This essay was first published in January 2017. It seems even more prescient 8 and a half years later. At that time I could not have imagined that Trump would bring in psychopathic cronies like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to destroy US AID and potentially kill 14 million people, more than died in World […]
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Featured
Under the Sea: China’s Digital Silk Road and the Middle East
London (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – China-US geopolitical rivalries have manifested in many arenas from esoteric ones like export controls over semiconductor chips, to high profile trade wars and confrontations over Taiwan. The outcome of the two sides’ efforts to entrench their control over the physical infrastructure that underlies the digital world of the […]
Saudi Arabia in Modern History
Book Review – David Commins, “Saudi Arabia: A Modern History” (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2025). Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The rise of Saudi power in the eighteenth century is not easy to explain. There are few sources, and most of them are highly partisan, remarks David Commins, a professor […]
Scientists prove Extensive Viking Silver Trade with Abbasid Empire from British Silver Hoard
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Northeastern England fell to the Vikings in 865, and they held it for several decades. They not only had what is now Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Durham but points south to the town of Bedale on the way to York. In 2012 archeologists found a silver and gold treasure hoard in Bedale […]
Trump to Xi: ‘Hold our Beer’ – EVs majority of Chinese New Car Sales, as Exports rocket 74%
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Car News China reports that in the first half of 2025, consumers in that country bought 10,891,000 passenger vehicles. But here’s the catch. They bought 5,458,000 EVs and 5,433,000 gasoline cars. Look carefully at those numbers. They bought more EVs than internal combustion engine cars. To be precise, 50.1% of […]
Cowardly Israeli Murder of 5 Journalists, including Anas al-Sharif, Smearing them as Hamas
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Israeli state by now has a long and sanguinary history of murdering writers and journalists in cold blood. In 1972, Israeli commandos murdered novelist, painter and short story writer Ghassan Kanafani in Beirut with a car bomb — the weapon of choice for terrorists ever since — killing his […]
Protesting Gaza War, Massive Crowds Shut down Tel Aviv, Storm TV Station, Call for General Strike
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Rubaie Sawaid, writing for the Israeli newspaper Arab 48, reports that on Saturday enormous crowds demonstrated in Israel against the government’s plan to take over all of Gaza, demanding that the release of the remaining over two dozen Israeli hostages in the Strip be prioritized. He writes that the families […]
Why is Israel Playing Spoiler in the New Syria?
Belfast (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Last week, Israel launched the latest of some 300 raids into Syria in the past few months. Some such incursions, as with a major set of airstrikes on Syria in July shows its determination to be a destabilizing factor in the region. Israel claimed that it carried out […]
War Crimes Then and Now: Hiroshima to Gaza
This week marks 80 years since the United States used its nuclear weapons against the civilian population of Japan in August 1945. Prior to that, the U.S. began the mass firebombing of Japanese citizens. On the night of March 9, U.S. bombers, “dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo, unleashing a firestorm that incinerated […]
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