p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px ‘Times New Roman’; color: #333333; -webkit-text-stroke: #333333} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px ‘Times New Roman’; color: #333333; -webkit-text-stroke: #333333; min-height: 15.0px} p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px ‘Times New Roman’; color: #0000ff; -webkit-text-stroke: #0000ff} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} span.s2 {text-decoration: underline ; font-kerning: none; color: #0000ff; -webkit-text-stroke: 0px #0000ff} span.s3 {text-decoration: underline ; font-kerning: none} After an election like this, even the faintest of whisper of hope from the Hillary Clinton campaign is enough to send supports (and opponents) into a frenzy. And Clinton may have done just that, giving her official support to a recount effort in…

Site of the Erawan Shrine bombing, Bangkok. Lillian Suwanrumpha/Demotix. All rights reserved.More than a week after Bangkok was rocked by what the Prime Minister called “the worst incident that has ever happened in Thailand”, in which at least 22 people lost their lives and scores were injured after a remotely detonated 3kg pipe bomb went off at a popular Hindu shrine, the country’s authorities are getting nowhere close to solving the whys and whos behind the attack. Caught between sprawling governmental corruption, lack of “CSI technology”, broken CCTV cameras, the absence of any claim of responsibility for the bombing, and armed with only a blurry image of a yellow-shirted male suspect lingering around…

Last night, during a live broadcast of the American Music Awards on ABC, punk legends Green Day performed their latest single “Bang, Bang,” as scheduled. But they surprised ABC reps by adding a special message for president-elect Donald Trump in the middle of the song. According to TMZ, ABC reps were thrown “completely off guard” when the band broke into a chant of “No Trump! No KKK! No fascist USA!” during the song’s breakdown, inspiring a standing ovation after the band’s performance. The chant Green Day incorporated is a call back to a 1982 song called “Born to Die” by the hardcore group M.D.C. The song was inspired by a clash…

After 100 days in office, President Trump is off to one of the weakest starts in presidential history. His big initiatives are going nowhere and he’s less popular than any president in the modern era. But his inability to deliver on key campaign promises, or win over a skeptical public, is actually part of a historical norm that has haunted every president since the Roosevelt White House first implemented the First 100 Days marker way back in 1933 as a means to reassure Americans suffering through the Great Depression. It turns out that every president in the modern era: Trump, Obama and all the rest, walk into the White House…

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad/Getty Images. All rights reserved. When the US invaded Iraq in 2003 it subsequently disbanded the country’s army, dismantled its security infrastructure and instituted an extensive set of occupation policies, all apparently geared at making it the main political, security and economic actor in the country. The consequences of those early policies and actions have radically transformed Iraq over the past few years, effectively turning it into a theatre for the playing out of domestic and regional contestations. One such emerging struggle over the future of Iraq, particularly for the devout Shi’a both inside and without the country, has been tracked by what has since happened to Iraq’s revered…

#rebuildingtrust  The Vienna Policy Conference, October 29-30, 2015, will delve into one of the most important trends driving change in European politics: the dramatic drop in public trust in many political institutions. Policy researchers, activists, leading European thinkers, and political figures will discuss new research and analysis of the causes and consequences of the trust gap across the European continent. Debating Europe and openDemocracy will be covering the event and its follow-up, and we continue the series with the perspective of Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, principal investigator in a report on integrity and trust in Europe for the 2017 Dutch EU presidency. Boris Johnson and Roger Gifford launch Lord Mayor's Summer Cycle Challenge, 2013. Flickr/ MichaelBowles/Rex…

You don’t have to search very hard to find critics of Donald Trump’s recent attorney general pick, Jeff Sessions. Throughout his career, allegations of both casual and systematic racism have surrounded his policies and actions. The same could be said (with a much larger degree of certainty) of career politician and avowed klansman David Duke, who recently endorsed Sessions’ appointment on Twitter:  Having proven recently that he’s not one to shy away from speaking out on social media, even at the expense of his fan base, Captain America portrayer Chris Evans responded to this alignment of ideas, suggesting that a David Duke endorsement goes a long way to revealing where your values…

HMS Artful. Defence Images/BAE Systems/Flickr. Some rights reserved.An accelerating debate over Britain's nuclear-weapons policy has focused on the government's plan to replace the existing, Vanguard-class Trident ballistic-missile submarines with the Successor-class. A decision to go ahead with the programme, which will take many years to complete and eventually cost around £150 billion, is likely to be made later this year. More recently a new ingredient has emerged to complicate matters: whether the world’s oceans are becoming transparent through new detection technologies, which could make the new submarines obsolete before they are even launched. The very suggestion brings heated denials from government sources. But the issue will not go away and…

With daily violence, punitive curfews and escalating tensions, you would be forgiven for mistaking the current war between the Turkish government and the PKK for that of twenty years ago. Since the ceasefire was ended in July, hundreds have been killed on both sides with the new rounds of bloodshed. Prospects for peace, which had been seemingly within reach after two years of calm, have all but disappeared. With each killing from either side, a new score has to be settled; in the end this vicious cycle will continue unabated as it has done for the past three decades. A contentious curfew in the Kurdish town of Cizre was finally…

In an interview with TODAY’s Matt Lauer on Monday, former President George W. Bush weighed in on Donald Trump’s first month in office, covering his immigration ban, Trump’s assault on the media, and Russian involvement in the election. Spoiler alert: It was not a glowing review, to say the least.    Right off the bat, Bush criticized Trump’s attack on highly respected news outlets, saying media is “indispensable to democracy.” He added, “We need an independent media to hold people like me to account,” additionally telling Lauer, “Power can be very addictive and it can be corrosive, and it’s important for the media to call to account people who abuse their…