Frida Berrigan | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – In the wake of Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s 1984 soared onto bestseller lists, as did Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which also hit TV screens in a storm of publicity. Zombies, fascists, and predators of every sort are now […]
New UN Report Documents Legacy of 10-year Siege in Gaza
By IMEMC News | – – Most of the projections for 2020, on the situation in the Gaza Strip, have deteriorated further and faster than anticipated in 2012, the United Nations said on Tuesday. Real GDP per capita in Gaza has decreased, the provision of health services has continued to decline, and the demand for […]
Uber Can be Fixed; and Mideast Women Need It
By Neslihan Cevik | (Informed Comment) | – – While in such metropolises as New York or Istanbul, Uber is most famous for hacking the commercial taxi system, it has hacked something much bigger in places like Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In KAS, it is still unlawful for women to drive. Women who have […]
Rolex “Caliph” of ISIL Dead: Syrian Observatory
TeleSur | – – Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s death has been widely speculated for months. Reports from the United Kingdom-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, SOHR, claim that ISIL leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been killed. “(We have) confirmed information from leaders, including one of the first rank, in the Islamic State in the eastern countryside […]
S. Africa ruling party will downgrade ties with Israel over Illegal Occupation
Ma’an News Agency | – – PRETORIA (Ma’an) — The African National Congress (ANC), the ruling party of South Africa, voted on Tuesday in favor of downgrading South Africa’s diplomatic representation in Israel in protest of the occupation. The decision, made during ANC’s National Policy Conference, was hailed as a “major victory for human rights […]
Can the Liberation of Mosul begin to free the Mideast from Fundamentalism?
By Balsam Mustafa | (The Conversation) | – – After an offensive lasting nearly nine months, the Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, walked through the streets of Mosul on July 9 after Iraqi forces backed by US-led coalition airstrikes “liberated” the city from so-called Islamic State (IS). Abadi was there to congratulate security forces for […]
How Dangerous is Trump’s Flirtation with Violence?
By Ian Buruma | (Project Syndicate) | – – NEW YORK – Some people might have dismissed Donald Trump’s recent tweet of a video clip showing him punching the face of a man with a CNN logo on his head as yet another example of the US president’s vulgar buffoonery – unseemly, perhaps, but par […]
Hobby Lobby caught smuggling Iraqi Antiquities (TYT)
Cenk Uygur and Brett Erlich | (The Young Turks News Video) || – – “Hobby Lobby just got caught smuggling. Cenk Uygur and Brett Erlich, the hosts of The Young Turks, tell you what they were smuggling. “(CNN)Hobby Lobby agreed to forfeit thousands of artifacts from modern-day Iraq and pay a $3 million fine to […]
We have dire Problems: Don’t be distracted by Trump’s Twitter Cascades
By Tom Engelhardt | (Tomdispatch.com) | – – I don’t tweet, but I do have a brief message for our president: Will you please get the hell out of the way for a few minutes? You and your antics are blocking our view of the damn world and it’s a world we should be focusing […]