Nicosia- I have a new piece out today for The Redline Podcast titled “Cyprus Votes: Growing Rifts and Eastward Drift” on this past Sunday’s presidential election here in Cyprus where the traditional establishment parties were thrown a curve by the…
Barcelona- Partly out of boredom and partly out of the itch to simply create something new out of old, I threw together this photo montage over the weekend. In this era of digital photography where one shoots thousands of frames…
Cairo- I had one of those accidentally fantastic days in Cairo today. Spent most of the day lazing around Zamalek, shot a few phot’s of some killer post-revolutionary street murals, and all I ate were two heaping bowls of mega…
New York- An NBC News reporter is somehow texting (though he says there’s no cell service?) from the port city of Tobruk where an editor in London is posting the texts on Twitter. The border between Egypt’s Western desert and…
New York- My former editor and colleague at Asia Times Online, Charles McDermid, has an article today with local Suleimani-based reporter Rebaz Mahmood on the fourth and perhaps ultimate death sentence for “Chemical” Ali Hassan al-Majid, the most brutal enforcer of…
Abu Dhabi, UAE- I have a new piece in today’s Asia Times about the overall decline of the security environment in Kabul and the collective West’s political will to do something about it. Five more years of Karzai rule is…
The Independent Election Commission held an arduous total of two (2) voting results announcements before they decided to take a well deserved break? The first event on Tuesday was pretty much a disaster and then yesterday independent candidate Ramazan Bashardost…
Urgent Update: I finally made it into the NY Times….in someone else’s photo…in the far lower left. The Afghan Independent Election Commission had a pathetic press conference today. The figures for the votes for the candidates counted thus far didn’t…
Went out to the Independent Election Commission warehouse out on Jalalabad road today to watch the ballots for Kabul Province come in via faded, clattering Pakistani lorries. Being ramadan, work went by at a snail’s pace. A few men and…
I’m suddenly feeling down. The adrenalin rush has worn off and the couple other journos I was socializing with have all left. I imagine today’s Safi flight to Dubai was packed with Westerners fleeing temporarily directionless politics and the discipline…
Afghanistan now sits in this awkward interim phase on this first day of Ramadan (Ramazan in Farsi) between the election and the official announcement of the preliminary results in about ten days. Allegations of fraud are being hurled back and…
Yesterday’s elections in Kabul went off with a few hitches but at least they went. People, mostly men, turned out in numbers that were substantial considering the threat this society is under. Within Kabul’s city limits, there was only one…
I was relaxing at breakfast this morning until the Sky News anchor quoted a Reuters report off the wire that two rockets had just struck the presidential palace deep inside Kabul’s green zone. Looked like I wasn’t going to relax…
Dr. Abdullah Abdullah had a rally of several thousand supporters in Kabul today, primarily Tajiks from the Panjshir Valley and Shomali Plain. The scene was one of rapt intensity as throngs of people, mostly teenage boys, pressed up against the…
We weren’t told we’d be refueling at an 82nd Airborne Forward Operating Base. Even seeing a base like this without an ISAF accreditation or being “embedded” (a concept I loathe) is highly unusual. The American soldiers who refueled us didn’t…
Keep that momentous pixelated video coming! I posted a piece addressed to Ayatollah Khamenei last night on the HP here. According to the Guardian, during the called-for day of mourning, protests are not letting up from Kurdistan to Baluchistan and…
A bird’s eye view video, I’m guessing from a mobile phone, shows the breadth of the crisis the Iranian leadership must now genuinely face. The Iranian government’s strategy of blocking websites and giving foreign journo’s the shoe is inherently flawed.…
Is this Iran’s Tianamen? Tehran’s restive urban class does not appear to be slowing down its outrage over what opposition supporters are terming a “Stolen Election.” Though without maintaining empirical evidence thus far, those opposed to the Ahmadinejad government here…