Cry Havoc and Let Slip: My Riotous Life by Clancy Sigal “Whatever ends your from put your ballys on link up and cause havic.” – Blackberry message from a London rioter I’m a veteran rioter. My first, at 15, was when – for racial solidarity and sheer adrenalin rush – I jumped aboard a motorized cavalcade of Jewish tough guys roaring off my Chicago turf into a nearby Italian-American neighborhood...

My nephew Adam Gandelman was in London last week on a business trip. This was the view of the London skyline from his office window:

Yet another chapter is being started in the saga of Pakistan, a country Washington grew closere to and greatly upset India in the 1970s when Henry Kissinger and Nixon “tilted” to it to achieve the “opening” in China. In recent years it has seemingly played both sides of the fence on the issues of terrorism and being an ally. And the latest could be the nail in its coffin in terms of...

Yaakov Kirschen, Dry Bone This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Patrick Edaburn reminded us that 50 years ago today, on August 13, 1961, construction started on the Berlin Wall. I don’t remember much about the day or the event. I was too busy completing the last few weeks of Officer Candidate School, and the Berlin Wall itself did not start going up immediately, as I remember. However, barbed wire went up everywhere, streets were dug up, East German military guards...

What will become of Iraq when U.S. forces leave at the end of this year? Is the current Iraqi government capable of dealing with life on its own? And if not, what should Iraqis do about it? Columnist Atheer Al Katib of Iraq’s Kitabat newspaper admonishes his readers to begin a great debate about what kind of government – and what kind of country – they want. For Iraq’s Kitabat, Atheer...

Here’s a truism that Americans need to better absorb: U.S. policy is global in impact and is the concern of a good portion of the world’s inhabitants. And here’s another truism: a lot of people out there are deeply frustrated because they can’t vote, so they intend to do everything in their power to liberate themselves from U.S. influence. But as this column by Maksim Blant of Russia’s...

The shocking statistics about Black family income released by the Pew Research center have not only caught the attention of Americans. For Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, columnist Mariusz Zawadzki writes with surprise that all the gains of the civil rights movement seem to have been either lost or diminished in the span of the last few years. For the Gazeta Wyborcza, Mariusz Zawadzki writes in part: Lincoln,...

The social media revolution that was garnered international praise in bringing down Egypt’s government is now being blamed for contributing to the turmoil in London — and British Prime Minister David Cameron has announced that the government is looking into banning people suspected of being involved from social media sites: – In response the this week’s riots in London following the...

UPDATE: Now we can see the faces, too, of these brave troops. Please click on Photo gallery: Servicemembers who died in the Chinook helicopter crash ****** The Department of Defense announced today the names of all 30 servicemembers who, supporting Operation Enduring Freedom, died Aug. 6 in Wardak province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when their CH-47 Chinook helicopter crashed. At this web site one can...

I do a lot of programs for kids and see frequent evidence of their compassion. Here is an example — about a 10 year old boy who wants to make sure that his Navy Seal father, who was taken from him abruptly in the recent helicopter crash in Afghanistan, is not forgotten: Here’s the LINK to his iReport. And here is the text: iReport — My father was one of the 30 US Soldiers killed in Afghanistan...

How could the riots change Great Britain? The Telegraph’s Robert Colvile gives us this list of 10 ways. Meanwhile GO HERE and watch two almost giddy teen rioters explaining why they’re doing what they’re doing (to “show the rich people”).’ UPDATE: Meanwhile, the (always must read) Christian Science Monitor reports that the British government is now moving towards tougher tactics: The...

With the economic crisis/collapse and the incapacity of leaders to effectively resolve it, there is a profound and existential fear gripping the modern world. According to columnist Jean-marc Vittori of France’s Les Echos, Western-style democracy, which has long been considered the most advanced system of governance, may be irretrievably unraveling. For Les Echos, Jean-marc Vittori writes in part: Global...

I was offline most of the weekend and Monday, so you can imagine my shock when I turned to Tweetdeck this morning and the first thing I saw was tweets about riots in the U.K. I found some articles to help bring me up to speed and provide some context. There were shocking bits: One journalist wrote that he was surprised how many people in Tottenham knew of and were critical of the IPCC [Independent Police Complaints...

Our Quote of the Day is actually part of a must-read post in The Huffington Post by Lola Adesioye on the ongoing riots in England: In 2011, it’s shameful that any of England’s citizens feel that violence is the best way in which to express frustration. Watching live online footage of yesterday’s rioting in Tottenham from America, I was thrown back to yesteryear. This is what happened in Tottenham...

How much is that F-35 in the Window? Some will say, if you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford that puppy. But since that question is so frequently and persistently asked, let’s first take a good look at the puppy. It is a pedigree puppy that has been carefully “developed” following years of exhaustive and expensive research and selective breeding in order to make it an...

The odd set of circumstances that has led to a credit downgrade of U.S. debt, a weakened dollar and hence a stronger yen, is setting off alarm bells in Tokyo and around the world. This editorial from Japan’s Asahi Shimbun explains the phenomena to readers and comes close to begging Washington to do something to reverse the trend, which is damaging Japan’s post-quake recovery. The Asahi Shimbun...

Is it time for the United States to stop standing up for human rights and democratic reform in other nations and start taking its own advice at home? According to this article by the thought-to-be-fictitious Communist Party columnist Ding Gang, U.S. presidents should stop inflaming China by meeting the Dalai Lama and selling weapons to democratic Taiwan, and start figuring out how the U.S. fits into a 21st...

Forty two years ago, I was preparing to teach my first classes. I had spent the summer at the University of North Carolina, studying John Dewey, Jerome Bruner, Carl Rogers and American Literature. I was one of about fifty students who were about to enter the public schools as teacher interns. We taught during the day, went to school at night, and were visited frequently by the faculty in the School of Education....

The shooting down of an American helicopter carrying the elite Navy SEALs in Afghanistan has been described as the deadliest single loss for U.S. forces in the decade-long war in Afghanistan. See here… A Pakistani newspaper says that the Abbottabad raid by US Navy Seals was not the first venture into Pakistan. The team had surreptitiously entered the country on ten to twelve previous occasions, the influential...

The event: massive riots in London. Those who did the damage: thugs. The reason: some think its the increasingly bleak financial outlook. Reuters reports: London picked itself up on Sunday from some of the worst violence seen in the British capital for years which politicians and police blamed on criminal thugs but residents attributed to local tensions and anger over rising financial hardship. Rioters throwing...

How badly does the United States want to maintain the value of the dollar? According to columnist Nazanin Amirian of Publico, what has been behind most recent U.S. wars is not human rights or weapons of mass destruction, but the imperative of beating back all challengers to the dominance of the greenback as the world’s currency. For Publico, Nazanin Amirian writes in part: When Bush invaded Iraq in...

What message should the United States government take away from the first credit rating downgrade in its entire history? According to this bluntly-worded editorial from Xinhua, the state news agency of America’s largest creditor, the U.S must break its ‘addiction’ to borrowed money, the political ‘wrangling’ in Washington must end, and China’s dollar denominated assets must be protected. The...

As we hurriedly walk in the scorching San Antonio heat to the Scottish Rite Auditorium, my thoughts go back to a much cooler day about 50 years ago when I became an American citizen. I wonder if anything has changed in either America or in those who have traveled thousands of miles, who have left loved ones in far-away lands, who sometimes even risk serious repercussions in their native lands in order to come...

The AP is reporting that 20 members of Navy SEAL Team Six — the unit responsible for Osama bin Laden’s killing — were among those killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. Some sources indicate that none of the SEAL members who died in the crash were present during the Islamabad night raid back in May, but nearly all agree that this is the largest death toll from a Taliban attack in the...