The speech of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to the UNGA pledged that Iran has no nuclear weapons program and said that Iran never would. The new Iranian president said he was committed to a time-bound set of negotiations over the country’s nuclear enrichment program. His remarks were encouraging, but unspecific about the ways he could […]
President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil at UN delivers Stinging Rebuke to Obama on NSA Spying (Lazare)
Reuters reports on President Roussef’s speech condemning US spying on her country and on her personally: Sarah Lazare writes at Commondreams: In a furious critique that opened the UN's General Assembly meeting Tuesday immediately before President Obama took the podium, Brazil's president Dilma Rousseff blasted U.S. secret surveillance programs for violating her country's national sovereignty, […]
Is Iran Ready to do a Deal with Obama over its Nuclear Program?
The United States, France, Germany, the UK, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE form a bloc that are convinced that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program is intended ultimately to produce a bomb. Iran maintains that the program is solely intended to produce fuel for nuclear reactors, which will allow it to avoid using its petroleum for […]
Is Hamas Finished? Facing a Youth Rebellion and Egyptian, Iranian Hostility
The party-militia Hamas, a distant offshoot in Palestinian Gaza of the Muslim Brotherhood, has seldom been on the sunny side of the street. But a combination of difficult political choices has left it more isolated and more broke than ever before in its history, as China’s Xinhua wire service points out. Adding insult to injury, […]
Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ Was less Intrusive than our own Feds & We OK’d That (Calabrese and Harwood)
Christopher Calabrese and Matthew Harwood write at Tomdispatch.com For at least the last six years, government agents have been exploiting an AT&T database filled with the records of billions of American phone calls from as far back as 1987. The rationale behind this dragnet intrusion, codenamed Hemisphere, is to find suspicious links between people with […]
Alshabab attack on Nairobi a Sign of Political Defeat
The horrible attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi by members of the Alshabab terrorist group from neighboring Somalia is the act of a declining political movement that has lost enormous ground in recent years. When we see this sort of naked terror, it is important to know if an ascendant group is announcing itself […]
Top Five Wind Energy Successes Today
Wind energy at the moment is by the apparent numbers less expensive than solar, and huge wind farms are being opened throughout the world. There is good news on this front from Denmark, Germany, and some other places. 1. Denmark has just opened its largest wind farm. Denmark gets a third of its electricity from […]
Americans Drawing the Line on Day of Action against Keystone XL (Lazare)
Sarah Lazare writes at Commondreams.org: In towns and cities across the U.S., demonstrators are 'drawing the line' Saturday demanding that President Obama protect people and the environment by rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline. Billed a national day of action, and spearheaded by the climate campaign 350.org, over 200 rallies will take place in all 50 […]
Israeli Troops attack European Diplomats on Aid Mission
First the Israelis again erased a Palestinian population, ruling that the 120 Bedouin inhabitants of Khirbet Makhul in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank did not have proper “building permits” for the huts in which they lived. These people have lived in Palestine since forever, and they are not in Israel. It is the Israelis who […]