Archives for 2010

We live in an even more regimented society than the 1950s and early 1960s. We live in a society where protests can be confined to ‘protest zones,’ where peaceful protest or critical comment can place activists and journalists on a no-fly list (while the authorities still seem routinely to overlook actual terrorists), where our electronic […]

Reuters AlertNet – HAITI: Arab aid making its way I was watching Aljazeera Arabic and they noted that the Qatari aid plane had difficulty getting in a queue to land at the airport and that aid delivery was heavily dependent on security, so that it would get easier as US troops were deployed. Some critics […]

Martha Coakley – Salon.com An evolution in the birthers and teabaggers? Joan Walsh points out that Republican candidate for senator from Massachusetts Scott Brown says he doesn’t know if Obama’s parents were married when they had him. You always knew what they called him in private, but here it is in public. A subtext here […]

A US and a Canadian soldier were announced killed in hostile action in Afghanistan on Saturday. In a further blow to the his leadership, the lower house of the Afghanistan parliament rejected 10 of 17 further cabinet nominees put forward by President Hamid Karzai, with 224 MPs present. Although the lede in most articles about […]

NTI: Global Security Newswire – Iran Not Committed to Building Nuclear Bomb, Pentagon Intel Chief Says U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency Chief Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess said, “The bottom line assessments of the [National Intelligence Estimate] still hold true,” Burgess said. “We have not seen indication that the government has made the decision to move ahead […]

At least two Pakistani soldiers in Pakistani Kashmir were killed by a roadside bomb Thursday.Some observers fear this sort of move is a bid by the Taliban to assert themselves in Kashmir, which is contested between India and Pakistan, and where India has mounted a concerted counter-insurgency campaign. The fighting has killed thousands in the […]

My essay is up at NPR on why Wall Street should tithe its bonuses to Haiti as an act of propitiation and a recognition that a lot of this money was generated by their use of low-interest public funds for triage. The only thing I’d add is that the bonuses of the six biggest banks […]

Three bombs were set off in the old city of Najaf, among the holiest of Shiite sacred sites on Thursday afternoon, according to DPA. The casualty count is confused, but up to 27 were killed and up to 111 wounded according to this source. The incident comes at a time of renewed Sunni-Shiite tension that […]

Jimmy Kimmel does 10 of 10 on Jay Leno’s show and savages him over the torpedoing of Conan O’Brien End/ (Not Continued)