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Veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk is interviewed by Amy Goodman on his experiences in Syria. In the course of the interview, he denounces the increasingly common stenography approach in Western journalism, where articles are written citing unnamed government intelligence analysts and security officials, with no fact-checking and no reporting from the ground:

Tom Engelhardt writes at Tomdispatch.com It stretched from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea, from the middle of Europe to the Kurile Islands in the Pacific, from Siberia to Central Asia.  Its nuclear arsenal held 45,000 warheads, and its military had five million troops under arms.  There had been nothing like it in Eurasia since the Mongols conquered […]

Save the Children has issued its annual report on mothers and newborns. The best place to be a mother? Finland! The worst? The Congo. Save the Children issued a video on motherhood in Mozambique: The US only ranks 30th, with the worst infant mortality rate in the industrialized world. Every year here, 11,500 newborns die […]

Some Spanish lyrics, some Arabic. In medieval Arabic poetry this genre was called mulamma`at. Alabina, “Habibi ya Nour el Ain,” rare version As This source points out, “The mulamma’, “patch-work,” or “macaronic” poem, composed in alternate lines or couplets in two or more different languages, has no separate form, and will be more suitably considered […]

A UN commission unvestigating the situation in Syria has strong, concrete suspicions that Syrian rebels used sarin gas, but does not have firm proof, according to investigator Carla del Ponti. Euronews reports The announcement landed like a bombshell because during the past week Israeli and European officials have levelled the same charge against the Syrian […]

Parody of 24-hour cable news from The Onion that that nails it: