Archives for 2009

IRAN: Authorities confiscate lawyer Shirin Ebadi's Nobel Peace Prize | Babylon & Beyond | Los Angeles Times I was privileged to be at a conference with Shirin Ebadi in early September in Atlanta, and when this relatively short and outwardly unprepossessing woman took the podium, she was transformed into something like an Old Testament prophet, […]

Proposed talks between the US and the Taliban, to be brokered by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, have broken down because the Taliban are unwilling to talk to what they consider the foreign, illegitimate occupiers of their country. (See Mullah Omar’s statement in the next post). On the other hand, some negotiations are doing well. Aljazeera […]

The USG Open Source Center translates the statement of Mullah Omar, leader of the “Old Taliban” in Afghanistan, on the occasion of the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice (Eid al-Adha). Mullah Omar demands and end to the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan and rejects the idea of negotiating with the US, calling it a “surrender.” […]

'The Geographic Gap' | HUMNews Of 237 countries and territories in the world, the 4 largest newsgathering and distribution companies that supply the world with 90% of news do not cover 116 of them. These 116 countries or territories contain 4 billion people over half the world. 63 of these media-ignored countries and territories are […]

When we used to do Thanksgiving as cross-dressing and insulting authority: Thanksgiving was a Northeastern regional commemoration until Abraham Lincoln promulgated it as a national holiday in 1863, and it was celebrated in lots of different ways. One of those ways was for young men to dress up as women or in fantastic costumes and […]

Town under siege: 6,000 camels to be shot – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) There are a million camels in Australia’s outback, and the camels were key to developing it. And the camels and cameleers of the 19th century came from . . . Afghanistan! The site notes: ‘ Without the Afghans much of the […]

Daily Times – Leading News Resource of Pakistan – opinion: Training the Afghan army —Brian Cloughley Brian Cloughley warned last September: ‘In Kabul last week, “an American service member and an Afghan police officer got into an argument because the American was drinking water in front of the Afghan police, who are not eating or […]

Iraq inquiry: Tony Blair told ‘days before invasion’ WMD had been dismantled – Telegraph What I remember is that knowledgeable inspectors and expatriate Iraq scientists were saying this all through 2002 and into early 2003. Here is Imad Khadduri’s piece from that winter: “Iraq has no N-weapons, claims expatriate scientist 06/01/2003. (Via my posting, at […]

In the midst of the state visit to Washington of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, President Barack Obama at a brief news conference announced that he was going to “finish the job” in Afghanistan. He cautioned, however, that down the road, Afghanistan would have to provide for its own security. As for the strong divide […]