It might help to know that in Afghanistan citizenship papers and birth certificates and the official registration of births and deaths are the exotica of faraway places. One is born 'in the time of the pomegranate harvest' or some such thing or one's birthdate is recorded as the first day of the year if you are even aware of the year you were born.
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.
It's true that since 9/11, the application of conventional military rules of engagement has gotten a bit foggy. The Taliban were not an 'enemy state,' but the Canadian Forces conducted its operations in Afghanistan as though the rules of war applied anyway.
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.
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.
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.
Chinese President Xi Jinping says that if Canada wants free access to Chinese markets, Trudeau should first ram a pipeline to the B.C. coast on China's behalf.
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 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.
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.
The Haavara agreement allowed the escape of well-to-do German Jews in exchange for the liquidation of their property and the purchase and export of German goods to break the boycott of Germany's Nazi-controlled economy.
The term 'meritocracy' was coined by socialist theoretician Michael Young, who crafted the party's 1945 election manifesto.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
About 3,500 years ago, when a patriarch called Moses was supposed to be leading a tribe of Seth's descendants out of the deserts of the Sinai Peninsula, another tribe of shepherds and pastoralists had already established a small kingdom for itself at Balkh.
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.
To fans of British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, the Chilcot report should be read as a kind of Rorschach test - those experiments psychiatrists sometimes use to determine what their patients imagine they are seeing in the shapes of inkblots.
