Juan Cole

British actor and writer Stephen Fry‘s rant against grammar Nazis, with kinetic typography:

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon bluntly threatened the Russian Federation on Tuesday, saying that if Moscow followed through on its plan to send the S-300 air defense system to Syria, Israel would bomb the arrays. Since the systems will be accompanied by Russian experts, any Israeli strike on them could well kill Russian personnel and […]

Andrew J. Bacevich writes at Tomdispatch.com For well over a decade now the United States has been “a nation at war.” Does that war have a name? It did at the outset.  After 9/11, George W. Bush’s administration wasted no time in announcing that the U.S. was engaged in a Global War on Terrorism, or GWOT.  […]

Herbicides and pesticides threaten to wipe out one third of amphibian species in the coming decades. A new study finds that frogs, toads and salamanders are disappearing much faster than earlier thought throughout the United States. Link TV reported : Uh, oh. Here is the ‘Frog Survival Project’: The amphibians were here before the dinosaurs […]

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 […]