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| Syria Uprising |
 IN
an interview with The Wall Street Journal in January, Syria´s
president, Bashar al Assad, said that his main objective was
to address his people´s "closed-mindedness".
He made it clear that this alone impeded reform, and it might
be another generation before Syria is ready for real change.
Dictators (including Assad´s father, Hafez) have long
presented themselves as suppressors of extremism in the region
generally, and Syria in particular. They said democracy would
usher in fundamentalists inherently opposed to modernity, civil
dialogue, international community legitimacy and civilised human
political and economic relations. Perhaps because of this fear... |
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| THE POWER OF MOCKERY |
| THE juiciest story behind the Middle East
uprisings doesn´t concern Colonel Moamer Qadhafi´s
"voluptuous" Ukrainian nurse or CIA bags of cash.
Rather, it´s the tale of how a nonviolent revolutionary
strategy crafted by Serbian students and an octogenarian American
scholar came to challenge dictators in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain
and many other countries. This "uprising in a bottle"
blueprint was developed by the Serbian youth movement, Otpor,
to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. One of Otpor´s
insights was that the most effective weapon against dictators
isn´t bombs or fiery speeches. It´s mockery. Otpor
activists once put Milosevic´s picture on a barrel that
they rolled down the street, inviting people to hit it with
a bat. Otpor´s strategy mirrors... |
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Australians prefer Rudd to PM Gillard
AFP
SYDNEY MOST Australians would prefer former leader Kevin Rudd to return as prime minister instead of Julia Gillard staying in the top job, a poll released on Monday showed.
The Nielsen/Herald survey showed that Rudd, who was dumped by Gillard in a brutal and sudden Labor Party coup last June, led his former deputy 55 percent to 38 percent in a head-to-head match-up for preferred prime minister.
“The former prime minister has redeemed himself in the eyes of voters,” the Sydney Morning Herald said in a page one story.
Gillard was comfortably ahead of conservative opposition leader Tony Abbott (50 percent to 42 percent) and tracking slightly better than Rudd at the time of his ousting when he dropped to just 41 percent approval.
But the poll of 1,400 voters underlined dissatisfaction with Gillard, with respondents for the first time more likely to say they disapproved of the prime minister’s performance than approved by 50 percent to 45 percent.
The poll said support for Labor was the lowest it had been in 15 years.
The Labor government, in which Rudd now serves as foreign minister, would win only 44 percent of the vote compared to the opposition Liberal/National coalition’s 56 percent if an election had been held last weekend, it said.
The poll is the latest to serve as a warning to Labor that the electorate is uncertain about its decision to press ahead with a tax on carbon emissions, a policy the opposition has said it will reverse if elected.
It found that while 34 percent of Australians support the scheme designed to curb Australia’s carbon pollution, opposition to a carbon price had risen three points since the previous month’s survey to 59 percent.
Gillard’s government has also promised tough budget cuts when it announces national finances on May 10, as it draws back spending in a bid to balance the books by 2012-2013.
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