Since Muslims gather on Friday afternoon for group prayers at mosques, Fridays have for 1400 years been a time when it is easy to mobilize crowds for political action. In the US, Friday is a nothing news day and in fact bad news is released late on Friday on the theory that no one will […]
Archives for April 2011
Syrian Army Splits over Deraa Repression
The Syrian regime of Bashar al-Asad’s decision to quell popular protests in Deraa with military force and live ammunition may have begun splitting his army. AP reports eyewitness accounts on Thursday that units of the 4th Army Division, headed by Maher al-Asad (the brother of the president), began firing on the crowds in Deraa. The […]
Birth Certificate just Jim Crow all Over Again
There isn’t actually any mystery about the phenomenon of birtherism, the denial that Barack Obama is a US citizen and has a right to vote and hold office, or why obnoxious billionaire Donald Trump is resorting to it in his farce of a presidential bid. Birthers are concentrated in former slaver, former Jim Crow states, […]
TomTom, Apple and the Security-GPS Complex
TomTom, the maker of a popular Global Positioning Device that helps drivers navigate their way in unknown territory, sold its data to the Dutch government. Dutch police requisitioned the data, and used it to set up speed traps for motorists! In other words, TomTom may as well have been spying on people for the government […]
Russia & China Block Condemnation of Syria as 200 Baathists Resign
For those who keep asking why there should be an international intervention in Libya but not in Syria, here is one answer: Russia and China have blocked an attempt to have the United Nations Security Council from making any statement at all about the political repression in Syria, which has left an estimated 350-450 persons […]
Free Libya Forces Hold out in Misrata, Zintan, As Tribes Say Qaddafi Must Go
CNN’s Ray Sayeh intrepidly reports from Misrata on the further shelling its port area took from Qaddafi brigades on Wednesday. Those loyalist brigades have been pushed out of the center of the town by the Free Libya forces, but they are still able to sit in the western suburbs and to target the port area. […]
Corporate Welfare Royalty
Courtesy Moveon.org:
Top Ten Arab Spring Advances this Week
With the horrid crackdowns on dissent in Syria and Bahrain and the vicious shelling by Qaddafi brigades of the port of Misrata in Libya on Tuesday, it would be easy to concentrate solely on the negative news. But the Arab Spring is still producing some positive reforms and questioning of past corrupt practices, and even […]
An Arab Spring for Women: the Coles in Tomdispatch
Just out in Tomdispatch.com, an essay by Shahin Cole and Juan Cole on “An Arab Spring for Women”. Excerpt: ‘ The Arab Spring has proven an epochal period of activism and change for women, recalling the role of early feminists in the 1919 Egyptian movement for independence from Britain, or the important place of women […]
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