International issues

The Dominican police have named the people they think masterminded and carried out the 2 August abduction and murder of journalist José Agustín Silvestre de los Santos and say the motive was an article by Silvestre linking the alleged mastermind to a recent murder.

Britain is reeling after several nights of rioting in major cities across the country–the worst civil unrest in a least a generation. What began at the end of last week as a series of protests against police brutality and racism has escalated into a major crisis of the entire social and political order, with police apparently losing control in parts of major cities.

Reporters Without Borders condemns yesterday’s murder of TV presenter José Agustín Silvestre de los Santos, who was kidnapped in the eastern city of La Romana and was later found dead in El Peñon, on the road from La Romana to San Pedro de Macorís. He had been shot three times.

Now that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is further concentrating its efforts on submitting to the UN, next September, a formal demand for the recognition of Palestine as an independent state, the U.S. and Israel are working to prevent the international community from doing so, and proposing new talks with the condition that the Palestinians abandon their legitimate request.

Over six years ago, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair asked Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf: What can we (the West) do for you (Pakistan) to strengthen you position in the region? Musharraf replied: Solve the Palestinian problem!

‘Pakistan’s government should immediately end widespread disappearances of suspected militants and activists by the military, intelligence agencies, and the paramilitary Frontier Corps in the southwestern province of Balochistan.’

Extremists would have the best chance to take possession of Pakistani nuclear weapons following the breakdown of the South Asian state’s government, the U.S. Congressional Research Service concluded in a report in July, 2011.

The so-called international community must be either bored or out of this planet. Otherwise it would not have wasted years and years in expensive meetings and lengthy discussions before ending up, twelve months ago, with an indisputable and undisputed finding—that safe water and sanitation is a ‘human right’!

When one of the most arrogant men in the world is forced to issue a full-page apology in national newspapers, you know that he feels he has little other choice. That must have been the calculation in the inner sanctum of News Corporation when billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch signed off on a full-page ad in several of his (and his competitors’) British newspapers.

Auro Ida, a renowned political journalist in the west-central state of Mato Grosso and editor of the Midianews (http://www.midianews.com.br/) website, was gunned down in Cuiabá, the state capital, on 22 July, becoming the fourth journalist to be murdered in Brazil since the start of the year.