Archives for January 2009

The USG Open Source Center paraphrases articles in the Jordanian press on the Israeli attack on Gaza. Jordan is one of only two Arab states to have a formal peace treaty with Israel, and its intellectuals clearly want the government to abrogate it. Worse, they have been driven by the images of dead children dug […]

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced Thursday that Iraq had “regained its national sovereignty”. It could in fact be argued that for the first time since the end of the Gulf War, Iraq is again for most purposes an independent country in international law. It was put under Chapter 7 of the United Nations charter […]

The news keeps reporting that the Israeli air force bombed refugee camps in Gaza. Did you ever wonder how those refugee camps got to be in Gaza? Cont’d . . .I mean, where are they refugees from? There didn’t used to be refugees in Gaza, before 1948, after all. The grandparents of today’s refugees were […]

We all too often focus only on negative developments, and while it is understandable for people to keep their eyes on impending calamities, obsessing about the bad sometimes causes us to miss good news. We see a lot of that even with regard to the US. For instance, there has been a 23% decline in […]