As the G8 wraps up and police continue their crackdown on Turkish anti-consumption activists, eight Brazilian cities are seeing massive demonstrations against the rising cost of transportation and the money being spent by the government to host a football championship and the 2016 Olympics.

Like, Greeks, Brits, Americans, Brazilians want their taxes spent on better health care, infrastructure and eduction.

They don’t want to be bought off, like ancient Romans, with circuses.

A Belgian televised debate confirms that some politicians are willing to countenance support for Al Qaeda as a lesser evil than socialism. The debate pitted a Belgian born activist of Turkish origin among others against the Belgian Interior Minister, and focused on the worries of parents of Belgian youth leaving to fight with the rebels [...]

Yesterday on RT in a comment by an English-language newspaper editor in Istanbul I heard the term ‘anti-capitalist Muslims’ for the first time.The day before that a commentator used the term ‘cultural Muslims’. These terms reveal to know-nothing Westerners the complexity of the Muslim world at a time when the West’s future depends in part [...]

Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey doesn’t seem to have noticed that with 50% of the vote you cannot impose your will on the other 50% if they really care.  The arrow of time is irreversible, and the term ‘Arab Spring’ or ‘Turkish Summer’  is a euphemism.

Nothing better illustrates the scientific truth that the arrow of time is irreversible than the early stages of a revolt: when the public energy flowing through a political system accelerates beyond a certain point, and is met by an accelerating flow of energy by the system’s controlling elements, nothing can prevent the situation from continuing [...]

Yesterday an old building that was being demo-lished in downtown Philadelphia collapsed onto another building, killing six people and injuring fourteen. Today the local Inquirer tells us that several neighbors had alerted the city that things didn’t seem to be going right with the demolition, but the city did nothing. It turns out that the [...]

In 1989, my book Une autre Europe, un autre Monde was published in France. It foresaw the reunification of Europe, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and a future in which Turkey would play the role of bridge between Christian Europe and the Muslim world. On the first two items, the book was recog-nized as [...]

Charles Krauthammer is right to point out that the war against terrorism is metastasizing, as revolt spreads through Africa as well as the Gulf, not to mention Syria. But he is dead wrong when he affirms that America’s inability to shape events is due to a power vacuum under Obama. A President who personally oversees [...]

Bradley Manning’s trial starts today.  A run-down of the government’s accusations reads like a modern-day Alice in Wonderland scenario: Bin Laden somehow benefitted from copies of Manning’s leaks, for example the infamous film of flyers deliberately shooting civilians on the ground, including those who came to rescue the victims, which included two children. The accusation [...]

The angry demonstrations in Turkey over the destruction of a central Istanbul park to make way for a shopping mall are not just about the love of green spaces. They show that in the Muslim world, almost any situation can spark revolt. Suddenly, an array of irritants coalesce, their nature depending on the society.  In Turkey [...]

You have to be watching the French news channel in English, France 24, to become aware of what is really going on in the African country of Niger (not to be confused with oil-rich Nigeria). Remember when the Bush administration was telling us about evidence that Saddam Hussein had purchased yellow cake in Niger, which [...]

Most people haven’t heard of the new electronic currency called bitcoin, but I’ve been aware of it for about a year, and according to a discussion today on RT’s ‘Crosstalk’, a number of real people around the world are using this currency successfully. I will not even try to understand how it works, but according [...]

When was the last time the leaders of the world’s major players succeeded each other in Washington over a critical situation?  You probably can’t remember and neither can I. Since World War II, Washington has been the uncontested locus of world diplomacy (though the U.N. meets in New York….).  Every sitting American President has been [...]