it reaches its 22nd day, overtaking the previous record – the 21-day shutdown in 1995-96 under then-President Bill Clinton.
The past year has been a difficult one for Muslim minorities around the world. We have seen an increase in overt hostility from governments in countries like India and China, along with an uptick in a climate of fear and hatred towards Muslims in Europe and North America. Even in Canada we have seen hostilities […]
At the first Cabinet meeting on January 2, 2019, Donald Trump criticized the regional countries, particularly Russia, Pakistan and India by directly urging them to become more involved in the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan. “Yet the US has been fighting from 6,000 miles away”, Trump emphasized, and called on the aforesaid countries to take […]
The US federal government has been partially ‘shutdown’ since the 22nd of December, 2018, and now, going into January, 2019, there are 800,000 federal employees without pay. They are struggling to cover their mortgage repayments, and some have been returning Christmas presents to pay their bills. Some government services have the reason for the shutdown […]
The half-way point of President Donald Trump’s term in office saw him lose the House of Representatives but hold onto Congress. His campaign like much of his campaign for the president was based anti-immigration, anti-migrant and anti-foreigner ticket and how only he could lead the US into the future. Donald Trump has thrown all the […]
“People react to fear, not love. They don’t teach that at school, but it’s true” said former US president Richard Nixon, and his words describe the mood of the current US mid-term elections, which, on the 6th of November, will decide which party will control the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as […]
Two Muslim organizations have raised nearly $200,000 to help victims and their families following the shooting massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on Saturday. The online fund-raiser was part of a broad outpouring of assistance in response to the anti-Semitic attack, which killed 11 people and left six others injured, including blood […]
President Trump is now closer to being removed from office than ever before. The process involves impeachment, which must be agreed by a majority in the House of Representatives, for bringing a President to trial before the Senate for crimes. The Mueller investigation is seeking to prove that Trump and his campaign colluded with Russian […]
Who would have imagined that getting Trump into the White House would be such an effective way of making a revolutionary reversal in the direction of US policy and international relations? Trump’s opponents are so blinded by his character flaws that they use his destabilization of the old world order as a mere pretext to […]
Question: The presidents of the United States and Russia held their summit in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, on Monday 16/7/2018. Does this mean that the tension between the two countries is over? Is there a significance of holding this summit after the summit of the NATO countries on 12/7/2018 and the tension that surfaced […]
On the 14th of July, Jeff Glor of CBS Evening News asked US President Trump to name his “biggest foe globally right now.” Trump’s answer surprised many: “Well, I think we have a lot of foes. I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade. Now, you wouldn’t think […]
Question: The NATO summit was held in Brussels, the capital of Belgium and the capital of the European Union, on 11 and 12 /7/2018. It was attended by the American president and the leaders of the 29-member states of the alliance. The debate between them and Trump intensified and almost was confined to the issue […]
The NATO Summit Declaration was issued on the first day, and there was nothing surprising in it; the surprises came later. Trump has been chiding European countries for not contributing enough money for their defense since his 2016 election campaign, but at the NATO summit in Brussels on the 11th and 12th of July, he […]
“The trade conflict is really a war against China’s rise, to see who has the greater stamina. This is absolutely no time for irresolution or reticence.” This is how Chinese authorities, in a leaked circular, outlined to state media how they should cover the trade spat with the US. The economic fight of the century […]
Recently, China has accused the United States of starting the “biggest trade war in history”. The Trump administration’s 25% tariffs affect more than 800 Chinese products worth $34 billion such as industrial machinery, medical devices and auto parts [1]. Meanwhile, Beijing has promised to respond in kind. Are we really looking at a large-scale trade […]
Under the American President’s vile ‘zero-tolerance’ immigration policy, around 2000 children, some as young as 4 or 5, of those classified as ‘illegal immigrants’, have been forcibly separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border over the past six weeks alone. They have been placed in wire mesh cages in detention centres, whose conditions have […]
US President Trump hit EU steel and aluminum with import tariffs at the start of June, and European Union countries unanimously backed a plan, on the 14th of June, to impose tariffs on $3.3 billion worth of U.S. products. The following day, Trump called French President Emmanuel Macron to push the European Union to negotiate […]
The US federal government has placed thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children in the homes of sponsors, but last year it couldn’t account for nearly 1,500 of them. Steven Wagner, a top official with the Department of Health and Human Services, disclosed the number to a Senate subcommittee last month while discussing the state of the […]
WASHINGTON: The White House said in a policy statement to lawmakers that it needs extra funds for prison reconstruction. The prisoners at Guantanamo Bay arrived as young men, captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere early in America’s war on terror. More than 15 years later, most of the inmates at the notorious US military prison have […]
According to the Guardian: The European Union is scrambling to arrange a crisis meeting with Iran after Donald Trump pulled out of the nuclear agreement, as the Iranian president Hassan Rouhani said Europe had a “very limited opportunity” to save the deal. A day after the US president broke with the landmark 2015 agreement and warned […]
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent nearly 10 hours testifying at a US Congressional hearing this week. On the 10th of April the Senate questioned him, and on the 11th of April, the House of Representatives got their turn. Democrats complained about Facebook’s role in Trump’s election, while Republicans complained about Facebook being biased against them. […]
Worsening US-Russia relations are “similar, to a large extent, to what we lived during the Cold War,” said the United Nations Chief Antonio Guterres on the 29th of March, after the US announced that it was expelling 60 Russian diplomats. The expulsions were claimed to be in response to the poisoning in the UK of […]
On Saturday, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets in Washington and cities across the globe to take a stance against gun violence. (New York Times, March 24) “I have a dream that enough is enough.” Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s granddaughter Yolanda Renee King was one of several young people to speak against […]
President Trump dismissed his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, by a twitter message on the 13th of March and announced CIA director Mike Pompeo as his replacement. Then, just hours after Tillerson was fired, Steve Goldstein, the State Department’s undersecretary of public affairs was also fired by the White House for publicly contradicting the White […]
