Juan Cole

US drones killed 123 civilians, three al-Qaeda men in January The Pakistani newspaper, The News alleges that: “Afghanistan-based US predators carried out a record number of 12 deadly missile strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan in January 2010, of which 10 went wrong and failed to hit their targets, killing 123 innocent Pakistanis. The […]

Reuters reports that President Hamid Karzai is calling upon the Taliban and other insurgent groups to drop their demand that foreign forces leave the country before agreeing to attend a Loya Jirga or national tribal council in six weeks to seek reconciliation with the Karzai government. Karzai says he will go to Riyadh to seek […]

Reprinted from last spring. Bookstores and bibliophiles: time to get working on this–advertising, word of mouth, etc. for this year.. There is a delightful custom in Barcelona. On April 23, St. George’s Day, men give their girlfriends or wives a rose. And the women give their male beloved a book. The gift of the book […]

In an audiotape attributed to Usamah Bin Laden, the mass murderer called for a boycott of the US dollar and blamed the US for global warming. There is nothing worse than a terrorist who kills thousands of innocent people, but being a hypocrite is also a pretty bad character flaw, and Bin Laden manages both. […]

Coal River Mountain Protestors Meet with Governor – Huntington News Network The closest thing you might get in today’s world to Gandhists and followers of Martin Luther King, on a practical plane, are the campaigners in West Virginia against shearing off mountaintops for coal mining. Coal mining should be illegal, much less destroying the environment […]

Muslim inventions that shaped the modern world – CNN.com Coffee houses, surgical techniques, algrebra, some key institutional developments in universities and hospitals, all from Muslim science. Not to mention optics, astronomical advances (some think they influenced Copernicus), etc. And those alcoholic stills so popular in Kentucky during Prohibition? Yup, Jabir ibn Hayyan was behind them. […]

NATO troops appear to have made a horrible error in Afghanistan on Friday, as they clashed with what turned out to be Afghan National Army troops and called in an air strike on them, killing 4 and wounding 6. The governor of Wardak province where the fight took place said he was at a loss […]

President Barack Obama was so effective in his 90-minute ‘questions session’ with the congressional Republican conference that some Republican leaders are said to be regretting that they allowed the session to be recorded. Fox Cable News rectified the error by pulling away its own cameras. Luckily, C-Span was there. Obama complained about hyperbole on the […]

America's Competitors Will Use Supreme Court Ruling To Block Our Green Jobs Effort And Close Our Factories | OurFuture.org ‘Saudi Arabia’s economy depends on oil exports so stands to be one of the biggest losers in any pact that curbs oil demand by penalizing carbon emissions. “It’s one of the biggest threats that we are […]