Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has abruptly been handed an honest-to-God crisis that may distract him from his usual antics of trolling Venezuelan asylum-seekers, firing elected prosecutors who disagree with him on coerced childbirth, and firing scientists who wouldn’t manipulate state COVID statistics for him. DeSantis called Hurricane Ian a once-in-a-500-year […]
Archives for September 2022
Juan Cole on Theocracy: The David Feldman Show (Video)
The David Feldman Show | Juan Cole on Theocracy | – “03:30:52 SPECIAL GUEST: Professor Juan Cole in conversation with Professor Adnan Husain Professor Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Since 2002, he has written and edited Informed Comment (juancole.com). On today’s show: Professor Cole draws […]
Iranian women have been rebelling against restrictions since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 – with renewed hope that protests this time will end differently
By Pardis Mahdavi, The University of Montana | – Shouts of “death to the dictator” and “woman, life, freedom” are reverberating throughout the streets of Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, while in custody of the “morality police” in Tehran. These protests have echoes from past resistance movements. For the past […]
How America’s Democracy Is “Ripe to Be Exploited”
By Eric Umansky | – ( ProPublica) – Voters in Sweden this month gave a leading role to a far-right party with neo-Nazi roots. Italy is also on the cusp of putting a party in power that has fascist origins. And of course, in the United States, one party has increasingly embraced election denialism and […]
Lie all you can Lie: Dishonesty Plagues America’s War Machine
( Tomdispatch.com ) – As a military professor for six years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in the 1990s, I often walked past the honor code prominently displayed for all cadets to see. Its message was simple and clear: they were not to tolerate lying, cheating, stealing, or similar dishonorable acts. Yet that’s exactly […]
Iranian Revolutionary Guards launch Drone Strikes on Dissident Kurds in Iraq, as Baghdad summons Iranian Ambassador
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps on Wednesday targeted Iranian Kurdish expatriate political and paramilitary groups in the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq for drone strikes, killing over a dozen people and wounding more than fifty. So reports Patrick Wintour at the Guardian. This is not the first time Iran has […]
Iran protests: majority of people reject compulsory hijab and an Islamic regime, surveys find
By Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Utrecht University and Ammar Maleki, Tilburg University | – (The Conversation) – A young woman’s death in custody in Iran on September 16 has sparked nationwide protests. Mahsa Amini’s fatal injuries resulted from an arrest and beating by the country’s hijab police, which enforces the mandatory and “correct” way of wearing […]
Is Putin in a Corner?
( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – When a country starts casting around for 60-year-old veterans to send to the front, you know that something’s wrong. All hands don’t go on deck unless the ship is foundering. It’s not yet clear whether the Russian ship of state is taking on water. But its military effort […]
Former Iranian President’s Daughter Arrested For Supporting Protests Triggered By Death Of Woman In Custody Over Hijab
By Mohammad Zarghami and Golnaz Esfandiari | – ( RFE/RL ) – Just days after expressing support for the protests in Iran, Faezeh Hashemi, the outspoken daughter of former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, was arrested in the Iranian capital on unknown charges. The hard-line Tasnim news agency, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards […]