Is there any historical basis for the alliance between certain Latin American nations and Islamic fundamentalist Iran? For Spain’s La Vanguardia, apparently exasperated columnist Pilar Rahola says that, “If Simon Bolívar were raise his head and see Ahmadinejad and Chávez in his noble land, he would die a second time of pure shame.” For La Vanguardia, Pilar Rahola writes in part: At what...

It can happen. Miraculous resurrection can sometimes emerge from unspeakable tragedy. On Sept. 11, 2001 Lauren Manning, senior vice president and partner at Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment bank which had several floors of offices in the World Trade Center, was on her way to work and getting ready to enter the elevator at the North Tower when the 9/11 terrorist attack punched the building — and a giant,...

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Your news media at work: first, obtain the authentic photo of the actual story; THEN black out anything in the photo that would actually show anything; THEN slap your video logos and bumperstickers all over it. • You know what I’m talking about. • No army that ever marched didn’t have douchebags like these. You know these guys. And so do I. They were the dumbasses who put the frog on the...

Venezuelan columnist Jose Toro Hardy is upset. Why? Because, according to him, President Hugo Chavez’ embrace of Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad not only puts Venezuelans at odds with almost the entire developed world, it goes against Venezuela’s historic strict adherence to neutrality when it comes to conflicts it has nothing to do with. For Venezuela’s El Universal, Jose Toro Hardy starts...

About 18 months ago and in response to a piece, “Why It’s Wrong to Equate Military Service With Heroism,” which discussed the technical, logical and semantic reasons why our fighting men and women should not be collectively called “heroes,” I wrote a piece claiming “Our Military: Yes, They Are All Heroes.” I started the article as follows: I am one of those misguided, clueless...

A scandal is now unfolding involving a video that administration officials reportedly believe is indeed authentic — a video showing a small group of Marines urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters. Why should that video be such a big deal? Because such an act would violate the traditional norms taught by military commanders about how the U.S. military should behave. And also because the video...

Even as tension over the Strait of Hormuz escalates, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is touring Latin America as a way of showing Iran has friends in the U.S. ‘backyard.’ But this tongue-in-cheek welcome to the Iranian leader by columnist Luis A. Vivanco of Ecuador’s La Hora goes to show that not everyone is buying the story. For La Hora of Ecuador, Luis A. Vivanco starts out this...

Is it the United States – and not Iran or Venezuela – that the world’s people need to worry about? According to this news account by María Lilibeth Da Corte of Venezuela’s El Universal, the arrival of Iran President Ahmadinejad in Latin America has begun with a Venezuelan ‘love fest’ of sorts, with lots of spicy language about the United States. For Venezuela’s El...

After all the demographic slicing and dicing, the final primary figures disclose one New Hampshire result pundits are ignoring: The only two candidates who unequivocally want to take us of out of Afghanistan and most of the Middle East muddle now, Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman, together received 39.8 percent of the vote to Mitt Romney’s 39.6 percent. In contrast, Rick Perry, who advocates going back into Iraq,...

What’s a risky business to go into? Apparently one of the riskiest is to be a nuclear scientist in Iran – since yet another one has been killed: At a time of growing tension over its nuclear program and mounting belligerence toward the West, Iran reported on Wednesday that an Iranian nuclear scientist died in what was termed a “terrorist bomb blast” in northern Tehran when an unidentified motorcyclist...

The size and scope of the American Embassy in Baghdad has been something of a major news story in the U.S. – but not so much in Iraq. Until now that is. For Iraq’s Al-Iraq News, Ibrahim Zaidan reports that with the U.S. supposedly ‘withdrawing’, Iraqi lawmakers and religious figures are demanding to know why Washington needs a $6.2 billion embassy staffed by 16,000 people that is bigger...

The only people I have more contempt for than those who would send our young men and women to get shot at, get maimed and get killed in unnecessary wars, are those who support sending our young men and women to get shot at, get maimed and get killed in unnecessary wars while they themselves refused to, declined to serve, had “other priorities,” or had all kinds of excuses for not serving in those very same...

The Taliban had banned music and 99% of everything else that is fun. Now, an Afghan version of the “American Idol” called “Afghan Star” has been broadcasted for seven seasons. Millions are watching and voting for their favorite singers by mobile phone. For many this is their first encounter with democracy. A documentary from 2009 follows “the dramatic stories of four contestants...

Three moderate GOP weathervanes—-George Will, Peggy Noonan and David Brooks—-are being blown by Iowa winds in Rick Santorum’s direction, but in a wobbly way. The usually dour Will starts out almost giddy, claiming Republicans “crave fun. Supporting Mitt Romney still seems to many like a duty…Suddenly, supporting Santorum seems like a lark, partly because a week or so ago he could quit complaining...

Experienced Iraq war veterans will decide the fate of Marine Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, who is charged with voluntary manslaughter and related charges in the massacre of two dozen civilians in the Iraqi village of Haditha in November 2005. The pool of potential jurors being questioned today at Camp Pendleton, California include a colonel, two lieutenant colonels, a major, a captain and six enlisted men....

Is the United States a war-happy nation? With the situation surrounding the Strait of Hormuz escalating, columnist Abd Al Bari Atwan of Samidoon in the Palestinian Territories writes that American embargoes invariably lead to war, and with the U.S. economy in crisis, a war with Iran that would boost weapons sales may be precisely what Washington wants. For Samidoon, Abd Al Bari Atwan writes in part: There...

Terrorist bombs killed another 72 people in Iraq today, on a day considered holy by the Islamic Shia religion. This is a further sign of bloody sectarian strife boiling over after the withdrawal of US troops last December. It also presages a more significant trend that could make 2012 go down in history as the start of a seismic shift in the political makeup of the wider Islamic Middle East, from Morocco...

Like Saddam Hussein, are Iranian leaders boasting of their nuclear program and military prowess when in fact they are quite weak? Ahmed Al-Jarallah, the editor in chief of Kuwait’s Al-Seyassah, warns Iranian leaders to step back from the brink and retract their threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which 40 percent of the world’s oil flows – before it is too late. Al-Seyassah...

Homecomings for returning combat veterans have never been easy no matter the war, but the flood of Iraq war veterans who will be mustered out in the coming months, as well as a fair number from the Afghan war, pose a huge challenge. This is because gratitude, and Americans certainly are grateful, will not pay the bill. That bill is formidable: * About 800,000 veterans are jobless and many newly discharged veterans...

As readers who have followed my writings — some call them rants — for the past few years know, while I have always opposed and condemned our invasion and occupation of Iraq, I have supported our efforts in Afghanistan to catch and punish the perpetrators of 9/11 and, in some measure, to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban. However, so many of the reports coming out of that country about the government’s...

Is US blood and treasure making Afghanistan safe for Chinese exploitation?  It certainly looks like it. In December, 2007, China’s state-owned China Metallurgical Group Corp. (MCC) signed a $2.9 billion agreement with the Kabul government to extract copper from the Aynak deposit, one of the world’s largest unexploited copper deposits with an estimated 240 million tons of ore. And now we...

How sorry is the present state of Iraq – and how bitter do some Iraqis feel about the consequences of the U.S. invasion and withdrawal? For Iraq’s Azzaman, columnist Fateh Abdulsalam accuses President Obama of brazenly using the Iraq withdrawal to his political advantage and leaving the country ‘with a government reveling in the joys of its own corruption and the opportunistic use of the symbols...

I don’t know what caught my attention while browsing the web today. Perhaps it was the similarity to the title of that famous song, “How much is that doggie in the window?” Perhaps it was the similarity to the title I chose for one of my military aviation stories, “How much is that F-35 in the window?” But more likely it was the incongruence in the words in the title of the story itself: “How much...

The New Year of 2012, a general election year, will be a year when the fortunes of political parties and politicians will rise and fall; it will be a year of unprecedented social and ideological confrontation; most important, it will be a year when “we the people” once again have the opportunity — the obligation — to make necessary adjustments or corrections to the course of our society,...