Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux of The Intercept have a detailed analysis based on confidential documents that they have received that about 40% of the 680,000 people on the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database have no recognized terrorist group affiliation. The TSDB is the ‘watch list’ that the government uses and one can land up on it merely if some government agency somewhere decided that you are suspicious.
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The new film Boyhood has got rave reviews all around. I have not seen it as yet and so was interested by this article by Los Angeles Times and NPR film critic Kenneth Turan who was not overly impressed with it, thinking it merely OK and somewhat gimmicky.
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We already know that the CIA’s use of a fake anti-vaccination program in Pakistan to try and find Osama bin Laden has caused the entire polio vaccination campaign in that country to become the target of the Taliban who have used that appalling strategy to portray all vaccination campaigns as potential CIA plots and even kill heath workers in those programs..
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In the urban areas of Sri Lanka, schools tend to be mostly single-sex K-12 and among the boys’ schools there were intense sporting rivalries. During those games, boys would show their support using generic cheers that were common to many schools. These cheers originated long before my own time and likely had been around for (I suspect) at least a century. One of them was used when your team had suffered a setback and was meant to show that this was not a cause for concern. It consisted of the following verse set to music.
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The Daily Show‘s Jordan Klepper talks to a group of idealistic young college newspaper journalists who seem to have no idea of what the future world of digital news holds in store for them.
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The word ‘scientist’ is so common and seems so appropriate now that it seems hard to imagine that it is not only of relatively recent coinage but that its introduction was controversial for almost a century. I came across an interesting article that outlined the history of a disputed term that has now become a coveted title.
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The organizers have released a list of the speakers, topic, and times for this conference that is to be held over the Labor Day weekend (August 29-31) in Pittsburgh. You have to reserve your hotel room by August 8 to get the conference rate.
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The Salt Lake Tribune writes about a private educational outfit that fired one of its employees because he wrote a blog post about the use of ‘homophones’ (words that sound the same while having different meanings and even different spellings) because they were afraid of “creating the perception that the school promoted a gay agenda.”
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The bombing by Israel of yet a third UN school that was being used as a shelter by people seeking refuge from Israeli bombing elsewhere has enraged even more people who normally give Israel unquestioned support. The UN Secretary General has called it a “moral outrage”, a statement signed by the EU and European commission presidents on behalf of 28 members said that Gazans were suffering “intolerable violence”, and even British prime minister David Cameron, goaded by condemnations by the Labor and Liberal party leaders for not speaking out more strongly, has said, “I’m not an international lawyer… but international law is very, very clear that use of force always has to be proportionate and civilians should not be targeted.” The French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said “How many more deaths will it take to stop what must be called the carnage in Gaza? The tradition of friendship between Israel and France is an old one and Israel’s right to security is total, but this right does not justify the killing of children and the slaughter of civilians.” Some of these statements are accompanied by calls for Hamas to stop sending missiles into Israel but these are sounding increasingly like pro-forma balancing statements.
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Campbell Brown is a former TV personality who used to masquerade as a journalist who now has become part of a group that is seeking to bust teacher unions. Andy Kroll exposes the secretive anti-teacher groups backing her. (She also happens to be married to Dan Senor, one of the Bush administration’s team that lied to people about the Iraq war during the US occupation of that country, and together they form part of the incestuous government-media complex.)
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