Salman Tasir, the governor of Punjab Province in Pakistan, was assassinated by one of his own guards Tuesday, allegedly for his desire to repeal Pakistan’s blasphemy law, which has been increasingly misused by the religious right to target Christians, Ahmadis and secularists. The guard who killed him was not a Deobandi fundamentalist but an adherent […]
Archives for January 2011
Wrong Again, Sen. Graham: Cole in Truthdig
My column is just out in Truthdig, entitled “Wrong Again, Sen. Graham,” on the South Carolina senator’s modest proposal to keep two big American air bases in Afghanistan “permanently.” Graham says the bases would keep Afghanistan from being taken back over by the Taliban. But is that anyway an actual prospect? And wouldn’t the bases […]
Women enlist as Fighters in Gaza
CNN reports on a handful of militant women in Gaza who have joined the radical al-Nasir Salahuddin Brigades and gained training as guerrillas. The women explicitly mentioned the model of women in the Israeli military as among their sources of inspiration. These groups are more militant than Hamas, which is the most important party-militia in […]
Taliban Getting Stronger, As US Public Support for Afghanistan War Collapses
Afghan President Hamid Karzai is getting weaker over time, and the Taliban are getting stronger, according to Jessica Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Matthews says that there will be a lull in the winter, but insurgent operations will pick up in the spring. As NATO allies draw down (many have announced […]
5000 Birds fall out of Sky in Arkansas
An environmental mystery: The blogosphere is abuzz about the mystery of thousands of birds falling out of the sky in Arkansas. Such things happen sometimes because of atmospheric events, lightning storms, etc. But Arkansas weather officials suspect this event may derive from a big fireworks spectacle in a rural area where the birds were concentrated […]
Glaspie Memo Vindicates Her, Shows Saddam’s Thinking
Wikileaks has released the July 25, 1990 cable by US Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie in which she reported her meeting with Saddam Hussein over the Kuwait crisis. Saddam had summoned her. The cable’s text supports Glaspie’s accounts of the meeting and exonerates her from the charges by her political enemies in the US Congress […]
Christian Crowds Protest Violently in Egypt
Crowds of Christian youth protested in the hundreds in Alexandria and Cairo on Sunday. The protesters in Alexandria were prevented by riot police from reaching the Saints Cathedral that had been bombed early Saturday morning, killing 21 and wounding almost 100. In Cairo in the Abbasiya neighborhood, the crowd gathered around St. Mark’s Cathedral, where […]
Wikileaks: Israel Plans Total War on Lebanon, Gaza
The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten has summarized an Israeli military briefing by Israeli Chief of Staff Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi of a US congressional delegation a little over a year ago and concludes that ‘ The memo on the talks between Ashkenazi and [Congressman Ike] Skelton, as well as numerous other documents from the same period of […]
Mubarak: We will Cut off the Head of the Snake; Al-Azhar: This was an Attack on all Egyptians
The semi-official Egyptian newspaper, al-Ahram, reports that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak asserted in a speech to the nation on Saturday that a foreign hand was behind the car-bombing of a Coptic Christian church in the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria shortly after midnight on Saturday morning, which killed 21 and left nearly 100 persons wounded, […]
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