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Maybe this is the reason the Bush administration illegally spied on Elliot Spitzer’s bank transfers despite lack of any evidence he was doing anything wrong?

Prospective White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel called Rose Oakar, the executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, to apologize for remarks of his father, Benjamin Emanuel. The elder Emanuel had replied to Maariv when asked whether his son would influence Obama to be pro-Israel, ““Obviously he’ll influence the president to be pro-Israel. Why […]

IHT reports on the way the economic slowdown is affecting Dubai (which unlike other members of the United Arab Emirates does not have much petroleum). Some citizens of the emirate see the end of excess as a good thing and a time to recover some authenticity. The Dubai property boom has had its bubble burst.

“Atmospheric brown clouds” stretch from Dubai to Shanghai; they reduce crop yields by blocking sunlight,and contribute to extreme weather that also hurts agriculture. The polluted clouds come from burning fossil fuels. USA Today says, “The huge plumes have darkened 13 megacities in Asia — including Beijing, Shanghai, Bangkok, Cairo, Mumbai and New Delhi — sharply […]

A suicide car bomber hit a US convoy near the eastern Pushtun city of Jalalabad, killing one US soldier and at least 20 civilians and wounding 67 other persons. Earlier, another suicide bomber had attacked a government intelligence office in the southwestern Pushtun city of Qandahar, killing 6 and wounding 42. There is a special […]

Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reports that Obama is considering a regional approach to the Afghanistan war that would extend to negotiating with Iran and with “reconcilable” elements of the Taliban. Certainly, some new policies are desperately needed, and whatever Bush was doing over there was just making things worse over time. Afghans are […]

The UN warns that it is running out of food to distribute in Gaza, putting the civilian population there at severe risk, as a direct result of an Israeli food blockade. A food blockade? That is a war crime! Why aren’t the people ordering the malnourishment of a civilian population under foreign military occupation being […]

More on Veterans Day: Someone alerted me to the good work that Survivor Corps is doing for Vets. And, This letter from Iraq Veteran Paul Hackett came to me in the mail on Veterans Day, and I thought it worth reprinting: “Juan, Ninety years ago today, the Great World War came to an end on […]

3 bombings in the largely Shiite neighborhood of Kasrah in mostly Sunni Adhamiya on Monday, killing 31 and wounding 71. There are lots of reasons for such an attack, but it is in part aimed at scaring Shiites living in Adhamiya into leaving; i.e. it was aimed in part at further ethnic cleansing of the […]