“The multipolar world has become a global reality, recognized as a near certainty by no less an authority than the U.S. intelligence community,” writes Elizabeth Dickinson in the latest issue of Foreign Policy. While missing the complexities of the debate about the global balance of power, the article details some of the historical moments when […]
“Be a patriot – kill a priest.” That was a bumper sticker seen on vehicles run by the national guard in El Salvador in the 1980s. The reason is that the entrenched elite of that country believed that Roman Catholic priests were becoming radicalized and increasingly political and who therefore threatened their interests. [kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/ILCZh1SIypA” […]
Someone in my class at Pace University in NYC a couple of years ago mentioned that she thought that earthquakes and other similar phenomenon were being influenced by climate change. I pooh-poohed the idea, saying that climate change was responsible for a lot of ills – with more to come – but that it couldn’t […]
Last week I dropped in, along with bloggers in 155 countries across six continents, for Blog Action Day ’09: Climate Change. CNN covered the story and the organizers report that 13,484 blogs reached 18,076,782 readers. A big part of the reason for this effort was to further enlighten folks around the world about this coming […]
While it is no secret that racism lives on in the United States, it was nonetheless shocking news that a justice of the peace in Louisiana had refused to marry an interracial couple because he doesn’t “believe in mixing the races that way.” Keith Bardwell, the justice of the peace in question, has […]
The news cycle has moved on and few are talking about President Obama’s Nobel Prize award but the event did prompt me to wonder how the U.S. was doing overall in the prize count. We like to think of the U.S. as producing outstanding achievers in almost every area of human endeavor, but does the […]
China’ economic emergence mirror’s America’s rise and how it was perceived by Britain at the height of the industrial revolution more than a century ago.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) will release their annual Press Freedom Index tomorrow. The report ranks 174 different countries by their committment to press freedom. The Annual World Press Freedom Index for 2009 will include details on progress made by the U.S., alongside a number of high-profile journalist kidnappings. RSF will hold a press conference at […]
Former NYS Governor Eliot Spitzer takes the President and his economic team to task for their light and soft approach to financial industry reform, and their failure to hold large financial corporations accountable for their continued practices that place the nation’s economy in more peril.
There is a potentially dramatic change in the location and availability of natural gas globally. If all comes to pass as predicted, it would alter the geopolitical power of some countries like Russia, while lessening American, and possibly Chinese, Indian, and European, dependence on foreign oil and gas. Unlike normal natural gas, which is often found […]
As if the passage northward were not dangerous enough for a migrant trying to enter the US without documentation, human rights organizations now report an epidemic of kidnappings. Irregular migrants are often beaten and detained by their captors until they provide the contact information of family members, who must then send money for their release. […]
Numbers can be a difficult thing. While statistics can be a powerful form of evidence, they can also be misleading or take a situation out of its proper context. Human rights organizations like numbers – casualty counts and similar statistics can demonstrate the magnitude of a problem in a way that mere prose cannot. However, […]
Bank lobby and ‘Big Business’ influence-peddling in Washington is at crisis levels that threatens the U.S. Congress’s constitutional duties to protect the ‘public welfare’ all enemies – foreign AND domestic.
According to confirmed reports from Newsweek, their own reporter and filmmaker, Maziar Bahari, has been released from Iran. Mr. Bahari, who was detained in Iran since the June elections, was released from Evin Prison on bail on Oct. 17. Read the Newsweek online article about Bahari’s release here The 42 year-old reporter is expecting his […]
As a writer on children’s rights, the subject of abuse is commonplace, the types of abuse are a varied as they are haunting. Most often I write about the horrors that happen outside the United States, however the US is plagued by its own child abusers in all forms. Often we forget to bring much […]