Juan Cole

After the announcement of the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C. (a case that, on the basis of what has been released so far, sounds as phony as a three dollar bill), President Obama pledged to tighten international sanctions further on Iran. There is no doubt that US and international […]

This story is irresistible for a world historian interested in climate change. Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford, argues that the European advent in the New World, which killed 90% of the 80 million native Americans, caused the Little Ice Age. The native peoples of the New World burned a lot of wood. When they […]

There are lots of problematic things about the way Facebook is run, and many more serious than the one I’m going to complain about. For instance, Facebook is apparently letting your applications track your browser activity even after you sign off the site. It is being sued for essentially wiretapping its customers in this way. […]

Somalia has been suffering from drought for two years, but now the situation is becoming a crisis. Even the recent arrival of rains is problematic because of flash floods. The corporate media in the US has given the problem relatively little coverage. Aljazeera English reports: Oxfam has more

Brookfield Properties, the owner of Zucotti Park where the Occupy Wall Street protesters have been gathered for weeks, is insisting on “cleaning” its property on Friday. Although New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has said that the protesters would be allowed to return thereafter, New York City police chief Raymond Kelly has warned that they would […]

I personally do not understand how the corporate media in the US can report the following things about Manssor Arbabsiar and then go on to repeat with a straight face the US government charges that he was part of a high-level Iranian government assassination plot. It seems pretty obvious that Arbabsiar is very possibly clinically […]

As many observers have pointed out, the story given us by Attorney General Eric Holder about the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., makes no sense. Veteran CIA operative Bob Baer, now retired, notes that Iranian intelligence is highly professional and works independently or through trusted proxies, and this sloppy […]