Archives for January 2013

Beleagured President Bashar al-Assad addressed the nation on Sunday, in a “Baghdad Bob” moment, in which he more or less denied he has lost control of much of the country or that most of his countrymen consider him a monster. Meanwhile, the civil war had raged all around the country. A mortar landed in north […]

Joaquin Sapien writes at ProPublica: Following the mass shooting in Connecticut, the Obama administration and lawmakers around the country have promised to re-examine gun control in America. ProPublica decided to take a look at what’s happened legislatively in states where some of the worst shootings in recent U.S. history have occurred to see what effect, […]

Chris Woods, Jack Serle and Alice K. Ross write at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism: Reported civilian deaths fell sharply in Pakistan in 2012, with Bureau data suggesting that a minimum of 2.5% of those reported killed were civilians – compared with more than 14% in 2011. This suggests the CIA is seeking to limit […]

  Kirk J. Beattie writes in a guest column for Informed Comment: Most concerned Americans have, understandably, had their eyes glued on the monumental changes sweeping the Arab world. But they remain largely oblivious to another regional transformation of great significance; that is, the rightward shift of Israel’s political, tectonic plates. From its historically strong […]

The UN Human Rights Commission under Navi Pillai has had a team of researchers go through five different lists of casualties in Syria, and they concluded that at least 60,000 have died since the revolution began some 20 months ago. Some 500,000 Syrians have fled or been made refugees by the fighting, about 2 percent […]

Just for fun: What was our world like a thousand years ago? Of course, technologically very different, but Song China and Muslim Spain had made real advances in science, technology and infrastructure. If CNN had existed then, what major events would they have listed and passed around by carrier pigeon? Some of the themes salient […]

Muhammad Shahid Nazir had a hero’s welcome at Lahore airport last week. The fishmonger had gone to the UK last summer and worked in an east London fish market. His boss asked him to do something to attract attention to his sale of fish (one per British pound, $1.60 US). So he made up a […]

While it is important that the Bush tax giveaway to the wealthy begin to be reversed if the US budget is ever to recover its health, the bigger significance of the budget deal passed yesterday by both houses of Congress is that the wind power tax break was restored for 2013. Actually, even this extension […]