ABC News reports on Super-Typhoon Haiyan, which is now estimated to have killed at least 1200 in the Philippines, and which forced millions from their homes, with winds of 195 miles per hour and gusts of over 200 miles per hour. Other storms have been larger and killed many more (mainly because they stuck around […]
US loses UNESCO Voting Rights: How Kow-Towing to Israeli Policy Weakens America
President Obama called America “the greatest country in the world” on Friday, but the same day the US lost basic voting rights on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco). The US stopped paying its dues in fall of 2011 because Unesco accepted Palestine (now a non-member observer state of the UN like […]
Top Reasons Israel’s Likud Really Opposes an Iran Nuclear Deal
Rightwing Israeli politicians like Binyamin Netanyahu are squawking furiously about the prospect that Sec. of State John Kerry might reach an agreement with Iran over its civilian nuclear enrichment program. The US is trying to convince Iran to scale back its program to the point where it cannot be used to produce a weapon in […]
Arts of the Arab Uprisings at the Arab-American Museum, Dearborn
The Arab-American Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, has mounted an exhibition on the Arts of the Arab Uprisings. It includes art, photography and video by street artist Amr Nazeer and celebrated social justice blogger Wael Abbas of Egypt and Tunisian activists Lina ben Mhenni and Nadia Khiari, among others. Here is NPR’s interview with Egyptian street […]
How American Troops in Afghanistan became Unreal (Jones)
Ann Jones writes at Tomdispath.com The last time I saw American soldiers in Afghanistan, they were silent. Knocked out by gunfire and explosions that left them grievously injured, as well as drugs administered by medics in the field, they were carried from medevac helicopters into a base hospital to be plugged into machines that would […]
Record High Warming Gases in Atmosphere: Earth Losing Race Against Time (McCauley)
Lauren McCauley writes at Commondreams.org The amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in our atmosphere reached a record high in 2012, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), continuing an upward and accelerating trend which, according to report authors, spells "devastating consequences" for the future of the planet. According to WMO's annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, between […]
It wasn’t Arafat who was Assassinated but the Palestinian People
Aljazeera America has the exclusive on the Swiss scientists’ findings that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was poisoned with polonium, after the fashion of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko. That the Likud government of Ariel Sharon in Israel was behind the assassination is not much in doubt. Polonium is only produced in Russia and wouldn’t be easy […]
Ms. Marvel and the Rise of the Muslim Superhero in America
Umberto Eco argued that Superman, from the character’s inception in the 1940s through about 1970, was a politically conservative figure. The stories were about protecting property and combating petty crime, rather banal stuff given the character’s powers. The character was opaque and unchanging (i.e. the stories are plot-driven adventures, not character-driven). Art by Adrian Alphono […]
Dear Press: Stop Enthusing About Habitable Planets until People like Va.’s Cuccinelli Stop Destroying this One
The issue of habitable planets, earth’s own disastrous climate change, and Virginia politics don’t intersect every day. But today they do, and that does not reflect well on the human species or its prospects. Bear with me. NASA’s now-idle Kepler telescope’s earlier search for habitable planets in the universe from time to time generates breathless […]
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