July 2011

News updates

by Paul Woodward 07.14.2011

I’ll be off-line for the next few days and so there won’t be regular news updates until late Friday. But in the meantime I have scheduled a lot of interesting feature articles which will appear here over this period. — PW Share

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Europeans against multiculturalism

by News Sources 07.14.2011

John R. Bowen writes: One of the many signs of the rightward creep of Western European politics is the recent unison of voices denouncing multiculturalism. German Chancellor Angela Merkel led off last October by claiming that multiculturalism “has failed and failed utterly.” She was echoed in February by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime [...]

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Does Islam stand against science?

by News Sources 07.14.2011

Steve Paulson writes: We may think the charged relationship between science and religion is mainly a problem for Christian fundamentalists, but modern science is also under fire in the Muslim world. Islamic creationist movements are gaining momentum, and growing numbers of Muslims now look to the Quran itself for revelations about science. Science in Muslim [...]

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Palestinians remember 1948

by News Sources 07.14.2011

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Black ops and blood money

by News Sources 07.14.2011

Matthew Teague writes: Hearing the American’s name whispered in his ear, the chief of police in Lahore, Pakistan, turns from his desk and nods toward a nondescript side door in his office. His desk sits surrounded by concentric rings of chairs, occupied by visitors hoping for a moment of Chief Aslam Tareen’s time. Lahore is [...]

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On Orientalism — Edward Said (Part 3)

by News Sources 07.14.2011

(Watch Part 1 here and Part 2 here.) Share

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The brain on trial

by Attention to the Unseen 07.14.2011

David Eagleman writes: On the steamy first day of August 1966, Charles Whitman took an elevator to the top floor of the University of Texas Tower in Austin. The 25-year-old climbed the stairs to the observation deck, lugging with him a footlocker full of guns and ammunition. At the top, he killed a receptionist with [...]

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Anwar al-Awlaki: the next Bin Laden

by News Sources 07.13.2011

Patrick Symmes writes: It was the first drone attack in Yemen in a decade. On May 5, three days after Osama bin Laden was killed, a weaponized unmanned aircraft flew at 20,000 feet over the cracked and broken topography of Yemen. The target was a pickup truck carrying two men, one of them an American-born [...]

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David Headley saves his own life in a Chicago courtroom

by News Sources 07.13.2011

Liz Mermin writes: The United States District Court of the Northern District of Illinois is an enormous glass cube of a building that occupies an entire block in downtown Chicago. When I arrive there on a cold and wet afternoon in the middle of May, the lobby is scattered with bomb-sniffing dogs and dozens of [...]

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On Orientalism — Edward Said (Part 2)

by News Sources 07.13.2011

(Watch Part 1 here.) Share

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The unquiet life of Franz Gayl

by News Sources 07.13.2011

James Verini writes: As he had every morning for years, on October 4, 2010, Franz Gayl woke up at five, fed his two Rhodesian Ridgebacks, and then walked down the street from his modest home at the end of a cul-de-sac in northern Virginia to wait for the bus to the Pentagon. Once there, Gayl [...]

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Glenn Beck’s magicland

by News Sources 07.13.2011

Laurie Winer, Los Angeles Review of Books: The undisputed high point of Beck’s tenure in Baltimore was an elaborate prank built around a nonexistent theme park. The idea was to run a promotional campaign for the fictional grand opening of the world’s first air-conditioned underground amusement park, called Magicland. According to Beck and Gray, it [...]

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News updates

by Paul Woodward 07.13.2011

I’ll be off-line for the next few days and so there won’t be regular news updates until late Friday. But in the meantime I have scheduled a lot of interesting feature articles which will appear here over this period. — PW Share

Read the full article →

Romney doesn’t scare Obama — Huntsman does

by News Sources 07.13.2011

Chris Jones writes: [Former US ambassador to China and newly-declared GOP presidential candidate, Jon] Huntsman and his family returned from Beijing only twenty days ago, at the end of April. Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, he had served at the embassy for nearly two years, his third ambassadorship and his fourth time living in Asia. (The [...]

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Life after capitalism

by News Sources 07.13.2011

Robert Skidelsky writes: In 1995, I published a book called The World After Communism. Today, I wonder whether there will be a world after capitalism. That question is not prompted by the worst economic slump since the 1930s. Capitalism has always had crises, and will go on having them. Rather, it comes from the feeling [...]

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On Orientalism — Edward Said (Part 1)

by News Sources 07.13.2011

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The tactic of arresting Palestinian children

by News Sources 07.13.2011

Jillian Kestler-DAmours writes: Dozens of Palestinian children clamoured excitedly in the East Jerusalem village of Silwan on June 26, each clutching the strings to as many helium-filled balloons as they could. Moments later, the children watched as the sky above this flashpoint Palestinian neighbourhood filled with red, green, black and white – the colours of [...]

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On flotillas and the law

by News Sources 07.13.2011

Lawrence Davidson writes: When it comes to the struggle against Israel’s policies of oppression there are two conflicting levels: that of government and that of civil society. The most recent example of this duality is the half dozen or so small ships held captive in the ports of Greece. The ships, loaded with humanitarian supplies [...]

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Avoiding impunity: the need to broaden torture prosecutions

by News Sources 07.13.2011

Marjorie Cohn writes: President Barack Obama declared “nobody’s above the law” in 2009, as Congress contemplated an investigation of torture authorized by the Bush administration. However, Obama has failed to honor those words. His Justice Department proclaimed its intention to grant a free pass to Bush officials and their lawyers who constructed a regime of [...]

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The Kingdom and the Towers

by News Sources 07.13.2011

Anthony Summers and Robynn Swan write: For 10 years now, a major question about 9/11 has remained unresolved. It was, as 9/11-commission chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton recalled, “Had the hijackers received any support from foreign governments?” There was information that pointed to the answer, but the commissioners apparently deemed it too disquieting to [...]

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The dark arts

by News Sources 07.12.2011

Vanity Fair reports: Phone hacking is illegal in Britain, but that is a technicality. By all accounts, it was a practice that was indulged in by many reporters at many newspapers. “It started as a playground trick,” Paul McMullan, a former editor at the News of the World, told me. “It was so easy that [...]

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Egypt: democracy in danger?

by News Sources 07.12.2011

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Introducing the next eco-warriors

by News Sources 07.12.2011

Derrick O’Keefe writes: Evo Morales, Bolivia’s indigenous president, has said that the challenge of the 21st century is to respect and restore the rights of Mother Earth. And the stakes are high. Ultimately, the fate of our species — and millions of others — hangs in the balance. Already, thousands of young people worldwide have [...]

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Why Egypt wasn’t waiting for WikiLeaks to ignite a revolution

by News Sources 07.12.2011

Nancy Messieh writes: Ask any Egyptian how much of an influence the Internet was in the nation’s uprising, the first thing they’ll probably do is roll their eyes at you. I’ve certainly mentioned it countless times – International media found the perfectly convenient package of the Facebook revolution fueled by a Google executive. A better [...]

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