By Rebecca Solnit via Tomdispatch.com There have undoubtedly been stable periods in human history, but you and your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents never lived through one, and neither will any children or grandchildren you may have or come to have. Everything has been changing continuously, profoundly — from the role of women to the nature […]
Archives for September 2014
Education, Health, and Global Warming: Top 5 Reasons 45% of Scots Wanted to Leave the Right Wing UK
by Juan Cole The US media coverage of the Scottish referendum is oddly lacking in any reference to actual politics. As usual, the corporate media concentrates on issues in ethnicity to cover up issues in social class and social policy. The “Washington consensus” of Neoliberalism, substituting blind so-called “market forces” for good governance, has been […]
Will Independence Harm Scotland’s Green Advantage?
(Bloomberg) –- Renewable energy is found in abundance in Scotland; nearly half of the country’s electricity comes from green sources. But will an independent Scotland struggle to land orders as it faces changes to regulation? We look at one of the world’s leading test sites for marine energy. Bloomberg News: “Will Independence Harm Scotland’s Green […]
Coalition Of One: Iran Leads Own Fight Against Islamic State
By Charles Recknagel, RFE/RL The United States is putting together the first international coalition to try to roll back the Islamic State (IS) militants in Iraq and Syria. But when the nearly 40-state-strong alliance starts operations, it will find that there is already another coalition on the ground whose presence could complicate the U.S.-led effort […]
A Way out of the Gaza Trap
By Jean-Pierre Filiu, author of Gaza: A History One person has been enjoying every minute of this summer’s fifty-day war on Gaza. He was known formerly as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, until he changed his name to Caliph Ibrahim. His self-proclaimed “Islamic State” has been winning recruits by the dozen every time a child was killed […]
Is Israel’s Far-Right Government Inciting against the Israeli Left?
Middle East Eye Leftist Israeli activists staged weekly protests during the war in Gaza and they were confronted by rightwing protesters that shouted racial slurs and physical attacks. Middle East Eye: Israel’s Zionist Left: A Chronicle of Ambivalence
Shiite Militias of Iraq Reject US Return, Threaten to Attack US Forces
By Juan Cole The pan-Arab, London-based daily, “Al-Sharq al-Awsat” (The Middle East) reports that the major Shiite militias of Iraq are denouncing Prime Minister Haydar al-Abadi for welcoming US air support in the fight against the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Prime Minister al-Abadi himself rejected conventional US ground troops for […]
The Next Conflict in Iraq? Will the Kurds try to Annex Kirkuk Permanently?
By Nawzat Shamdeen | Berlin | via Niqash.org What will happen to Iraq’s “disputed territories” once Sunni Muslim extremists have been driven out? Will the Iraqi Kurdish military, who now control some of it, insist on staying? Or will conflicts between the Iraqi Kurdish and the Iraqi army make for the country’s next crisis? NIQASH […]
CBS Unjustly Punishes Rihanna For Ray Rice Controversy
Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks “CBS Sports pulled Rihanna’s intro to Thursday night’s NFL game between the Ravens and the Steelers following the release of video showing Ravens running back Ray Rice beating then-fiancée Janay Palmer in an Atlantic City casino elevator. CBS said it pulled the intro last Thursday to maintain an “appropriate […]