Juan Cole

Since the Free Syrian Army is a guerrilla group, whether it can hold the northern metropolis of Aleppo is not absolutely central to its survival. Guerrillas can always fade away to fight another day. But for the Baath regime of Bashar al-Assad, losing Aleppo would be fatal. The regime controls increasingly little of the country, […]

William Fitzgibbon writes at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism When the government told the people of London that the eyes of the world would be on it during the Olympic Games, it failed to mention one particularly powerful watcher; a new software programme used for tracking potential troublemakers. In the September edition of Wired Magazine, […]

John Sullivan writes in a guest column for Informed Comment: A Cabinet nominee or a Supreme Court nominee produces decades of tax returns to the Senate for confirmation. Romney should meet that criteria. The deduction for the horse included over $2,000 in medical expenses. Medical expenses are not deductible for taxpayers unless they exceed 7.5% […]

Mitt Romney told notorious media bully and propagandist for the American Far Right, Sean Hannity, that it is time for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to ‘put up or shut up.’ Reid had pointed out that an investor with Bain capital, Romney’s former company, had alleged that Romney had not paid taxes for ten years […]

Subhankar Banerjee writes at Tomdispatch.com: Walking the Waters: How to Bring the Major Oil Companies Ashore and Halt the Destruction of Our Oceans When you go to the mountains, you go to the mountains.  When it’s the desert, it’s the desert.  When it’s the ocean, though, we generally say that we’re going “to the beach.”  […]

The Syrian opposition continued to hang on in the northern commercial center of Aleppo on Thursday, and even launched a daring new raid. Rebels used a tank they captured to attack the Menagh air force base near Aleppo. They are attempting to forestall its use by the regime to launch helicopter gunship and jet attacks […]

Sanity: Former US officials and academics (including me) call on the Congressional leadership to remove dangerous conspiracy theorist Michele Bachmann from the House Intelligence Committee. Bachmann has not only embarrassed herself and Congress by saying that the federal government is riddled with “Muslim Brotherhood moles,” but her crackpot ideas have hurt US diplomacy in Egypt. […]

Youcef Ben Mahammed. “Algerian Tuareg.” Youcef Ben Mahammed (b. Oran, 1973) is a Tunisian-Algerian artist based in Montreal.