By Tom Engelhardt via Tomdispatch For America’s national security state, this is the age of impunity. Nothing it does — torture, kidnapping, assassination, illegal surveillance, you name it — will ever be brought to court. For none of its beyond-the-boundaries acts will anyone be held accountable. The only crimes that can now be committed in […]
Archives for July 2014
The Court Trial of Bibi Netanyahu
By Juan Cole Dark Satire: Irony alert Prosecutor: “Justices of the International Criminal Court, I shall demonstrate to you that this man (points at detained Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu in orange jump suit and manacles at accused table) is guilty of serious breaches of international law and not just of war crimes but of a […]
Is Pope Francis the Green Pope?
By Robyn Purchia Pope Francis is putting a smile on environmentalists’ faces again. In an address at the University of Molise on Saturday, an agricultural and industrial region in southern Italy, Pope Francis called for more respect for nature, branding the destruction of South America’s rain forests and other forms of environmental exploitation a sin […]
Draft notices sent out 100 Years Late
By Cory Doctorow A US Selective Service database merge used two-digit years, and didn’t sanity-check its threatening notices to 19th century men who’d apparently failed to sign up for the draft by their 18th birthday. That’s how some 14,000 angry letters came to be sent to the last known residences of Pennsylvania men born in […]
Palestine 1896
First film footage taken of Ottoman Palestine (Lumiere Bros.), in 1896. Palestine 1896 h/t William Dalrymple Kemal Karpat wrote that according to the Ottoman Census of 1893, the population of most of what is now Palestine (excluding northern areas then attached to Beirut) was as follows: 371,959 Muslims 42,689 Christians 9,000 Jews This does not […]
The Map: A Palestinian Nation Thwarted & Speaking Truth to Power
By Juan Cole Reprint edn. … As part of my original posting, I mirrored a map of modern Palestinian history that has the virtue of showing graphically what has happened to the Palestinians politically and territorially in the past century. Andrew Sullivan then mirrored the map from my site, which set off a lot of […]
Top 7 Really Disturbing News from Iraq
1. Last Wednesday Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki angrily lashed out at the Kurds, accusing them of harboring the terrorists of the so-called ‘Islamic State.’ Since the Kurds have in fact fought the IS radicals, al-Maliki’s charge is hard to take seriously. Rather, it appears to be a sign of how angry he is that Kurdistan […]
Gaza’s Children Trapped by Israeli Airstrikes, Naval Bombardment, over 20 Dead
By Sarah Lazare As the human rights crisis grows more acute in this besieged strip, the number of dead and injured children continues to rise As Israeli fighter jets, attack helicopters, and armed drones continue to pummel Gaza for a fourth day, children—who comprise half of the population of this besieged strip—face mounting wounds and […]
NSA Spying: Now It’s Personal
By Eva Galperin and Nadia Kayyali via EFF Imagine that you watched a police officer in your neighborhood stop ten completely ordinary people every day just to take a look inside their vehicle or backpack. Now imagine that nine of those people are never even accused of a crime. They just happened to be in […]