Will Hutton, writing in The Observer, says the “precious freedom of speech of an individual is different from the freedom of speech of a media corporation with its capacity to manipulate the opinions of millions.”
Posted on Nov 25, 2012
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — I hope the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops contemplating the future of the church’s public and political engagement notice how the good deeds of the Roman Catholic parish of St. Francis de Sales have inspired people far beyond the confines of Catholicism.
Posted on Nov 25, 2012
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The success of societies depends on people who remember history and understand human nature, as Guardian columnist Chris McGreal does in his writing about the latest confrontation between Gaza and Israel.
Posted on Nov 24, 2012
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MRI scans conducted by researchers at NYU’s School of Medicine have shown that the resting state functioning of brains that have suffered mild trauma corresponds to a host of problems, including cognitive dysfunction, depression, anxiety and fatigue.
Posted on Nov 24, 2012
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Egypt’s highest court has accused President Mohamed Morsi of staging an “unprecedented attack” on the judiciary by granting himself extensive new powers, including a ban on revoking presidential decisions and a prohibition against dissolving the legislative assembly.
Posted on Nov 24, 2012
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The U.S. government formally values the human right to be free from indefinite detention without charge, except in certain cases such as when the practice is useful for securing its own interests in Afghanistan and Iraq, writes Glenn Greenwald.
Posted on Nov 24, 2012
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About 17,000 police officers were deployed to subdue at least 9,000 people who rallied in the streets of Bangkok on Saturday to call for the overthrow of the Thai government. Protesters believe the current prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, is doing the bidding of her brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted from the post in 2006.
Posted on Nov 24, 2012
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Did you stay home for what has become an American commercial tradition? Armed with cellphone cameras, a few fascinated spectators caught riots and stampedes on Black Friday at shopping centers across the country.
Posted on Nov 24, 2012
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President Barack Obama won a second term. The House Republicans kept their majority. And the Reagan coalition that Mitt Romney depended on to win appears to have disappeared. Was election 2012 a vote for the status quo? The “Left, Right & Center” commentators dissect the ramifications on this week’s show.
Posted on Nov 23, 2012
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Pope Benedict XVI claims that, thanks to a sixth-century monk’s mistake, the most commonly used calendar is off by several years; topless feminists disguised as nuns protest anti-gay marriage in Paris; meanwhile, mainstream media pile on the same cliches about Israel and Palestine we’ve been hearing for 40 years. These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on Nov 23, 2012
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In 300 B.C., a student of Aristotle observed that humans could change regional temperatures by draining marshes and clearing forests. More than 2,000 years later, a Swede quantified carbon’s role in keeping the planet warm.
Posted on Nov 23, 2012
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After Wednesday’s cease-fire between Hamas and Israel, a 20-year-old Palestinian was killed and nine others wounded in a clash with Israeli soldiers in the southeast Gaza Strip.
Posted on Nov 23, 2012
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Maria Alyokhina, a member of the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot jailed for performing an anti-Putin “punk prayer” in Moscow’s main cathedral this year, has been transferred to a solitary cell at Berezniki penal colony, apparently at her own request.
Posted on Nov 23, 2012
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If President Obama is serious about confronting global warming, he’ll have the opportunity to show it through the actions of U.S. representatives at the United Nations climate change summit in Doha, Qatar, next week.
Posted on Nov 23, 2012
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A Kentucky law requires residents and government officials to affirm the existence of an almighty, protective God via a series of plaques installed outside the state Homeland Security building, with a penalty of up to 12 months in prison for failure to comply.
Posted on Nov 23, 2012
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A group of CEOs led by Macy’s Terry Lundgren calling itself the Fix the Debt coalition is hoping for a deficit-busting austerity budget this holiday season—not a program to create American jobs.
Posted on Nov 22, 2012
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Despite temperate weather, low unemployment and high per-capita GDP, a new Gallup poll marks Singapore as the least outwardly emotional country in the world, beating what some regard as the traditionally humorless nations of Eastern Europe.
Posted on Nov 22, 2012
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Professors at Columbia University pressed lawmakers to take advantage of widespread public interest in global warming after the destruction of Hurricane Sandy before a lifeless economy and the “fiscal cliff” dominate the American political discussion again.
Posted on Nov 22, 2012
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Numbers compiled by The Economist show the loss of life in the latest Gaza-Israel conflict to be grossly disproportionate.
Posted on Nov 22, 2012
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By Robert Reich — America’s largest employer is Walmart, whose average employee earns $8.81 an hour. A third of Walmart’s employees work less than 28 hours per week and don’t qualify for benefits.
Posted on Nov 21, 2012
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By Joe Conason — Hearing so much chatter about “change” in the Republican Party, the innocent voter might believe that the Republicans had learned important lessons from their stinging electoral defeat.
Posted on Nov 21, 2012
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — For nearly a decade I have had the privilege of teaching veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, though they have taught me more.
Posted on Nov 21, 2012
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By Tracy Bloom — A look at the day’s political happenings, including a Democratic congressman’s resignation and why Joe Scarborough is apologizing to Nate Silver.
Posted on Nov 21, 2012
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The city’s public officials have a simple message to residents and visitors: “Keep your clothes on!”
Posted on Nov 21, 2012
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“Embracing ‘screw-both-sides’ nihilism and doing nothing else [about the Israel-Gaza conflict] is so tempting because it appears to provide relief from the burden of paying any further attention to the horrific violence or bearing responsibility for any of it,” but it means ignoring the U.S. government’s total support for Israeli aggression, Glenn Greenwald writes.
Posted on Nov 21, 2012
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By Theodoric Meyer, ProPublica —
The recent inspector general’s report is the latest in a string of critical assessments DHS has received on its efforts to improve communication among federal, state and local agencies.
Posted on Nov 21, 2012
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“It has been so strange,” Herbert Richardson told incarceration activist Bryan Stevenson on the day of his execution. “All day long people have been saying to me, ‘What can I do to help you?’ … More people have said what can they do to help me in the last 14 hours of my life than they ever did” before, Chris Hedges writes in Smithsonian magazine.
Posted on Nov 21, 2012
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By Amy Goodman — “The Palestinian people want to be free of the occupation,” award-winning Israeli journalist Gideon Levy summed up this week. It is that simple.
Posted on Nov 21, 2012
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By William Pfaff — Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Syrian President Bashar Al Assad have an important thing in common: When a part of the populations under their control rise up against them, they do not negotiate or compromise; they bomb the rebel civilians.
Posted on Nov 21, 2012
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About the worker walkout and protest planned across the country this Friday, Wal-Mart said: “These so-called protests involve a handful of associates and a handful of stores. In fact, most of the protesters ... are union organizers and union members who work somewhere else.” Says William Fletcher of OUR Walmart: “It’s not true.”
Posted on Nov 21, 2012
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