Glenn Greenwald reports on what happened to a CNN investigative report that it had commissioned on the Arab spring in Bahrain in 2011. On arrival there, the CNN news team was shocked at the harsh treatment being meted out to everyone including them and they turned in a story that was highly critical of the Bahraini government. [Read more…]
I used to think that John McCain’s election campaign was incompetent but Mitt Romney’s is surely giving him a run for his money. McCain always faced an uphill battle in 2008 with the albatross of the George W. Bush presidency hanging around his neck but his unforced errors, especially the disastrous selection of Sarah Palin, did not help him. By comparison, Romney should have had it easy. The economy is sputtering, unemployment is high, people are feeling uneasy and fearful about their future, and he could have run as the agent of change. And yet he still has not managed to take the lead in the polls. [Read more…]
It used to be the case that when people observed someone behaving bizarrely, or even dangerously, in a public place, they would be in somewhat of a quandary. Should they intervene and try to calm the person down? Should they call the authorities? Should they ignore and go on their way? [Read more…]
It’s good to see high-ranking church officials beginning to be held to account for their role in covering up the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic church. [Read more…]
If the BBC, rather than asking Rod Dreher and David Ellis Dickerson, had asked me to give reasons for the global decline in religion, I would have pointed to two things: the rise in acceptance of science in popular culture, and the internet (and of course bacon). I would have agreed with Dickerson that the increasing acceptance of homosexuality by the general public has put traditional religion in a bind and is speeding up the process but I disagree with Dreher that the fault lies with mainstream Christianity abandoning orthodoxy. [Read more…]
Most of us are familiar with the fact that with solid objects, it is harder to start things moving than it is to keep it moving. A similar phenomenon occurs with fluids, where we use the term viscosity to indicate the frictional effects. With most fluids, keeping it stirred is easier or stays the same when compared to starting to stir it. [Read more…]
Given the silly hoo-ha about the Democratic party platform dropping references to god and re-instating them at the last minute, I was amused to read this news story about former British prime minister Tony Blair. [Read more…]
The Democratic convention ran into some problems yesterday when the Republicans noticed that the party platform did not mention their support for Jerusalem as the capital of Israel nor did it mention ‘god-given’ when describing people’s potential, both of which were changes from the 2008 platform. [Read more…]
The internet started buzzing yesterday with the news that someone had broken into the Franklin, Tennessee office of the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and obtained copies of Mitt Romney’s past tax returns for an unspecified number of years. They claim to have made digital copies of them and mailed flash drives containing encrypted versions to various organizations, saying that if they do not receive $1 million by September 28, they will release the public key that will enable people to unencrypt the files and read the documents. [Read more…]