Juan Cole

Just a reminder that President Obama has not yet pardoned John Kiriakou, the CIA whistleblower who revealed the agency’s torture practices Kiriakou went to jail on February to serve 30 months. Obama has also not punished anyone in the US government for extensive torture practices and has allowed evidence to be destroyed. RT interviewed Kiriakou […]

Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist, secular Yesh Atid party, has threatened to withdraw from the government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu unless a proposed bill is passed into law that would conscript most young men from the Haredi or Ultra-Orthodox community into the Israeli army. Many in the far right wing […]

Dubai promotional video

Memorial Day began as a commemoration for the dead in the US Civil War, and especially for the Northern dead. Southern states for the most part had their own days of mourning for Confederate dead (some still do). Only after World War I when the day was repurposed as a commemoration of the soldiers killed […]

Karbala, Iraq, doesn’t have enough good medical care. The number one killer is heart attacks, but a whole range of ailments are not being effectively combatted. There is an opportunity for us all to do something about that, now. An Iraqi philanthropy backed by the well-known al-Qazwini family is founding a state-of-the-art hospital there (click […]

Listening to Newt Gingrich, the great bloviator, go on this morning on the alleged Muslim threat, set me off. Gingrich did his dissertation on Belgian educational policy in the Congo, where he managed to miss the genocide perpetrated by the Europeans. Gingrich knows better, he is just hate-mongering. But since he brought it up, it […]

Four persons were wounded by GRAD rockets that fell in south-western Beirut, a Hizbullah stronghold, on Sunday. The strikes come a day after the head of Hizbullah pledged to continue fighting for the al-Assad regime in Syria. Most Sunni Muslims in Lebanon support the rebels against the Baath government, and so are annoyed with Hizbullah […]

After a subway official chastised a young couple in Ankara for kissing in public, internet activists organized a small flashmob at the Kurtuluş metro station in the Turkish capital, where lots of couples engaged in a public display of affection. They attracted the ire of a group of religious men, but were protected by the […]

As The Scientific American noted a couple of years ago: In a 2011 study published in Nature, “. . . researchers examined daily records of rainfall, snowfall and sleet from more than 6,000 weather stations between 1951 and 1999. They found a rise in cases of extreme precipitation, such as rainstorms that deliver 100 millimeters […]