Juan Cole

A Guatamalan court has sentenced former dictator Efrain Rios Montt to 80 years in prison for his responsibility for the slaughter of some 1,771 members of the Maya Ixil by the army during his period in power, 1982-83. What the court did not decide was the culpability of Ronald Reagan for the atrocity, given his […]

A construction company in Belize gradually hollowed out and ultimately destroyed a 60-foot, 2300-year-old Mayan pyramid to get gravel for paving roads, National Geographic reports. There are exceptions (executives with a conscience), but mostly capitalism and its companies are about making money, any way they need to. They are all too often amoral, which is […]

Bertrand Piccard is piloting the sun-powered plane, ‘Solar Impulse,’ across America in legs. This video is of his flight from California up to San Francisco and then down to Phoenix, AZ this weekend. He used only a third of his battery power on this leg. Airplanes are currently a source of carbon pollution, contributing to […]

I got back from my trip to Baghdad on Sunday evening, and noticed when I checked the news that there seemed to have been a horrible shooting in New Orleans. I was jet-lagged and crashed before I could look into it. I remember thinking, oh, well,it will dominate the news cycle on Monday and I’ll […]

From Al-Araqib to Susiya (English) , a film by al-Adalah (Justice) : ” Two Villages – One Story An Interactive Dialogue on Forced Displacement In a new short film, From Al-Araqib to Susiya, Adalah journeys between two Palestinian villages on either side of the Green Line. The residents of Al-Araqib and Susiya tell their stories […]

Iraqi Sword Dance: Here are some folklore performances put on for us by a troupe in Baghdad on May 8, 2013, at the Ministry of Culture’s 3rd International Conference on Translation, which I attended. They shed a different light on the country than the news of sectarian clashes, bombings and fundamentalism that so often dominate […]

The Associated Press has been the victim of massive secret surveillance of its reporters’ telephone traffic (not the substance but to whom they were talking) on the part of the Department of Justice. AP received a leak last year about a plot by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen against the United States, but […]

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached the milestone of 400 parts per million, something not seen on earth for 2 or 3 million years. This time, it is driven by human emissions from burning coal, natural gas and petroleum. Climate change at this pace threatens 50,000 plant and animal species over […]

Anne-Ruth Wertheim writes in a guest column for Informed Comment On 31 January 2013 Mohamed Rabbae stated on www.Joop.nl that far right wing politician Geert Wilders is not looking for solutions to what he calls ‘The Moroccan Problem’ in the Dutch Parliament. He is looking for allies to keep successful Moroccans out of politics, management […]