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Daily Headlines
Not everyone has a mother to celebrate on Mother's Day. For those who have mentally ill or abusive mothers, this is a sad, even bizarre, holiday.
While Hungary has just destroyed all Monsanto genetically engineered corn fields, the USDA takes a slightly different approach toward the chemical giant. The USDA has, in fact, never denied a single application from Monsanto for new genetically engineered crops. Not one. Not ever.
Although political polarization has been decades in the making recent actions by Congress and President Obama highlight shameful days of a dysfunctional government that further divides the public.
A follow-up to my recent popular article, "Obamaheads--like Extreme Right--Are Useful Idiots for Corporatocracy," this piece identifies the BIG STORY that our two major parties' angry "idiot wars" are driving off the front page. Namely, their criminal abdication of the responsibility to manage economic globalization, and the guaranteed "race to the bottom" that means for us and our environment.
An underground landfill fire near tons of nuclear waste raises serious health and safety concerns -- so why isn't the government doing more to help? West Lake Landfill is an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site that's home to some of the oldest radioactive wastes in the world. A six-foot chain-link fence surrounds the perimeter, plastered with bright yellow hazard signs that warn of the dangers within. On one corner stands a rusty gas pump. About 1,200 feet south of the radioactive EPA site, the fire at Bridgeton Landfill spreads out like hot barbeque coals. No one knows for sure what happens when an underground inferno meets a pool of atomic waste, but residents aren't eager to find out...
The occupation has already created a de facto One State -- an evil state of oppression and brutality, in which half the population (or slightly less than half) deprives the other half of almost all rights -- human rights, economic rights and political rights. The Jewish settlements proliferate, and every day brings new stories of woe.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai stressed that he was amenable to the US demand to maintain nine military bases after the formal deadline for US withdrawal, indicating that he was willing to trade the bases for promises of a continued flow of economic aid from the West and security for his puppet government. Another likely condition is US support for the election of his handpicked successor in an election set for next year.
Hours after a paramedic in West, Texas, was taken into federal custody on Friday for unlawful possession of a "destructive device," the Texas Department of Public Safety and the McLennan County sheriff said they are launching a criminal investigation into the fertilizer plant explosion there last month that killed 14 people. But officials declined to draw a link between the arrest of the paramedic, 31-year-old Bryce Reed, and the disaster.
Now, more than ever before, we are reaping the consequences of our recklessness. From Superstorm Sandy, which crippled New York City and large areas of New Jersey, to a drought that parched more than half of our nation; from a flood that inundated large swaths of Australia to rising seas affecting millions around the world, the reality of the climate crisis is upon us.
Who's telling the truth? Will we ever know as long as politics is so polarized?
Like the morning sun
The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years. The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.
Before the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, global average CO2 was about 280 ppm. During the last 800,000 years, CO2 fluctuated between about 180 ppm during ice ages and 280 ppm during interglacial warm periods. Today's rate of increase is more than 100 times faster than the increase that occurred when the last ice age ended.
Yes it will not be easy ,sometimes, to tell the difference between poor judgment and corrupt one, but this should not mean we let corrupt bank executives get away with it
By Abdus-Sattar Ghazali
Nawaz Sharif stages comeback in Pakistan's landmark election
Defying political pundits, former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif's Muslim League (PML-N) emerged as the leading political party in Saturday's general election in Pakistan. According to unofficial results PML-N was leading on 117 of 272 seats of the National Assembly.
Nawaz Sharif stages comeback in Pakistan's landmark election
Defying political pundits, former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif's Muslim League (PML-N) emerged as the leading political party in Saturday's general election in Pakistan. According to unofficial results PML-N was leading on 117 of 272 seats of the National Assembly.
America the Clueless - By FRANK BRUNI NYTimes.com
"That we Americans are out to lunch isn't news. But every once in a while we are reminded s that we're out to breakfast and dinner as well.But only limited sense can be made of what is often nonsensical, and the truth is that a great big chunk of the electorate is tuned out, zonked out or combing Roswell for alien remains. Polls over the last few years have variously shown that about 30 percent of us couldn't name the vice president, about 35 percent couldn't assign the proper century to the American Revolution and 6 percent couldn't circle Independence Day on a calendar. Into the vacuum of substantive knowledge rush the unprincipled advertisements, the unctuous hucksters, the "super PACs," the Swift boating, the Sunday-morning-talk-show spin. A clueless electorate is a corruptible one, and one that seems ill poised to make the smartest, best calls about anything
"That we Americans are out to lunch isn't news. But every once in a while we are reminded s that we're out to breakfast and dinner as well.But only limited sense can be made of what is often nonsensical, and the truth is that a great big chunk of the electorate is tuned out, zonked out or combing Roswell for alien remains. Polls over the last few years have variously shown that about 30 percent of us couldn't name the vice president, about 35 percent couldn't assign the proper century to the American Revolution and 6 percent couldn't circle Independence Day on a calendar. Into the vacuum of substantive knowledge rush the unprincipled advertisements, the unctuous hucksters, the "super PACs," the Swift boating, the Sunday-morning-talk-show spin. A clueless electorate is a corruptible one, and one that seems ill poised to make the smartest, best calls about anything
Israel, which has launched three air strikes inside Syria since January this year, has escaped scrutiny or condemnation by a Security Council which remains sharply divided. Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of the Arab Studies Journal Jadaliyya, told IPS the Anglo-American reaction has been "the political equivalent of a standing ovation, though it remains unclear whether Washington and London's public approval of Israeli aggression was in this case the result of a coordinated strategy or merely a Pavlovian response."
The Dow is over 15,000 and continually testing new highs. The unemployment rate and unemployment claims are at lows that haven't been seen since before the economic crisis of 2008. If Mitt Romney were president, Republicans would be hailing him as the new Reagan with a better dye job. Yet a right-wing group is suggesting that President Obama should be impeached for wrecking the stock market and slowing job growth. The truth is that the Republican Party made a conscious decision to slow the economic recovery the moment the president took office.
By Sherwood Ross
Time Running Out On Obama To Act as Guantanamo Prisoners Weaken
When a nation with 1.1 million lawyers can't bring a couple of hundred prisoners to trial in more than 10 years one could be pardoned for suspecting the legal system is broke. But that's what's happened in Guantanamo and wherever the U.S. has prosecuted the so-called War on Terror.
Time Running Out On Obama To Act as Guantanamo Prisoners Weaken
When a nation with 1.1 million lawyers can't bring a couple of hundred prisoners to trial in more than 10 years one could be pardoned for suspecting the legal system is broke. But that's what's happened in Guantanamo and wherever the U.S. has prosecuted the so-called War on Terror.
Right now, the Republican Party is tearing apart at the seams. the GOP's unholy alliance of super-wealthy country clubbers and working-class cultural conservatives is now fraying.
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Twice in recent weeks newscasters have said what my 3-year-old calls "bad words" (where's George Carlin when you need him?) on television accidentally, and both times they have been fired, because apparently we are all still striving to reach puberty.
Twice in recent weeks newscasters have said what my 3-year-old calls "bad words" (where's George Carlin when you need him?) on television accidentally, and both times they have been fired, because apparently we are all still striving to reach puberty.
Individuality Breeds Greatness -- The Memo Sloane Stephens Forgot To Read
Sloane Stephens either never received or failed to read the memo on what makes the Great Ones, quite simply, GREAT!
Sloane Stephens either never received or failed to read the memo on what makes the Great Ones, quite simply, GREAT!
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Deep fissures are emerging between, on one side, a base of ideological voters and lawmakers with strong ties to powerful tea-party groups and super PACs funded by the fossil-fuel industry who see climate change as a false threat concocted by liberals to justify greater government control; and on the other side, a quiet group of moderates, younger voters, and leading conservative intellectuals who fear that if Republicans continue to dismiss or deny climate change, the party will become irrelevant. "There is a divide within the party," says Samuel Thernstrom, who served on President George W. Bush's Council on Environmental Quality and is now a scholar of environmental policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. "The position that climate change is a hoax is untenable."
Hitler's spy Gehlen worked with American military intelligence to establish an anti-Soviet clandestine army that would operate throughout Eastern Europe, the Baltics and inside Russian territory. The Gehlen Organization, as it became known, was Washington's "eyes and ears" on the Soviet Union. One of Gehlen's closest American associates at the time was John Foster Dulles, who led the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Europe during the war. Dulles shared Gehlen's rabid anti-communist views. Justifying the American collaboration with this senior Third Reich officer, Dulles said: "He's on our side, and that's all that matters." The OSS would soon evolve into the Central Intelligence Agency and Dulles became its director.
he Kochs, after years of working through the media with relentless lobbying and messaging, are exploring the idea of skipping the middleman and becoming media themselves, with the acquisition of one of the biggest media groups in the country. The Tribune papers encompass eight major publications across the country, including the Los Angeles Times, the Allentown Daily Call, the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, the Baltimore Sun, the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the Hartford Courant, the Daily Press of Hampton Roads, Virginia, and Hoy, America's second-largest Spanish-language paper.
