Incredibly, another large (around 7.3 or 7.4) earthquake hit beleaguered Nepal today, east of Kathmandu: Residents of Kathmandu, the capital, reported that buildings swayed in the earthquake, which was felt as far away as New Delhi. The United States Geological Survey assigned the quake a preliminary magnitude of 7.3, with an epicenter about 50 miles … Continue reading Nepal hit by ANOTHER major quake: links for charities

On Saturday I went on Alhurra's "30 Minutes" to talk about this week's upcoming US-Gulf Cooperation Council summit at Camp David, along with Dr. Anwar Ishqi from Saudi Arabia's Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies. If you have a strong desire to watch a fat guy being dubbed in Arabic (assuming you don't … Continue reading US and GCC (or whoever shows up) prepare to put on a happy face at Camp David

Ezra Klein, filling in for Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, looks at the "decline" of cable news and suggests that it's not so much the news channels that are to blame as the fact that the news itself these days is both generally depressing and (worse) usually pretty boring: The Washington Post's Paul Farhi sees … Continue reading When “the news” stopped being about news

To preface this, I've only read about half of Seymour Hersh's report on the raid (or "raid") that ended with the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, because a) it's very long, plus b) its publication raised such a commotion online that the LRB's website crashed for over an hour, both of which matter … Continue reading About Abbottabad

After floating the possibility of a five-day humanitarian ceasefire in Yemen yesterday, today Saudi Arabia gave that ceasefire a firm start time: 11 PM local time next Tuesday, May 12. This is good news, tentatively, though it should probably be taken with a grain of salt seeing as how the last Saudi ceasefire didn't even … Continue reading Maybe this ceasefire will actually be a ceasefire

Ever since I got the first whiff of the emerging right-wing conspiracy around the military's Jade Helm 15 training exercise, I have gone to great lengths to avoid hearing, seeing, reading about, or otherwise coming into contact with any mention of the whole story. There's just nothing to it. We're talking about a group of … Continue reading Conspiracy theory faceoff

This should go well: The British Conservative Party’s victory in yesterday’s British elections should give hope to U.S. Republicans who remember how Margaret Thatcher’s decisive victory in 1979 preceded Ronald Reagan’s sweep of the U.S. election in 1980. That Prime Minister David Cameron’s party managed to actually pick up seats in Parliament — despite being … Continue reading Just what everybody needed

Here's the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (though not for much longer), General Martin Dempsey, in April, when Ramadi seemed like it was on the verge of falling to ISIS (the situation has since stabilized somewhat but the city is still at risk): If the Iraqi city of Ramadi, which is under imminent … Continue reading Sour grapes in Iraq

Things aren't looking good for Bashar al-Assad these days. He's almost totally lost control of Idlib Province in the past two months, to a rebel coalition mostly controlled by Jabhat al-Nusra and the equally Islamist, albeit not al-Qaeda affiliated (there are links, but they fall short of outright affiliation), Ahrar al-Sham. That loss gives the … Continue reading Tide turning against Assad, my newest at LobeLog

Crisis averted, I guess. Benjamin Netanyahu cut a deal with Naftali Bennett literally minutes before the deadline, so he's the proud leader of a brand new 61-seat majority coalition in the Israeli Knesset. Bennett himself will serve as Education Minister, which just makes sense given his zero experience in education, and Jewish Home MK Ayelet … Continue reading Netanyahu in under the wire