Crime Archive

The majority of the English-language media outside of India have been notably tentative about accepting the obvious premise that the recent mob attack on eight Indians in the eastern German town of Mügeln was a racist attack. (See the earlier WPR report here.) To the extent they have, however, virtually all have framed the issue of racism and xenophobia in Germany as a specifically “East German problem.” CNN, for example, noted that “since German re-unification in 1990, racist violence has broken out sporadically in the poorer east of the country.” A Reuters report used a similar formula: “Eastern Germany has […]

On August 9, the Bush Administration issued its revised U.S. Counternarcotics Strategy for Afghanistan. The main innovation is the explicit use of enhanced “sticks and carrots” to change Afghans’ behavior. Protracted infighting within the administration in recent weeks about timing and tactics had twice delayed the new strategy’s publication. Despite the extra editing time, senior Democrats and Republicans in Congress called the revisions inadequate given the magnitude of the problem. Preliminary assessments of the data the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime plans to release next month indicate that opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has increased by 15 percent during […]