December 2011

Inside Syria: Is the Syrian revolution getting militarised?

by News Sources 12.26.2011

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Vengeance in Libya

by News Sources 12.26.2011

Joshua Hammer writes: On November 20, the day after the capture of Seif Qaddafi, the second son and former heir apparent of Muammar Qaddafi, I set out from Tripoli for Libya’s Nafusa Mountains, to meet some of the former rebels who had tracked him down. I left the seaside capital just after dawn, followed the [...]

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New York Times implies anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic

by Paul Woodward 12.26.2011

When Jim Rutenberg and Serge Kovaleski refer to “books like The Invention of the Jewish People and March of the Titans: A History of the White Race,” should we assume that these are just ignorant journalists making a grossly inappropriate association, or are they purposefully trying to mislead their readers? In their New York Times [...]

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U.S. no longer able to disregard Pakistan’s sovereignty

by News Sources 12.25.2011

The New York Times reports: With the United States facing the reality that its broad security partnership with Pakistan is over, American officials are seeking to salvage a more limited counterterrorism alliance that they acknowledge will complicate their ability to launch attacks against extremists and move supplies into Afghanistan. The United States will be forced [...]

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Imran Khan: the most popular politician in Pakistan

by News Sources 12.25.2011

The Daily Telegraph reports on the rapidly rising star of Pakistani politics: Imran Khan has been written off before. As a cricketer, he was initially dismissed as having average ability before captaining his team to World Cup glory. For the past 15 years his political party has stumbled from one election humiliation to the next. [...]

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The year secrecy jumped the shark

by News Sources 12.25.2011

Electronic Frontier Foundation notes a few of the examples in which the Obama administration has pushed secrecy to absurd degrees in 2011: Government report concludes the government classified 77 million documents in 2010, a 40% increase on the year before. The number of people with security clearances exceeded 4.2. million, more people than the city [...]

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Assad’s Lebanese invasion

by News Sources 12.25.2011

Mitchell Prothero writes: The blacked-out sport utility vehicles entered the small mountain village of Arsal, in the furthest reaches of Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, at midnight on a cold night late last month. The mostly Sunni residents of the town immediately knew what was happening: Hezbollah had come to grab someone from his bed. The target [...]

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Bruised but defiant: Mona Eltahawy on her assault by Egyptian security forces

by News Sources 12.25.2011

Mona Eltahawy describes her recent assault in Cairo: I suffered a broken left arm and right hand. The Egyptian security forces’ brutality is always ugly, often random and occasionally poetic. Initially, I assumed my experience was random, but a veteran human rights activist told me they knew exactly who I was and what they were [...]

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Egyptian judge frees anti-junta blogger

by News Sources 12.25.2011

The Guardian reports: One of Egypt’s most prominent revolutionaries has been released from jail after almost two months during which he missed the birth of his first child. An Egyptian investigative judge ordered that Alaa Abd El Fattah, who has been at the forefront of anti-regime struggles for a decade and was a political prisoner [...]

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One world on Christmas Day

by Attention to the Unseen 12.25.2011

The best Christian slogan I know comes from the charity, Christian Aid: We believe in life before death. Keep that in mind when gazing into the life-sustaining sky that from below looks so vast, yet from above is revealed to be wafer thin — all that stands between us and a lifeless void. Sufjan Stevens [...]

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Wade Davis: Dreams from endangered cultures

by Attention to the Unseen 12.25.2011

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Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education

by Attention to the Unseen 12.25.2011

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Antonio Damasio: The quest to understand consciousness

by Attention to the Unseen 12.25.2011

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Karen Tse: How to stop torture

by News Sources 12.25.2011

International Bridges of Justice Share

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Why the 1 percent are only 1 percent

by News Sources 12.25.2011

Huffington Post reports: Social psychologists are making an argument that Occupy Wall Street protesters have been saying for months: Many rich people just aren’t in the habit of thinking of others. According to researchers at the University of California-Berkeley, people who grew up in economically comfortable circumstances are less attuned to the suffering of other [...]

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Capitalism is the crisis

by News Sources 12.25.2011

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Whose Egypt?

by News Sources 12.25.2011

Adam Shatz writes: The awakening is not over, but the heady days of the Arab Spring have come to an end. The counter-revolution, Régis Debray once observed, is revolutionised by the revolution. And so it has been. In Syria, protests have degenerated into sectarian warfare, fomented by a thuggish ruling clique that seems ready to [...]

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Egypt on the edge

by News Sources 12.25.2011

Yasmine El Rashidi writes: In Tahrir on November 25 the Islamist researcher and political analyst Ibrahim El Houdaiby told a group of us: “It would have taken a completely different direction had the Brotherhood come out last weekend and put their weight behind the people.” Even Islamists and some preachers and veiled women spoke of [...]

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Does airport security really make us safer?

by News Sources 12.25.2011

Charles C. Mann writes: Not until I walked with Bruce Schneier toward the mass of people unloading their laptops did it occur to me that it might not be possible for us to hang around unnoticed near Reagan National Airport’s security line. Much as upscale restaurants hang mug shots of local food writers in their [...]

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Christmas fading in the Holy Land

by News Sources 12.25.2011

Khaled Diab writes: In the land that put Christ in Christmas, Christianity is shrinking. Less than a century ago, Christians comprised nearly 10 percent of the population of Palestine (now Israel and the Palestinian territories). In 1946, the figure was around 8 percent. Today, Christians make up about 4 percent of the West Bank’s population, [...]

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The youngest prisoner held at Guantánamo

by News Sources 12.24.2011

Mohammed el Gorani was born in Saudi Arabia in 1986 but since his parents were from Chad, he didn’t have the rights of a Saudi. In the hope of advancing himself he traveled to Pakistan where he studied English with the goal of being able to return and work in a hotel in Mecca. Instead, [...]

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Yemen’s Saleh says he is going to U.S.

by News Sources 12.24.2011

Al Jazeera reports: Yemeni security forces in Sanaa have shot at protesters marching against President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who on his part said he would go to the United States in order to allow an interim government to prepare for an election to replace him, but did not specify when he would leave. Saleh, speaking [...]

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Israel’s plans for ‘mass forcible transfers’ of Palestinian Bedouin

by News Sources 12.24.2011

Jonathan Guyer writes: United Nations officials have issued a warning that the Government of Israel’s plans for Palestinian Bedouin communities living in Jerusalem’s periphery could constitute “mass forcible transfers” and “grave breaches” of international law. A pending plan in the West Bank threatens to displace Khan al-Ahmar, a Bedouin village of refugees originally from Israel’s [...]

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No alternative to a one-state solution

by News Sources 12.24.2011

Avraham Burg, former Speaker of the Knessett, argues that it is time for what remains of an Israeli left to abandon the idea of a two-state solution. Until now, we the seekers of peace, wandered through the world, spreading the hope that there would soon be solutions, while they were busy creating disheartening facts on [...]

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