Politics

NOVANEWS By Sajjad Shaukat Although rampant corruption in Pakistan has continued by damaging the social and institutional fabric of the country, yet it has again come into limelight, after the massive leak of secret documents from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, which were released on April 3, this year. The level of tax avoidance and money laundering, disclosed in the Panama Papers Leaks run into the several hundreds of billions of dollars, points out the details and names of hundreds of powerful and leading persons across the world. Some countries have announced investigation, while in some countries, the opposition parties and the people are conducting protests, after the revelations of corruption, money laundering, and financial secrecy in relation to their nations. Icelan...

NOVANEWS By John Chuckman In truth, there is no such thing as a right. The last three centuries or so of European history developed the concept and fixed it in our minds as something real and many modern states have enumerated lists of rights, but, in the limit, the concept of rights has no force behind it. Words on paper mean nothing when those with real power in your society decide that the words are only that, words. Judges have no power to direct where the society’s power is unwilling to cooperate. Apart from what has happened at various times in a number of European countries, the ability simply to switch off rights has been demonstrated many times in America’s history, and there can be little doubt that dimming down and gradually switching off rights now has become a central acti...

Anthony Banbury In the run-up to the election of a new secretary general this year, it is essential that governments think carefully about what they want out of the United Nations. The organization is a Remington typewriter in a smartphone world. If it is going to advance the causes of peace, human rights, development and the climate, it needs a leader genuinely committed to reform. I have worked for the United Nations for most of the last three decades. I was a human rights officer in Haiti in the 1990s and served in the former Yugoslavia during the Srebrenica genocide. I helped lead the response to the Indian Ocean tsunami and the Haitian earthquake, planned the mission to eliminate Syrian chemical weapons, and most recently led the Ebola mission in West Afric...

 NOVANEWS Frank Watkins There is no question whether the Bank's institutionalized, widespread and sustained racial discrimination and systemic denial of due process against an entire group of people is a crime. Whether it is a crime against a group of people or a crime against humanity may be debatable in theory. But in practice, the difference is indistinguishable to the victims. I am a white man of 73 years of age, born and raised in the thick of Jim Crow era where state and local laws enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. As a civil rights advocate since my high-school years, I have seen racism in all its complexities and simplicities, as well as in its raw cruelties and refined subtleties. To hear firsthand the harrowing discrimination that...

NOVANEWS By Gilad Atzmon  If terrorism is the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims then to surrender to terror is to become a terrorist To surrender to terror is to retaliate using violence and genocidal tactics in the pursuit of Globalist political aims But the West can’t become a terrorist For the West was already a terrorist For decades we have been using violence and genocidal tactics against Muslims in the name of Coca Cola and Zion To fight terrorism for real is to say NO to an ‘eye for an eye’ To defeat terrorism is to turn the other cheek To eliminate terrorism is to look at ourselves and ask why? Why do they hate us? What did we do to deserve all this? To beat terrorism is to depart from Jerusalem and return to Athens Can we do that or must we emancip...

NOVANEWS By Jay Stanley  Last year I wrote about “acting and directing with police body cameras” — how police officers are likely to increasingly learn to manipulate the photographic record that their cameras create. A stark case study in that kind of manipulation can be found in video of a 2014 arrest in Florida that was released in January and recently came to my attention. It’s the kind of video that everyone should watch in order to become sophisticated and properly skeptical consumers of video evidence. There are two videos of the arrest: footage from a nearby surveillance camera, and footage from a body camera worn by one of the officers. I could describe the video but it’s short, so I suggest you just watch it before reading further. A local NBC affiliate produced this 70-second pr...