Archives for January 2010

Understandably, President Obama concentrated on domestic issues, especially job creation, in his State of the Union address. But there were a few paragraphs toward the end about foreign affairs that I want to talk about. While I thought the speech generally strong, and the flash polls suggest that the public did, as well, I felt […]

AP reports that guerrillas drove a car bomb into an Interior Ministry crime lab in the Karrada district of Baghdad on Tuesday, only a day after a coordinated bombing attack on the city’s hotel district, killing 22. Al-Zaman says that a number of high-ranking officers are among the dead, and that some 80 are wounded. […]

Four charged in phone scheme at Sen. Landrieu's office – USATODAY.com James O’Keefe, the rightwing activist who tried to punk ACORN by dressing as a pimp, was endorsed in a resolution by 31 Republican congressmen as a role model. Yes, the very model of an upright gentleman. So the political right wing ruled the United […]

Headline news of the sort on which I concentrate on at Informed Comment is driven by dramatic events, with violence being the most dramatic. But it is also important to fight back against the reduction of Arab culture to stereotypes that have become all too common in the West. So I want to offset some […]

Juan Cole will be a guest in the Second Life virtual world on Jay Ackroyd’s Virtually Speaking interview show at 9 pm Eastern, 1/28/2010. Note that this is much better than just passively watching that Avatar movie over and over again. Listen live on Blog Talk Radio:

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic on Monday’s string of bombings in Baghdad, in which late reports say 37 persons were killed and more than 100 wounded. The bombings especially targeted the Jadiriya district, where many foreigners, diplomats, and Iraqi policiticians reside. Al-Zaman says that most leaders of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, including Ammar al-Hakim […]

Leslie F. Roberts writes in a guest op-ed for Informed Comment An astonishing version of the Human Security Report was released this past week. It was astonishing for its primary headline: “NEW REPORT REVEALS THAT DEATH RATES DECLINE DURING TODAY’S WARS.” The researchers at Simon Fraser University used the war-monitoring PIRO dataset in Sweden, along […]

Oregon's rich getting richer and all others falling behind, wage study shows | Oregon Business News – OregonLive.com ‘ The free-market fervor that has gripped the country since the Ronald Reagan administration has allowed the country, for the most part, to remain competitive in a globalized economy. But some contend that the trickle-down economy has […]

Afghanistan postpones parliamentary elections – latimes.com The LAT lays out the basic facts around the postponement of parliamentary elections in Afghanistan. The Afghan press stresses two factors aboveall: Afghanpaper.com writing in Dari Persian says it was told by concerned Afghan officials who declined to allow their names to be used that the four-month delay was […]