The Lahore High Court’s ban on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and some other social media sites was supported on Friday in Pakistan by rallies of students, attorneys and fundamentalists. Blackberry services have also been banned by the Pakistani telecom authority. But these knowledge workers are unwittingly shooting themselves in the foot and raising the question of […]
Iran Threatens to Pull out of Nuclear Deal over new UN Sanctions
Iranian member of parliament Mohammad Reza Bahonar warned Thursday that “If (the West) issues a new resolution against Iran, we will not be committed to Tehran’s statement and dispatching fuel outside Iran will be canceled.” Turkey and Brazil, with full backing from Washington DC and in close cooperation with the Obama administration, had apparently succeeded […]
Top Ten Other Gratuitously Offensive Draw-a-Cartoon Days
The juvenile “draw Muhammad” day has generally been avoided by professional editorial cartoonists. One Islamophobic theme apparent in the writing on it is that Muslims are peculiar in their thin-skinned responses to such assaults on their religious sensibilities and that members of other religions never riot or protest. This assertion is not only bigoted but […]
Angry Tea Partiers are not the Moral Equivalent of Compassionate Democrats
Just to enter an objection to the increasing tendency of the mainstream media to equate the Tea Party on the American right wing with supposedly “angry” activists on the left wing of the Democratic Party. And moreover to point out that the Corporate Media pet narrative of the Rise of the New New Right and […]
Apartheid Israel, Bunker Israel: Elvis Costello and Noam Chomsky
The repercussions of the brutal shooting-fish-in-a-barrel Gaza War, of the continued Israeli siege and boycott of the Gaza Strip, and of the vigorous colonization of the Palestinian West Bank by militant Israelis, continue to grow. The clear resistance of the far rightwing government of Binyamin Netanyahu to the two-state solution sought urgently by US president […]
Kabul Blast Kills 19, Wounds 52; 5 US Troops Dead
The BBC is reporting that Afghan guerrillas deployed a suicide car bomb against a NATO military convoy in west Kabul near the parliament building Tuesday morning, killing at least 19 persons and wounding 52. Five US troops are said among the dead. MSNBC has a good video report: The enormous fireball destroyed twenty vehicles. Spokesman […]
Iran Announces Breakthrough Nuclear Exchange Deal
Veteran Iran observer Borzou Daragahi reports on the agreement just announced by Iran and Turkey on the disposition of Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium. Under the deal, according to the Iranian spokesman, “After a final agreement is signed between Iran and the Vienna group, our fuel will be shipped to Turkey under the supervision of […]
Palestinians Observe Nakbah or Catastrophe Day, raise Hopes of Unity
Thousands of Palestinians rallied in Gaza on Saturday to commemorate the Nakbah or national catastrophe of 1948, when European Jewish settlers brought into the Mandate of Palestine by imperial British policy expelled 700,000 Palestinians from what is now Israel and then sealed the border, confiscating all their property without compensation. These actions turned the bulk […]
BP Trashes Apollo Astronauts, Parrots Sarah Palin; Oil Godzilla heads for Coast
In a BBC interview British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward said Friday that the massive petroleum gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, the greatest oil-based environmental catastrophe in recorded history with the exception of global warming itself, should not forestall further deep-water drilling. I’m not sure whether Hayward was channeling Sarah Palin, that font of good […]