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I doubt Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator from Nebraska, and I would agree about almost anything with regard to domestic US politics. Unless his views have changed, we certainly would not agree on gay rights. ( He says, at least, that his views have in fact changed and has apologized for remarks in the […]

Bill McKibben writes at Tomdispatch Change usually happens very slowly, even once all the serious people have decided there’s a problem. That’s because, in a country as big as the United States, public opinion moves in slow currents.  Since change by definition requires going up against powerful established interests, it can take decades for those […]

Beleagured President Bashar al-Assad addressed the nation on Sunday, in a “Baghdad Bob” moment, in which he more or less denied he has lost control of much of the country or that most of his countrymen consider him a monster. Meanwhile, the civil war had raged all around the country. A mortar landed in north […]

Joaquin Sapien writes at ProPublica: Following the mass shooting in Connecticut, the Obama administration and lawmakers around the country have promised to re-examine gun control in America. ProPublica decided to take a look at what’s happened legislatively in states where some of the worst shootings in recent U.S. history have occurred to see what effect, […]

Chris Woods, Jack Serle and Alice K. Ross write at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism: Reported civilian deaths fell sharply in Pakistan in 2012, with Bureau data suggesting that a minimum of 2.5% of those reported killed were civilians – compared with more than 14% in 2011. This suggests the CIA is seeking to limit […]

  Kirk J. Beattie writes in a guest column for Informed Comment: Most concerned Americans have, understandably, had their eyes glued on the monumental changes sweeping the Arab world. But they remain largely oblivious to another regional transformation of great significance; that is, the rightward shift of Israel’s political, tectonic plates. From its historically strong […]

The UN Human Rights Commission under Navi Pillai has had a team of researchers go through five different lists of casualties in Syria, and they concluded that at least 60,000 have died since the revolution began some 20 months ago. Some 500,000 Syrians have fled or been made refugees by the fighting, about 2 percent […]

Just for fun: What was our world like a thousand years ago? Of course, technologically very different, but Song China and Muslim Spain had made real advances in science, technology and infrastructure. If CNN had existed then, what major events would they have listed and passed around by carrier pigeon? Some of the themes salient […]