Liliana Segura writes about the botched attempt last week by the state of Alabama at executing Doyle Lee Hamm, who had been on death row since 1987. What resulted was nothing less than torture as the state rushed to execute him before the midnight deadline for the execution warrant expired, all the while trying to hide what happened from his lawyer, his brother, and an outside anesthetist.
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British imperialism is usually portrayed in the English media by English-speakers who are broadly sympathetic to Britain and thus see its colonial practices through rose-tinted glasses. It is portrayed as a somewhat benevolent empire, at least when compared to how the Belgians treated their colonies. The British built roads, railways, schools, and created administrative structures. All these were to enable more efficient looting of the colonies’ resources but they did constitute a legacy of sorts that they left behind. While they did commit acts of brutality, these tend to be downplayed.
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There was a brief flurry of excitement when it looked like Donald Trump was going against the NRA and the gun lobby and proposing restrictions limiting the easy availability of guns. I did not share that excitement because I felt it was only a matter of time before Trump reversed himself and went back into the arms of the lobby and his gun nut supporters. And sure enough, that reversal happened the very next day, after a meeting with a top NRA official.
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Perhaps the easiest step we can take to encourage more humane agricultural practices is to buy eggs that are produced by farms where the hens are ‘free-range’, i.e., not confined to tiny spaces but free to roam on pastures. And indeed more and more people seem to be buying such eggs. In my local supermarket, the brands that sold them used to have a small space in the egg section but now it has expanded considerably as people become more aware of what exactly goes on in egg farms.
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It is bad enough to have Donald Trump wallowing in military grandiosity, talking about his ‘big button’ and military parades, now Russian president Vladimir Putin is making grandiose claims about having an ‘invincible nuclear weapon’.
Mr Putin made the claims as he laid out his key policies for a fourth presidential term, ahead of an election he is expected to win in 17 days’ time.
The weapons he boasted of included a cruise missile that he said could “reach anywhere in the world”.
He said of the West: “They need to take account of a new reality and understand … [this]… is not a bluff.”
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One of the things that always bugs me is the waste of food. This is especially the case with grocery stores that throw out tons of food because they have reached or are approaching the ‘sell by’ or vague ‘best used by’ dates stamped on them, even though the items may be perfectly usable. So I was interested to hear on last Saturday’s episode of All Things Considered a story about how France has passed a law that requires grocery stores to donate such items to food banks or face fines.
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William M. LeoGrande, a professor of government at American University, writes about the disingenuous coverage of Russian interference in US elections that portray it as an outrageous violation of the sovereign rights of a nation, when the US has been doing it for so long and in much more overt ways. Such behavior was revealed a long time ago in former CIA agent Philip Agee’s book Inside the Company: CIA Diary (1975) that detailed the things he did in Latin America after he joined the CIA in 1957. Like so many things that the US ruling class finds distasteful, this knowledge tends to be repeatedly buried.
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Donald Trump has suggested that teachers should be armed with guns to deter killers. Of course, the fact that an actual police offer (and maybe even four) was on site at the Parkland school and did not act shows that having an armed person present is not a solution when there is the ability for any person to buy a rapid-firing weapon that can kill many people in just a few seconds. Teachers are also pushing back saying that they joined the profession to teach people, not to be law enforcement officers.
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As I have mentioned, CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) that is currently going on is basically a closed feedback loop where extreme right-wingers come to hear extreme right wing speakers pander to their deeply held prejudices and fact-free views. Michael Steele used to be head of the Republican National Committee in the years 2009-2011. He also happens to be black. At a dinner on Friday evening for the attendees at CPAC, Ian Walters, a spokesperson for the American Conservative Union that sponsors CPAC, said that “We elected Mike Steele as chairman because he was a black guy. That was the wrong thing to do,”
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