Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
I’ve been deeply disappointed by President Trump’s reluctance to take on certain dictators. Unfortunately, the senior Iranian murderer killed in Baghdad by the US air force was not personally a dictator. However, he soldiered for the turbaned junta so his…
Before it can be exported or refined, half the country’s oil output (and 5% of the world’s) must be processed at a single, supersized facility. Located in a politically and militarily unstable region, it has been poorly protected from a…
The Guardian‘s Observer “can reveal” that Trump’s aides hired an Israeli private intelligence agency last May to find “dirt” on two former Obama advisers. It’s been “part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the [Iran nuclear] deal,” according to the…
On a meager data plan in this Alpine cottage, I’ve limited myself to reading news stories – no images, no streaming video, no podcasts. That’s my preferred way of getting news anyway. Unsurprisingly, I’ve been aware of the Iranian protests,…
The BBC’s Russian service has run the story of a young man from Kostroma, an old Russian city 185 miles northeast of Moscow, who was charged with insulting a government official for calling Putin a “thief” and a “miserable crook”…
I can understand Washington’s resolve to keep out people from disorderly (ex-)polities such as Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Sudan, as well as from the ISIS-infected Syria and Iraq, but Iran is an entirely different matter. To begin with, it’s a…
I have written on the “squeeze Iran, disarm Ukraine” line of geopolitical thinking in this post, and JCass discussed it in the comments to this entry. In three sentences, the logic in question is this: “Putin has nukes, thus must…
“Never has so much been written about a speech that hasn’t been given,” said Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu of his address to US Congress scheduled for today. True: it’s been on the front pages for weeks. Some argue that Netanyahu…
Apart from discussions of whether the US should make use of its military potential in certain parts of the world, there is also disagreement on where it should do so, and in what order of priority. I have heard calls…
One of the reasons is Armenia. Judge for yourself: YEREVAN, Armenia (AP)–Iranian President Mohammad Khatami and Armenian President Robert Kocharian Wednesday signed an agreement on financing and contracting for a gas pipeline linking Iran and the small Caucasus Mountain nation…