Now that the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen has finally started seeing some major successes, there are calls for both sides in that country's civil war to stop fighting and pursue peace talks. The feeling is that previous negotiations were rendered impossible by the fact that the Houthi-Saleh side was in such a dominant position that … Continue reading Backing a winner

Chinese authorities have "detained" ten top executives at the Tianjin Dongjiang Port Rui Hai International Logistics Company, which was responsible for the facility that exploded on Wednesday in the port city of Tianjin. The death toll from that explosion has reached 114, with 57 people still missing and environmental hazards (including "several hundred tons of … Continue reading Crime and punishment

These early presidential polls aren't useful for much other than the occasional laugh or when TV news networks decide to take it upon themselves to cull one political party's primary field, and since I'm not a TV news network I'm mainly in it for the laughs. Take the Republican field Everybody else in the field … Continue reading The Trump flameout doesn’t seem so imminent

Earlier today, a pipe bomb tore through the popular Erawan Shrine in downtown Bangkok, killing at least 22 20 people and injuring at least 125 more. The shrine, dedicated to the Hindu god Brahma, was built in the 1950s and has thousands of visitors every day in spite of the fact that Thailand is a … Continue reading Who bombed Bangkok today?

King Tut is still getting over the trauma of having his beard broken off and badly reattached with epoxy, so maybe it's unfair to pile on the guy like this, but an Egyptologist at the University of Arizona named Nicholas Reeves is now accusing Tutankhamun('s tomb) of hiding the tomb of Nefertiti, the chief consort … Continue reading What’s King Tut hiding?

Groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda don't win when they pull off a terrorist attack; they pull off terrorist attacks in hopes of winning in the aftermath. Terrorist organizations, or organizations that use terrorism as a tactic (the line in blurry but it does exist), survive only as long as they're able to recruit new followers. … Continue reading This is how ISIS wins

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is trying to implement a major reconstruction of the Iraqi government, something we talked about here last week. In fact, he's already reduced the size of his cabinet by a full third, from 33 ministries to 22. To recap, major public protests against basic government incompetence and corruption took place … Continue reading Sistani to the rescue?

Full confession: this is the third thing I've written about Syria in the last two days mostly because I knew I was going on TV to talk about it this afternoon and I wanted to get my own thoughts straight before I did that. I used you all as a sounding board, basically. Sorry. Anyway, … Continue reading Now for the reality check

Putting two and two together, Mohammad Javad Zarif's recent travels and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's recent chat with Saudi FM Adel al-Jubeir point to a coordinated push by Bashar al-Assad's two biggest allies, Russia and Iran, to follow-up the nuclear deal by recharging some kind of peace process in Syria. In fact, Zarif is … Continue reading Tag team effort

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is on a bit of a diplomacy jag in the aftermath of reaching the nuclear agreement with the P5+1. On Tuesday and Wednesday he was in Lebanon, where he met with Lebanese Prime Minister (and acting President, on account of they don't currently have one) Tammam Salam and other … Continue reading Is Iran pushing a diplomatic solution for Syria?