By Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski ( ProPublica ) – In 2014, one of Texas billionaire Harlan Crow’s companies purchased a string of properties on a quiet residential street in Savannah, Georgia. It wasn’t a marquee acquisition for the real estate magnate, just an old single-story home and two vacant lots down the […]
Archives for April 2023
DNA Study Sheds Light on Arab Expansion in Africa, Axum and other Empires
By Nancy Bird, UCL | – Pre-colonial African history is alive with tales of civilisations rising and falling and of different cultures intermingling across the continent. We have now shed more light on some of these societies using the science of genetics. In a study published in Science Advances, my co-authors and I used DNA […]
Weaponizing ChatGPT? The Pentagon Girds for Mid-Century Wars
( Tomdispatch.com )- Why is the Pentagon budget so high? On March 13th, the Biden administration unveiled its $842 billion military budget request for 2024, the largest ask (in today’s dollars) since the peaks of the Afghan and Iraq wars. And mind you, that’s before the hawks in Congress get their hands on it. Last […]
Assault on Religious Freedom: Violent Crackdown by Israeli Police on Christian Worshipers in Jerusalem
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Arabic press is reporting violent assaults Saturday evening by Israeli police against Palestinian Christian worshipers in Jerusalem attempting to make their way to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher for the “Saturday of Light” commemoration. The police attacks took place at the entrance to the Church of the Holy […]
Trump’s Al Capone Moment
By Mitchell Zimmerman | ( Otherwords.org) – The Prohibition Era mobster and thug Alphonse “Al” Capone comes to mind as we see the man who incited the January 2021 Capitol insurrection, among other misdeeds, finally face a criminal charge: falsifying business records. Al Capone was the boss of a murderous Chicago criminal enterprise that […]
Heavy Fighting Breaks out in Sudanese Capital, Imperiling Revolution
( Middle East Monitor ) – Clashes erupted Saturday between the conventional Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), formerly known as the Janjaweed militias, in the capital Khartoum. The RSF had been deployed in 2019 by the military junta against the civilian revolutionary movement that overthrew dictator and war criminal Omar […]
The Taliban is not playing Straight with the west over Easing of Sanctions – and Women and Girls are paying much of the Price
By Kambaiz Rafi, SOAS, University of London | – The economic and political isolation of Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover in August 2021 has worsened a humanitarian crisis in the country. The World Food Program has projected that between November 2022 and March 2023 the number of food-insecure Afghans would rise to 20 million – […]
US in Eclipse: 240,000 Palestinians worship at al-Aqsa in Jerusalem as Iran, Lebanon, Show Solidarity on Jerusalem Day
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Quds (Jerusalem) Day is commemorated on the last Friday of Ramadan, and was held yesterday. “Al-Quds” is the Arabic name for Jerusalem, meaning “the Holy.” Revolutionary Iran established this custom, and some of the biggest Quds Day crowds gathered in Tehran. Demonstrations were held, however, all over the Muslim world. […]
A Renewed Yemen Truce Is No Substitute for Justice
By Peter Certo | – ( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The news that Saudi officials, who have been leading a bombing campaign in Yemen for eight years, met with the Houthi officials who control much of the country on April 9 to possibly renew a truce that ended in October is positive. But […]
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