Uncategorized

(By Juan Cole) David D. Kirkpatrick at the New York Times has settled the controversy over events in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, by actually going to Benghazi and digging into the story. Admittedly, it was a somewhat dangerous assignment, but Kirkpatrick risked it. The take-away of this careful investigation, depending on a range of […]

Human Rights

The other Victim of Israeli settler vigilantism is Israeli Society Itself

contributors

(By Shirin Rubin) Israeli society will pay the ‘price’ for settler vigilantism, rights group warns (via The Christian Science Monitor) When Ahmad Milhem heard earlier this month that Jewish extremists had scrawled “Mohammad is a pig” on the walls of his local mosque, he feared for both his Arab and Jewish neighbors. “If our young […]

Climate Change

Birth of Hope: Top Ten Solar Energy Stories 2013

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) The story of a doomed race who need to be saved by a messiah is on people’s minds today. It functions at a spiritual level. There is an analogous story at the physical level. Humankind is facing the biggest crisis in its 120,000-year-long existence, the physical equivalent of original sin. It is […]

Climate Change

Climate Denialists Spending Billions in untraceable Dark Money to fool the Public

contributors

(By Lauren McCauley) The expansive misinformation campaign behind climate change denial is increasingly being funded in the dark, reveals a new report published Friday in the journal Climatic Change According to the study titled "Institutionalizing Delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations," while the largest and most consistent funders of […]

China

Coleridge, Kubla Khan (Poem of the Day)

contributors

(By Samuel Taylor Coleridge) Kubla Khan Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round; And there […]

Environment

Real Time Earth Wind Map

Juan Cole

Real Time Earth Wind Map from Earth Nullschool.net h/t Treehugger

Domestic Surveillance

Colbert: NSA Spying on Online Games to Prevent non-existent Virtual Terrorism

Juan Cole

Stephen Colbert reports on NSA spying on online games. He notes that covert NSA analysts may be a majority in some virtual hang-outs and had to institute protocols so that they did not end up spying on each other! [Juan Cole made fun a few years ago of the obsession by some security agencies with […]

Human Rights

842,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon (pop.: 4.4 mn) as UN Calls for $6 bn Aid

contributors

(By Agence France Presse) One in five Lebanon residents Syria refugees: UN (via AFP) One of five people living in Lebanon are refugees who have fled the conflict in neighbouring Syria, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said Monday. The UNHCR says there are more than 842,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon but the actual […]

Domestic Surveillance

Federal Judge to NSA: What you did to Verizon Customers was Unconstitutional

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) Judge Richard Leon of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled Monday that the bulk collection by the National Security Agency of cell phone data (everyone you called, when you called them and where you were when you called them) of Americans violates the Fourth Amendment to the […]