An always welcome development is the rise of alternative major English news sources to counterbalance those that report from the perspective of the US and Western European governments. Al Jazeera (funded by the Qatar government) is one such voice and now RT (which receives funding from the Russian government) is another rising force. [Read more…]
It seems like we are moving into an era where basic rights and freedoms are valued not as abstract principles but situationally, depending on the conditions under which the rights are threatened. Equal treatment under the law has always been an imperfectly applied ideal and in the past was violated with impunity but at least in the post-civil rights era, such selectivity was much more discreet. We are entering an era in which there is no longer even any pretense that the laws will be equally applied. [Read more…]
A couple of days ago, The Daily Show had a bit on the ‘war on women’ topic and in the process outraged Bill Donahue of The Catholic League, not that hard to do because he seems to be in a state of eternal apoplexy. In fact, going on TV and screaming that his finely tuned Catholic feelings are hurt seems to be his full-time occupation. [Read more…]
Most people seeking a peaceful solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict have clung to the hope of some form of a two-state solution, where each group has its own viable independent state. But Robert Wright writes in The Atlantic that it is rapidly disappearing as a realistic option. [Read more…]
The recently concluded summit of 31 Western Hemispheric nations ended without a final declaration because of protests over the exclusion of Cuba.
The issue of Cuba’s absence from any diplomatic forums in the hemisphere where the U.S. is present has galvanized leftist leaders in Latin America for decades. An eight-member leftist bloc founded by Cuba and Venezuelan firebrand leader Hugo Chávez has said it will skip any future summits if Cuba was not invited.
But this weekend even some of the region’s more conservative presidents, like Mexico’s Felipe Calderón and Colombia’s Santos, joined the chorus of public demands for the communist island to be included in new summits.
All the countries except the US and Canada protested the exclusion of Cuba from these gatherings and warned that future summits may not happen unless Cuba is included.
Bill Maher says that Castro phobia makes no sense.
US foreign policy continues to be increasingly isolated because of being held hostage by the aging Cuban population in Miami.
I am a little late to this story about how in the US extreme sensitivity to religious people’s beliefs can result in the most bizarre policies being implemented. For example, the New York City department of education has banned certain words in citywide tests because they may upset students. What words? ‘Dinosaur’ for one. [Read more…]
The deadline for filing taxes is April 17 and so I mailed in my tax returns over the weekend. Yes, I still send in paper returns via snail mail. It is not that I am a Luddite, not entirely anyway. In fact, I wrote my own spreadsheet for taxes many years ago that I update each year to accommodate any changes. All I have to do is input the data and it calculates my federal, state, and local taxes in exactly the same format as the tax forms. I then download the fillable pdf forms from the various government websites and copy the figures from my spreadsheet onto the forms. [Read more…]