When we hear of the country Nicaragua, many of us will associate it with the vicious war that Ronald Reagan waged against that country, using the CIA-supported Contra mercenaries an terrorist proxies to destabilize that country by killing people and inflicting damage on schools and hospitals and other soft targets, simply because the Reagan administration did not approve of the Sandinista government led by Daniel Ortega.
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Brent Larkin used to be the director of the editorial page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer before he retired and now has a weekly column that appears on Sundays. He is someone whom I consider to be a conservative and during his tenure the editorials tended to favor conservative causes and endorse conservative candidates. In last Sunday’s column, he reflected on what he had learned on a recent overseas trip about how other countries view the US and Donald Trump, and that they, unlike his supporters in the US, see him as the “mean, small man he really is”.
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Some of you may have seen this item about a girls soccer team being disqualified from the finals of a tournament because Mili Hernandez, an 8-year old girl with short hair, was suspected to be a boy even though she was not.
The Springfield club told WOWT that a misprint in the team’s roster identified Mili as a boy. Her family brought several forms of identification, including her insurance card and a doctor’s physical form, to prove she’s a girl, but the team was still disqualified.
Teach coach Mario Torres told KMTV in Omaha that tournament officials did not handle a clerical mistake properly.
“Even if it was a mistake, they did not need to humiliate her or kick the entire team off the field,” Torres said.
After wallowing in the mud at Fox News for a decade and reaping the huge rewards of being just another of their attack dogs, faithfully repeating the party line and viciously attacking people who disagreed with it when she was not being utterly ridiculous (she once made the claim that Santa Claus was white), Megyn Kelly has now moved to NBC and is trying to pass herself off as serious journalist. On her new show she landed an interview with Russian president Vladimir Putin.
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One of the truly weird aspects of Roman Catholicism is their preservation and veneration of body parts of those declared by the church to be saints, seemingly in the belief that viewing and praying to those bits increases your chances of having your prayers answered. This article lists some of the body parts that have been preserved, including (if you can imagine it) Jesus’s foreskin, It is a macabre practice, to put it mildly. This news item about a brain fragment of a saint being stolen raises the weirdness all the way to 11.
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PZ Myers informs us that the switch to the new host server occurred last night and went pretty smoothly and that the only glitch seems to be that the list of approved commenters (i.e., those whose very first comments were approved by the editor of each site) has disappeared and so your first comment after the switch might have to be approved by me again. I’ll monitor the site more frequently than usual to do so.
The war in Afghanistan is a tragic version of the film Groundhog Day, where the same cycle of events gets played out over and over again with no discernible progress. We now have president Trump faced with the prospect of deciding whether to send in more troops and a new commander to break the stalemate, which is the same situation president Barack Obama faced in 2009 when he was newly elected.
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James Bond he is not.
Leo Varadkar has been elected leader of the Fine Gael party in the Republic of Ireland which means that he will become the country’s next taoiseach, the equivalent of prime minister. On the positive side is the fact that the 38-year old Varadkar is the son of an Indian immigrant father and Irish mother. He is also gay. Neither of these is insignificant given the overwhelming Roman Catholic culture of the country and the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment that saw the passage in 2004 of legislation that removed citizenship rights from the Irish-born children of non-national parents.
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As visitors to any of the FreethoughtsBlogs site will have noticed, there have been server problems that have periodically made the sites unavailable during the past few days. But PZ Myers says that we are shifting to a new webhosting service this week that one hopes will be more reliable. The move should be invisible to visitors to FtB and also (I hope!) to those of us who write the blogs.