Blog

  • 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.…

    Read more »


  • 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]

    Read more »


  • 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…

    Read more »


  • 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…

    Read more »


  • 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…

    Read more »


  • 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…

    Read more »


  • 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…

    Read more »


  • 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…

    Read more »


  • 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:

    Read more »


  • 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…

    Read more »


  • * Secretary of Navy “Lied to Congress” * U.S. Withdrawal from Arms Trade Treaty

    “The Treaty seeks to regulate the $100 billion global arms trade, requiring governments to assess the risk of violations of international human rights and humanitarian law before they authorize an arms deal, to not transfer arms where they are likely to end up in the hands of terrorists and organized criminal groups.”

  • Legal Escalation Against Catholic Activists Facing 25 Years for Anti-Nuclear Weapons Action

    The defendants are Elizabeth McAlister (the widow of Phil Berrigan), Martha Hennessy, granddaughter of Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day, Stephen Kelly S.J., Clare Grady, Patrick O’Neill, Mark Colville, and Carmen Trotta.

  • The Antitrust Case Against Facebook

    “Clearly, Facebook is preparing for battle and hiring a government insider to lead it. But let’s remember that in the early 1900s, AT&T was also proficient at playing inside baseball. AT&T settled an early antitrust investigation with the Department of Justice but it was a settlement that pulled the wool over regulators’ eyes. It allowed AT&T…

  • Report: U.S. Sanctions on Venezuela Are Responsible for Tens of Thousands of Deaths

    The group reports the study “finds that economic sanctions implemented by the Trump administration since August 2017 have caused tens of thousands of deaths and are rapidly worsening the humanitarian crisis.”

  • Biden’s “Disastrous” Legislative Record

    As Cockburn points out: “The net result has been a tide of refugees fleeing north, most famously exemplified by the ‘caravan’ used by Donald Trump to galvanize support prior to November’s congressional elections and his subsequent fraudulent ‘border crisis.'”

  • “Russiagate” Used to Demonize WikiLeaks

    “At my last meeting this year with Assange, the energy I recall at our first encounter in January 2011 was undiminished. He made coffee, glancing up at surveillance cameras in the tiny kitchen and every other room in the embassy that recorded his every movement.

  • Biden’s Deceitful Record on Iraq Invasion

    CNN “As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, Biden stated that Saddam Hussein had a sizable arsenal of chemical weapons as well as biological weapons, including anthrax, and that ‘he may have a strain’ of smallpox, despite UN inspectors reporting that Iraq no longer appeared to have any weaponized chemical or biological…

  • Mueller and Barr’s Real History of Cover-ups

    “As always, Mueller relies without critical questioning or thought upon intelligence agencies’ specious ‘assessments’ similar to how he relied upon Colin Powell’s presentation of false ‘intelligence’ to the U.N. to help the Bush administration gin up their illegal and disastrous war on Iraq. There could be gaping holes in Mueller’s indictment of the 12 Russian GRU…

  • Trump Vetoes Yemen War Powers Bill

    “This brutal and ongoing onslaught has taken the lives of more than 60,000 Yemenis and left half the population — 14 million people — on the verge of famine. What began as a civil war in Yemen escalated into what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Yemen became an international killing field,…

  • Examining the Center for American Progress

    “Internal criticism of the Emirati donations leaked into the news media, prompting an in-house investigation that led to the firing of two staff members. One of them, Ken Gude, a longtime executive, is working with a lawyer on a wrongful dismissal lawsuit.

Mastodon