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A jury has found an independent “Baptist” church (which doesn’t actually appear to have anything to do with the Baptist Church) in Topeka, KS, guilty of inflicting emotional distress on the bereaved family of a Marine killed in Iraq. The “church” (i.e. cult) members had protested at the funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder […]

AFP reports that Prime Minister Rejep Tayyib Erdogan of Turkey said Saturday, of the Kurdish Workers Party guerrillas holed up in Iraq, “We will launch an operation when it will be necessary, without asking for anybody’s opinion . . .” The USG Open Source Center translates an article about Turkish President Abdullah Gul calling Iranian […]

The Bush administration announced wideranging new sanctions on Iran on Thursday, which target three Iranian banks, nine companies associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, and several individuals, as well as the IRGC (roughly analogous to the National Guard in the US, i.e. a populist adjunct to the formal Iranian army). These unilateral sanctions clearly […]

My appearance on Amy Goodman’s ‘Democracy Now’ is now available online. I am also giving the YouTube links below, which are clickable. But do help support DN at their web site. I discuss developments in Iraq and Iraq, and in no. 3 below discuss the resonances of Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt to contemporary affairs. 1. […]

From the Morning News Book section: ‘Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East by Juan Cole Book Digest: As the bibliography of the disaster known as the Bush administration grows, a useful early distinction will be chronicle versus analysis and context. Cole, a thoughtful and imaginative scholar, offers the latter with his account of an earlier, […]

The Guardian reports on a building scandal in Israel over the extreme brutality of its occupation of the Palestinians in the West Bank. Excerpt: ‘ According to Yishai Karin: ‘At one point or another of their service, the majority of the interviewees enjoyed violence. They enjoyed the violence because it broke the routine and they […]

At the Napoleon’s Egypt blog, Jaubert’s important letter critical of Napoleon Bonaparte’s use of the naval forces. It also contains the crucial passage, “You will laugh outright, perhaps you witlings of Paris, at the Mahometan proclamation to the Commander in Chief. He is proof, however, against all your raillery; and the thing itself will certainly […]

Alexandra Russell writes: This morning, the New York Times revealed that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is rushing through a plan to rewrite media ownership rules, letting the biggest media companies control even more local outlets. And he’s doing it without giving the public a chance to respond. The rules could take effect as early as […]

Barnett Rubin points in our Global Affairs group blog to the impact of the failures in Afghanistan, of the tribal turmoil in Waziristan, on the Karachi bombing at the center of Pakistani politics.