Juan Cole

In Baghdad, two bombs went off near a falafel stand and killed 8 and wounded 21 persons Al-Zaman [The Times of Baghdad] reports in Arabic on other attacks on Sunday. In Fallujah, armed guerrillas invaded the home of a policemen, killing 4 family members and wounding 3 others. They then blew up the house, in […]

While Americans are debating their own health system, they are unindicted co-conspirators in an effort to degrade the health, mental and physical, and to half-starve the people of Gaza. The callousness, ruthlessness and selfishness of this policy, in which all Americans are implicated, is breathtaking. In Gaza, there really were death panels deciding who lived […]

Some 22 militants died in fighting in Gaza between Hamas and the Army of God’s Helpers on Friday, the latter being a radical fundamentalist cult that took some of its cues from al-Qaeda and the Taliban and demanded the imposition of a rigid understanding of Islamic law in Gaza, as well as plotting global holy […]

Check out this blog of an interesting experiment in American public diplomacy in Syria: “The American MidEast Leadership Network’s (AMLN’s) Virtual Scrapbook is an online collection of the thoughts, musings, favorite things, photographs, and video/audio clips collected by the participants and administrators of AMLN’s Grassroots Diplomacy Program, a three-week cultural exchange program between American and […]

A suicide bomber penetrated several rings of security in Kabul and detonated his payload outside NATO headquarters next to the American Embassy, killing 7 persons and wounding 91. Police and a parliamentarian are among the wounded. AFP reports that as many as 10 percent of voting places may be closed on election day, out of […]

I am sure they are smart people, but every once in a while the journalists working for the mainstream media deliver themselves of the opinion that exercise does not help you lose weight, or that, indeed, there is no way to lose weight. This article in Time says that the reporter’s friends removed the benefit […]

Two suicide bombers hit a cafe in the Yazidi town of Sinjar, Iraq, on Thursday, killing at least 21 persons and wounded many more. The Yazidis are a religious group among the Kurds who are considered heretics by hard line Muslims, since their religion mixes old pre-Islamic Iranian motifs with Sufi mystical terminology. This operation […]

Former VP Richard Bruce Cheney says he will air his dissatisfactions with George W. Bush’s policies, especially in the second term when Cheney feels he yielded to politics as usual. Cheney believes in elective dictatorship. He thinks democracy and elections are just the way a ruler gets in power. After he is elected, he may […]

Four NATO troops, including one American and three Britons, were killed in Afghanistan on Thursday. The American was killed by small arms fire. The three British soldiers fell victim to a roadside bomb. Nearly 200 British troops have been killed in Afghanistan, and 706 Americans. Pashtun guerrillas attempted to kill former president Burhanuddin Rabbani in […]