Helen Thomas was the longest serving member of the White House press corps. She had reported from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for 57 years, going back to the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower. Sadly and after remarks made during a videotaped interview for a website called rabbilive.com., Ms Thomas announced she was retiring from Hearst Newspapers where she was a columnist. Read the rest of this entry »

This past Monday while the former UK prime minister Tony Blair was visiting the European Parliament for a hearing on the Israeli-Palestinians conflict, he had an unexpected surprise. Read the rest of this entry »

After the Christmas day failed terrorist attempt by a Nigerian who allegedly was trained in Yemen by al-Qaeda, talk about going against the terrorists in Yemen was something that many thought could happen. To the point that the Yemeni government had to warn Washington to learn the lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan. Read the rest of this entry »

The so long awaited decision of Obama on Afghanistan reached us last night from the Military Academy of West Point. While an unemotional gray sea of cadets looked at their commander-in-chief, they and the rest of the world watching heard those words we more or less expected: an additional 30,000 US soldiers were to march into Afghanistan. Read the rest of this entry »

Nobody is sure yet of how much was accomplished at the G20 meeting mostly because the most talked about event, one that was probably orchestrated behind the scenes but not expected to be presented, was the dramatic disclosure Friday made by Obama, flanked by Brown and Sarkozy, the leaders of Britain and France, of the existence of a covert Iranian nuclear enrichment site. Read the rest of this entry »

From the Arab world to the Normandy beaches in France with a short stop over in Germany, president Obama is trying to use his travels to obtain understanding for the US among the Muslims, maybe help from his European allies for the Afghanistan war and the closing of Guantanamo. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that the Iraqi government is finally taking decisions and that should be welcomed. A couple of days ago, Ali al-Dabbagh, spokesman for the Office of the Prime Minister of Iraq and former member of the Iraqi Parliament, announced in Washington at the Institute of Peace, an independent, nonpartisan, national institution established and funded by the United States Congress, a proposal for the creation of a regional economic and security union for the Middle East explicitly modeled on the European Union. Read the rest of this entry »