By Joseph Richard Preville and Julie Poucher Harbin | (ISLAMiCommentary) How do Muslims fit into the quilt of American history? Jonathan Curiel investigates this question in his new book, Islam in America (I.B. Tauris, April 28, 2015). “America’s first Muslims,” he writes, “were perceived as less than human – people put in chains, forced to […]
Archives for February 2015
War on Whistleblowers (ft. Edward Snowden & David Carr)
Brave New Films | – Brave New Films: War on Whistleblowers (ft. Edward Snowden & David Carr) War on Whistleblowers highlights recent cases where American government employees and contractors took to the media to expose fraud and abuse. In all cases the whistle-blowing was to the detriment of their professional and personal lives. With President […]
Renewable Energy skyrocketing, From Solar Mosques to Wave-Powered Naval Bases
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – Here are some of the green energy good news stories of the past few weeks: 1. China put in a massive 21 gigawatts of new wind power in 2014, half of all the wind power installed in the entire world that year and four times as much as […]
Surprise: Noted Climate Change Denialist Secretly Took Oil Co. Payouts
By Nadia Prupis | (Commondreams.org) A prominent climate change denier and researcher quietly took more than $1.2 million in payouts from the energy industry, including the Koch brothers and other oil lobbyists, for the past 14 years, newly released documents have shown. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, accumulated a […]
‘I would have come forward sooner’ – Snowden on NSA leak regrets
RT | – Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has frequently said that he does not regret blowing the whistle on the agency’s mass surveillance programs. However, he has now stated that he would change one thing if he could do it all again. He would have leaked the information earlier. Snowden made the […]
Leak: Netanyahu’s 2012 Iran Bomb Warning refuted by Israeli Intel
Cenk Uygur | (The Young Turks) – “Benjamin Netanyahu’s dramatic declaration to world leaders in 2012 that Iran was about a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by his own secret service, according to a top-secret Mossad document. It is part of a cache of hundreds of dossiers, files and cables from […]
In Egypt, the Law itself is an Enemy of Women’s Rights
By Rana Allam | – CAIRO, Feb 23 2015 (IPS) – In November 2013, a Thomson Reuters Foundation survey ranked Egypt as the worst of 22 Arab states with regards to women’s rights. Several people argued that any country strictly following Islamic laws should rank lower, because Egypt and many other Arab and Muslim countries […]
Israel denies Gaza govt floodwater allegations
NB AFP has withdrawn the original story. BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Israel on Monday rejected allegations by the government in the Gaza Strip that authorities had released storm water into the coastal enclave. Children clear water after flooding in Gaza. (MaanImages) In a statement, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories said Israel did not […]
In New Gilded Age, Social Protest dominates Academy Awards Ceremony
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – If social and economic inequality were a mine, and if America were deep in this mine with a canary in tow, the canary would long since have expired. Some 400 billionaires have more wealth than the bottom half of Americans. We lived through a year of dramatic incidents […]