Juan Cole

1. In response to the sting of defeat at the UN, Israel announced it is building a further 3,000 Israel squatter housing units on Palestinian land around Jerusalem. The Israelis had said that the Palestinians should come to the negotiating table instead of going to the UN, but they would be negotiating over this land […]

The Young Turks cover a new report on carbon emissions and climate change.:

The USG Open Source Center carries summaries of Arabic news reports from Palestinian wire services on the reaction of the Palestinians on Friday to Thursday’s United Nations General Assembly vote granting Palestine “Observer State” status. Palestinian media on 29 and 30 November report on Palestinian reactions to the “victory’ the Palestinians scored at the UN […]

Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! reports on the testimony of government whistleblower Bradley Manning in which he said he thought he was going to die “in a cage.” He was forbidden to exercise in his tiny cell and so danced (dancing was not considered exercise), but then that was characterized as crazy behavior by his military […]

The United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to accord Palestine the status of “Observer State” on Thursday, with 138 countries voting in favor of the measure, 41 abstaining, and only 9 voting against. The US and Israel were decisively marginalized, as Italy and Sweden joined France, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and several other European countries in […]

The USG Open Source Center translates Hebrew press reports and reaction in Israel to the UN bestowal of “Observer State” status on the Palestinians, including an item about two Israeli members of parliament (Knesset) who burned a Palestinian flag and condemned the “subservience” of the government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in failing to “fight […]

The confidence scam that Israel and the United States have been running on the Palestinians, of a “peace process,” is finally about to meet a well-deserved demise. There are now over 600,000 Israeli settlers on the Occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank (including the areas unilaterally annexed by Israel to its ‘district of Jerusalem’). […]

Yousaf Butt and Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress write at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: This week the Associated Press reported that unnamed officials “from a country critical of Iran’s nuclear program” leaked an illustration to demonstrate that “Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force […]

Matthew Machowski, current Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Physics and Astronomy, Queen Mary, University of London and an experienced Middle East analyst gives the best talk on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program that I’ve yet heard. His conclusion: There is no good evidence that Iran has a “structured” nuclear weapons program as opposed to […]