Following Boston, pressure cookers have now become suspicious objects. We have news reports of a student from Saudi Arabia being questioned by the FBI after neighbors reported seeing him carrying one. It turns out that he had cooked some food in it and was taking it to a friend’s house. [Read more…]
There is this curious belief by people who want to defend president Obama’s right to kill even US citizens abroad that US citizens no longer have the same rights under the US constitution once they leave the country. Charles Krauthammer is the latest person to make this claim, saying in a recent column that “Outside American soil, the Constitution does not rule”. [Read more…]
Naw Kham is the leader of a drug trafficking group suspected of a massacre of Chinese citizens who had been eluding Chinese authorities for a long time. Working with Laotian authorities, the Chinese authorities captured him when he went to that country, took him back to China, and he is now standing trial. What is interesting is that the Chinese government refrained from using drones to pursue him into the jungles of Myanmar and Laos and kill him even though they had intelligence pinpointing his location. They say that this was because they wanted to capture him alive and bring him to trial and also because of concerns that such an action would violate international law. [Read more…]
The reputation of Harvard University, especially the John F. Kennedy School of Public Policy, has been getting a severe hammering in the last month. We first had the Reinhart-Rogoff affair (see here and here) and now we have the Heritage-Richwine affair. [Read more…]
So Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s body has been finally buried in a small private cemetery in Virginia, which I hope brings to an end a ridiculous chapter in the Boston bombing tragedy.
Martha Mullen, a woman in Virginia, hearing about the difficulty the family and funeral director were having in finding a cemetery willing to accept it, felt it was her Christian duty to help and so quickly organized a local interfaith group in her area to have him interred in a small burial ground. Her action has resulted in the predictable vituperation from local officials, neighbors, and the online community, as if she had committed a heinous crime. [Read more…]
The Democratic and Republican political parties are quite similar in that they carefully shape their message to appeal to blocs of voters, trying to encompass as many segments as they can to cobble together a majority, while both remain staunchly pro-oligarchy. This strategy required them to pay at least lip-service to the needs of the non-oligarchic population. [Read more…]
This morning NPR had an extraordinary story about how Robert Ford, the US Ambassador to Syria who had left that country because of the deteriorating security situation there, had sneaked back into the rebel-held northern part of country to meet with and provide aid to one of the many factions that is fighting the Syrian government. So it looks like the US government has come down firmly on one side in the civil war that is raging in that country and causing immense hardship. [Read more…]
We can sometimes forget that the First Amendment of the US Constitution actually imposes two restrictions on the government when it comes to religious matters. The amendment says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The ‘establishment’ part gets the most attention in church-state matters because of repeated attempts to force religion into public life but the ‘free exercise’ part is also important. [Read more…]
The problem of the big banks is becoming acute, as was made clear by Neil Barofsky in his excellent book Bailout: How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street that I reviewed here. While having banks that are too big to jail makes a mockery of the legal system by inviting corruption, there is another reason that they are bad and that is because when some banks are perceived as too big to fail/jail, then they are being implicitly guaranteed by the US government, that it will step in and rescue them if they get in trouble. That means that people feel as safe lending money to them as they feel with buying US Treasury bonds and this carries with it real costs. [Read more…]