Inside Story asks whether the current situation in Thailand is a battle for democracy or a power struggle between parties. Will fresh elections solve the crisis, or will they just give rise to the same problems again?
Pak Tok-hun, North korea’s ambassador to the UN has told Al Jazeera that North Korea will take “strong measures” in response to the UN statement condemning its recent rocket launch.
Within hours of President Barack Obama’s announcement that some restrictions on travel and commerce would be eased between the United States and Cuba, the man whose policies provoked those restrictions almost 50 years ago weighed in.
In an online column, the ailing former president Fidel Castro said the U.S. had announced the repeal of several hateful restrictions, as he put it. But of the blockade, which is the cruelest of measures, said Castro, not a word was uttered.
Peter Eisner, who recently spent several weeks in Cuba reporting for the Worldfocus signature series Cuba After Fidel, joins Martin Savidge to discuss how these changes will impact the average Cuban, if more changes on the part of the U.S. are expected and if the U.S. will ask the Cuban government for changes.
My own view is that this move largely undoes the Bush tightening but it does not meet the expectations of Latin America. Lift the embargo.
In this felicitous union that we called the United States, there resides among us a very bitter lunatic fringe.
To get Iran to come to the negotiating table for talks on its nuclear program, the United States is proposing a shift in strategy, including possibly dropping the requirement that Tehran shut down its nuclear facilities during the early phases of negotiations. David Sanger of The New York Times discusses the implications of this potential shift in U.S. policy.
For a 14-year period ending in 2003, Liberia struggled with a brutal civil war, a crippled economy and not much hope. That was until a women’s movement started to take hold — a movement that helped to drive a dictator from power and gave women the kind of opportunities they could never have dreamed of.
Here’s one example of women transforming their lives and by extension that of their country, The Liberian Women’s Sewing Project.
The Liberian’s Women Sewing Project is partially financed through Sustainable Global Sourcing, a social venture based in San Francisco that is focused on women’s economic empowerment in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Another group is Mama Cash which is the oldest international women’s empowerment fund in the world. Established in the Netherlands in 1983, Mama Cash supports pioneering and innovative women’s initiatives around the world, because social change starts with women and girls.
Since 1983 Mama Cash has subsidized more than 6.000 women’s projects and has invested more than 30 million euros. She is active in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Below is a video of Mama Cash’s efforts and results in Liberia.