Juan Cole

The regime seems to have successfully repressed any significant demonstrations by the opposition on Thursday. One of the problems for the opposition is that it has essentially been mounting ‘flashmobs’— fairly spontaneous demonstrations organized by email and Facebook. The regime closed down most electronic communication earlier this week, foiling the tactic. It may also be […]

Thursday February 11 (22 Bahman of the Iranian calendar) is the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran of Imam Ruhollah Khomeini. This year, the commemoration is fraught with irony, since the political opposition intends to use it to protest what they consider the fraudulent presidential election of June, 2009, and the drift of the […]

BBC News – Dubai court annuls marriage to 'bearded lady' This item will be picked up for novelty and curiosity value. But actually, the episode raises all the problems in the philosophy of the person presented by the full veil. Some of the French objection to it is precisely that in a Republic, all citizens […]

The Real News has a good video series entitled, “Do the Taliban represent the Pashtuns?” This is the sort of information US corporate media almost never supplies. Here is part 1: More at The Real News End/ (Not Continued)

A US and another NATO soldier were killed in Afghanistan on Tuesday. On the other side of the border, Pakistani Taliban sources announced that their leader, Hakimullah Mahsud, had died of wounds inflicted by a US drone attack. Mahsud was allegedly behind a wave of bombings in Pakistan, and played a role in the suicide […]

The USG Open Source Center translated remarks of Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, regarding Sunday’s announcement by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Iran would seek to enrich uranium to the 19.75% necessary to produce medical isotopes. Salehi represented the announcement as a way for Iran to put pressure on the West […]

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton engaged in some fearmongering on Iran on Sunday on Candy Crowley’s CNN magazine show, State of the Union. Here is how the exchange went: ‘CROWLEY: If you were to say to the American people, this country is the most dangerous to Americans and to the U.S., where is that country? […]

Sarah Palin’s turn before the teabaggers was an exercise in emptying the US Constitution of meaning while seeming to exalt it. She praised US military personnel for defending the constitution. But she complained that constitutional protections were offered to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underpants bomber. She said it is ‘our’ constitution, reducing it from a […]

Agence France Presse reports that thousands of Afghans are fleeing an anticipated NATO/Afghan (mainly British) campaign against the Taliban stronghold of Marja, a city of 80,000, south of the capital of Lashkar Gah in Helmand Province. Marja is in the midst of a major poppy-growing region and so a center of narco-terrorism (the poppies are […]