Source: Washington Post

By Ernesto Londoño July 24 at 2:22 PM

Three American citizens, including The Washington Post’s correspondent in Iran, appear to have been detained this week in Tehran, U.S. officials and the newspaper said Thursday.

Washington Post foreign editor Douglas Jehl said the newspaper has received “credible reports” that correspondent Jason Rezaian and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, were detained Tuesday evening in Tehran. It is unclear who detained them or why.

“We are deeply troubled by this news and are concerned for the welfare of Jason, Yeganeh and two others said to have been detained with them,” Jehl said in a statement.

Jehl said that Rezaian, who has been The Post’s correspondent in Tehran since 2012, “is an experienced, knowledgeable reporter who deserves protection and whose work merits respect.”

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/post-reporter-other-americans-appear-to-have-been-detained-in-iran/2014/07/24/1a13511e-1356-11e4-8936-26932bcfd6ed_story.html

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Well, at least they weren't "hiking" on the Iran-Iraq border.

Source: Washington Post

BAGHDAD — A veteran Kurdish politician was elected president of Iraq on Thursday, as political leaders moved a step closer to forming a new government that will face the momentous task of repairing the deep divisions that are tearing the country apart.

Fuad Masum received 211 of 269 votes in the Iraqi parliament after the Kurds presented him as their only candidate for the post. An informal power-sharing agreement dictates that the role of president goes to a Kurd, speaker of parliament to a Sunni and prime minister to a Shiite.

Masum’s election starts the clock ticking on the thornier issue of the role of prime minister, as pressure mounts on the incumbent, Nouri al-Maliki, to step aside. Shiite lawmakers now have 15 days to name a prime minister, according to the constitution.

The United States is among countries urging Iraqis to move rapidly to form a new government after advances by the armed Sunni extremist group that calls itself the Islamic State, which has taken over large swaths of Iraq in an offensive that began last month.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/veteran-kurdish-politician-elected-president-of-iraq/2014/07/24/28448523-487b-4091-a4f1-fb7eefb87899_story.html

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Too bad there is no Iraq, huh?

Hey, I'm new here. You answer the damn question!

Just another night in Gaza, right? Nope. This is Bethlehem in the West Bank. (Video shot by Kelly Lynn of Mondoweiss.)

Source: The Guardian (UK)

Shaun Walker in Torez
The Guardian, Monday 21 July 2014

Masked, hooded men ran along the platform nervously waving their guns, as the large grey door to one of five train carriages was levered open. A ghoulish stench poured out; inside the glint of shiny black body bags piled in a heap was visible. A group of international monitors from the OSCE peered in briefly, and then the door was swung shut again.

That this event was seen as a great breakthrough in the cleanup of the MH17 air disaster only went to show what a grimly farcical mess it had been up to now.

As politicians, investigators and relatives of the dead across the world expressed anger at the Kremlin for not forcing pro-Russia rebels to offer more cooperation, there had yet to be any serious examination of the crash site.

The UN security council is due to vote on Monday on a resolution that demands armed groups do not compromise the crash site integrity, as well as that those responsible be held accountable.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/mh17-victims-crash-site-anger-russia-grows

Andrew O'Hehir writes in Salon today:

With Israeli tanks rolling into the Gaza Strip and Hamas fighters firing dozens of rockets into Israel every day, the two sides in the endless Middle East standoff appear to be replaying scenes from a recurring nightmare, with real-world tragic effects. I don’t mean to suggest that the conflict is in any sense symmetrical. As we have already seen, the worst price for this latest round of violence will be paid by the civilian population of Gaza, almost 2 million people fenced into a slice of arid seacoast with roughly the same land area as the city of Detroit. But for those of us in the West, and especially in the United States, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict plays out in public discourse, over and over again, as a drama of rhetoric and propaganda, accusation and counter-accusation.

Both in the real conflict on the ground and the ideological conflict for hearts and minds, both sides feel misunderstood and unfairly stigmatized – and if you’re willing or able to take the long view, they both have a point. Along with every other American journalist, I received emails this week from Arab-American groups complaining about the pro-Israeli bias of the mainstream media, and from Jewish activists eager to elucidate President Obama’s “pro-Muslim agenda” and his long-term campaign to undermine Israel. Within the American left, which for generations has been closely allied with the Jewish intellectual tradition, this ideological combat can often be intensely personal and painful. I’ve managed to stay out of the angry debates between friends and acquaintances in my Facebook feed – about whether Rachel Maddow is an Israeli shill, or whether American progressives are hypocrites for weeping over Gaza but ignoring the death toll in Iraq, Syria and Egypt – and I don’t even want to know what kinds of insults people are hurling at each other on Twitter.

What do we talk about when we talk about Israel? Perhaps this is an index of our bottomless narcissism, but the not-so-secret subtext of both pro-Israel and anti-Israel arguments is that they’re really debates about America and its role in the world. Israel is of course closely tied to the U.S. in military, economic, cultural and psychological terms, and in all likelihood would not exist if not for six-plus decades of staunch American support. Although it’s a distinctive society in many ways, Israel is also a familiar kind of place – a Westernized consumer democracy of yoga classes, designer cocktails and gay pride parades – in a way no Islamic Middle Eastern country even approaches. Israel can be read as an American proxy state, a wayward bastard child or (in the paranoid view) as a sinister force behind American politics, pulling the superpower’s strings. However you understand this “special relationship,” the genetic kinship is unmistakable.

Everything about the politics of the Israel-Palestine debate – which are mostly the politics of guilt, victimhood and mutual, purposeful incomprehension – is distorted and exacerbated by the gravitational effect of America. As I said earlier, both sides have valid points to make about the nature of that distortion. But I don’t mean to retreat to some journalistic posture of false equivalency and despair: Everybody has done bad things, and it’s just dreadful. Can we get back to watching HBO? That only fuels the hapless status quo, as captured so memorably in Mitt Romney’s phrase about kicking the can down the road, in which the U.S. appears subservient to the Israeli right wing while continuing to advocate for a two-state solution that will never happen. I have no solution to that dilemma, but it’s useful to understand that pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian forces are responding to the same phenomenon – Israel’s inextricable relationship with the United States – and interpreting it in different ways.

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/19/israel_americas_frankenstein_monster/

The country? No problem. Its government? Big problem!

Israeli air strikes have killed at least 231 Palestinians in total. More than 1,650 have been wounded in 10 days of attacks. More than 75 percent of those killed were non-combatants, according to the United Nations. Nearly a quarter of the dead were children, including four young boys killed on June 16 by an Israeli air strike while playing soccer on a Gaza beach. They were all members of the Bakr family and between the ages of nine and 11.

Those numbers don't convey the horror of what's happening right now in Gaza. Neither do most of the photographs you'll find in news media. Streets and buildings have been blasted to rubble, yes. People are broken and mourning. Those things must be documented. But too often, we hide from the most graphic scenes of violence and death.









http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/middle-east/140709/these-are-the-photos-gaza-too-graphic-for-some-news-media-to-show

All the children in these photos are dead, killed by weapons we paid for and supplied.

If this post gets hidden, believe me when I say I'll understand! Right now, I have to go to the bathroom and puke my fucking guts up.

BAM!

Source: huffingtonpost.co.uk

A high-profile Russia Today reporter has resigned her post at the Putin-friendly channel, slamming its response to the crash of the Malaysian Airline MH17.

Sara Firth, a foreign correspondent and multimedia reporter at the Kremlin-backed channel, did not voice her anger on air like Abby Martin did over the annexation of Crimea earlier this year. Instead, she took to Twitter, even directing her anger at her own colleagues.



Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/07/18/russia-today-sara-firth_n_5598718.html

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RT=FOX