Tom Engelhardt writes at Tomdispatch.com “But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional. With humility, but with resolve, let us never […]
Archives for September 2013
Why Ted Cruz Should sit down and Shut Up: Countries with Social Safety Net Happiest
In a performance that the rest of the world could not even comprehend, a wealthy, Ivy League-educated Texan talked until he was blue in the face to prevent poor children from seeing a doctor. Political scientist Benjamin Radcliff summarizes decades of survey research on human happiness, and the findings are not in doubt. People report […]
Taliban on the Euphrates: Syria fighters Dump Moderate SNC, Aim for Fundamentalist State
The pan-Arab daily al-Hayat [Life] reports that 14 bands of fighters in Syria have broken with the moderate Syrian National Council led by Ahmad al-Jarba and have repudiated its Free Syrian Army. The importance of this development should not be underestimated. It will throw a scare into Baghdad and Amman, and will provoke serious thought […]
US, UN Sanctions on Iran Hurt Most Vulnerable
In smug Washington-speak, US ‘sanctions’ on Iran have forced it to the negotiating table, making it possible to ‘stop’ the Iranian ‘nuclear weapons program.’ Even President Obama has started talking this way. They leave out the story of the children who die because they can’t afford medicine. The US doesn’t just have sanctions on Iran, […]
Iranian President Rouhani acknowledges Holocaust as Crime against Jewish People
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 […]
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