Daily News Channel
If human rights workers and journalists are ever allowed into the besieged southern Syrian city of Dara’a near the Jordanian border, what horrors will they find? Syrians always had good reason to avoid rebelling against their authoritarian regime, ignoring early calls to join the Arab Spring.
Polls closed across Indonesia on Wednesday after citizens cast ballots to elect their next president and vice president. Preliminary election results were expected within a few hours, with official results expected no sooner than next week. Indonesia has 175 million registered voters spread over 17,000 islands.
Ever since Josef Fritzl, the authoritarian patriarch of a sprawling family in the north Austrian town of Amstetten, was discovered to have imprisoned his daughter as a sex slave in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her, Austria has been locked in an emotional debate over what could cause such a crime. Some have claimed Fritzl’s sadism to be a vestige of Nazism’s moral corruption, others that the psychological strain of living for years under the threat of nuclear destruction was to blame.