The USG Open Source Center translates broadcasts from Arabic satellite television concerning the speech on Sunday of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in which he again dismissed his opposition as terrorists and blamed outside hands at the same time as he called for a vague political process. The revolutionaries were scathing in their responses. Pan-Arab TVs […]
Top Ten Reasons Chuck Hagel Should be Secretary of Defense
I doubt Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator from Nebraska, and I would agree about almost anything with regard to domestic US politics. Unless his views have changed, we certainly would not agree on gay rights. ( He says, at least, that his views have in fact changed and has apologized for remarks in the […]
Climate Change is Snowballing on Obama: Time for Drama, not Gradualism! (McKibben)
Bill McKibben writes at Tomdispatch Change usually happens very slowly, even once all the serious people have decided there’s a problem. That’s because, in a country as big as the United States, public opinion moves in slow currents. Since change by definition requires going up against powerful established interests, it can take decades for those […]
Syrian Revolutionaries Continue Damascus Operations as Bashar takes to Airwaves
Beleagured President Bashar al-Assad addressed the nation on Sunday, in a “Baghdad Bob” moment, in which he more or less denied he has lost control of much of the country or that most of his countrymen consider him a monster. Meanwhile, the civil war had raged all around the country. A mortar landed in north […]
Mass Shootings don’t Provoke States to Regulate Semi-Automatic Weapons (Sapien)
Joaquin Sapien writes at ProPublica: Following the mass shooting in Connecticut, the Obama administration and lawmakers around the country have promised to re-examine gun control in America. ProPublica decided to take a look at what’s happened legislatively in states where some of the worst shootings in recent U.S. history have occurred to see what effect, […]
What Juan’s Been Tweeting (Saturday Reading)
The Secret History of US Drone Strikes in 2012 (Woods et al.)
Chris Woods, Jack Serle and Alice K. Ross write at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism: Reported civilian deaths fell sharply in Pakistan in 2012, with Bureau data suggesting that a minimum of 2.5% of those reported killed were civilians – compared with more than 14% in 2011. This suggests the CIA is seeking to limit […]
Israel’s Turn to the Far Right: The Point of No Return? (Beattie)
Kirk J. Beattie writes in a guest column for Informed Comment: Most concerned Americans have, understandably, had their eyes glued on the monumental changes sweeping the Arab world. But they remain largely oblivious to another regional transformation of great significance; that is, the rightward shift of Israel’s political, tectonic plates. From its historically strong […]
UN: 60,000 have been Killed in Syrian Revolution (Video)
The UN Human Rights Commission under Navi Pillai has had a team of researchers go through five different lists of casualties in Syria, and they concluded that at least 60,000 have died since the revolution began some 20 months ago. Some 500,000 Syrians have fled or been made refugees by the fighting, about 2 percent […]
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