Bloomberg argues that Saturday’s bombing of the Marriott in Islamabad will likely put pressure on US/ Pakistani relations. The bombing was a clear signal from militants that the Pakistani government must back away from its American alliance. Newly elected president Ali Asaf Zardari gave an address to the parliament in which he called for the […]
German Left Stands up to anti-Muslim Fascists; Clashes in Cologne
3,000 progressives in Cologne clashed Saturday with far rightwing protesters trying to stop the building of a mosque. There are about 3.3 million Muslims in Germany, about 4 percent of the population. The Jewish population of the US is 2%, so this would be as though American rightwingers tried to stop a synagogue from being […]
40 Killed in Massive Bombing of Marriott in Islamabad
Guerrillas in Pakistan set off an enormous bomb blast at the Marriott in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad Saturday morning EDT. It left a 30 foot crater and set off a conflagration that was still burning brightly hours after the bombing. Aljazeera English reports on the explosion: The Pakistani military has been bombing the tribal […]
Sunni Baghdad Dark on Satellite; Kagan Proved Wrong Again
Fred Kagan has once more been proved wrong. He called the ethnic cleansing of Sunni Arabs in Baghdad a ‘myth.’ For all their arrogance and academic credentials, the Neoconservatives keep having trouble with that reality-based thing. Satellite imaging that shows Sunni Arab neighborhoods in Baghdad dark gives evidence that the ethnic cleansing of the Sunnis […]
Crowds Protest US in Tikrit after Airstrike Kills Family of 8; Sistani Site Hacked
US troops targeting a Sunni Arab guerrilla appear instead to have killed an Iraqi family of 8 in a town 70 mi. north of Baghdad on Friday. Three women were among the dead. AFP reports of Tikrit, ‘Large crowds protested against the US raid after the main weekly Muslim prayers in the city, capital of […]
McCain: Deregulate Health Care just Like Banking!
H t Josh Marshall: John McCain: “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”
Ahmadinejad Censored, Distorted in US Media
60 Minutes Interviewed Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad a couple of years ago. They cut some key passages out of the interview. I’ve made the same point at Informed Comment in the past. It is legitimate to decry his positions, and I decry a lot of them. It is not legitimate to misrepresent what he has […]
"Bring’em on"? Are the Sanaa Embassy Attacks Blowback from Iraq?
Newsweek asks if the fundamentalist vigilantes (my term) who hit the US embassy in Sanaa, Yemen included returnees from the fighting in Iraq. If the answer is yes, then it is a refutation of the right-wing US ‘flypaper theory’ and instead a vindication of those who feared a long US military occupation of Iraq would […]
Provincial Election Law Stalled Again; Arab-Kurdish Disputes Deepen; Da’wa Security Committees Protested by Badr Head
The Iraqi parliament failed for a fifth time to pass a law on provincial elections. Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that after months of wrangling in parliament over the enabling legislation for provincial elections, parliament has failed to find a mutually agreed-upon formula. Worse, the parliamentary debates on this issue have deepened the dispute between the […]
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