America

Since President Barack Obama’s historic Cuba visit on March 20, some are speculating about whether he can pressure Cuba to improve its human rights. A comparison of Cuba’s human rights record with that of the United States, however, shows that the America should be taking lessons from Cuba, says Marjorie Cohn. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights contains two different categories of human rights – civil and political rights on the one hand; and economic, social and cultural rights on the other.

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has told a gathering in Salt Lake City that America is now a poor ‘third world country’ with infrastructure that is ancient compared to other countries. AlAlam reports: “We have become a third world country, folks!,” Trump told supporters at an election rally. “If you go to places like Dubai, China, you look at the roads, at the rail roads, they have the bullet trains that go 100s of miles an hour. And if you go to New York, they’re like 100 years ago,” he said.

Donald Trump is going to make America great again. But you already knew that.

The question many voters have, is how exactly he plans to do it. The frontrunner has thrown some rather vague ideas out there, some of which focus on trade. Everyone has by now heard the “Trump stump”: “We don’t win anymore. We’re getting killed on trade. We make terrible deals. We’re losing to China.”

Submitted by Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg

Least transparent administration ever. The Associated Press reports:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration set a record for the number of times its federal employees told disappointed citizens, journalists and others that despite searching they couldn’t find a single page requested under the Freedom of Information Act, according to a new Associated Press analysis of government data.

 

Siberia (the non-academic version). Image via Shutterstock.

“Forget what the Right says,” the headline instructs me: things aren’t so bad for conservatives in the academy. Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn, Sr. write,