Human Rights Watch | – (Beirut) – The Saudi Arabia-led coalition of Arab countries that conducted airstrikes in Yemen on March 26 and 27, 2015, killed at least 11 and possibly as many as 34 civilians during the first day of bombings in Sanaa, the capital, Human Rights Watch said today. The 11 dead included […]
Archives for March 2015
A Game-Changer in Syrian War? al-Qaeda-led Factions take Idlib
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – The provincial capital Idlib, a city of 165,000 in the old days and administrative center of the northwestern Idlib province, appears to have fallen completely to a Muslim fundamentalist coalition spearheaded by Ahrar al-Sham (Free Men of Syria) and the al-Qaeda affiliate, the Support Front (Jabhat al-Nusra). Most […]
ISIL, Yemen, Syria: Drought, Climate Change and new Wars
By David Reed | (Foreign Policy in Focus) – Natural resource scarcity poses a far broader challenge to prosperity and national security than traditional military threats. The U.S. intelligence and security communities grapple on a daily basis with the pressing reality that natural resource scarcity and global climate change pose direct threats to U.S. prosperity […]
French Firm Pulls Out of Jerusalem Cable Car Project
by IMEMC News | – France-based utility giant Suez Environnement said Wednesday that, because of political sensitivities, it has decided not to take part in a cable car project linking West Jerusalem to the annexed Eastern sector. The project, run by the Jerusalem city council, has stoked controversy over the Israeli cable car’s planned route, […]
Antarctic Ice Melting Faster than Ever in “Unstoppable Decline”
By Laurence Padman, Fernando Paolo and Helen Amanda Fricker | (The Conversation) Ask people what they know about Antarctica and they usually mention cold, snow and ice. In fact, there’s so much ice on Antarctica that if it all melted into the ocean, average sea level around the entire world would rise about 200 feet, […]
Who Has A Stake In Yemen Fight?
By Michael Scollon | (RFE/RL) – Yemen is at the center of a proxy war between regional heavyweights Iran and Saudi Arabia. It's the source of fears of a broader Sunni-Shi'ite conflict. And it has implications far beyond its borders. Here is a look at the stakeholders in the fight. The Playing Field […]
Lebanon’s Shiite Hizbullah slams Saudi attack on Yemen
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – Hasan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hizbullah, Lebanese Shiite party-militia, weighed in on Friday on the Saudi intervention in Yemen. The Saudis put together a Sunni coalition against the Shiite Houthis and have bombed Zaidi Shiite population centers like Sa’adeh. I discussed their motives in my just-published piece in […]
Will Indiana ‘Religious Freedom’ Law permit anti-Gay Discrimination?
Jackie Koppell and Jo Ankier | (TheLipTV) “Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed a religious freedom bill into law amid pressure from opponents who argue that the measure is a secret way for states to condone discrimination against the LGBT community. We look at the story on the Lip News with Jackie Koppell and Jo Ankier. […]
More Palestinians killed than any year since1967, Says United Nations
By Valentina Ieri UNITED NATIONS (IPS) – In 2014, the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) saw the worst escalation of hostilities since 1967, said a report by the United Nations Office of Coordination and Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), released on March 26. The report, Fragmented Lives, said that the Gaza strip’s 1.8 […]