Editor’s Note: Corridors of Power, penned by WPR Editor-at-Large Roland Flamini, appears in WPR every Monday. SORRY ABOUT THAT NO. 1 — It’s generally considered poor form in the international community for a foreign leader visiting a friendly country to have a private meeting with the leader of the opposition, but President George Bush wasn’t going to be in Rome and pass up a chance to spend quality time with prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Prior to Saturday’s presidential visit, the Italian government had made it clear to the White House that a meeting with Berlusconi would not be appreciated, and [...]
Editor’s Note: Rights & Wrongs is a new weekly column covering the world’s major human rights-related happenings. It is written by regular WPR contributor Juliette Terzieff. GOING DIGITAL ON DARFUR — Amnesty International launched a new program Wednesday to monitor villages in Darfur in the hopes of putting pressure on the Sudanese government to admit a large United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force. Under the program, the rights group is using satellites to track some of the most vulnerable villages in war-ravaged Darfur, posting images online and urging members of the public across the world to log on to www.eyesondarfur.org and [...]
The Russians, Tom Clancy’s old reliable villains, are back. The American techno-thriller author has lent his name to several computer games, including the intricate new title from Ubisoft known as EndWar. The video game’s scenario? In the next twenty years, America deploys a space weapons system to protect the United States and Europe from nuclear attack, while a sullen Russia stays out of the missile shield club. A few years later, the world’s peak oil doomsayers are suddenly proven right and all of the world’s major oil producers — except for Russia — are found to have massively inflated their [...]
