By Toby Matthiesen is a senior research fellow in the international relations of the Middle East at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He is the author of "Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring That Wasn’t" and "The Other Saudis: Shiism, Dissent and Sectarianism." Originally posted on the NYT.

The West’s Alliance With Saudi Arabia Fuels Islamism

The long-cherished neocon dream of "regime change" in Syria is blocking a possible route out of the crisis -- a ceasefire followed by elections in which President Assad could compete. The problem is there's no guarantee that Assad would lose and thus the dream might go unfulfilled, writes Robert Parry.

Can GOP Establishment dreams come true... after all it's nearly Christmas...

Source: Townhall.com

Great news! The "greatest threat to future generations of the world" has apparently been solved. World leaders Saturday adopted an historic international climate accord in Paris, the first-ever agreement to commit almost every country to fight climate change. However, as we knew all along and just got confirmation, the 31-page pact does not have binding language or a mechanism to force countries to live up to the promises to cut greenhouse gases emissions or provide money for developing and poor nations to cope with the effects of global warming.

Kiriakou served two years in prison for exposing President Bush's "lie" about the U.S. torture program. He tells Scheer how the CIA -- an organization created to recruit spies to steal secrets -- evolved into a "paramilitary force," how the U.S. drone program "creates terrorists" by killing innocent civilians, and how the Obama administration uses the Espionage Act as a political tool to threaten whistleblowers.