(By Juan Cole) The militarization of American police and humiliating practices of routine strip and cavity searches are the real culprits in the current diplomatic dispute between the United States and India. Police not only arrested the Indian deputy consul, Devyani Khobragade, who claims diplomatic immunity, on a minor visa and domestic labor charge, they […]
Colbert: NSA Spying on Online Games to Prevent non-existent Virtual Terrorism
Stephen Colbert reports on NSA spying on online games. He notes that covert NSA analysts may be a majority in some virtual hang-outs and had to institute protocols so that they did not end up spying on each other! [Juan Cole made fun a few years ago of the obsession by some security agencies with […]
Top Ten Ominous Signs about Last Month being the Hottest November on Record
(By Juan Cole) The The National Climatic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Aeronautics Administration has announced that if you take the average land surface temperature and the average sea surface temperature, November of 2013 was the warmest November since records began being kept in 1880. Here are some of the ominous statistics they […]
Federal Judge to NSA: What you did to Verizon Customers was Unconstitutional
(By Juan Cole) Judge Richard Leon of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled Monday that the bulk collection by the National Security Agency of cell phone data (everyone you called, when you called them and where you were when you called them) of Americans violates the Fourth Amendment to the […]
Syrian Christians Menaced by Extremist Sunnis, Slam Lack of Lebanese Support
Layal Abu Rahhal reported in Arabic from Beirut for al-Sharq al-Awsat [The Middle East] on the dilemmas of Syrian Christians and their Lebanese neighbors, Dec. 13, 2013. This is my paraphrase, influenced by the translation done by BBC Monitoring: Considering what the Christians of Syria are facing, Christians in Lebanon are raising alarums about the […]
Photo of the Day: Pyramids in Giza at Sunset
h/t Ahl Misr Zaman
How Peter O’Toole Saved the Arabs (According to David Lean)
(By Juan Cole) The late Peter O’Toole played T.E. Lawrence in David Lean’s 1963 “Lawrence of Arabia” with genius and abandon. All of us in my generation who went into Middle East studies were influenced by that film one way or another. Only later did it gradually become apparent to many of us how flawed […]
Dozens Killed by Regime Barrel Bombs in Aleppo, half of them Children
The Lebanese newspaper al-Nahar reports that the Syrian air force bombed Aleppo on Sunday with makeshift barrel bombs, killed at least 36 persons, including 15 children. They targeted neighborhoods controlled by rebels in the country’s largest city, in the north of the country. The Aleppo Information Center made up of activist citizen journalists said that […]
Is our Media Screwing us on Climate the Way it Did on Iraq?
Like The Iraq War, Media Fails To Report On Climate Change Accurately (via Clean Technica) Originally published on Skeptical Science. By Stephan Lewandowsky. “Iraq is developing a long-range ballistic missile system that could carry weapons of mass destruction up to 700 miles.” Iraq is progressing towards “dirty bombs that spew radioactivity… Related video: Eric […]
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