Alex Kane writes that mounting evidence is making it increasingly hard to deny that war crimes were committed by Israel in its most recent assault on Gaza. The United Nations Human Rights Commission has sent in a three member team to investigate human rights violations in the most recent conflict.
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Jimmy Carter had his faults as president, the main one being his decision to implement what they must have thought was a clever plan to destabilize Afghanistan so as to covertly draw the Soviet Union, its Cold War adversary, into that country and get bogged down so as to create for them their own Vietnam. That set in motion a train of horrific conflict under which the Afghan people still suffer. [IPDATE: See the interview that Zbigniew Bzerzinski, Carter’s National Security Advisor, gave in 1998.]
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There is an strong extremist Buddhist faction in Sri Lanka that believes that non-Buddhists are second class citizens and this group is powerful enough that it can influence the government, yet another example of the terrible consequences when religions can influence the use of state power.
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James Bamford is a writer specializing in security issues. After great effort he managed to arrange an interview with Edward Snowden in Moscow for Wired magazine. The writer spent three full days spread out over three weeks interviewing Snowden for a cover story as to what made him do what he did, a question that continues to fascinate observers despite Snowden having seemingly answered it many times. The article is accompanied by several photographs that were take just before Bamford arrived in Moscow and the story of that photo shoot is itself pretty interesting.
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Below is a video of 13 dogs jumping rope simultaneously. This is apparently a world record for the number of dogs to do this.
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I want to point you to a very interesting post by Greta Christina on a recent Gallup poll that finds that members of the LGBT community are less religious than others. A lot less. Almost half of them describe themselves as ‘not religious’.
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Three years ago, I wrote about the danger of the creeping paramilitarization of local police departments, with them acquiring military style clothing, weaponry, vehicles, and other hardware. The trouble in Ferguson, MO following the killing of an unarmed black man by police, shows just what can happen when you do that. It looks like the local police went full metal jacket on a civilian population as they protested the initial shooting, with snipers, armored vehicles, and all the other goodies that the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security has been showering on police departments with. These photos show snipers, police in riot gear, and the like.
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Michael and Laura McIntyre decided in 2004 to homeschool their nine children, using as a classroom some space in a motorcycle dealership that he co-owned. But his twin brother Tracy noticed that the children never seemed to be doing any actual work, instead singing and playing. He also overheard one of the children tell a cousin that they did not need to do any work because they were going to be raptured.
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Amanda Marcotte has some interesting speculations on the fear of death and lays the blame on human ego. She points out that many people cannot quite come to terms with the fact that after they die, they will cease to exist. More than that, they fear that their lives will not have even mattered and will not be remembered, and this can be a shattering blow to their egos.
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