2020

3 Dead as Iraqi Crowds Protest Electricity Outages in 124° Heat; Have US and Climate Crisis left Iraq Unviable?

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Tuesday, the temperature in Baghdad hit 124° F. (51.2°). Just for perspective, the all-time highest temperature recorded for Asia was in Kuwait five years ago, at 129° F. Scientists consider an average temperature of 95° the highest consistent with habitability. Since these temperatures and higher will become more and […]

Houthi

Yemen: Houthi Stonewalling on Leaking Oil Supertanker endangers Red Sea Ecology, 30 Million Livelihoods

Human Rights Watch

( Human Rights Watch) – Houthi authorities in Yemen should immediately permit United Nations experts access to a supertanker moored off Yemen’s coast that risks spilling over a million barrels of crude oil into the Red Sea, Human Rights Watch said today. The UN says a spill would have catastrophic environmental and humanitarian consequences, including […]

Bill of Rights

“Defendant Shall Not Attend Protests”: In Portland, Getting Out of Jail Requires Relinquishing Constitutional Rights

ProPublica

By Dara Lind | – ( ProPublica ) – Federal authorities are using a new tactic in their battle against protesters in Portland, Oregon: arrest them on offenses as minor as “failing to obey” an order to get off a sidewalk on federal property — and then tell them they can’t protest anymore as a […]

Epidemics

The New Isolationism and the Distrustful Citizen: Covid-19 and the end of Geopolitics

John Feffer

( Tomdispatch.com) – I don’t trust you. Don’t take it personally. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a friend or a stranger. I don’t care about your identity or your politics, where you work or if you work, whether you wear a mask or carry a gun. I don’t trust you because you are, for the […]

Featured

Is Netanyahu Wagging the Dog with Claims of Hezbollah Clashes (Which Hezbollah doesn’t Know about)?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been virtually besieged in his prime ministerial mansion on Balfour Street in Jerusalem by protesters for weeks, as the rallies against his mismanagement of the economy and the pandemic have grown ever larger, spreading to Tel Aviv and other cities. It is the largest […]

Israel/ Palestine

Israel-Palestine between Hi-Tech Dystopian Apartheid and a State for all its Peoples

Yara Hawari

( Al-Shabakah) – Palestinian futures have long been discussed without Palestinian input or within an imposed and limited framework. Indeed, most ideas of the future in mainstream political spaces rather consistently establish the containment of the Indigenous Palestinians and security for the Israeli settler state as their primary concern. The most recent manifestation of this […]

Authoritarianism

Colonizing Portland: How Trump’s tactics Recall Worst Excesses of British Empire in places like Hong Kong

Martin Powers

Ann Arbor (Special to Informed Comment) – When Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty in1997, the Western press loudly bemoaned the death of Democracy, but those of us who had lived there knew better. In times of stress colonial rule more closely resembled Trump’s Portland than a citadel of law, with the use of militarized […]

African-Americans

John Lewis knew that Democrats must build a Cross-Race Coalition against Plutocrats that Honors the Victimization of Minorities

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Rep. John Lewis lay in state at the Capitol on Monday, after a lifetime devoted to racial justice issues. With racial injustice now more obvious than ever, steps both by business and government to redress the systemic failings may be possible. Nonetheless some of the best current […]

Featured

Coronavirus Protests against “Corrupt” Netanyahu Rock Israel, as cases per capita outstrip Brazil

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in office continuously since 2009, is facing a perfect storm. His trial on corruption charges is ongoing. The unemployment rate is 20 percent, and Israel has slightly more cases of the novel coronavirus per capita than Brazil (one of the countries with the worst record […]

Archives for 2020