In an interview with Katie Couric broadcast Tuesday, Republican presidential candidate John McCain said that "I would much rather lose a campaign than lose a war. Sen. Obama has indicated that by his failure to acknowledge the success of the surge (in Iraq), that he would rather lose a war than lose a campaign."
The rather desperate comments by McCain result from a week been outshone by Obama's state-like reception in Europe and Iraq.
While Mr. Obama was shown striding across military tarmacs and inspecting troops standing at attention, Mr. McCain on Monday was seen being driven around in a golf cart by former President George Bush in the resort town of Kennebunkport, Me. Later, the two men spoke to reporters side by side at a waterfront, and they looked more like fellow members of a Past Presidents’ Club than a party elder passing the torch to his political heir.
In the video below, first broadcast on Fox July 17, Naomi makes the point that Bush is using the oil crisis to push through controversial legislation in a similar manner to his exploitation of the fear generated by the 911 terrorist attacks.
Dozens of rights groups are urging the President of Belarus not to sign in a new media law that will impose curbs on the Internet, one of the few remaining sources of independent information left in the country.
The bill, which won final approval in the lower house of Parliament on 24 June and was passed by the upper house last weekend, requires that all Internet sites originating in Belarus be registered with the government, say the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ) and other press freedom groups. Many independent newspapers that the authorities closed down have made a presence on the Internet.
Foreign Policy in Focus writer Laura Carlsen dissects the North American Free Trade Agreement
About every six months or so, the media provide a fleeting show of North American unity. Whether on the shores of the Mexican Caribbean, the forests of Quebec, or the hurricane-torn streets of New Orleans, the script is pretty much the same. It includes a lot of back-slapping and almost no public information.
Russia has today reiterated its opposition to US plans to deploy missile defences in eastern Europe. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said the results of recent Iranian missile tests proved that a defence shield in Europe was unnecesarry to protect the US from rogue (ie Iran) states.
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