Massimo Calabresi

Al Jazeera’s live feed from Alexandria is showing two sparring crowds and audible automatic weapons fire; it appears military tanks are attempting to interpose themselves.

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After a week of increasingly pointed but ineffectual rhetorical forays, the U.S. waded directly into Egypt’s turmoil today, dispatching envoys to the opposing parties in an attempt to steer the unrest towards what Hillary Clinton over the weekend called an “orderly transition.” It is a risky move by Obama, putting the …

A new dawn broke in Tunis with the ouster of its long-time corrupt dictator. After years of repression, news organizations suddenly were allowed to criticize the government. Committees were formed in parliament to create laws allowing independent political parties and to make democratic changes to the constitution. The hated State …

On CNN and Fox today the Secretary of State took the U.S. position on the situation in Egypt a tonal step further, calling for an “orderly transition”, suggesting that the administration is beginning to view embattled President Hosni Mubarak’s days as numbered. She was careful in both appearances not to take sides explicitly, saying the …

There is often a naïve reaction in America to political uprisings abroad. The United States is a free place and has a long, albeit imperfect, history of granting asylum to political dissidents. This leads some observers, like George W. Bush’s former speechwriter Michael Gerson, to assume that freedom-seeking political dissidents abroad …

Over the course of the Obama administration’s two-year effort to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Attorney General Eric Holder has presided over a series of Pyrrhic victories. Today he won another, as the judge in a federal trial in Manhattan sentenced Ahmed Ghailani to life without parole for his participation in the 1998 embassy …

After Tiananmen, the Communist Party in China unveiled the Student Information System, whose nominal goals were to improve the quality of college and university teaching and increase student involvement in education. “In practice, however, the SIS’s principal objective is to monitor and control teachers and students,” says a new …

For those of us who like to dig through the Senate and House lobbying records, FARA registrations and old SEC filings, nothing excites like the possibility of a presidential candidate with deep but largely undisclosed business ties at home and abroad. So when I read the following exchange between Rudy Giuliani and CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, …

Every Christmas, longshoremen working the docks in New York and New Jersey receive royalty payments from shipping companies that off-load at the region’s piers. Every Christmas for the last 30 years the Genovese crime family, which infiltrated union leadership, would violently extort part of the payments from members, according to an …

Jared Loughner deserves no sympathy. The same cannot be said about the 2.4 million adult schizophrenics in America or the roughly 55 million other adults with mental illness. In the wake of mass killings there is always the danger of a fear-fueled backlash against the innocent—remember the Sikhs attacked after 9/11? Amid …

With the help of one of the authors of the study I cited yesterday, Jeffrey Swanson of Duke, and a psychiatrist friend who teaches at a major university and has treated patients with psychosis for close to 20 years, I have tracked down some other articles on the subject of environmental influence on people with violent …

The media are now in full backlash against the idea that the alleged shooter in Arizona, Jared Loughner, was motivated to shoot Gabrielle Gifford by the violent content of the country’s political discourse. Completely disassociating Loughner’s violence from its political environment at this early stage is as wrongheaded as asserting a …

The reclusive funder of Jewish settlers’ efforts to “reclaim” East Jerusalem, Irving Moskowitz, began demolition of the Shepherd’s Hotel in the occupied Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of the city yesterday. The hotel is a particularly charged symbol for Jews and Arabs: it was the home of the Mufti of Jerusalem who collaborated with …