Juan Cole

That boulder-sized meteoroid that hit the moon on the 17th, causing a star-bright conflagration? NASA reports that it likely was part of a whole pack of meteoroids, a smaller set of which hit the earth’s atmosphere around the same time. Meteoroids are space rocks up to 10 yards / meter wide. From 10 meters wide […]

Michael Mann: Climate change is already costing us $1 trillion a year. Aljazeera asks Professor Mann why there is still confusion among Americans about the perils of climate change, at a time when the scientific consensus is virtually complete. Some recent links on the impact: Much of Australia’s farmland could turn to desert or be […]

Late capitalism in the United States is a process whereby more and more of the national income is going every month to a smaller number of people at the top, while the average wage of the average worker has been virtually static in real terms since 1970. All the extra money the US has made […]

Not an endorsement, but this cover by secular leftists of Gloria Gaynor’s 1978 “I will Survive,” with satirical Arabic lyrics (translated in subtitles) about the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis in Egypt since the fall of dictator Hosni Mubarak gives a window into the grievances and disappointments of the youth who made the […]

John Aravosis at AmericaBlog has been all over the Republican congressmen who forged versions of alleged White House emails on Benghazi and falsified them to the news networks, trying to make it look like there had been a cover-up. Extraordinarily, Bob Schieffer of CBS News called them out, naming the party but not the individuals […]

The Moapa Paiutes are celebrating the advent of solar power and the beginning of the end of coal power in southern Nevada. They are having a solar plant built on tribal lands, which will allow them meet their own needs and to sell electricity to Los Angeles. Best of all, they can envision the closing […]

Andy Kroll writes at Tomdispatch.com Billionaires with an axe to grind, now is your time. Not since the days before a bumbling crew of would-be break-in artists set into motion the fabled Watergate scandal, leading to the first far-reaching restrictions on money in American politics, have you been so free to meddle. There is no […]

Three astronauts from the International Space Station did a Google hangout with the stars of “Star Trek: Into Darkness.” Meanwhile, VOA profiles an earlier generation of Skylab astronauts who risked their lives to find out if humans can live in outer space. VOA has video:

Gulbuddin Hikmatyar’s Hizb-i Islami [the Islamic Party] guerrilla group bombed a military convoy in Kabul this morning, killing 15, including 6 Americans. The Reagan administration gave Hikmatyar billions in the 1980s because he was effective in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, but in 2001 the old guerrilla switched sides and allied with the Taliban in […]