Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, two of the most prominent human rights non-governmental organizations in the world, have called upon the UN to suspend Saudi Arabia’s membership on the UN Human Rights Council until Saudi military action in Yemen is stopped. An earlier move in the UN to blacklist the Saudi coalition in Yemen failed after Saudi Arabia applied tremendous pressure on the Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon. We will have to see if this move is more effective.
The Guardian has a short video of one of the leaders of the Brexit movement, Nigel Farage, giving a speech to the European Parliament. Farage is the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party but he was also elected as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP). I highly recommend the video because it rather dramatically highlights the extreme depths of incivility that has characterized the Brexit debate. It also makes me feel a little better to know that Donald Trump is not the only asshole in politics.
Among neoconservative analysts of world politics, there is a sense that a war between the US and China is almost inevitable. The argument is that rising powers almost always clash with status quo powers as the balance of power undergoes a re-calibration. The neoconservatives refer to Thucydides and his explanation for the “inevitable” war between Athens and Sparta. Richard Ned Lebow and Daniel P. Tompkins raise some excellent reasons to doubt this line of analysis.
World Politics News 
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