The selection of the new pope was carried out by a conclave of elderly men, and the only candidates were men. The new pope is a staunch social conservative who opposes women’s ordination as priests and women’s right to control their own bodies and limit family size, key issues for women’s health and well-being. It […]
Why Wasn’t the Higgs Boson Discovered in the US? Neal DeGrasse Tyson explains congressional stupidity
Scientists at a conference in Italy have confirmed the discovery of the Higgs Boson, after further experiments performed at the large hadron collider near Geneva in Switzerland, built in the late ’90s by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) with the cooperation of 10,000 scientists. The Higgs Boson is associated with a field that […]
Phoenix, Az.: Climate Change Denial HQ will be First Urban Victim of … Climate Change (deBuys)
William deBuys writes at Tomdispatch.com Of course, it’s an easy city to pick on. The nation’s 13th largest metropolitan area (nudging out Detroit) crams 4.3 million people into a low bowl in a hot desert, where horrific heat waves and windstorms visit it regularly. It snuggles next to the nation’s largest nuclear plant and, having […]
Top Ten Ways Pope Francis heralds the Emergence of Global South
The selection of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina as the new pope signals the first time the Roman Catholic Church has been headed by a non-European since St. Gregory III (d. 741), who was what we would today call either a Lebanese or a Syrian. (Of course, the church holds that a Palestinian was […]
What the US invasion felt like to Iraqis (Kukis)
Journalist Mark Kukis (Time magazine correspondent in Iraq 2006-2009) writes in a guest piece for Informed Comment Iraqis have a phrase they use to describe the U.S. invasion and early occupation. They call it “the collapse,” and in conversation the term is understood to mean the time covering the fall of Saddam Hussein to roughly […]
Amazing Social Media Facts 2013 (video)
Social media facts 2013, by the numbers:
Falsity of Nuclear Accusation against Iraq Was Known before Bush’s Invasion
As we approach the ten year anniversary of the launching of George W. Bush’s war on Iraq, it is worth my pointing out that I concluded even before the war began that the main rationale then given for it, Iraq’s alleged nuclear weapons program, was a fiction. I was following the inspectors which Bush had […]
Bradley Manning Explains his Leaks in his own Voice in new Tape (Goodman)
Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! airs excerpts from a leaked interview in which Bradley Manning for the first time since his arrest can be heard explaining why he gave government documents to Wikileaks for public release. He wanted to show everyone the “true costs of war” and to “spark a domestic debate on the role of […]
Everybody Leaks in Washington: What the Bradley Manning Trial Tells us about a Broken System (Schanzer)
DAVID SCHANZER writes at ISLAMiCOMMENTARY When you cut through the bluster and controversies surrounding the Bradley Manning/Wikileaks case, it raises a difficult unresolved question that has great significance for our democracy: How can the government be held accountable for its national security policies (and mistakes) in a world where there are far too many secrets, […]