Terry Glavin

“The kleptocracy overseen by Chinese President Xi Jinping is more vicious and brutally anti-democratic than any regime run by any clique the Chinese Communist Party's ruling elite has vomited up since the days of Mao Zedong.”

“Back in 2010, it didn't matter when it was only Cuban democrats, Zimbabwean dissidents, Afghan reformists and Russian bloggers whose lives and liberty were put at risk by Wikileaks' wilfully negligent data dumps.”

“If you rely on a more conventional understanding of the term 'left-wing' as being associated with gradations of socialism in the emancipation of the working class, the Leap Manifesto looks something more along the lines of what the great British socialist and essayist George Orwell was on about in 'The Road to Wigan Pier' in 1937.”

“The anti-war politicians who have risen to power in Washington, London, Ottawa and Brussels have never had to explain why they were offering the persecuted people of Iraq nothing that was in any way more useful to them than the shoddy, outrageously ill-planned intervention that was on offer from Blair and Bush back in 2003.”

“Among the fables that inspired the British Admiralty's cartographic assignments to Captain James Cook in the 1770s and Captain George Vancouver in the 1790s was a 1640 account under the name of Bartholomew de Fonte that appeared in a journal with the delightful title 'The Monthly Miscellany, or Memoirs for the Curious.'”

“During the post-Soviet anarchy and the rush for the spoils of war, Hekmatyar spent most of his time between 1992 and 1996 raining rockets and artillery shells on the people of Kabul, leaving the city a smoking tomb of as many as 50,000 corpses.”

“A former Erdogan ally, Gulen has been living in self-imposed exile in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, since 1999.”

“It has been almost three years since U.S. President Barack Obama pipsqueaked on his chemical-weapons 'red line' in Syria and joined with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin in the pantomime that resulted in the Sept. 27, 2013 U.N. Security Council Resolution 2118, which called on Assad to surrender his chemical weapons stockpile.”

“Chia Chang, the Washington correspondent for the privately owned Taipei news organization 'United Daily News,' was told to leave the ICAO building after producing a Taiwanese passport to ICAO media accreditation officials. Canada recognizes Taiwanese passports. Beijing does not.”

“Argentina has elected a centre-right president, Mauricio Macri. Bolivia's Evo Morales, having lost a referendum that would have allowed him a fourth presidential term, spends his time muttering about CIA plots and issuing threats to jail journalists who persist in reporting influence-peddling scandals. The economy is a sputtering shambles.”

“It isn't true, in any conventional meaning of the term, that the United States or its NATO partners 'invaded' Afghanistan.”

“Xi has made plain that he will no longer tolerate hearing the words 'human rights' spoken out loud in the same sentence with the word 'China.'”

“Disaffection, alienation and conspiracy theories are commonplace among European Muslims, but dangerous Islamist radicalism and the Islamic State's 'foreign fighter' recruitment successes tend to be specific to certain European towns, districts and ghettos.”

“Roughly nine of every 10 Syrian war dead since 2011 are on the butcher's bill accumulated by Assad and his friends in Iran's Quds Force, the Iran-allied Hezbollah, and the Russian air force.”

“The 'SAMS' study, titled 'A New Normal: Ongoing Chemical Weapons Attacks in Syria', reveals that the Assad regime merely switched from sarin gas to chlorine gas in its bombardment of civilians areas.”

“The overwhelming majority of Afghans are not tribal, and they're not Pashtun.”

“'The world's wealthiest failed state,' as it has come to be known, Belgium endured 589 days without a functioning elected government between June 2010 and December 2011 and remains a dysfunctional, linguistically divided waxworks of one federal and five regional-cultural parliaments.”

“While Labour Party orators readily remember the 1980s for Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's free-booting variety of entrepreneurial meritocracy, what gets forgotten is that Thatcher also gave the heave-ho to the old establishment's notion of merit - good breeding, a posh school, and so on.”

“It was in Dara'a that Syria's non-violent democratic movement had begun in 2011, with schoolboys scrawling on a wall: 'The people want to topple the regime.'”

“The term 'meritocracy' was coined by socialist theoretician Michael Young, who crafted the party's 1945 election manifesto.”