Those who are expecting the US senate to block the atrocious health care bill passed by the House of Representatives should not be too sanguine. They may pass a slightly watered down version but it will still hurt a lot of people.
The outgoing governor of the Jakarta in Indonesia, who is a double minority in that he is both Christian and ethnic Chinese in a country that has the largest Muslim population in the world and is 85% Muslim, was sentenced to two-years imprisonment for blasphemy. His crime? Quoting a verse from the Koran which he said that opponents were using to mislead people that Muslims should not vote for a non-Muslim.
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You may have seen this photograph in the media showing a 16-year old Girl Scout Lucie Myslikova in her uniform calmly facing down a skinhead during a neo-Nazi rally held in the Czech Republic.
He does a brilliant job of explaining why the fight for new neutrality is important for everyone to get involved in and how that neutrality is being threatened by the new FCC chairperson Ajit Pai. His show has set up a website gofccyourself.com to make it easy to go straight to the relevant FCC page. Once there, click on ‘express’ link at the upper right, and leave your comment telling thee FCC that you back strong net neutrality backed by Title II oversight of ISPs. I already did so.
Alex Emmons writes about a lawsuit filed by the ACLU against two psychologists James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen who received lucrative government contracts to devise the most abusive torture methods used by the government. Their work was supervised by Gina Haspel who has been appointed by Donald Trump as deputy director of the CIA.
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I have expressed my puzzlement with several aspects of the national spelling bee competition, especially the fact that the words have become increasingly obscure over time. (For example, in 1932, the winning word was ‘knack’!) One question in my mind is why such a pointless activity as spelling highly esoteric words has become so attractive that young children spend countless hours learning to do so and then subject themselves to sweating it out in front of cameras and large prime time TV audiences in a format that seems to revel in their agony. To win this contest requires knowing the spelling of 150,000 to 200,000 words. This is astonishing when one considers that Shakespeare used only about 33,000 words in his plays and this is considered to be close to the upper limit of most people’s vocabularies, even those who have high levels of formal education. So these competitors are learning to spell a lot of words they will never, ever use.
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I never quite understood the Pokemon craze, especially the Pokemon Go one that was a massive sensation recently and just as quickly disappeared from the news. But it appears that the craze is going strong and there is even a Pokemon World Festival that was help this year in South Korea. Really.
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On Friday I saw the new film Risk produced and directed by award-winning documentarian Laura Poitras, who won the Academy Award for Citizenfour, the film about Edward Snowden and his leaks. The focus this time is Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and unlike the earlier one, the narrative structure of this film is, to say the least, a bit confused. But that is not due to the lack of skill of Poitras but due to the fact that after she started filming it, the story went off in many directions and she too became part of it.
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When we think of people being targeted for blasphemy, Muslim-majority countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia immediately come to mind. But it turns out that atheist Stephen Fry is being investigated for this offense in Ireland for comments he made on a television show when he was asked what he would say to god if it so happened that after he died he was confronted by god.
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Below is a portion of the detailed transcript of the 2010 drone strike that killed 23 civilians, including women and children, in Afghanistan. The drones were operated out of Creech base in Nevada and this was re-enacted in the documentary National Bird that I reviewed two days ago. You can stream the film for free until May 15.
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