Jim Lobe

This week’s outburst of apparently Islamist-related violence, which has killed more than 40 people in two major cities in Uzbekistan in the past three days, could spur renewed attention to the strategically located Central Asian country’s deplorable human rights record. In a new report whose release coincided with the bloodiest day yet in three days … Continue reading “With Friends Like Uzbekistan…”

A newly declassified audiotape and documents released here Wednesday 40 years after the 1964 coup that installed military rule in Brazil show that then US President Lyndon Johnson was directly involved in the decision to back the coup forces, if necessary. In a six-minute tape of Johnson being briefed by phone at his Texas ranch, … Continue reading “Documents Shed New Light on US Support for 1964 Brazilian Coup”

Tuesday’s White House decision to permit National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify publicly under oath before the so-called 9/11 Commission marks an unusual reversal by an administration that has fiercely resisted taking any moves that suggests it is capable of making mistakes. It also signals recognition by President George W. Bush’s political handlers that … Continue reading “Clarke, Watergate Echoes Prompt Rare Bush Reversal”

One year after the U.S.-led attack on Iraq, civilians are seeing some improvements in human rights but violence is endemic and many people live in fear for their safety, says a report by Amnesty International (AI). Based on a series of visits to Iraq over the past year, as well as media accounts, the report, … Continue reading “Rights Group Slams US Actions in Iraq”

Amnesty International is expressing “serious concerns” about reports that least 20 people have been killed and hundreds of Syrian Kurds arrested by security forces since clashes broke out at a football match in the largely Kurdish town of Qamishli last Friday. Unrest spread to several other northeastern cities where Kurdish demonstrators clashed with security forces … Continue reading “Syria’s Treatment of Kurds Sparks Concern”

The growing gap between the United States and its European allies over the Iraq war – most recently highlighted by last weekend’s Spanish elections – belies deeper strains that date to the end of the Cold War, according to a report released Friday by the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). But tensions produced by … Continue reading “Euro-US Rift Over Iraq Belies Much Deeper Strains”

For neo-conservative and other right-wing US hawks, Madrid has suddenly become Munich in 1938 and Spain’s Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In an extraordinarily unanimous campaign, newspaper columnists and television commentators are flooding the media with cries of “appeasement,” the dreaded epithet with which Chamberlain was permanently … Continue reading “Madrid 2004 = Munich 1938? Not Even Close”

Mistrust of the United States, particularly US President George W. Bush, has grown steadily in western Europe over the past 10 months while anti-American sentiment in the Arab world remains pervasive, says a major new public-opinion poll of nine countries. Large majorities in each of the eight foreign nations surveyed (the United States was the … Continue reading “Gap Grows Between US, World Public Opinion”

It was just last week, on the eve of the bloodiest act of terrorism in Europe’s modern history, that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet warned that the U.S. administration’s optimistic rhetoric on winning the “war on terrorism” was premature. Al-Qaeda has “infected others with its ideology, which depicts the United States as Islam’s … Continue reading “Spanish Blowback: Iraq War Boomerangs”

A total of 36 journalists were killed as a direct result of their work during 2003, almost double the death toll of 19 in 2002, according to the latest in an annual series of reports on ‘Attacks on the Press’ released today by the New York-based watchdog, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The increase … Continue reading “Journalist Death Toll Doubles in 2003”