... or something like that, since it is difficult to explain why else he would be there advocating that the United States attack not Iran's nuclear capabilities, but that nation's refineries in order to de-stablize the existing regime: The former speaker of the US House of Representatives has said that the US should "sabotage" Iran's oil and gas infrastructure as part of its efforts to bring down the government. In an interview with Al Jazeera's Avi Lewis for the Fault Lines programme, Republican Newt Gingrich said targeting Iran's refinery would spark an economic crisis that would destabilise the government in Tehran. He said the US should "use covert operations … to create a gasoline-led crisis to try and replace the regime". "I think we have a vested interest, the world has a vested interest, in a responsible Iranian government, just as we have a vested interest in a responsible North Korean government," he said. I love the logic, ...

And the source , by the way, is Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Gates: such talks are "ultimately the exit strategy for all of us." Brigadier General Mark Carleton-Smith, the senior British commander in Afghanistan, is now on record saying that the war there cannot be won militarily , something that ever previous invader of the region--from the former Soviet Union back to Alexander the Great--could have told us all several years ago. What I like best is the comment on the story by someone posting from Afghanistan, which points out the obvious: "If it cannot be won, it is lost." In related news from Al Jazeera , Pakistan is reporting US missile strikes from across the Afghan border, and the Bush administration is pissed that a Federal judge has just ruled that 17 Guantanamo detainees who are Uighur nationalists interested in fighting China rather than America must be released. I leave it to the reader to come up with his or her own commentary.

From Al Jazeera : A Saudi scholar has issued a religious decree saying it is permissible to kill the owners of television networks broadcasting "depravation and debauchery". "It is lawful to kill ... the apostles of depravation ... if their evil cannot be easily removed through simple sanctions," Saleh al-Luhaidan, chief justice of the supreme judicial council, was quoted by the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya news channel as saying. "The situation is serious ... the degradation of morals is a form of perversion on Earth," al-Luhaidan said. The 79-year-old scholar, who holds the highest judicial authority in the kingdom, made the comments during a recent radio show in which he was asked by a caller for his opinions on immoral programmes being broadcast on Arab televisions during the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. The shows depict lifestyles and values deemed offensive by many Saudi religious leaders and judges. Many of the most popular Arab satellite network...

From Al Jazeera this post of Dubya warning Russia not to recognize the breakaway Georgian provinces: The US president has warned Russia not to recognise Georgia's two breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. George Bush said on Monday that Russia's leadership should "meet its commitments and not recognise these separatist regions". "Georgia's territorial integrity and borders must command the same respect as every other nation's, including Russia's," he said. Bush's statement came after Russia's parliament passed resolutions calling for the recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states on Monday. Without commenting on the relative merits of Georgia vs South Ossetia/Abkhazia, I'd only point out that we were quite willing to recognize Kosovan independence in February 2008 against Russia's protests when it suited our foreign policy agenda. And, of course there's Joe Biden's old plan to break up I...

His name is Gibson Glass, and his interview led off Al Jazeera's coverage of the issue of health care in America : Gibson Glass, 58, enjoys his jogs though New York City's Central Park. But he is not just running for fun. Gibson is one of more than 40 million Americans who does not have health insurance. So, for Gibson, regular exercise is a form of health insurance. He is a freelance picture framer, and he says he simply cannot afford to pay about $600 each month on insurance. He says that the United States' healthcare system is "totally messed up" because, as he puts it, "everybody should be able to afford health insurance, whatever their income, and I have a pretty good income, I just can't afford it." Gibson has worked out the odds and is making a rational decision, based on his circumstances. Seven years from now, when he is 65, he will qualify for Medicare, government-funded healthcare for the US's elderly. But sometimes, a rational decisi...

. . . occurred at Al Jazeera in Marwan Bishara's column . Go figure.

You gotta love it when Al Jazeera runs a piece covering the lastest Chavez reforms in Venezuela, and gives all the comment space to his opponents: Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's president, has pushed through 26 new laws, covering changes in areas ranging from the military to small businesses. The package of laws, which were published in the official gazette on Monday, were enacted on July 31, the final day of an 18-month period during which Chavez had been granted special legislative powers. The new laws includes measures which would set up neighbourhood-based militias, move the country towards a socialist economy and increase state control over agriculture. The decrees met with opposition from Fedecamaras, the Venezuelan federation of chambers of commerce. Jose Manuel Gonzalez, a business chamber leader of Fedecamaras, said: "We ask the president: Why does he fear democracy?" He said that the package of laws included socialist concepts that voters rejected last year as part ...

Like this one, from Al Jazeera : Wow! Wow! Wow what? Like so many I was wowed. What a rock star! Did you see how Obama drew a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin, how people were clamouring to take his picture and autograph? What are you, a teenager? Come on! Barack looked truly presidential during his Middle East and Europe trip - like really cool. Yeah and he has Denzel Washington's teeth and Tiger Woods' smile! So what? What does "looking presidential" mean? Is he auditioning for the president's role in a new TV series? Martin Sheen certainly looked more presidential in the Kennedy series and more recently in The West Wing. For that matter, even Michael Douglas looked more presidential in the Hollywood epic The American President. This wasn't just a Hollywood moment. He was able to handle himself very well with world leaders. How do you know? The only thing we saw were photo ops - at gates, doorways and gardens. So the camera likes him, how does that make him comman...

If anything, Senator Barack Obama's whirlwind "I am the acting President for at least a decade" tour of the Middle East and Afghanistan , has not necessarily improved his standing with the developing world, as this commentary in Al Jazeera suggests: Obama also committed to increasing the number of fighting brigades in Afghanistan. That, however, is not so smart. In fact it is stupid, not because he never set foot in the country, nor because McCain makes the same promises, but because of the way the Democratic candidate has connected the two commitments. His logic follows that Washington needs to withdraw troops from Iraq and re-direct them to Afghanistan - the centre of the "war on terror" - where the US military is over extended. The presumably cultured liberal Obama failed to explain why killing more Afghans rather than killings Iraqis will make Americans safer, or how adopting the Bush-McCain rhetoric on the "war on terror" will win him the presiden...

.... Al Jazeera starts to cover them. I'm serious, really. A huge chunk of the world relies on Al Jazeera for coverage of American and international news. Intriguingly, that coverage is usually pretty pedestrian, drawn from the same wire-service reports that small-town US newspapers use (although the editorials are something else). There is a special page on the American presidential race , whereupon the coverage is usually pro-Obama, except when he's promising to keep Jerusalem for the Israelis at AIPAC. Not surprising. Months ago, when it seemed that Hillary had a lock on the Democratic nomination and there were still 5 or 6 GOPers in the mix, Al Jazeera did give occasional coverage to Ron Paul, highlighting him as the only candidate actually talking about getting out of Iraq and pursuing a non-interventionist foreign policy. But since Senator Obama became the presumptive Democrat nominee and Senator McCain secured the GOP nod, there has been no third part coverage at all ...

There are just over 1,000,000 people in Bahrain , more than two-thirds of which are Shi'a (although it is 15% Sunnis who rule); Christians compose slightly less than 10% of the population and there are--at last count--forty Jewish citizens. Bahrain has a constitutional monarchy; the Islamist parties (both Shi'a and Sunni) are growing in strength, but are peaceful and opposed by more moderate secularists. On women's rights: Women's political rights in Bahrain saw an important step forward when women were granted the right to vote and stand in national elections for the first time in the 2002 election. However, no women were elected to office in that year’s polls and instead Shī'a and Sunnī Islamists dominated the election, collectively winning a majority of seats. In response to the failure of women candidates, six were appointed to the Shura Council, which also includes representatives of the Kingdom’s indigenous Jewish and Christian communities. The country's f...

. . . as seen by a local expert. I can still remember being told by my parents about starving children in India. Later I discovered that India had become agriculturally self-sufficient. Now, while preparing a post on the escalating world food crisis, I found this interview with Dr. Vandana Shiva at Al Jazeera . It's not very long, but it is an interesting perspective.

. . . . and then other times you're sure we were positively ape-shit out of our minds. Everyone--even our most strident Iraq war critics--agrees that we should have invaded Afghanistan, and that we should be focusing our efforts there, even as we get the hell out of Baghdad. Just one example from Senator Barack Obama, the man who would not have supported the invasion of Iraq at all: One of the things that I think is critical, as the next president, is to make absolutely certain that we not only phase out the Iraq but we also focus on the critical battle that we have in Afghanistan and root out al Qaeda. If we do not do that, then we're going to potentially see another attack here in the US. [ June 2007 debate ] So we overthrew the Taliban, we're rooting around in the hills like a fat man trying to locate his wallet, and we've engaged in serious nation-building activities in support of moderate President Harmid Karzai. Now we're trying to figure out a way to pass t...

... you get a story like this: Abbas Government accused of Torture : More detainees have complained of torture by the Palestinian Authority following the death in custody of a Hamas religious leader in the West Bank. The family and followers of imam Majd al-Barghouthi say he was tortured to death last Friday, an allegation that the authorities strenuously deny. Now new allegations have emerged of ill-treatment – even torture – of Hamas supporters held in Palestinian Authority jails. Four men who were arrested alongside al-Barghouthi told his family that they were all tied up in painful positions during interrogation, and that intelligence officers demanded to know where the detainees had hidden weapons. Accused of possessing weapons, Azzam Fehil was arrested on February 10 and held for 13 days in the same detention facility as al-Barghouti. He told Al Jazeera's Jacky Rowland that he was handcuffed and suspended by his arms for long periods. He also said he was kicked and beaten...

... stumbling peasant colossus? The answer is: Yes, sort of. To both. It's really interesting to read Al Jazeera today to discover that More Americans believe China, rather than the United States, is the world's top economic power, a poll has found. The Gallup World Affairs Survey revealed that four out of 10 Americans saw the Chinese economy as the world leader, while only 33 per cent picked the US. A majority of respondents also picked China as likely to be the world's top economy for the next two decades. The same survey conducted in 2000 had 65 per cent of Americans putting the US as the world's economic leader. At the time, more than half of those polled thought the US would remain the world's top economic powerhouse for the following 20 years. The survey comes amid economic uncertainty in the US, shaken by turbulence in financial markets, a weak dollar and continuing worries over the fallout from the sub-prime mortgage crisis. China's economy, mean...

Thinking back several decades to grad school (my god, when did I get that old) I can remember one day stumbling across the TASS coverage of the 1984 Reagan-Mondale presidential election right after the Democratic Convention. Mondale has just made his famous (ultimately losing) admission that both candidates would have to raise taxes, but that only he was honest enough to say so. Many people reading this may not be old enough to recall the stereotypes of Soviet-era news media: state-run television that only presented the official Communist Party line.... The problem was that the TASS analysis was the best, most penetrating analyses of American electoral politics I've ever read. No proletariat or imperialist lackey running dogs, just careful, knowledgeable analysis that ended by concluding Mondale would lose in a landslide because Americans would always vote against a man who said publicly he'd raise taxes.... Which brings me to the Al Jazeera story today on the impact of the ...

Denmark has officially asked the Bush administration to explain possibly illegal CIA flights staged through Greenland's Narsarsuaq airport to move Al Qaeda suspects into secret detention centers in Egypt, Jordan, Romania and Afghanistan, among other countries. The legal concern arises from the use of private as opposed to official flights to transfer prisoners acquired through rendition, as required by international aviation law. The issue was raised by a recent Danish documentary, The CIA's Danish Connections , which has caused an uproar in that nation's politics : Per Stig Moeller, Denmark's foreign minister, said: "There is evidence in this film which I had not seen before which shows that the Americans are using private airplanes as government airplanes." Lars Emil Johansen, one of Greenland's two representatives in the Danish parliament, demanded an in-depth investigation, saying he did not have confidence in the Danish government, a long-time ally ...

French troops form the bulk of a newly deployed European Union peace-keeping force in Chad and the (completely misnamed) Central African Republic intended to protect relief workers and streamline delivery of humanitarian aid to the starving population in Darfur. Eventually, this force will reach 3,700 troops from 14 countries, now that Austria has also signed up. This is the largest peace-keeping force ever deployed by the European Union (and it's six months late due to internal bickering) as an entity that doesn't (A) revolve around a US cadre or (B) function as a subsidiary of the UN. There are two ways to look at this. One is to be pleased that the damn Europeans are finally getting off their butts and taking responsibility for some of the world's hot spots, so we don't have to.... Or you can recognize that France is carefully positioning itself in all kinds of ways to rival the US as a major geo-political player around the globe, competing under an entirely new par...

The difficulty with understanding issues like global warming (beyond the simplistic Al Gore "the US is the energy satan of the world" interpretation) and the world economy is that, quite simply, most Americans don't have a single damn clue about conditions in other countries. For example, we hear often enough about China as a growing competitor on the world oil market, which is partly responsible for driving our domestic energy prices up, but do we ever examine the internal energy situation in China? Again I go back to Al Jazeera : China is facing its worst-ever power shortage as winter weather puts pressure on dwindling coal supplies. Officials say reserves are down to emergency levels with only enough coal to power the entire country for another eight days. According to state media the shortage amounts to nearly 70 gigawatts, equivalent to about the entire generating capacity of the United Kingdom. Across China 13 provinces including the southern industrial and expo...

OK this is why you check on Al Jazeera from time to time: Fighters in Nigeria's oil region have invited George Clooney, an actor and peace activist, to visit the region. They have also asked for UN intervention in the conflict. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, designated Clooney as a UN "messenger of peace" on Friday to promote the world body's activities. The 46-year-old actor has been campaigning for an end to the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan, and for humanitarian aid for the millions caught up in the conflict. Nigeria's Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) congratulated Clooney on his appointment, and invited him to visit their impoverished region wracked by two years of fighting, bombings and kidnapping of foreign workers. "Mr. Clooney, MEND extends an invitation to you to see things for yourself and is willing to work with you and other credible peace makers of international repute to stop Nigeria from plunging into t...