By Juan Cole Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu demanded on Sunday that the world community constrain Iran to change its “genocidal policy” toward Israel, in the course of a speech in which he attacked President Obama’s current round of negotiations with Iran over its civilian nuclear enrichment program. The rhetoric Netanyahu uses is not just […]
Uygur: Bush Targetting of Juan Cole proves that NSA can’t be trusted with our Personal Data
Cenk Uygur at Young Turks makes the point that the National Security Agency and other US intelligence (services who are ending up with massive amounts of electronic surveillance information on Americans –whether that is what they were mainly going for or not) keep saying we should trust them with the information. They maintain that they […]
Solar would be Cheaper: US Pentagon has spent $8 Trillion to Guard Gulf Oil
By Juan Cole Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was in the Gulf on Friday at a conference of defense ministers from the region, including the Gulf Cooperation Council and Iran. Hagel underlined American commitment to the security of the Arab states on the littoral of the Gulf, including Oman, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, […]
The Mandela Problem of the AWM Wing of the GOP
The US Republican Party has become the party of the angry white man (AWM) in the United States, which is a large part of the reason it has had trouble winning presidential elections. There are more female than male voters, and if you add white females to Asians, Latinos, African-Americans, gays and agnostics, you have […]
FBi Laptop Camera Snooping and Orwell’s 1984: Side by Side Comparison
Jon Schwartz ( @tinyrevolution ) posted this to Twitter. It is a side by side comparison of a passage from “1984” to the news report from a former senior FBI official that the FBI can turn on the laptop cameras of individuals without activating the red light that shows the camera is operating. The Washington […]
Interview with Jeremy Scahill Questions “War on Terror”
Euronews asks Jeremy Scahill about his new film, “Dirty Wars,” which has been nominated for an Academy Award. Scahill was also recently interviewed at Democracy Now! “AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, this report that just came out from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that more people have been killed in drone strikes in the six months after […]
Today’s South Africa by the Numbers (with Photos)
Population of South Africa: 51 million (slightly larger than South Korea) Annual Gross Domestic Product (nominal): $384 billion (in neighborhood of Taiwan, Austria, UAE) Rank among world economies: 29 Rank among African economies: 1 Amount GDP has grown since end of white rule in 1994: 3 times Number of people added to middle class in […]
Photo of the Day: Apartheid South Africa Sign
This sign is left over from Apartheid days and is preserved under an awning in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa as a reminder of what was. I photographed it in August, 2012. —— Related video: For more context, the BBC has a minute-and-a-half review of the horrible institution of Apartheid in South Africa:
Photo of the Day: Mandela Training in Algeria
h/t Sami Ben Gharbia @ifikra Nelson Mandela training with the Algerian Liberation Front in 1962. The Algerians fought an 8-year war, 1954-1962, to become independent from French imperialism, in the course of which between half a million and a million Algerians died (the population of the country was then 11 million). In 1962, South Africa […]