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  • Mubarak, Army, U.S., Israel vs Egyptian People

    [As government forces have attacked peaceful protesters in Tahrir Square, Emad Mekay from Cairo reports] Mubarak is clearly backed by the Americans. He took some moves after speaking with Obama and a visit by a former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Frank Wisner. Mubarak, the army, the Americans and the Israelis are clearly on one side.…

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  • Unrest Spreads to Sinai

    A Bedouin youth casually spreads out a piece of cloth before a police headquarters in Sheikh Zwayyed town in Sinai, the vast desert area to the east of Cairo across the Suez. “I will leave when Mubarak leaves,” he says. [Full piece from Inter Press Service]

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  • Chomsky: Strategic and Economic Objectives, Not Anti-Islamization, Drives U.S. Policy

    [While many are claiming that a central goal of U.S. policy is to minimize influence of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Noam Chomsky contributed this to our blog] It is well-established, including the major scholarly literature, that the U.S. supports democracy if and only if that accords with strategic and economic objectives.  Following…

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  • An Open Letter to President Barack Obama

    ————————————————————————————————————————— [To sign; for recent news releases on Egypt from the Institute for Public Accuracy] Dear President Obama: As political scientists, historians, and researchers in related fields who have studied the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, we the undersigned believe you have a chance to move beyond rhetoric to support the democratic movement sweeping…

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  • Report from Cairo

    From Alex Ortiz in Cairo: “The army is beginning to come into Cairo … tens of thousands converged in midan al-gala’ coming from three different protest marches. Total communication blackout. Reports of senior police officers ordering their men to stand down and not beat or fire tear gas at protesters in Midan al-gala an hour…

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  • Report on Latest from Cairo

    CAIRO, Egypt [11 p.m. local time] — 1-Some government media figures appear to be joining ranks with the protesters. Mahmoud Saad, a talk show host in the Egyptian state-run TV, has announced that he will no longer appear on TV starting tonight after he came under pressure from top government officials to report “untruths” about…

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  • Police in Cairo Beating up Jounalists

    [From 9:28 a.m. ET]: Police started beating up journalists protesting outside the Press Syndicate in downtown Cairo. They beat up women journalists too who were screaming and crying for help. “Do not club women. Do not club women,” some of the men rushed to the police asking them not to target women. “You’ll make things…

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  • From Alex Ortiz in Cairo

    [The Egyptian government has apparently block Twitter, Facebook (as of Wed. morn U.S. ET) and other internet tools, though apparently some people are able to get around such restrictions. Email from 8:45 a.m. ET:] Downtown Cairo today remains in a state of high alert. There are many security forces and plainsclothed policemen visible on every…

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  • Video from Cairo

    Phone lines are intermittent and Twitter has reportedly been blocked in Egypt. Here is a live video feed: ustream.tv/channel/cairodowntown [update: ustream has been blocked, streaming now intermittently at livestream.com/cairowitness — further update, now at: www.justin.tv/cairowitness] Here is a YouTube video from earlier today:

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  • Ukraine’s Assault on a Free Press

    In Ukraine, where media diversity is often defined by which powerful oligarch controls which TV station, one network, TVi — known for its independent investigative style — is under intense legal pressure, with its owner not part of Ukraine’s power circles. TVi faces a court hearing on Tuesday over a legal claim that the station’s…

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  • Last Year Teachers, Now GM Strike

    “A successful strike at General Motors could persuade UAW members that the union is willing to take significant risks to fight on behalf of its members, potentially opening the door to more organizing in the anti-union South, where many auto plants have migrated…’We are the architects of showing a better way, showing the light and…

  • Israel: “Apartheid Vote”

    “…this was an apartheid vote with an apartheid outcome. Any conversation about the election needs to include the context of millions of Palestinians who have no vote over who rules them…While Netanyahu not being around is a pleasant prospect, Cahol Lavan [Blue and White] must be understood as a rightwing party with less corruption issues.…

  • New Advisor is “Bolton Lite”

    “Will O’Brien work to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan? Or will he expand/facilitate war with Iran? Track record suggests latter…This is still a triumph for Pompeo, who gets a State guy in there and a weaker NSA than [with] Bolton. Pompeo is achieving Kissingerian levels of power in national security…”

  • Medicine for All

    “Forcing pharmaceutical companies to compete with a public alternative that does not answer to Wall Street and its demands for profit extraction would transform the market in ways that empowering the federal government to negotiate prices for a subset of drugs would not. It would also mean that patients with chronic diseases like diabetes would…

  • Why Would Saudi Arabia Get Attacked?

    “Easy to think of a rationale, with the U.S. (along with the Saudis) working to destroy not only [Iran’s] petroleum system but their whole economy, a consideration that seems to be left out of commentary that reflexively accepts that what the U.S. is doing, however shocking, cannot really be that bad, perhaps an error in…

  • Trump Threatens War With Iran: Why is Congress AWOL? 

    “It’s certainly true that Congress is charged with deciding whether or not to declare war. But the Congress has failed to live up to its responsibility as the U.S. is waging war in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Niger and elsewhere without a constitutionally mandated declaration of war. The U.S. government is also providing…

  • Beyond the Wall “Debate”: The “Bipartisan Border Industrial Complex”

    “Joe Biden was not telling the truth when at the debate on Thursday he said that the Obama administration did not ‘lock people in cages’ or ‘separate families.’ The statement is an impossible one given the nearly 3 million deportations during the eight years of Obama, the most ever by a sitting president, among other…

  • Biden: New Level of Iraq War Lies

    Presidential candidate Joe Biden is now claiming about the 2003 Iraq invasion: “Yes, I did oppose the war before it began.”…Tracey also writes: “When I reminded Biden that if he opposed the war all along, he could have joined 23 of his Senate colleagues in voting against authorizing it, he replied: ‘No, no, because they…

  • Bolton Out: A Step Away from More War?

    “Of course, Bolton’s departure will naturally increase the influence of Pompeo, a Christian Zionist whose views on Middle East policy, in particular, are very close to hard-line neoconservatives, but hopefully the Pentagon can act as an effective counterweight.”

  • Iraq War Lies Exposed by “Official Secrets” Heroine Influenced by Author

    The film is a remarkably accurate Hollywood account of how British spy Katharine Gun (played by Keira Knightley) attempted to stop the invasion of Iraq by exposing a top secret NSA document proving the U.S. and British governments were spying on other UN members to bully and blackmail their way to a UN authorization for…

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