News has emerged of a US drone strike in Yemen that killed 14 members of a wedding party and injured 22 others. The victims were traveling in a convoy and the news has understandably caused outrage in that country with the parliament voting to ban any more strikes, though the vote is not binding on the government. [Read more…]
I am not quite sure what to make of the latest developments in the infighting within the Republican party. All of a sudden, leaders such as speaker John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and senate minority leader Mitch McConnell seem to be openly challenging the Tea Party faction within the party, sometimes using almost contemptuous language. [Read more…]
The European parliament, defying opposition from the US and its own conservative bloc of center-right parties, has invited Edward Snowden to testify before them about the issues involved in his revelations of widespread government spying. [Read more…]
It turns out that it is not just journalists like David Miranda and Laura Poitras who are detained and questioned at length when they arrive at airports in the US and the UK. Now comes a report that even reporters from establishment media like the New York Times have suffered the same fate. [Read more…]
Well, actually he is still dead. But the story about the friend and aide to the Clintons who tragically committed suicide in 1993, and which the right wing got into a lather about claiming that he had been murdered by the Clintons because he harbored some dark secret about them, has now received a new incarnation with a new dastardly plot. [Read more…]
Edward Snowden tops the list of Foreign Policy journal’s list of Global Thinkers for 2013. The top ten people were all associated with the NSA scandal, almost all of them critical of it, except for one (NSA director Keith Alexander) who came second and was immediately followed by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. [Read more…]
Congressional districts are required to be redrawn after every census that occurs every decade. They have to be contiguous and to represent a limited range of numbers of people but beyond that the process is pretty much up for grabs. Whoever has the power to draw the lines can do so to achieve their own goals, such as to create safe seats for one party or to unite (or disperse) a particular ethnic or racial group, and so on. [Read more…]
We have all experienced the convenience of the auto-complete feature of many software items that save you some typing. But the prompts can often be the wrong ones. For me, the most common error due to autocorrect is to send emails to the wrong people who happen to share the first names or first letters of their names with others, because I hit send before double-checking. So far, that has not caused any problems, except delays. [Read more…]
Yesterday saw two setbacks for gay rights, in India and Australia.
In 2009, the Indian supreme court overturned a 153-year old British law that forbid gay sex and imposed punishments of up to ten years. That decision was seen as a major step forward in a part of the world where attitudes towards the LGBT community can only be described as appalling. [Read more…]
On Tuesday morning, the news headlines on the radio that I listen to while having breakfast mentioned that president Obama had shaken hands with Cuban president Raul Castro at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. I immediately said to myself that this would be treated as a huge story in our shallow media and I was not disappointed. [Read more…]