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The Nation has a powerful editorial on Bush's America.

World opinion is against it. The American people are against it. The Democratic Party is against it. The Congress of the United States is against it. The Iraq Study Group is against it. The Iraqi people are against it. The Iraqi government is against it. Many Republican lawmakers are against it. The top brass are against it. But George W. Bush is going to do it: send 21,500 more troops into Iraq. Can a single man force a nation to fight a war it does not want to fight, expand a war it does not want to expand--possibly to other countries? If he can, is that nation any longer a democracy in any meaningful sense? Is its government any longer a constitutional republic? If not, how can democratic rule and the republican form of government be restored? These are the unwelcome questions that President Bush's decision has forced on the country.


Hrant Dink murder in Turkey last week, was shocking.

Hrant Dink was at the forefront of efforts in Turkey to shatter the long taboo surrounding the fate of the Ottoman Armenians. It remains one of the most sensitive issues in Turkey today.

A Turkish citizen of Armenian descent, the newspaper editor openly challenged the official Turkish denial that the mass killing of Armenians by Turks during World War I was genocide.

"Hrant Dink was killed because he was Armenian first, and second because he had the courage to write, think and speak differently to the crowd," Ismet Berkan wrote in Radikal daily this weekend. He argued that Turkey's streets today were filled with nationalist wolves.

The current issue of the The New Yorker has a Letter from Moscow, titled Kremlin, Inc Why are Vladimir Putin’s opponents dying? By Michael Specter.

The article talks about the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who wrote about the terror in the Southern Republic of Chechnya. This was followed earlier by the poisoning of investigate reporter Yuri Shchekochikhin, who wrote on the mafia, tax evasion and links of the F.S.B. with the old K.G.B. The list is not limited to journalists but includes politicians like Victor Yushchenko and the imprisonment of Yukos owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Putin an old KGB man, has passed a law that allows Russians to kill opponents abroad. Propaganda has became more sophisticated, TV is used to support the Kremlin and its corporate interests. Putin likes to project Russia as a haven of stability. But the situation on the ground is quite different. There is an AIDS epidemic sweeping the country, alcoholism is rampant among all sections of society, along with vast differences in income among Russian citizens.