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" It should tell you something that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency invented the Taliban in the early 1990s only because Hekmatyar, its primary U.S.-bankrolled proxy in the war for control of Afghanistan, had proved too bloodthirsty after the Soviets withdrew, even by the low standards of the ISI's ghastly generals in Rawalpindi. "

Terry Glavin

You

Intelligence

" 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. "

Terry Glavin

Communist

Days

" The IIP had to be folded up by the Harper Conservatives after it became clear - and as it took the 'South China Morning Post's Ian Young to reveal - that Canada's ragged refugee-class immigrants had contributed more to Revenue Canada than the IIP's big-spender immigrant investors did over the life of the program. "

" 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 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. "

" Obama has refused to equip, or to arm, any rebel groups fighting Assad or his forces. "

" Balkh is now little more than a sleepy Afghan town of overgrown ruins forgotten by the world. On market day, down lanes that wind through apple orchards and cherry orchards, merchants slowly make their way to the central bazaar, their wares teetering on donkey carts. "

" There is often little to distinguish what Beijing wants from what Canada's foreign affairs mandarins want out of the Canada-China relationship, which is in any case rarely even close to what Canadians want - like some demonstrable public benefit for once, the opinion polls consistently show. "

" Patrick Pearse - who set the events of 1916 in motion when he read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin - is not exactly an unfamiliar name to the Miramichi Irish. "

" There is much in the result of John Chilcot's seven-year inquiry into the decision-making that led to Britain's involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq that can be cited to excuse headlines that refer to his findings as 'scathing' and 'damning.' "

" It's known as the Livingstone Formulation. It's a cunning rhetorical device routinely deployed to shield avowedly left-wing establishment figures from any scrutiny that might expose their 'anti-Zionist' obsessions as redolent of a bigotry of that older and more unambiguously unsanitary type: antisemitism. "

Terry Glavin

Older

Shield

" Conceived as a short-term remedy to the occasional ailment of acute labour shortages in key industries, the indentured-labour service had to be dismantled by the Conservatives owing to its inevitably scandalous abuse by disreputable employers. By 2012, there were 338,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada. "

" After 9/11, Hekmatyar helped Osama bin Laden escape from the mountains of Tora Bora into Pakistan, and then decamped to Iran, until his presence there became a bit too inconvenient. "

" On Sept. 20, 2011, a year after I spoke with Rabanni, a couple of Taliban emissaries arrived at his Kabul fortress with a gift for his 71st birthday. It turned out not to be the truce offering they had claimed they were bringing: one of the Talibs had a bomb hidden in his turban. "

" 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.' "

" It is an intellectual and moral vacuity that has crippled what the World Social Forum's founders sincerely hoped would produce some sort of democratic alternative to what they saw as the heartless corporate model of globalization. "

" Trudeau claims he's wary about Chinese espionage, but also says there's nothing wrong with Chinese state-owned enterprises buying up as much of Canada's resource sector as it likes. "

Terry Glavin

Canada

Buying

" The United States is NATO's leading military power, and President Barack Obama has required NATO to align behind a doctrine that has amounted to the most disastrous American foreign-policy debacle since Vietnam. "

" Under Xi, China has again become the world's top jailer of journalists. China's rank on the Reporters Without Borders index of press freedom is 176th out of 180 countries. China comes in dead last on the Freedom House 'Freedom on the Net' list. "

" 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.' "

" The CUAG specializes in providing support to Chinese human rights lawyers. "

" As late as 2009, 90 per cent of Afghans reckoned Karzai's performance was excellent, good or fair. "

" Remotely operated aircraft have been on the Canadian Forces' wish list since the 1990s. Trials of a variety of drone prototypes began at the Canadian Forces Experimentation Centre in 2002. "

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

" It was less in pity than in anger that the world was moved by the photograph of little Alan Kurdi, that dead three-year-old Syrian refugee boy whose name we're all remembering now on the first anniversary of his drowning, along with his five-year-old brother Galip and their mother Rehanna. "

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

" Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson has been resorting to the 'It's racism' dodge for years now in order to shut down scrutiny of his determined inattention to the catastrophe of Vancouver's housing crisis. "

" It wasn't until the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was ratified by the United Nations in 1948 that Lemkin's proposed law was given at least the appearance of force and effect. "

" A notorious network of violent Islamist hoodlums, concentrated in the rough-and-tumble district of Molenbeek in Brussels, has been operating in plain sight since the 1990s, planning, plotting and carrying out dozens of elaborate jihadi missions from Afghanistan to Algeria. "

" The Canadian economy relies on foreign trade. Nearly three-quarters of Canada's exports go south. "

Terry Glavin

Trade

Economy