Reports that Italian intelligence officers had been paying Taliban fighters not to attack their troops – and that France’s ignorance of this tactic left it unaware of the true security risk in the Sarobi district of Afghanistan when it took over last summer – were dismissed as “rubbish” by Italy’s defence minister. But the allegation sparked outrage in France. (full article…)

Des histoires comme celles-là, j’en aurais tant d’autres à raconter. On dit de moi que je suis d’origine étrangère, un beur, une racaille, un islamiste, un délinquant, un sauvageon, un “beurgeois”, un enfant issu de l’immigration… Mais jamais un Français, Français tout court. (full article…)

France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday. (more…)

Worldwide spending on weapons has reached record levels amounting to well over $1tn last year, a leading research organisation reported today.

Global military expenditure has risen by 45% over the past decade to $1.46tn, according to the latest annual Yearbook on Armaments, Disarmament, and International Security published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri). (more…)

During a Paris conference on gender and sexuality Friday Horowitz said, “I call on the Palestinian Authority from this conference to stop persecuting homosexuals. This situation is intolerable.” (more…)

He then added, “But Israel’s four-decades of brutality in the occupied territories is delightfully tolerable… Oh and there is also no such thing as homophobia in Israeli society. Thank you.”

Don’t you just love how the Israeli “left” never mentions the IDF’s practice of blackmailing Palestinian homosexuals with exposure if they refuse to collaborate?

The weeds are already growing rampant at the notorious “Camp X-Ray,” and President-elect Barack Obama plans to shut down the entire detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Now the Pentagon is inviting journalists to tour the camp one last time.

One would imagine a trip to the world’s best-known and most notorious prison could be an unpleasant experience. Everyone knows the horror stories from Guantanamo: how the prisoners were chained on the flight to Cuba, and how they arrived at the camp half-frozen, their eyes blindfolded and completely disoriented. They didn’t know where they were at the time, and many of them are still there today, in the prison where the United States keeps its terror suspects.

A special group recently embarked on a trip to Guantanamo that would prove to be significantly more comfortable. The group met at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington in the early morning hours, where a North American Airlines charter flight was already waiting. The destination, with the airport code NBW, well removed from the rule of US constitutional law, is known simply as GTMO in military slang. The boarding pass was first of many amusing souvenirs of the trip. (more…)

Well, let’s begin with the elections. The word that the rolls off of everyone’s tongue is historic. Historic election. And I agree with it. It was an historic election. To have a black family in the white house is a momentous achievement. In fact, it’s historic in a broader sense. The two Democratic candidates were an African-American and a woman. Both remarkable achievements. We go back say 40 years, it would have been unthinkable. So something’s happened to the country in 40 years. And what’s happened to the country- which is we’re not supposed to mention- is that there was extensive and very constructive activism in the 1960s, which had an aftermath. So the feminist movement, mostly developed in the 70s-–the solidarity movements of the 80’s and on till today. And the activism did civilize the country. The country’s a lot more civilized than it was 40 years ago and the historic achievements illustrate it. That’s also a lesson for what’s next.

What’s next will depend on whether the same thing happens. Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below. And the answer to what’s next depends on people like you. Nobody else can answer it. It’s not predictable. In some ways, the election—the election was surprising in some respects.

Going back to my bad prediction, If the financial crisis hadn’t taken place at the moment that it did, if it had been delayed a couple of months, I suspect that prediction would have been correct. But not speculating, one thing surprising about the election was that it wasn’t a landslide. By the usual criteria, you would expect the opposition party to win in a landslide under conditions like the ones that exist today. The incumbent president for eight years was so unpopular that his own party couldn’t mention his name and had to pretend to be opposing his policies. He presided over the worst record for ordinary people in post-war history, in terms of job growth, real wealth and so on. Just about everything the administration was touched just turned into a disaster. (more…)