John Metzler

Following the Taliban’s lightning takeover of Afghanistan and America’s humiliating withdrawal, the remote South Asian country soon morphed into the political netherworld.

The setting is remote. The players are highly improbable. Yet in the deep and forgotten forests along the Belorussian/Polish frontier, thousands of migrants from far off Syria, Iraq, and even Afghanistan are massing and milling trying to enter Poland.

The ongoing global COVID pandemic combined with a shroud of secrecy and indifference has hidden the fast-deteriorating human rights situation in North Korea.

Here we go again; Another military coup in Sudan.

China’s ongoing human rights abuses against its Muslim minority in Xinjiang have again been chastised by a key UN committee. Forty-three countries strongly condemned the Beijing regime’s widespread human rights violations against the Uyghur minority in what has become a systematic state policy in China’s western Xinjiang region.

Beijing’s communists are good at bullying; look at political crackdowns in prosperous Hong Kong, the suppression of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, and of course China’s ongoing military harassment of Taiwan, a democratically ruled island which the communists claim as part of the People’s Republic of China.

We all remember where we were on September 11, 2001. We all remember with sheer disbelief watching the unfolding horror and the realization that “it could happen here.”

Sadly, we have seen this movie before. In the Spring of 1975, the collapse of South Vietnam coming to crescendo with the fall of Saigon indelibly marking a generation.

Cuba’s ongoing political and social upheaval has shocked many observers as a sudden and intense summer storm. Across the island in small towns and provincial centers protests erupted like a squall line until reaching the capital Havana.

It’s summertime and the living is easy, as the old song goes. And vacations both domestic and international should be surging despite dark pandemic clouds still shrouding parts of the world.

Amid pomp, pageantry and proletarian parades, China’s President Xi Jinping kicked off festivities celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Communist Party of China (CCP).

Were there great expectations for the summit meeting in Geneva between President Joe Biden and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin?

Economic growth is making a long-awaited rebound after the height of the global pandemic; yet the recovery is still shadowed by serious and ongoing concerns overactive Corona virus outbreaks and the danger of flareups on the international scene.

Though Beijing is usually able to control or stifle the narrative inside the United Nations and many of its Committees, the oxygen of free speech on the taboo topic of human rights of China’s Muslim minority was able to seep through and be heard.

This didn’t have to happen. But blame toxic politics, the living legacy of the populist Peronist era, and the tipping point of the Corona pandemic, and you discover what is unraveling Argentina’s socio/economic fabric.