(By Juan Cole) Polling by the Pew Charitable trust shows that the gap between Republicans and Democrats on evolution has substantially widened in just 5 years. The percentage of Republicans who say that human beings have been unchanged since they originated rose from 39% to 48% just since 2009. Meanwhile, the percentage of Democrats who […]
Archives for January 2014
Syria: 73,000 were Killed in 2013 Carnage as Refugees Brace for Winter
(By AFP) 73,000 dead in Syria in 2013, war’s bloodiest year (via AFP) More than 73,000 people were killed in Syria in 2013, the bloodiest year yet in the brutal civil war that began in March 2011, an NGO said on Wednesday. The tally from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights came as renewed regime […]
Is a Third Palestinian Uprising on its Way?
(By Ruthie Blum) On December 25, Ali Jarbawi published his blockbuster Op-Ed “The Coming Intifada” with The New York Times. ”We Palestinians are living through the worst situation in years,” he wrote. Meanwhile, Kerry & Co. attempt to strike an historic peace agreement. So what will it be? Has the Arab Spring, now in its […]
Street Kebab Chef in Mosul, Iraq, 1903 (Photo of the Day)
From M. E. Hume-Griffith and A. Hume, Behind the Veil in Persia and Turkish Arabia: An Account of an Englishwoman’s Eight Years’ Residence Amongst the Women of the East (1909).
Egyptian Military Junta Jumps the Shark, Interrogates Islamist Muppet
(By Juan Cole) When the venerable al-Ahram newspaper, then under the control of the government of Hosni Mubarak, published the allegation during the 2011 revolution that the crowds were just coming down to Tahrir Square for KFC chicken, it was the beginning of the end of the Mubarak establishment. It might have survived being repressive, […]
Solar Ascendancy: Minnesota Court Ruling for Solar over Gas a Harbinger of Things to Come
(By Juan Cole) Minnesota Judge Eric Lipman found that solar is a better deal than natural gas for Xcel Energy, permitting Geronimo Energy to construct 20 huge solar facilities worth $250 million in Xcel’s service area in that state. The amount of solar power in the state would increase by a factor of 7. The […]
Apple: We didn’t help NSA put the Dropoutjeep Backdoor in our iPhones
(By Jon Queally) Apple, the company giant behind the iconic iPhone, declared on Monday that is has never assisted the NSA in its efforts to create "back doors" to its signature mobile phone or any of its other products. The declaration by the computer giant comes in response to revelations made public by the German […]
Turkey’s Secretive Gulen Movement Challenges its Prime Minister as Religious Right Splits
(By Alexander Christie-Miller) The Gulen movement: a self-exiled imam challenges Turkey’s Erdogan (via The Christian Science Monitor) The man some see as the architect of a political storm threatening to topple Turkey’s government lives 5,000 miles away in rural Pennsylvania. Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim preacher born in 1941 near the eastern Turkish city of Erzurum, […]
Tagore’s “The New Year” (Poem of the Day)
(By Rabindranath Tagore) The New Year LIKE FRUIT, shaken free by an impatient wind from the veils of its mother flower, thou comest, New Year, whirling in a frantic dance amid the stampede of the wind-lashed clouds and infuriate showers, while trampled by thy turbulence are scattered away the faded and the frail in an […]
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