Juan Cole

Cenk Uygur on the scandal of the Obama administration’s admission that it had no clear criteria for drone strikes. According to the NYT, the Obama team scrambled to come up with formal procedures lest they bequeath an out-of-control program to the Republicans if Romney were to win. What I don’t understand is why the Obama […]

On Wednesday morning, in the wake of a huge demonstration downtown Cairo, the crowds assembled in Tahrir Square faced tear gas barrages whenever they moved out of the center of the square. Some 36 persons were wounded in Port Said in clashes Wednesday between anti-government forces and the Muslim Brotherhood. The fight began when three […]

Jennifer Granholm’s War Room guests discuss the roadblocks in the way of a major new, job-creating industry in the US, the electric vehicle. The Tea Party Congress almost closed down the government to block funding for retooling auto plants. Granholm goes on to make a typically impassioned appeal for government support for EV manufacturing as […]

Mark Schoofs and Jeff Larson write at ProPublica: Documents posted online Monday by hackers associated with the online group Anonymous appear to give new details on a Syrian passenger flight from Moscow to Damascus that Turkish fighter jets forced to land last month. The incident sparked a diplomatic row between the two neighbors that have […]

Sharif Abdel Kouddous on Gaza’s “Severe Damage” and Why Truce Won’t Stop the Violence of Occupation at Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” The blurb from the show: Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip ended in a ceasefire last week with the final toll standing at around 170 Palestinians killed, and more than 700 wounded. Meanwhile in […]

Pulitzer Prize-winning war journalist Tom Ricks was brought on Fox Cable News to discussion Susan Rice and the so-called Benghazi affair. His retort that Fox has been functioning as ‘a wing of the Republican Party,’ which obviously caused the interview to be hastily ended should not obscure what else he said. Ricks’s main points were […]

Lior Sternfeld writes in a guest column for Informed Comment: On November 29, 1947 the UN general assembly granted the Zionist movement one of its most prominent diplomatic achievements, when it approved the Palestine Partition Plan. The non-binding resolution, never voted on by the UN Security Council, proposed dividing the land of the British mandate […]

Excellent documentary on the fast-breaking solar technology revolution. From www.vpro.nl/ backlight.

Egypt is on the knife edge between plunging into Algeria-style faction-fighting between secularists and Muslim fundamentalists, and finding a graceful way for its elected president to climb down from his more extreme assertions of power and privilege vis-a-vis the other branches of government. The toll from fighting in Egypt between pro- and anti-Morsi activists all […]