Dave Eggers’ novel, Hologram for the King, was the best novel I read in 2012. The book centers on an American telecom company hoping to make a sale in Saudi Arabia, which requires literally camping out at a prospective artificial city (King Abdul Aziz Economic City) near Jidda on the Red Sea coast. The protagonist, […]
Rape in India, and the Low Status of Women
The unnamed Indian woman who was gang-raped on a bus in New Delhi and had to be sent to Singapore for medical treatment has died and her body has been cremated back in Delhi, provoking further protests throughout India. Aljazeera English reports Rape is always about power, not sex. India is a highly patriarchal society. […]
Best Green Energy Responses to Climate Crisis: IC’s 2012 Amun-Ra Award
I have created an annual Amun-Ra award for heroic green energy responses to our global climate crisis. Climate change is by far the most urgent of the threats to human existence that human beings can do something about. We are moving rapidly, by virtue of our massive carbon emissions, toward a climate that may be […]
Top 10 Ways the Middle East Changed, 2012
1. The end of any potential ‘two state solution’ to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel’s far right wing Likud government, headed by Binyamin Netanyahu, built or committed to build thousands of new family domiciles for Israeli squatters in Palestinian territory. In the absence of a Palestinian state, Palestinians are doomed to statelessness and a lack of […]
Schwarzkopf (RIP) and How the United States got Bogged Down in the Middle East
Gen. Norman H. Schwarzkopf is dead at 78. He died of pneumonia. Schwarzkopf was among the military leaders who repositioned the United States as a Middle Eastern hegemon. The US had interests in the Middle East from World War II forward, but the region was frankly on the back burner. The central American military and […]
FBI Violated Constitution by Branding Peaceful Occupy Wall Street as Terrorist threat
Second Amendment fundamentalists push for open carrying of firearms in public, and armed gun nuts even attended one of President Obama’s rallies in Arizona. That was apparently just all right with the FBI. But the peaceful protest movement, Occupy Wall Street, was treated by the FBI as a terrorist threat. Democracy Now! reports: The PATRIOT […]
The Afghan Sk8ter Girrls of Kabul (Video) – (Female Literacy has Tripled in Afghanistan)
Skateistan is a skateboard NGO in Kabul, which maintains a facility for skateboarding and gets as many as 300 youth to attend as spectators at competitions. The organization maintains that 40% of skateboarders in Kabul are girls and young women, and that it is one of few relatively gender-integrated sports. Although in the 1990s under […]
Syria’s Head of Military Police Defects, as Death Toll in Revolution Climbs to 45,000
Maj. Gen. Abdul Aziz Jasim al-Shalal, head of Syria’s military police, defected late Tuesday to Turkey, joining the revolutionaries against the regime. He announced his defection in a YouTube video, saying that the Syrian army is no longer fulfilling its primary mission, of defending the country from attack, but rather has become a gang attacking […]
Egypt: Women Cut their Hair in Tahrir Square to Protest Fundamentalist Constitution
Dozens of progressive Egyptian women cut their hair in Tahrir Square on Tuesday to protest the passage of Egypt’s new, fundamentalist constitution. The protesters chanted, “A woman’s crown is her liberation!” Mona Abd al-Radi, the secretary-general of the Union of the Women’s Organization of Cairo, and one of eight who cut her hair, said that […]
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