By Michael Deibert —It is time for the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti to either significantly refocus its mission or close its operation completely.
This week on Truthdig Radio: the dark side of international freight; the downside of DSK's dismissal; the power of journalism, and the fall of the Soviet Union.
The attorney general of the Syrian province Hama resigned in a video posted online by activists Thursday in protest of President Bashar al-Assad’s violent response to peaceful protesters.
This week on Truthdig Radio, in collaboration with KPFK, we hear about the dark side of international freight; the downside of DSK’s dismissal; the power of journalism, and the fall of the Soviet Union.
The 24/7 news cycle and the accompanying cacophony of voices competing for attention meant that little time remained to understand the extent of the damage Hurricane Irene caused in Vermont.
The recently published “Acts of War: Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays” collects seven works for the stage, all of them about war. Here are excerpts from two of those plays, “9 Circles” by Bill Cain and “American Tet” by Lydia Stryk. A review of the book will be published in this column Friday.
Coffee mugs, bumper stickers and posters displayed at political rallies nationwide bear the clumsy distortions of remarks made by thoughtful people throughout the ages. The question of their popularity and endurance has been the subject of a number of recent essays. (more)
After England’s summer of unrest, Billy Bragg, folk- and punk-rock icon of the British protesting classes, recalls the musicians who politicized him after London’s 1976 Notting Hill riots and summons a new generation of artists to raise their voices against social and political convention. (more)
Mike Rose notes that no one in power is asking fundamental questions about the purpose of education and whether much-hyped reforms might do more harm than good.
Thank you, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, for emerging from your secure, undisclosed locations to remind us how we got into this mess: It didn’t happen by accident.
After seven years in Haiti, it is time for the U.N. peacekeeping mission to either significantly refocus its mission or close its operation and leave the business of governing and reconstruction to the Haitians themselves.
Are we a nation of brothers who come to the aid of each other? Or are we just a crowd of folks out for ourselves? Why have a country if we don’t use it to help each other?
Call it the Party-of-Government Paradox: If the nation’s capital looks dysfunctional, it will come back to hurt President Obama and the Democrats, even if the Republicans are primarily responsible for the dysfunction.
It has been an intense Ramadan in this August of the Arab Spring. But now it is time to celebrate one of the most important Islamic traditions: The Festival of Breaking the Fast, or Eid al-Fitr.
“When one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it,” wrote Joseph Goebbels, Germany’s Reich minister of propaganda, in 1941. Former Vice President Dick Cheney seems to have taken the famous Nazi’s advice in his new book, “In My Time.”
It now seems a necessary qualification for the Republican nomination, at least at the present primaries stage, to be a born-again fundamentalist Protestant. Yet in the United States the majority of the electorate is not fundamentalist, evangelical or Protestant.
The United States conducted experiments on unsuspecting Guatemalans in the 1940s in order to test the effectiveness of penicillin on STDs. According to the BBC, “some 1,300 prisoners, psychiatric patients and sex workers were deliberately infected with syphilis, gonorrhea” and other diseases. (more)
Fifteen months ago Israeli forces raided a Gaza-bound flotilla carrying aid, killing nine civilians in the process. A U.N. report, which acknowledges that its sources are limited and its conclusions are not definitive, has found that Israel’s blockade in international waters was legal. (more)
Research over the years has shown that attractive people tend to reap economic rewards, from higher salaries and more promotions to lower interest rates on mortgages. (more)
Oil-rig operators in the Gulf of Mexico announced Thursday that they would evacuate workers, and a flash-flood watch was issued for New Orleans ahead of a slow-moving storm system that could develop into a cyclone or even a hurricane. (more)
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Wednesday in a speech to French ambassadors that he wanted all 27 countries of the European Union to speak with “one voice” in September on the issue of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations General Assembly. (more)
Solar-cell manufacturer Solyndra, one of the first green-tech companies to win a loan guarantee from the Obama administration in 2009, announced Wednesday that it will cease operations, lay off its 1,000-plus employees and file for bankruptcy. (more)
The World Health Organization reported that babies born in the U.S. are more likely to die in their first month of life than are babies born in 40 other countries, including South Korea, Cuba, Malaysia, Lithuania, Poland and Israel. (more)
Syrian Official Resigns in Protest of Assad’s ‘Savage’ Regime
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