- Marc Lynch on Obama in Turkey and Iraq. Good assessment, I think. Marc Lynch deserves your daily readership. I'm a neophyte; Abu Aardvark has been around since the early blogosphere. Of course that doesn't mean you shouldn't read me, too.
- This story is intriguing. Aluf Benn is not a sensationalist reporter, but he is clearly stating that the Obama Administration may be willing to take on Netanyahu over the two state solution and other issues. For an Israeli newspaper on the left of center (Haaretz) to suggest a major US-Israeli confrontation is possible is intriguing indeed.
- If you read my earlier link to the Egyptian short story The Earthquake of 2012, The Arabist has it all in one place now. It's not quite as satisfying as I thought it might be based on the first part, but it's still an interesting opposition satire.
- Well, Egypt is the country best known for Denial/Da Nile. Somebody had to say 6 April was a success, so why not write that it succeeded before it ever began? (Except, um, that it didn't?)
- Folks in Vegas and Atlantic City: Will Avigdor Lieberman leave the Foreign Ministry because of his outrageous statements that make a farce of normal diplomatic commentary, or will they get him on corruption charges first? What if the US Secretary of State was being interrogated for five hours by the police on corruption charges? What would that do to diplomatic credibility? Bonus odds: anyone willing to bet he'll still be Foreign Minister at the end of the year? Even Michael Totten, generally a very conservative and pro-Israeli blogger on the Middle East, is ready to see him go.
- There's an uproar in Saudi Arabia over the fact that a film managed to get shown in the Kingdom despite the ban on cinemas. While, the last I heard, YouTube was blocked in the Kingdom, I suspect that there will be a lot of electronic leakage of video that makes the whole cinema ban rather moot.
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