The protests in Ukraine have rattled financial markets as holders of Ukrainian bonds fear that the instability of the government has made their investments much riskier. As many as 350,000 people protested in the main city of Kiev demanding a general strike and the overthrow of the government of President Yanukovich. Much of the anti-government sentiment is due to the perception that Yanukovich has moved much too close to Russia and Valdimir Putin. Putin was in Armenia and said that the protests have little to do with anti-Russian or Pro-EU sentiments, but rather are the product of intra-Ukrainian politics.
The United Nations Commissioner on Human Rights, Navi Pillay, has accused Syrian President Assad of authorizing war crimes. This is the first time that the UN has accused Assad directly of criminal behavior. The death toll in the more than two years of fighting in Syria has reached 125,000, about a third of whom are civilians. Pillay referred to both war crimes and crimes against humanity which are two of the three conditions supposed to invoke the “Responsibility to Protect.” Unfortunately, there was no movement in the UN Security Council to protect the people of Syria.
Iranian Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, is engaged in an intense diplomatic foray to the Persian Gulf Arab states, trying to mollify their fears of the nuclear agreement Iran signed with the P5+1. The effort is a rather dramatic turnaround from the diplomacy of the last 30 years in which relations between the Sunni Arab states and the Shia Persian state of Iran have been negligible. It is hard to believe that an Iranian-Saudi rapprochement is possible, but a nuclear agreement between Iran and the US was also hard to imagine.
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