Juan Cole

Iran’s Guardian Council startled that country when it announced that Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president (1989-1997) who was among the founders of the Islamic Republic, would not be allowed to run for president in the June election. Less surprising, it struck down the candidacy of Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, a confidant of outgoing president Mahmoud […]

The immense, mindless violence of a tornado hitting a small Oklahoma town, turning houses into splinters and crushing people under rubble, including children, has rightfully dominated the American airwaves for the past few days. Oklahoma is a great state, a state with profound history, a place of big plans where Native Americans play an outsized […]

PBS declined to show “Citizen Koch, a documentary about the Wisconsin public union issue, treating the influence of the dirty energy magnates who are destroying the world through climate change and funding climate change denial, among the various other nefarious things they do. This according to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer. It points to the […]

The Increasingly desperate Baath regime in Syria appears to be seeking skirmishes with Israel as a way of shoring up its nationalist credentials. If the regime were under fire from Israel, that would put the rebels in the position of acting as allies of Tel Aviv and so discrediting them. Hence, Syria’s troops fired at […]

My column is out at Truthdig, looking at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s muscular new role in the Eastern Mediterranean and Syria: Excerpt: “Even as Damascus pushes back against the rebels militarily, Putin has swung into action on the international and regional stages. The Russian government persuaded U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to support an […]

Mattea Kramer and Jo Comerford write at Tomdispatch: The streets are so much darker now, since money for streetlights is rarely available to municipal governments. The national parks began closing down years ago. Some are already being subdivided and sold to the highest bidder. Reports on bridges crumbling or even collapsing are commonplace. The air […]

Bombings killed at least 95 people on Monday in Iraq, with 10 car bombs going off in the capital of Baghdad alone. Two car bombs were detonated in the southern Shiite port city of Basra, and the mostly Sunni city of Samarra north of the capital was also attacked. Most of the violence seems to […]

The USG Open Source Center translates an interview by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov from Russian, treating Syria and Palestine. Russian Foreign Minister Discusses Syria, Palestinian Question in Interview to Lebanese TV Transcript of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s interview to Lebanese Television: “Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s Interview to Lebanese TV Channel Al-Mayadin, Moscow, […]

Any particular storm is weather, not climate. That is, it is a discrete event, whereas climate is a decades-long pattern of such events. But the pattern is worrisome. A hotter atmosphere, which we are producing by dumping 5 billion metric tons of pollution from burning coal, gas and petroleum right into our earth’s atmosphere, produces […]