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Mohamed Heikal, the Arab world's foremost political commentator, talks to the Guardian. This comes from the secular Arab perspective. It is worth reading... Excerpt: When I hear Bush talking about al-Qaida as if it was Nazi Germany or the communist party of the Soviet Union, I laugh because I know what is there. Bin Laden has been under surveillance for years: every telephone call was monitored and al-Qaida has been penetrated by American intelligence, Pakistani intelligence, Saudi intelligence, Egyptian intelligence. They could not have kept secret an operation that required such a degree of organisation and sophistication."
posted on Oct-13-01 at 1:14 AM

The Pakistan Maelstrom, by Tariq Ali. Analysis of the situation in Pakistan and the Middle East. Inludes a hilarious description of an attempted football match between Afghanistan and Pakistan last year...
posted on Oct-11-01 at 4:20 AM

Chomsky on MSNBC talks about recent events! That would be news all by itself. I know that a lot of people on the right disagree with him, but who can argue with what he says here? Also from left field an incisive Q&A about Afghanistan history and the current situation by Tariq Ali.
posted on Oct-8-01 at 2:57 AM

Is the west creating the new Osama? An excellent (as always) article by Robert Fisk in the Independent. Is the "Northern Alliance" just another bunch of fanatical thugs? If so is the West wise in supporting them?
posted on Oct-4-01 at 2:20 AM

Violent Clashes in Pakistan. This is bad news. Previous BBC reports dramatically highlight the folly of having a leader who is not well read enough to recognize the historical connotations of the word "crusade". For background context the Economist has a good article on Pakistan's dilemma.
posted on Sep-21-01 at 6:29 AM

Erward Said article about the attack, in the Observer. Reposted on Znet: No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents, most particularly when only a small group of people are in charge of such actions and feel themselves to represent the cause without having a real mandate to do so.
posted on Sep-18-01 at 4:03 AM

Passenger train collision in Utah. Reports from the US say two trains have collided in the state of Utah. I hope this has nothing to do with Tuesday...
posted on Sep-13-01 at 7:10 AM

A former CIA operative explains why the terrorist Usama bin Ladin has little to fear from American intelligence. From the Atlantic an inside look at the non-existence of US intelligence in the Afghanistan region: Unless one of bin Ladin's foot soldiers walks through the door of a U.S. consulate or embassy, the odds that a CIA counterterrorist officer will ever see one are extremely poor.
posted on Sep-13-01 at 5:33 AM

Taleban will extradite Bin Laden... If there is sufficient evidence for his guilt, according to the BBC.
posted on Sep-12-01 at 5:44 AM

So that's how cricket is played!
posted on Sep-6-01 at 7:05 AM

Amazing Photo of real hand to hand combat. The page is in Greek but the (600K) picture on top is, I think, worth your while. This is a photo taken by a British liaison officer to the partisans in the Greek island of Crete during WWII (named John Eberson or Emberson), as a group of guerillas confronts a German patrol. What is amazing is the fact that Emberson reached for his camera instead of his gun... This is the closest view of a combat situation I've ever seen captured on film - does anyone know of anything similar on the web? Caption translation inside this thread's comments.
posted on May-25-01 at 5:11 AM

Louisiana legislation decides that Darwin was "racist." It's not just the fundamentalist right... now it's Democrats pushing for the demonization of evolution. The full text of the resolution (in PDF format) can be found here. This is a Salon article about it. And this is the full text of "Darwin's Descent of Man", so that someone can point to me where exactly is Darwin suggesting that some races are "more evolved" than others... I mean don't they read the books before they start putting stickers on them?
posted on May-21-01 at 9:35 AM

Ben Allinger for fascist dictator page (official). Now there's a young man with big plans for his (our) future. Where does one vote for world dictators? He's as good as they get.
posted on May-9-01 at 7:42 AM

News picks from the Guardian. This is a very useful service of course: The Guardian links to top news stories on the web- weblog style... But is this a weblog or just a related links page...? Either way it's a news junky's heaven...
posted on Apr-11-01 at 6:56 AM

Human Rights Watch report on USA. Rather serious charges against the US government. Nothing new of course, but how come items like this are never discussed in major US media? "As in previous years, serious human rights violations were most apparent in the criminal justice system-including police brutality, discriminatory racial disparities in incarceration, abusive conditions of confinement, and state-sponsored executions, even of juvenile offenders and the mentally handicapped. But extensively documented human rights violations also included violations of workers' rights, discrimination against gay men and lesbians in the military, and the abuse of migrant child farmworkers. "
posted on Apr-4-01 at 3:58 AM

The anti-Napster or Napster's future?... File sharing as perceived by the music industry. I wonder if there isn't a deal with Napster already. But what are they going to do with all the Napster clones?
posted on Apr-2-01 at 9:28 AM

The market-model university: '...by looking at research on the health impact of tobacco, the "science" behind global warming or breast implants, or the effectiveness of a drug, we can see that it is not unusual for sponsored academics to fudge the data, suppress unfavourable evidence, and otherwise "torture the numbers till they confess"...'
posted on Mar-15-01 at 8:57 AM

A word from the future. "At the turn of the second millennium, humanity seemed set on a steady upward course. How did it all go wrong in just 200 years? This is a memo on the fall of homo sapiens, 2000-2200 CE, written for the crew of the third interstellar colonising mission, 2759 CE, by Anatol Lieven, as a record and a warning." Science-fiction? Dire warning? Anyway this is an enjoyable read.
posted on Mar-9-01 at 4:03 AM

Not your average mobile home. For the filthy rich among the MeFi crowd. Truly awe inspiring size... Residents will certainly need city guides. But will competition offer more affordable pricing?
posted on Mar-9-01 at 2:58 AM

Inspector Clouseau as Greek Police role-model? Wait for the midi file to load... At first I thought the site was hacked but, no, I checked, it's the real "Hellenic police informatics dept" web-site. I'm not sure whether it's self-sarcasm or cluelessness. And I wont even start about the site's imaginative design...
posted on Mar-6-01 at 3:04 AM

Drug Manufacturers to african AIDS patients:die. "Forty big pharmaceutical companies are trying to stop the South African Government from importing cut-price versions of well-known [AIDS] drugs.The multi-nationals say that would threaten their patent rights." The milk of human kindness... And BTW before anyone comments on how the drug companies have to make profits to fund further research and provide new drugs, since when finding ways to provide cheaper drugs stifles innovation?
posted on Mar-5-01 at 2:05 AM

A small world in most dimensions: "University of Washington scientists using gravity measurements to hunt for evidence of dimensions in addition to those already known have found that those dimensions would have to occupy a space smaller than 0.2 millimeter."
posted on Mar-1-01 at 5:02 AM

Prime Time. A prime is a whole number divisible only by itself and 1. In Aesthetics of the prime sequence one can hear primes, view primes (here also) and test for primes. Quite interesting and not just for math geeks...
posted on Feb-14-01 at 7:36 AM