An old argument over the compatibility of Islam and democracy is being transformed under the influence of new social and intellectual currents. The external advocates of democracy in the Muslim world should take note, says Asef Bayat of OpenDemocracy.
Staff reporter Gene Kerrigan has been through New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Illinois and New York on the campaign trail of Senator Edward Kennedy.
It's a state convention of trade unionists in Massachusetts. The keynote speaker is Senator Edward Kennedy. He leaps to the rostrum and delivers a rousing populist oration, not at all in the idiom of these conservative times. He concludes with an impassioned plea for the cause he has made his own: national health insurance.
Huge oil revenues have destabilised one of the world's most corrupt and repressive regimes, as communists and clerics have joined to topple the Shah.
The gunshots that cut down Presiident Kennedy 15 years ago still echo through American history, still haunt the national imagination. In the weeks and months after the murder President Johnson urged the Warren Commission towards its definitive verrdict. That commission, which included congressman - later President - Jerry Ford, reviewed the testimony of hunndreds of people. Among them were Marina Oswald, Governor John Connally and Mrs. Connally who had been in the same car as Kennedy himself. The Commmission, as we all know, concluded that Oswald was the lone assassin.
Ten years after the assassination of Robert Kennedy his career is examined in the light of a newly published biography by Arthur Schleisinger Jr.
THERE IS WAR today, right across Africa's desert regions, from the Western Sahara on the Atlantic to Somalia on the Indian Ocean. It is as if some subterranean fault was causing the continent to crack along its political seams. The wars in Western Sahara, where a liberation struggle is being fought against the Mauritian and Moroccan Governments, and in Chad, represent the resistance of nomads to political settlements which they resent. The wars there are being fought at a fairly primitive level. What is going on in Ethiopia is quite different.
On the 80th Anniversary of the Petrograd Rising should we celebrate the Russian Revolution. By Paul Foot
DESPITE THE prospect of further American troop withdrawals from Vietnam, it seems clear that American involvement in the area will continue long beyond any settlement reached in Saigon. Recent events in Laos, Cambodia and Thailand underline the American need for strong, vehemently anti-communist regimes in IndoChinese capitals. And Thailand, rather than Vietnam, is the lynchpin to this policy.
THE RECENT HYSTERICAL outbursts about Maoism in Ireland suggest that an influential and large group of Chinese Communists are on the brink of a power take-overleading to this country's ensnarement inside the bamboo enclave. A cooler appraisal of the strength of Maoism here suggests a less optimistic or pessimistic (depending on your viewpoint) situation.