Archives for 2012

Fireworks at the iconic Burj Khalifa in Dubai for 2013: Dubai is back. Its economy grew 3.2 percent in 2012, owing in part to good economic growth among its two major trade partners, China and India, and in part to the United Arab Emirates federal government having stepped in to use government stimulus to achieve […]

Demonstrations and rallies began being held in the largely Sunni Arab province of al-Anbar and spread to Samarra (Salahuddin) and Nineva in Iraq on December 26. Sometimes crowds flew the flag of the Free Syrian Army, with which Iraqi Sunnis often identify, since the FSA is fighting a Shiite-dominated regime. The Sunni Arab youth are […]

Dave Eggers’ novel, Hologram for the King, was the best novel I read in 2012. The book centers on an American telecom company hoping to make a sale in Saudi Arabia, which requires literally camping out at a prospective artificial city (King Abdul Aziz Economic City) near Jidda on the Red Sea coast. The protagonist, […]

The unnamed Indian woman who was gang-raped on a bus in New Delhi and had to be sent to Singapore for medical treatment has died and her body has been cremated back in Delhi, provoking further protests throughout India. Aljazeera English reports Rape is always about power, not sex. India is a highly patriarchal society. […]

I have created an annual Amun-Ra award for heroic green energy responses to our global climate crisis. Climate change is by far the most urgent of the threats to human existence that human beings can do something about. We are moving rapidly, by virtue of our massive carbon emissions, toward a climate that may be […]

1. The end of any potential ‘two state solution’ to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel’s far right wing Likud government, headed by Binyamin Netanyahu, built or committed to build thousands of new family domiciles for Israeli squatters in Palestinian territory. In the absence of a Palestinian state, Palestinians are doomed to statelessness and a lack of […]

Gen. Norman H. Schwarzkopf is dead at 78. He died of pneumonia. Schwarzkopf was among the military leaders who repositioned the United States as a Middle Eastern hegemon. The US had interests in the Middle East from World War II forward, but the region was frankly on the back burner. The central American military and […]

Second Amendment fundamentalists push for open carrying of firearms in public, and armed gun nuts even attended one of President Obama’s rallies in Arizona. That was apparently just all right with the FBI. But the peaceful protest movement, Occupy Wall Street, was treated by the FBI as a terrorist threat. Democracy Now! reports: The PATRIOT […]

Skateistan is a skateboard NGO in Kabul, which maintains a facility for skateboarding and gets as many as 300 youth to attend as spectators at competitions. The organization maintains that 40% of skateboarders in Kabul are girls and young women, and that it is one of few relatively gender-integrated sports. Although in the 1990s under […]