Many people are unable to speak, either from birth or due to something that happened later in life. Thanks to modern technology, we now have voice synthesizers that enable them to translate their written words into sounds. Stephen Hawking is perhaps the person whom we are most familiar with who uses this.
[Read more…]
The death penalty is in trouble. It is not because of public opposition to this barbaric practice but due to technical reasons. It turns out that the drug company in the US that made one of the three drugs that go into the cocktail that makes up the lethal injections decided to stop producing it because of the negative image it gave of a drug company being in the death business.
[Read more…]
Given that courts everywhere are overturning bans on same-sex marriage I was wondering why it had not been challenged in Oho, which passed by referendum a constitutional amendment banning it in 2004 in the heyday of anti-gay fervor. But yesterday comes news that a family living in a nearby community to mine that is headed by a same-sex couple with an adopted child had challenged it because Ohio’s definition of marriage excludes them from obtaining cheaper health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
[Read more…]
About a year ago, I wrote about the awful case of Herbert and Catherine Schaible, members of a Pentecostal church that believes in faith healing, who were charged with the death of their 8-month old child whose life could have been saved if they had sought medical treatment.
[Read more…]
In the west and especially in the US, one of the least known elements of the story of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is the ugly story of how the Palestinians were uprooted from their land and homes leading up to and through the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The heroic story of how the Jews, ‘a people without a land’ came to occupy ‘a land without a people’, was always based on a false premise. Palestine, far from being a largely unoccupied wasteland, was a bustling place, home to many people whose ancestors had lived there for millennia.
[Read more…]
I have written before about how the visual special effects (VFX) industry in the US is in a sorry state. Even as so many major American films based their success on special effects and had spectacular box office returns, the industry that was so essential to their success was itself collapsing.
[Read more…]
Journalism professor Jay Rosen has a piece about how much of political journalism has gone astray by focusing their efforts not on educating the voters about what the important issues are but by appealing to those whom they refer to as ‘political junkies’, those who love the gossipy insider game of tactics used by the masters of the game.
[Read more…]
In the past, Hinduism used to take a refreshingly open attitude towards sex. One has only to see the carvings on old Hindu temples with people engaged in all manner of sexual acts to quickly recognize this. But that was then, this is now. Hindus have become just like people of other major religions in viewing sex as something sinful and to be discouraged except in highly restrictive settings.
[Read more…]
Thanks to the documents released by Edward Snowden, we know that the US government thinks that it has the right to spy on citizens all over the world. While it claims to abide by legal restrictions that prevent it spying on Americans (a claim that has been seen to be increasingly hollow), it openly asserts that it can spy on the people of other countries without restriction. The only regret it has expressed is for getting caught spying on the leaders of friendly countries.
[Read more…]