An unusually flimsy bit of analysis comes to us today from Timothy Williams of the New York Times, who claims that Samarra, the site of the 2006 shrine bombings that kicked off the worst of Iraq’s sectarian violence, has now transformed into a tranquil enclave to be emulated throughout the country.  This claim is interesting, especially as Timothy basically admits that tranquility is enforced by a heavy US military presence, and the Americans are the one group in Iraq who are definitely on the way out.

Beijing’s promise to veto new sanctions on Iran is one more sign of increased Chinese assertiveness, and may eventually help the growing economic power-house secure another oil supply outside the US sphere.  It is also an ironic twist in the history of Security Council action in the region, as China take’s the American role of the lone hold-out.

The next trickiest consonants after ق [qaf], in the various spoken dialects of Arabic, are ث [tha], ذ [dhal], ظ [dha], and ض [dhad].  In Egypt and much of the Levant, the letter ث [tha] practically disappears, being sometimes converted to س [sin] as in

ثورة [thau-ra] (revolution) --> سورة [sau-ra],

and other times to ت [ta] as in

كثير [ka-thir] -->كتير [ka-teer].