(AFP reports) Teen in Beirut bombing ‘selfie’ dies (via AFP) A Lebanese teenager seen posing for a group “selfie” in front of a bomb-laden car moments before it exploded in the capital Beirut died of his injuries on Saturday. “The number of victims from the attack rose to seven after the death of young Mohammad… […]
SNL: Anti-Depressant for Obama (Video of the Day)
Saturday Night Live commercial parody with Jay Pharoah on the anti-depressant Obama needs after the year he had in 2013.
Ethiopia aims to become Africa’s Green Energy Giant
Ethiopia intends to increase its power generation from 2000 megawatts to 10,000 MW. That goal is not unusual for a developing country. What is distinctive is that its government wants to achieve as much as possible of this increase in power through green energy (hydro, wind, solar and geothermal). AFP reports on “Ethiopia spearheads green […]
Syria spills over on Lebanon: Beirut Bombing Kills Sunni Critic of Syria’s al-Assad
(By Juan Cole) Respected Lebanese politician and former ambassador to the United States, Muhammad Shatah, was assassinated by a massive car bomb near the parliament building on Friday. He was on his way to a meeting of the Future Party. He was an adviser to former prime minister Saad Hariri of Future, whose own father […]
Locusts & Climate Change Plague Yemen on top of al-Qaeda, Drones, Huthis (Video of the Day)
Yemen has suffered flash floods and unusual amounts of rainfall recently. These phenomena are not new, but they may be increasing because of climate change, which increases water vapor in the atmosphere. Locusts flourish in wetter top soil. Yemen is an agricultural society and much of the population is food insecure to begin with. Climate […]
Yezidi Kurdish Family in Syria, 1899 (Photo of the Day)
A Kurdish Yezidi Family of the Mount Simeon district of northern Syria, at a village near Aleppo, circa 1899 (From Gertrude Bell, Syria: The Desert and the Sown, 1908) The Kurdish population of northeast Syria is roughly 10 percent of the population. At that time, there were about 3 million people in what is now […]
US Arms Shiite Iraqi Gov’t to Kill Sunni Rebels, Arms Syrian Sunni Rebels to overthrow Shiite Gov’t
(By Juan Cole) It can only be called an Escherian Mobius Strip foreign policy. The Obama administration is sending hellfire missiles and surveillance drones to the Shiite Islamic Mission Party-dominated government of Iraq to help in the latter’s struggle against radical Sunni rebels who have increased their bombings and attacks this year. If the helicopter […]
Freed Pussy Riot Band Members call for ‘Russia without Putin’ (Video of the Day)
Channel 4 News reports: On this occasion of their release, it is worthwhile reprinting excerpts from the translation of an interview by Elena Masyuk with Maria “Masha” Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova from last January that appears on the Free Pussy Riot web site: Masyuk: “— I attended almost every single day of your [Maria’s} trial […]
Snowden’s Christmas Message on Privacy: Does NSA threaten 9th, 14th Amendments, ‘Inviolate Personality’?
(By Juan Cole) Edward Snowden’s Christmas address, carried by the British Channel 4, concentrated on the disappearance of privacy. He said that a child born today might “never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought.” People walk around with a tracking device in their pockets, he noted, […]
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