On Saturday, in twelve different cities, Saudi Arabia carried out executions of forty-seven Muslims convicted of terrorism. -- Forty-three were Sunnis and four were Shi'ites. -- One of the Shi'ites executed, Nimr al-Nimra, was a prominent cleric whose principal crime seems to have been criticism of the brutal, obscurantist, intolerant, theocratic, yet faithfully Western-backed Saudi monarchy, an absolutist regime that in 2014 was the leading importer of military hardware in the world. -- "The executions are Saudi Arabia's first in 2016. -- At least 157 people were put to death last year, a big increase from the ninety people killed in 2014," Reuters reported.[1] -- "[F]our prisons us[ed] firing squads and the others beheading." -- It was the largest mass execution in Saudi Arabia since Jan. 9, 1980, when sixty-three were publicly beheaded in the aftermath of the Grand Mosque seizure of Nov. 29, 1979, but Saturday's executions were not carried out in public. -- Saturday's executions "seemed mostly aimed at discouraging Saudis from jihadism," Angus McDowall said. -- But many Shi'ites believe the four Shi'ites executed were innocent. -- Their families "have vigorously denied they were involved in attacks and said they were only peaceful protesters against sectarian discrimination in the Sunni-ruled kingdom," McDowall said. -- Iraq's Shi'ite leaders expressed outrage at the executions, with Ayatollah Sistani describing them as "an injustice and an aggression" and Moqtada al-Sadr calling them a "horrible attack," AFP reported Sunday.[2] -- After the Saudi embassy in Tehran was stormed and partially burned by protesters, "Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic ties with Iran . . . and gave Iranian diplomats forty-eight hours to leave the kingdom," the New York Times reported Sunday.[3] -- This despite the fact that "The Iranians did, however, appear to be taking steps to prevent the dispute from escalating further," Ben Hubbard and Thomas Erdbrink said. -- "Forty Iranians were arrested in the anti-Saudi mayhem -- a sign that the authorities were trying to contain public outrage." -- Michael Stephens, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, said the "very disturbing escalation" of tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran guaranteed that "instability across the region is going to continue," particularly in Syria, whose civil conflict is also a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran...
The suicide on Dec. 9 of Tyler Schlagel, 29, a model "great Marine" from Longmont, Colorado, about 30 miles north of Denver, whom no one expected of suicidal thoughts, has deeply disturbed fellow soldiers and has highlighted once more a Kafkaesque aspect of the U.S. military's approach to suicide among veterans, Wednesday's New York Times reported.[1] -- The U.S. military has no authority over former military personnel and the V.A. is not allowed to contact veterans until they seek help. -- As a result, although the development of "suicide clusters" can put lives at risk, the military does nothing for units like the 2/7 (Second Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment), which has seen fourteen suicides among its veterans returning from Afghanistan. -- The Pentagon does not even have the capability accurately to assess the problem. -- "'I don’t understand -- they should at least do something,' Madelyn Gould, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who helped create national guidelines on responding to suicide clusters, said in an interview." -- COMMENT: Strange to say, apart from the Times article Schlagel's death seems to have prompted little commentary. -- A search of the Longmont Times-Call, the local paper owned by the MediaNews Group, turns up nothing. -- The same holds true of The Denver Post, the Colorado Springs Gazette, the Boulder Daily Camera, The Pueblo Chieftain, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, the Fort Collins Coloradoan, the Loveland Reporter-Herald, The Durango Herald, and Cañon City Daily Record. -- The New York Times posted a series entitled "Remembering a Marine" consisting of seven photos by Todd Heisler of Schlagel's funeral and burial in Longmont....
With the measured, Olympian gravity of the philosopher, well-known Italian political thinker Giorgio Agamben reminded readers of Le Monde (Paris) on Sunday that it is extremely naive to believe that the state of emergency that the government of President François Hollande is trying to write into the constitution of France's Fifth Republic is anything other than a preliminary to "a rapid and irreversible degradation of public institutions."[1] -- A complete translation of Agamben's piece is posted below....