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Monday
Sep132010

US Politics: Republican Leader Gingrich on Obama's "Kenyan, Anti-Colonial" Behaviour

Citing a recent Forbes article by Dinesh D’Souza, former House speaker Newt Gingrich tells National Review Online that President Obama may follow a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview.

Gingrich says that D’Souza has made a “stunning insight” into Obama’s behavior — the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama".

“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Gingrich asks. “That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”

“This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president,” Gingrich tells us.

“I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true,” Gingrich continues. “In the Alinksy tradition, he was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve . . . He was authentically dishonest.”

“[Obama] is in the great tradition of Edison, Ford, the Wright Brothers, Bill Gates — he saw his opportunity and he took it,” Gingrich says.

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Monday
Sep132010

Afghanistan: Aid Groups "Security Deteriorating" (Nordland)

Rod Nordland writes in The New York Times:

Even as more American troops flow into the country, Afghanistan is more dangerous than it has ever been during this war, with security deteriorating in recent months, according to international organizations and humanitarian groups.

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Monday
Sep132010

China This Week: Sino-US Talks; No More Iran Sanctions; Sea Tension with Japan; Ties with Myanmar

High-level talks strengthen Sino-US ties: Lawrence Summers, the head of President Barack Obama's National Economic Council, and Deputy National Security Adviser Tom Donilon visited China from 5 to 8 September, seeking to iron out touchy issues in bilateral relations.

President Hu Jintao called said during a meeting on Wednesday, "Further comprehensive development of Sino-US relations is more important than ever before, as the global economic recovery is facing a variety of unstable and uncertain factors. China and the US should view the bilateral relationship from a global and strategic perspective."

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Sunday
Sep122010

Introducing EA WorldView

As I write, our new site is beginning to appear to readers around the world. I wanted to quickly introduce it and provide a post where you can leave comments regarding our new look. The main change for us has been the switch from Wordpress to Squarespace. We were very happy with Wordpress, but as EA grew the maintenance required (and the problems if something went wrong) became too much for our small team to handle. Squarespace, with its team of dedicated staff in New York, should ease some of the stresses and strains our old site used to exert on both EA readers and staff.

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Sunday
Sep122010

UPDATED Iran Exclusive: Rafsanjani Meets with Larijanis to Discuss Moves Against President

EA sources offer further information about the manoeuvres of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani. 

Two weeks ago Rafsanjani had separate meetings with Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani and the head of Iran's judiciary, Sadegh Larijani. In the latter meeting, the following topics were discussed....

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Sunday
Sep122010

Israel-Palestine: Time to Move Beyond a US-Centred Approach (Freeman)

On 1 September, Charles Freeman --- former State Department and Defense Department official, US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and nominee in 2009 to head the National Intelligence Council --- delivered this speech to the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs....

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Sunday
Sep122010

Afghanistan: The Perils of Our Lack of Knowledge (Lieven)

The battlefields of Afghanistan are real enough, God knows, for the poor devils who fight and die there; but as so many fatuous statements about Afghanistan suggest, for great sections of Western government, politics, media and public opinion engagement in Afghanistan has been above all one of the largest and most expensive exercises in collective narcissism that the world has ever known, and Afghanistan itself a landscape of the mind, onto which Westerners could project a variety of agendas and fantasies. As Antonio Giustozzi writes, “Every age has its follies; perhaps the folly of our age could be defined as an unmatched ambition to change the world, without even bothering to study it in detail and understand it first.”

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Sunday
Sep122010

Iran Breaking: Latest on Detained US Hiker Sarah Shourd

UPDATED 1525 GMT: The pro-Ahmadinejad Islamic Republic News Agency, on its English-language site, is now reporting the Tehran Prosecutor's announcement that Sarah Shourd will be released on $500,000 bail, even though "the documents about three American spies indicated that they were not on an excursion in Iran". 

Interestingly, IRNA's Persian-language site still has no reference to the development.

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Sunday
Sep122010

The Latest from Iran (12 September): Activist Nazar Ahari Freed

2240 GMT: Picture of the Day. Activist Shiva Nazar Ahari leaving Evin Prison tonight after she was freed on $500,000 bail. Nazar Ahari had been in detention since July 2009.

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Sunday
Sep122010

EA Flashback: God on 9-11 "Which Part of 'Don't Kill' Do You Not Understand?" (The Onion)

By 2001, many of us at the University of Birmingham had become avid followers of The Onion, the weekly satirical US on-line "newspaper". As we all tried to take in the tragedy of 11 September, we wondered if The Onion would make any reference to what had happened. Indeed, we wondered if it would appear again: a week after the attacks, there was no edition. But on 26 September, there was. Indeed, almost the entire newspaper was devoted to a darkly humourous treatment of 9-11. To do it credit, the full issue should be read --- for example, "U.S. Vows To Defeat Whoever It Is We're At War With" is a spot-on forecast ofwhat would happen as the Bush Administration moved from Afghanistan to Iraq --- but here is one of the "reports"that helped us grieve and think through what had happened. And it also made us smile.

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