the parliamentary election in syria

the parliamentary election held in Syria is "ludicrous", the credible elections are not possible when the country is beset by continuing violence.
"It's not really possible to hold credible elections in a climate where basic human rights are being denied to the citizens and the government is continuing to carry out daily assaults on its own citizens," he said at a regular news briefing.
"So to hold a parliamentary election in that kind of atmosphere borders on ludicrous," he added.
The Monday election, the first of its kind in Syria under a new constitution that ends the monopoly on power of President Bashar al-Assad's Baath Party and allows a multi-party system, is part of the government's reform program aimed at quelling the bloody unrest that has raged across the country since mid-March 2011.
Syrian authorities said 7,195 candidates from 12 political parties were competing for the 250 parliamentary seats. However, the main opposition groups boycotted the vote amid fighting with the government security forces.
UN observers are being deployed in Syria to monitor a ceasefire brokered by Kofi Annan, the joint UN-Arab League envoy.

UN observers in syria

The United Nations has recruited only half the 300 military observers it needs to staff its unarmed monitoring force in Syria, a cease-fire mission that one Security Council diplomat said is designed to fail.

The UN is making repeated calls to member states seeking personnel as it tries to deploy the full force by the end of May, said Herve Ladsous, Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations. The 24 monitors now deployed are tailed by Syrian police as they try to assess the cease-fire, which Ladsous said both sides are breaking.
The deployment is hindered by the acknowledgment of U.S. and other Security Council diplomats that the mission is likely to fail and that its purpose is to convince Russia and China that stronger measures, which they previously blocked, are needed to force President Bashar al-Assad to stop killing his opponents and civilians. The U.S. will not support extending the mission beyond an initial 90 days if Assad isn’t meeting his obligations, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said last month.
“The point of the mission is not for what the observers will see or do, but instead for what it will allow you to do in the coming months,” said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy group in Washington.

mali coup

The situation in Mali remains tense as neighbors threaten sanctions against the country taken over by a military junta. The coup is just one of the many destabilizing results of what has been called the African Spring, experts believe.

The junta said it began the mutiny against its government because President Toure was unable to handle the uprising of Tuareg tribes in the north of the country.

The Mali Tuareg separatists’ National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) started a rebellion in January seeking independence. The group is rumored to have members who fought in the 2011 civil war in Libya, both in Muammar Gaddafi’s army and with rebel troops. Some of the arms from Gaddafi’s depots and NATO’s supply drops ended up in their hands, which may have triggered the insurgence.

“Many of the rebels were coming back from Libya very well armed with pickup trucks and machine guns and other ammunition. Essentially it’s the failed policy of President Obama and the West together with the economic crises which are the main causes for this rebellion,” The political expert says the West’s zeal in ousting Gaddafi is now backfiring on its ally Mali.

“Mali was an area which the US put a lot of military backing into. They were trying to fight the various sources known as ‘the al-Qaeda of the Maghreb’. And then you have a low-level officer carry out a coup. So you have to wonder how strong the government was,” he said.

Lawrence says the Tuareg uprising and the military coup in Mali signify the continuation of the turmoil in the African continent. The causes of the dissent, which include staggering poverty and people’s lack of control over their lives, are still there in many African countries, regardless of whether they are Western allies or not.

Meanwhile Mali was suspended from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), an eight country alliance, following the coup. ECOWAS and the African Union sent its delegations to Mali to assess the situation there on the ground.

ECOWAS has put its troops on standby and is ready to intervene, should the situation in Mali deteriorate. Mali’s capital Bamako saw some looting and violence following the coup, but apparently the junta led by Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo has managed to whip up some public support. On Wednesday thousands of Babako residents walked its streets in support of the new leadership.

Mali’s ousted President Amadou Toumani Toure got in touch with AFP and said he was well and still in the capital.

 

china human rights

Amnesty International has documented widespread human rights violations in China. An estimated 500,000 people are currently enduring punitive detention without charge or trial, and millions are unable to access the legal system to seek redress for their grievances. Harassment, surveillance, house arrest, and imprisonment of human rights defenders are on the rise, and censorship of the Internet and other media has grown. Repression of minority groups, including Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongolians, and of Falun Gong practitioners and Christians who practice their religion outside state-sanctioned churches continues. While the recent reinstatement of Supreme People's Court review of death penalty cases may result in lower numbers of executions, China remains the leading executioner in the world.

Detention Without Trial

The authorities frequently used administrative punishments, including Re-education through Labour (RTL), to detain people without trial. According to the government, 190,000 people were held in RTL facilities, down from half a million several years ago, although the real figures were likely to be much higher. Former RTL prisoners reported that Falun Gong constituted one of the largest groups of prisoners, and political activists, petitioners and others practising their religion outside permitted bounds were common targets. The authorities used a variety of illegal forms of detention, including "black jails", "legal education classes", "study classes" and mental health institutions to detain thousands of people.

Death Penalty

China continued to make extensive use of the death penalty, including for non-violent crimes. The death sentence continued to be imposed after unfair trials. Statistics on death sentences and executions remained classified as state secrets and, while executions numbered in the thousands, the government did not release actual figures.

the drug cartels in mexico

The Zetas drug cartel gang has become the largest in Mexico after overtaking its rival Sinaloa, and now operates in more than half of country’s 32 states, a US security firm report says.
"By the end of 2011, Los Zetas eclipsed the Sinaloa Federation as the largest cartel operating in Mexico in terms of geographic presence,"  the Stratfor report published online on Tuesday said.
The Zetas operate in 17 states while the Sinaloa gang operates in 16 states, down from 23 in 2005, according to the US Assistant Attorney General's Office of Special Investigations into Organized Crime, cited in the Stratfor report.
Both these cartels have subsumed smaller groups, with Sinaloa now controlling much of western Mexico, while Zetas has reinforced its control over much of the east, the report said.
Thousands of people have died in rising drug-related violence since the government of President Felipe Calderon launched crackdown against the drug cartels five years ago.
Last year, the Mexican police were able to capture some of the senior Zetas operatives, including its founding member Flavio Mendez Santiago.
Violence is likely to continue as the government pursues its strategy, Stratfor said, underlining geographical shifts in violent areas in recent months.
Although violent, the decades-old Sinaloa gang preferred "to buy off and corrupt to achieve its objectives," while the Zetas, formed by ex-military personnel in the 1990s, "prefer brutality", the report said.
The report's authors anticipated a further spread of Mexican cartel activities in the Caribbean, Europe and Australia in 2012.

the secret assad emails

Bashar al-Assad took advice from Iran on how to handle the uprising against his rule, according to a cache of what appear to be several thousand emails received and sent by the Syrian leader and his wife.
The Syrian leader was also briefed in detail about the presence of western journalists in the Baba Amr district of Homs and urged to "tighten the security grip" on the opposition-held city in November.
The revelations are contained in more than 3,000 documents that activists say are emails downloaded from private accounts belonging to Assad and his wife Asma.
The messages, which have been obtained by the Guardian, are said to have been intercepted by members of the opposition Supreme Council of the Revolution group between June and early February.
The documents, which emerge on the first anniversary of the rebellion that has seen more than 8,000 Syrians killed, paint a portrait of a first family remarkably insulated from the mounting crisis and continuing to enjoy a luxurious lifestyle.
They appear to show the president's wife spending thousands of dollars over the internet for designer goods while he swaps entertaining internet links on his iPad and downloads music from iTunes.
As the world watched in horror at the brutal suppression of protests across the country and many Syrians faced food shortages and other hardships, Mrs Assad spent more than £10,000 on candlesticks, tables and chandeliers from Paris and instructed an aide to order a fondue set from Amazon.
The Guardian has made extensive efforts to authenticate the emails by checking their contents against established facts and contacting 10 individuals whose correspondence appears in the cache. These checks suggest the messages are genuine, but it has not been possible to verify every one.

protests in moscow against vladimir putin

Thousands of Russians streamed through metal detectors for hours, past camouflaged trucks and under the whirring blades of a helicopter, to join a mass protest against Vladimir Putin's official return to the Kremlin.

They were furious and frustrated. Gone were the lighthearted slogans and costumes that had thus far marked the protests that exploded in Moscow in December and carried through Russia's presidential vote on Sunday.

A few held white flowers, a symbol of the peaceful movement. Their white ribbons, until now emblazoned with words like "For a Putin-less Russia", hung bare.
Many protesters had hoped to force Putin into a second round, proving that Russia's longtime leader had indeed lost the support of the heartland.
Instead they were met with an official result of nearly 64% for Putin, buoyed, election monitors say, by massive fraud. Russia's elections chief, Vladimir Churov, called the vote the "most honest in the world".
"It's not just about falsifications," said Ivan, 65, an office manager, explaining why he turned out on a workday to stand for two hours in wet, windy snow. "I want our country to be democratic. I want to be led not by crooks and thieves, but by normal people. I want society to democratise, to allow different parties to take part in elections, to allow different people into the presidential election. I want them to stop robbing the country."
To the 20,000 people who turned out for the protest, Putin wasn't a president, but a tsar. "These weren't presidential elections – it was a succession to the throne," read one large sign held high above protesters' heads.
Opposition leaders, taking to a stage constructed in the shadow of Alexander Pushkin, Russia's most revered poet, refused, one by one, to recognise a president they denounced as "illegitimate".
"I've heard that a lot of people are disappointed," opposition leader Alexey Navalny shouted from the stage. "Did you expect something different from these crooks and thieves? They robbed us."