Last weekend, Clive Stafford Smith, the Director of the legal action charity Reprieve, travelled to Sudan to meet the recently released al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj. He had been represented by Reprieve since 2005 and was now a free man. This is an edited version of Clive’s report, which includes a passage specifically refuting Pentagon claims that Mr al-Haj, who had been on a hunger strike for 16 months prior to his release, and was taken to a hospital on his arrival in Sudan, “seemed like a healthy individual” as he departed from Guantánamo.
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The game looks pretty much up for Hillary Clinton now, as John Zogby makes plain. Lawyers notwithstanding, the hope of seating the ‘lost’ delegates of Michigan and Florida to pull the margin back to under 100 is a pipedream. George McGovern is the first major figure to call on Clinton to stand down. And if Barack Obama can get promises from 40-50 ’super-delegates‘ in the next day or so, the race for the Democratic nomination should be over.

I’m much more sceptical about Obama than many people I know (including many around here). In practice, I don’t think he’ll be as progressive as is wished or assumed, nor Clinton as regressive as her campaign has sometimes sounded. Andrew Stephen in the New Statesman is right:
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The United Nations nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed El-Baradei has strongly criticised the US for withholding information about Syria’s nuclear programme. via Justin.

An empirical study examining every story about Iraq on ABC and CBS News between 1st Aug 02 and 19th Mar ‘03 - 908 stories in all - showed the networks were biased towards invasion. More: The Monkey Cage.

The polls have now closed and counting has begun for the state of Pennsylvania in tonight’s stand-off between Clinton and Obama.
Update: Clinton wins by around 10% of the vote, but it won’t be enough to make the delegate count.

MSNBC are saying that the pledged delegate count for Hillary is basically over. She didn’t take enough of a lead in Pennsylvania.
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Except that…erm.. the US government does. Now, following an ABC News report, a campaign is underway pushing for Condoleezza Rice to go.

A group of 100 officials, Jewish activists and academics have launched a new lobby in Washington to challenge the way AIPAC represents their views. Will it signal a shift in Middle East policy?

The Mayor of Sin City is considering a change in law to legalise prostitution, in accordance with the rest of Nevada law. The impact could be huge.

The Home Office has won a landmark test case giving it the power to return refugees to war-torn parts of Iraq, including Basra and Baghdad.

3 ½ years after The Washington Post first reported it, President Bush acknowledged this weekend he sanctioned meetings on “harsh interrogations” of detainees.

Google Earth and the UNHCR teamed up to map refugee camps from around the world on Google Earth. But curiously, they missed out Palestinian refugee camps.

The now infamous interview where Nick Clegg roughly talks about his sex life with Piers Morgan for GQ also has this exchange (via) on Iraq:
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Iraq is making “fragile but reversible” progress on security, but it’s too early to set dates to pull out all U.S. troops, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq told Congress today.

Well done those Parisians, for having managed to extinguish that Olympic flame a few times. But I can’t help feel this is like the last gasp before the world learns to shut its mouth in front of China.

But before I get onto that, I have a question. Who still supports that anti-terrorist legislation then?
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A couple of years ago I was part of the team that produced The Unrecognized, a film highlighting the plight of the Bedouin population of the Negev (Naqab) desert in southern Israel. Despite having lived and worked on the land since the time of the British Mandate and before, their settlements and farms are not acknowledged by the state. Despite paying taxes, the residents are denied basic services such as water and healthcare, which their Jewish neighbours in the area take for granted.

Their story has been in the news again recently, due to a recent report by Human Rights Watch that renews the criticism of Israel’s discriminatory laws.
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Stephen Glover is in no doubt that one part of the UK political spectrum consistently accommodated itself to the Zanu-PF regime that has misruled Zimbabwe for the last 28 years; his column in the Daily Mail this morning is headlined ‘Never let it be forgotten that it was the British Left who gave succour to the monstrous Mr Mugabe’. There are, however, just a few snags with this thesis. Not the least of them is that it simply isn’t true.

A quick trawl of the main British leftwing websites – well, the free access ones, at least - reveals not a single readily available pro-Mugabe article from the pen of any socialist. Nor am I aware of any Labour MP, of any persuasion, or even one single prominent trade unionist, backing for the Zimbabwean ruler.
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Our Man Inside has been to Jordan to photograph Iraqi refuges. Check out his amazing photoessay here:

The Jeremiah Wright / Obama controversy has sent conservatives in the US and Britain into an almost orgasmic tizzy. The man who fired up Democrats in such a way that the Republicans were in serious danger of being banished into political wilderness for a generation had their achilles heel. Their familiar tactic - of painting Democrats as not being patriotic enough - was going to work a treat come the general election.

But for all this mock-anger over how far Obama should distance himself from his pastor, their position is deeply hypocritical because they conveniently ignore who John McCain has embraced.
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I very much welcome Gordon Brown’s commitment to an inquiry ” to learn all possible lessons from the military action in Iraq and its aftermath” - even aside from the unusual experience of this very welcome political development coming in correspondence between myself and the Prime Minister. (Naturally, one also expects that other Cabinet ministers will take note.

We were very pleased with last week’s budget commitments on child poverty and will be thinking about where else we should now be pressing for progress).
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Erstwhile radicals who drift rightwards in middle age are too plentiful to need exemplification. Their ranks include a fair chunk of leading Labour politicians and trade union leaders, for starters.

Then again, the world has changed tremendously over the last quarter of a century, say. Political analysis has to keep pace. Just because somebody advanced a position in 1983 and advances a different position in 2008, it does not automatically follow that they are mutating into a reactionary.

This train of thought has been sparked, in part, by my toe-curling recollection of a student union meeting in the early eighties, at which I opposed a resolution calling for Chinese withdrawal from Tibet. My argument was that the Chinese annexation of 1951 had introduced proletarian property relations to a backward feudal country, and was therefore historically progressive. Such was the Trotskyist orthodoxy of the day.
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