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Turkey s Imprisoned Press

Intimidation and detention of activists continued, with over 1,100 people currently behind bars for their political beliefs.

While Russia was launching its bid to subordinate Ukraine, I was in prison, with scant hope of ever regaining my freedom. The regime of former President Viktor Yanukovych was dancing to the Kremlin's tune, and my confinement ended only because of the courage of the millions of Ukrainians who demanded its ouster.

Many Puerto Ricans had committed their lives to the struggle for human rights and national sovereignty some of them had been killed while others had been imprisoned or forced to flee the country to escape repression.

You're in a jam and you know it. Says you.

As a sociologist, I have been studying these issues for 30 years. As an inmate of an Egyptian prison, I discussed them with my fellow prisoners, many of whom were imprisoned as supporters of Egypt s Islamic movement.

For Chinese concerned about how to live in truth, Havel remains our exemplar. The Charter 77 movement that he founded provided the template for men like the imprisoned Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, who helped to found Charter 08, which proclaimed that Chinese, too, could live in dignity and freedom.

Isolationism is a familiar refrain in US foreign policy among those elements of the right that consider the US too good for the world, as well as among those on the left who consider America a destructive global force. But this time, as perhaps never before, a bipartisan isolationist impulse is being driven by the budget.

At the core of Magris book is the destiny of a group of Italian communists who travel to Yugoslavia after the Second World War to contribute to the construction of a socialist society, only to be caught in the conflict between Stalin and Tito. They are imprisoned for their Stalinist allegiance when they are finally allowed to return to Italy, their old comrades refuse to accept them.

Mr. Koppel (Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (Socialist Workers Party)) called for the release of Carlos Alberto Torres, Haydee Beltrán and Oscar López Rivera, independence fighters who had been imprisoned in the United States for a quarter of a century, and of José Perez González and José Velez Acosta, who remained in jail for opposing the United States presence in Vieques.

Political leaders can huff and puff as much as they want, but, without a credible threat of poverty and time behind bars, bankers have no reason to comply with the law. For them, it s all about the trade and you can be the sucker in public policy as easily as you can be the sucker in an individual loan agreement.

The rest of Egypt, however, only felt this money in the form of an ever expanding state apparatus that solidified Mubarak s rule, crushed dissent, and repressed millions. When Egyptians rose up against Mubarak in January, they were confronted by weapons paid for with borrowed money.

But the tax paying public innocent of any wrongdoing has also had to bear costs, both direct and indirect. And, while a handful of rogue traders (and, most recently, one Libor manipulator) have ended up in prison, it would be overly optimistic to conclude that the punishment has been sufficient to transform bank culture.

As Tommaso Campanella, a great philosopher who spent much time in prison and was tortured because of his ideas, wrote a few centuries ago, history is changed first by the tongue and then by the sword. Nowadays, it is associations such as Amnesty International and Hands Off Cain that push states to abolish capital punishment.

Both are insufficient to check Naif. A key early test of Abdullah s kingship will be if he can succeed in freeing the hundreds of political reformers now in prison, especially three respected academics whom he encouraged to make reform proposals, only to be incarcerated by Naif.