May 14 – Boko Haram’s Backers and Nigeria’s Disgruntled Military; Europe’s “Right to be Left Along” as Internet Censorship; The UN Mediator Quits as Syria’s Murderous Stalemate Continues

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the latest in the hunt for the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls and speak with Mark Quarterman, the Director of Research and Programs at Enough, who was previously on the staff of the Africa Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. We investigate the links between Northern Nigerian politicians and Boko Haram and discuss the state of the Nigerian military following reports that disgruntled soldiers in the capitol of the state where Boko Haram is active, fired on their commander’s convoy in a protest over lack of pay and poor equipment.

Part 2

Then we examine the European Courts of Justice's decision against Google requiring the tech giant to enact a “right to be left alone” regime that would allow individuals to demand that Google remove content from their search engines that the complainant disapproves of or considers out of date. Eva Galperin, a Global Policy Analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation joins us to discuss the difficulty of enacting and enforcing this new law that advocates of Internet freedom see as arbitrary and censorious.

Part 3

Then finally, we discuss the political and military stalemate in Syria with Nicholas Heras, an analyst with the Washington-based think tank The Jamestown Foundation. He has just returned from the region where neighbors like Jordan and Lebanon are feeling the strain on food and water resources from millions of Syrian refugees as the killing of Syrians and the destruction of their country continues unabated.  We discuss the resignation of the U.N. mediator on Syria who, on the eve of a meeting in London of the U.S. Secretary of State and his European and Arab counterparts on the Syrian crisis, quit in despair over the lack of peace negotiations amid the increasingly outrageous suffering of the Syrian people.