Archives for March 2013

I have long held that the worst thing about religious fundamentalism is that it is humorless. And, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is proving me right. The Egyptian Prosecutor General has issued a summons to Bassem Youssef for the comic’s satire on fundamentalist president Muhammad Morsi and for mocking ‘religions. Aljazeera English reports: Morsi just justified […]

Recycled WMD charges: From Jamiol’s World

Tom Giesen writes in a guest column at Informed Comment The option to avoid 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) of global warming – our goal for more than 10 years – is out of reach: we have emitted too many greenhouse gases and are on a much warmer trajectory. In 2000, we had many […]

Pope Francis on Maundy Thursday declined to address enormous crowds. Instead he went to a prison to emulate Jesus’s act of humility before his crucifixion in washing the feet of his 12 disciples. The pope washed and kissed the feet of 12 inmates, two of them women and two of them Muslim (one of the […]

Yet again, researchers have found that there is no link between vaccines and autism. It is a myth, a hysteria, and a dangerous one, since large numbers of unvaccinated children are an epidemic waiting to happen. Why so many Americans go running off on such wild goose chases but can’t see the nose on their […]

Cenk Uygur interviews former president Jimmy Carter concerning his imminent complete eradication of the deadly guinea worm: This extremely impressive achievement of Carter and his Carter Center is one that I have discussed at some length in the past. Let’s just recall that some former presidents go around speaking for large sums, whereas Carter in […]

h/t Allvoices

Tom Engelhardt writes at Tomdispatch.com It’s true that, last week, few in Congress cared to discuss, no less memorialize, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.  Nonetheless, two anniversaries of American disasters and crimes abroad — the “mission accomplished” debacle of 2003 and the 45th anniversary of the My Lai massacre — were at least noted in passing in […]

This is a [pdf] letter to President Obama pleading for a substantial rethink of Yemen policy in his second term, which I among other Middle East experts signed. It was worked up by the Yemen Policy Initiative of the Atlantic Council and the Project on Middle East Democracy. Yemen gets little news coverage in the […]