Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – This report “is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.” Such was the response of UN secretary general Antonio Guterres to the February 28, 2022 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) documenting the present and future impact of the […]
Can sanctions ever be just — let alone effective?
( Fellowship of Conciliation/ Waging Nonviolence ) – As a result of its brutal invasion of Ukraine, Russia is now the most sanctioned country in the world, leading one former Obama administration Treasury official to describe the situation as “financial nuclear war.” Western European countries, however, depend on Russian oil and gas, so they have […]
Have We Forgotten . . . the people of Afghanistan?
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – The US 20-year war and occupation in Afghanistan, waged to avenge the September 11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, has taken the lives of more than 71,000 Afghani and Pakistani civilians. A massive increase in civilian deaths ensued there in 2017 when the US military loosened […]
Women have had the Right to Choose in America for a Large Part of its History
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – Did you know? …Abortion has been legal for a large part of US history and was significant in the history of women’s reproductive health care: Not a single state banned abortion in our country’s first century. Women used abortion-inducing herbs and medications described in early pharmacological literature and […]
How Government Policy created the New Urban Black-White Segregation and Failing Inner Cities
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – For many years, I worked in Boston public housing with teams of residents, community organizations, public housing staff and other professors on reducing and removing the many asthma triggers that caused the highest rates of asthma and asthma attacks in the city. Living and working in the heart […]
November 11 Armistice Day: Honor Peace Day
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – The first Armistice Day was a celebration of the moment – the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, 1918 – that the brutality of that first industrial war, which robbed 40 million soldiers and civilians of life, ended; and peace began. On Veterans Day […]
Forty-Two Years in Afghanistan: Can a New US Foreign Policy avoid Hyper-Masculinist Ego?
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – Every member of Congress attended the September 14, 2001 memorial service at the Washington National Cathedral for the nearly 3,000 victims of September 11 attacks in New York City, Washington DC and Pennsylvania. In that service Dean of the Cathedral Reverend Nathan Baxter invoked “Let us also pray […]
The Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Near-Meltdown is a Lasting Tragedy
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – In 2011 the Great East Japan Earthquake and ensuing tsunami devastated northeast Japan, taking the lives of more than 18,000 people and triggering one of the worst industrial accidents in history: the crippling breakdown of the Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear power plant. Three of the plant’s six reactors suffered […]
On Anniversary of U.S. Nuking of Hiroshima, can we Learn from the Forests?
(Special to Informed Comment) – On August 6 and 9 throughout the world, people will commemorate the hundreds of thousands of Japanese people who died—crushed, vaporized, burned beyond recognition, poisoned by radiation—from the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The bombs’ hideous intent and impact constituted a crime […]
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