Ed Brayton not only writes the widely read blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars but is also the person who manages the business end of the Freethought Blogs site and keeps the whole thing running smoothly.
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Yesterday the Pulitzer prizes for 2013, considered the apex of establishment US journalistic achievement, were announced. Of those the public service prize is the most coveted and the committee stunned the world by giving it to Edward Snowden, adding to the Polk award that he received earlier in the year.
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Al Madrigal of The Daily Show looked at how the Spanish language media promoted the Affordable Care Act to encourage people to sign up and how that was covered by Fox News.
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A friend recently sent me this very short video clip. It briefly tells the love story of a middle-aged couple in rural Sri Lanka who have been married for 34 years and live and work on their own small tea plantation.
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NPR had a wonderful story about someone whom I had never heard of. It was about a US District Judge named J. Waties Waring in South Carolina who, in a landmark school segregation case Briggs v. Elliott, declared that segregation “was an evil that must be eradicated”.
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In an interesting and amusing turn of events, Pastafarianism has been allowed to apply to be an official religion in Poland.
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Last Wednesday a three judge panel of the US Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the appeal of the US District Judge’s’ ruling that struck down Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage. Although over a dozen federal district courts around the nation have struck down the ban or aspects of it since the US Supreme Court’s DOMA decision last summer, and not a single judge has upheld it, this is the first time that this issue has reached the level of an Appeals Court, so this is a significant case
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The Daily Show chronicles the continuing decline of Congress into a body that seems to be purely becoming a punching bag for comedians, such as producing over-the-top campaign ads
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Given all the revelations about the NSA and GCHQ spy agencies intercepting the communications of individuals all over the globe, the obvious question that arises is to what extent they were involved in the Heartbleed bug, the weakness in the OpenSSL protocol that enables third parties to extract 64K chunks of information at a time from targeted computers without the hosts being aware, a security problem so serious that it even caused the Canadian government to suspend electronic tax filing.
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