RT | Some 92 percent of married women in Egypt underwent female genital
mutilation, the country’s health minister said, citing a recent study.
He added that the majority of girls face this ordeal when they are only
nine to 12 years old.
The results of the Egypt
Demographic and Health Survey (EDHS) were announced by Health
Minister Adel Adawy at a Sunday conference dedicated to the
study, Egyptian media reported. The poll was carried out last
year and involved women aged 15 to 49.
According to the minister, only 31 percent of the operations are
carried out by doctors, with most being performed by traditional
midwives and “health barbers.”
The rate of female circumcision in rural places is extremely high
– almost 95 percent while in urban areas it reaches 39.2 percent,
the minister said.
The study claimed that more than half of married women in the
country are in favor of genital mutilation. Only 30 percent of
women say it should be banned, the study said.
Egypt’s top Islamic authority has condemned the practice as
“un-Islamic” and “barbaric.” Female
circumcision was banned in 2008. The offenders may be sentenced
to prison (from three months to two years) or fined between 1,000
and 5,000 Egyptian pounds.
In January, an Egyptian doctor, Raslan Fadl, was sentenced to two
years in jail for performing a female genital mutilation
procedure which killed a young girl. Thirteen-year-old Sohair
al-Bata’a died in June 2013 following the surgery.
Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), a traditional practice to
partially or completely remove the outer sexual organs, is mainly
practiced in Africa and in a few countries in the Middle East
(Yemen, Kurdish communities, Saudi Arabia) and Asia.
Up to 140 million women and girls worldwide have been subjected
to FGM, the World Health Organization (WHO) says.
The Stranger | For most of their lives, Eric Rachner and Phil Mocek had no strong feelings about police. Mocek, who grew up in Kansas, said he regarded police officers as honorable civil servants, like firefighters. Both chose careers as programmers: Rachner, 39, is an independent cyber-security expert, while Mocek, 40, works on administrative software used by dentists.
But through their shrewd use of Washington's Public Records Act, the two Seattle residents are now the closest thing the city has to a civilian police-oversight board. In the last year and a half, they have acquired hundreds of reports, videos, and 911 calls related to the Seattle Police Department's internal investigations of officer misconduct between 2010 and 2013. And though they have only combed through a small portion of the data, they say they have found several instances of officers appearing to lie, use racist language, and use excessive force—with no consequences. In fact, they believe that the Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) has systematically "run interference" for cops. In the aforementioned cases of alleged officer misconduct, all of the involved officers were exonerated and still remain on the force.
"We're trying to do OPA's job for them because OPA was so explicitly not interested in doing their own job," said Rachner.
Among some of Rachner and Mocek's findings: a total of 1,028 SPD employees (including civilian employees) were investigated between 2010 and 2013. (The current number of total SPD staff is 1,820.) Of the 11 most-investigated employees—one was investigated 18 times during the three-year period—every single one of them is still on the force, according to SPD.
In 569 allegations of excessive or inappropriate use of force (arising from 363 incidents), only seven were sustained—meaning 99 percent of cases were dismissed. Exoneration rates were only slightly smaller when looking at all the cases between 2010 and 2013—of the total 4,407 allegations, 284 were sustained.
globalresearch | "Once again a country “liberated” by the West is sinking deeper and deeper into chaos.” Global Research.
This could be anyone of the
countries in conflict, where Washington and its Western and Middle
Eastern stooges sow war – eternal chaos, misery, death – and submission.
This is precisely the point: The
Washington / NATO strategy is not to ‘win’ a war or conflict, but to
create ongoing – endless chaos. That’s the way (i) to control people,
nations and their resources; (ii) to assures the west a continuous need
for military – troops and equipment – remember more than 50% of the US
GDP depends on the military industrial complex, related industries and
services; and (iii) finally, a country in disarray or chaos, is broke
and needs money – money with hardship conditions, ‘austerity’ money from
the notorious IMF, World Bank and other associated nefarious
‘development institutions’ and money lenders; money that equals
enslavement, especially with corrupt leaders that do not care for their
people.
That’s the name of the game – in Yemen,
in Ukraine, in Syria, in Iraq, in Sudan, in Central Africa, in Libya….
you name it. Who fights against whom is unimportant. ISIS
/ ISIL / IS / DAISH / DAESH / Al-Qaeda and whatever other names for the
mercenary killer organizations you want to add to the list – are just
tags to confuse. You might as well add Blackwater, Xe, Academi and all
its other successive names chosen to escape easy recognition. They are
prostitutes for the Zionist-Anglo-Saxon Empire, prostitutes of the
lowest level. Then come elite prostitutes, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar,
Bahrain and other Gulf States, plus the UK and France, of course.
President Hollande has just signed a multi-billion euro contract with Qatar for the sale of 24 Rafale fighter jets. He is now heading to Riyadh for talks with the Saudi King Salman, and to sell more Rafale planes
– it’s good business and helps killing off the fabricated enemies; and
also to attend a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit on 5 May. Topics
of discussions at the meeting are the ‘crises’ of the region including
in Yemen, planted by the west on behalf of Washington (and its Zionist
masters) and blamed on the ‘rebels’ who are seeking merely a more just
government.
The west has invented a vocabulary so
sick, it’s like a virus ingrained in our brains – or what’s left of it –
that we don’t even know anymore what the words really mean. We repeat
them and believe them. After all, the MSM drills them into our
intestines day-in and day-out. People who fight for their freedom, for
survival against oppressive regimes, are ‘terrorists’, ‘rebels’. – The
refugees from Africa, from the Washington inflicted conflict-stricken
countries, the refugees of whom more than 4,000 have already perished
this year trying to cross the Mediterranean for a ‘better life’ – they
have been conveniently renamed ‘immigrants’. Often the term ‘illegal’ is
added. Thus, the west’s conscience is whitewashed from guilt.
Immigrants are beggars. Illegal immigrants belong jailed. They have
nothing to do with unrest and chaos planted by the west in the
‘immigrants’ home countries. – Shame on you, Brussels!
commondreams | "It's time to talk about what's next. It is time for Americans to think boldly about ...
what it will take to move our country to a very different place, one
where outcomes that are truly sustainable, equitable, and democratic are
commonplace."
Those are the words of academic and author Gar Alperovitz, founder of the Democracy Collaborative, who—alongside veteran environmentalist Gus Speth—this week launched a new initiative called the "Next System Project"
which seeks to address the interrelated threats of financial
inequality, planetary climate disruption, and money-saturated
democracies by advocating for deep, heretofore radical transformations
of the current systems that govern the world's economies, energy
systems, and political institutions.
As part of the launch, the Next System Project produced this video
which features prominent progressive figures such as actor and activist
Danny Glover, economist Juliet Schor, 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben,
labor rights activist Sarita Gupta, and others:
According to the project's website, the effort is a response to a
tangible and widespread "hunger for a new way forward" capable of
addressing various social problems by injecting "the central idea of
system change" into the public discourse. The goal of the
project—described as an ambitious multi-year initiative—would be to
formulate, refine, and publicize "comprehensive alternative
political-economic system models" that would, in practice, prove that
achieving "superior social, economic and ecological outcomes" is not
just desirable, but possible.
"By defining issues systemically," the project organizers explain,
"we believe we can begin to move the political conversation beyond
current limits with the aim of catalyzing a substantive debate about the
need for a radically different system and how we might go about its
construction. Despite the scale of the difficulties, a cautious and
paradoxical optimism is warranted. There are real alternatives. Arising
from the unforgiving logic of dead ends, the steadily building array of
promising new proposals and alternative institutions and experiments,
together with an explosion of ideas and new activism, offer a powerful
basis for hope."
The mission statement of the project—articulated in a short document titled It's Time to Face the Depth of the Systemic Crisis We Confront
(pdf)—has been endorsed by an impressive list of more than 350
contemporary journalists, activists, academics, and thought leaders from
various disciplines who all agree the current political and economic
system is serving the interests of "corporate profits, the growth of
GDP, and the projection of national power" while ignoring the needs and
wellbeing of people, communities, ecosystems and the planet as a whole.
WaPo | Using synthetic biology techniques, researchers have created everything from new flavors and fragrances to new types of biofuels and materials.
While the innovation potential of combining biology and engineering is
unquestionable, now comes the hard part of proving that it is possible
to design and build engineered biological systems on a cost-effective
industrial scale, thereby creating true “bio-factories.” For that scenario to become a reality, here are three developments in the synthetic biology space to keep an eye on in 2015:
1. New efforts to catalogue synthetic biology innovations
On April 29, the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. launched a new initiative of its Synthetic Biology Project (which dates back to 2008): a first-of-its-kind inventory to track the dizzying array of new synthetic biology products
that are emerging in fields such as agriculture, chemicals and
materials. The task is so large that the Wilson Center is crowdsourcing
the project, letting registered users track the functions and properties
of these products.
As a result of this synthetic biology inventory,
a user can choose to drill down on synthetic biology innovations within
a specific industry. Say, for example, you’re interested in how
synthetic biology innovations from the nation’s innovators are showing
up in food products that you purchase at the supermarket. In the
category field, you’d select “foods,” in the country field, you’d select
“U.S.” and in the “market status” field, you’d select “on the market
(or close to market).” As a result, you’d find entries such as Zemea USP,
a product from DuPont and Tate & Lyle Bio Products, which works via
microorganism-facilitated fermentation to create new flavor profiles
for food.
Having access to this type of information could be a
real boon for attempts to govern and regulate these products. In order
to come up with a coherent regulatory scheme, after all, policymakers
need to know what’s out there, who’s using it, and what types of
functions and properties these products have. And the average citizen,
too, is probably more than just a little interested in what types of
engineered organisms are out there.
“As
the U.S. government, the United Nations and other bodies start to
grapple with the governance and regulation of synthetic biology, it is
imperative to track the market and understand the sectors primed for
growth,” says Todd Kuiken,
a senior program associate with the Synthetic Biology Project. “As more
products and platforms move onto the market, there will be increased
demand for risk research to underpin regulatory decisions.”
2. New initiatives to embrace industry-wide standards
NPR | Here's something that might sound strange: There are companies now that print and sell DNA.
This trend — which uses the term "print" in the sense of making a bunch of copies speedily — is making particular stretches of DNA
much cheaper and easier to obtain than ever before. That excites many
scientists who are keen to use these tailored strings of genetic
instructions to do all sorts of things, ranging from finding new medical
treatments to genetically engineering better crops.
"So much good can be done," says Austen Heinz, CEO of Cambrian Genomics in San Francisco, one of the companies selling these stretches of DNA.
But
some of the ways Heinz and others talk about the possible uses of the
technology also worries some people who are keeping tabs on the trend.
"I have significant concerns," says Marcy Darnovsky, who directs the Center for Genetics and Society, a genetics watchdog group.
A
number of companies have been taking advantage of several recent
advances in technology to produce DNA quickly and cheaply. Heinz says
his company has made the process even cheaper.
"Everyone else
that makes DNA, makes DNA incorrectly and then tries to fix it," Heinz
says. "We don't fix it. We just see what's good, what's bad and then we
use the correct pieces."
NYTimes | Many
of these experiments on in-group bias have been conducted around the
world, and almost every ethnic group shows a bias favoring its own. One
exception: African-Americans.
Researchers
find that in contrast to other groups, African-Americans do not have an
unconscious bias toward their own. From young children to adults, they
are essentially neutral and favor neither whites nor blacks.
Banaji
and other scholars suggest that this is because even young
African-American children somehow absorb the social construct that white
skin is prestigious and that black skin isn’t. In one respect, that is
unspeakably sad; in another, it’s a model of unconscious race
neutrality. Yet even if we humans have evolved to have a penchant for
racial preferences from a very young age, this is not destiny. We can
resist the legacy that evolution has bequeathed us.
“We
wouldn’t have survived if our ancestors hadn’t developed bodies that
store sugar and fat,” Banaji says. “What made them survive is what kills
us.” Yet we fight the battle of the bulge and sometimes win — and,
likewise, we can resist a predisposition for bias against other groups.
One strategy that works is seeing images of heroic African-Americans; afterward, whites and Asians show less bias,
a study found. Likewise, hearing a story in which a black person
rescues someone from a white assailant reduces anti-black bias in
subsequent testing. It’s not clear how long this effect lasts.
Deep
friendships, especially romantic relationships with someone of another
race, also seem to mute bias — and that, too, has implications for
bringing young people together to forge powerful friendships.
“If
you actually have friendships across race lines, you probably have
fewer biases,” Banaji says. “These are learned, so they can be
unlearned.”
HuffPo | The urban poor in the United States are experiencing accelerated
aging at the cellular level, and chronic stress linked both to income
level and racial-ethnic identity is driving this physiological
deterioration.
These are among the findings published
this week by a group of prominent biologists and social researchers,
including a Nobel laureate. Dr. Arline Geronimus, a visiting scholar at
the Stanford Center for Advanced Study and the lead author of the study,
described it as the most rigorous research of its kind examining how
"structurally rooted social processes work through biological mechanisms
to impact health."
What They Found
Researchers
analyzed telomeres of poor and lower middle-class black, white, and
Mexican residents of Detroit. Telomeres are tiny caps at the ends of DNA
strands, akin to the plastic caps at the end of shoelaces, that protect
cells from aging prematurely. Telomeres naturally shorten as people
age. But various types of intense chronic stress are believed to cause
telomeres to shorten, and short telomeres are associated with an array
of serious ailments including cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.
Evidence
increasingly points to telomere length being highly predictive of
healthy life expectancy. Put simply, "the shorter your telomeres, the greater your chance of dying."
The
new study found that low-income residents of Detroit, regardless of
race, have significantly shorter telomeres than the national average.
"There are effects of living in high-poverty, racially segregated
neighborhoods -- the life experiences people have, the physical
exposures, a whole range of things -- that are just not good for your
health," Geronimus said in an interview with The Huffington Post.
zerohedge | Several years ago (and then subsequently renewed almost every year) Barack Obama unviled a
manufacturing initative during one of his countless teleprompted
appearances before the nation, in which he promised to do everything in
his power to boost the US manufacturing sector. It should therefore come
as no surprise that in the month of April America's attempts to
rekindle a manufacturing renaissance have fizzled once again, with a
tiny 1,000 manufacturing jobs added, following zero manufacturing jobs
added the month before.
Putting this in perspective, for every manufacturing job added in
April there were 26 new waiters and bartenders confirming the
"robustness" of America's jobs recovery. The chart below shows the
progression of how America is slowly but surely transforming from a
manufacturing society to one of waiters and bartenders.
dailyimpact | Arthur Berman is perhaps the most credible debunkers of oil hype on the
planet because he is a highly qualified petroleum geologist and a
longtime, top-tier employee of the oil industry. In a presentation early
this year, he made an offhand remark in answer to a question about
Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson. “Oh,” Berman responded, “Rex knows his
company is in liquidation and he’s terrified his stockholders are going
to find out.” I don’t know if anyone else heard a thunderclap at that
moment. The discussion moved quickly onward, but I sat stunned (as I
listened to the tape). It seemed to me I had just heard spoken aloud the
essential truth of our industrial age: it’s in liquidation, and the
people in charge are terrified we are going to find out.
Liquidation, also known as a going-out-of-business sale, is a
stunning word to use about the oil industry, unless you think about it
for a minute. A company in liquidation stops
making or buying its product and keeps selling until its inventory is
gone, then turns out the lights and locks the doors. Oil companies don’t
make oil, they have to find it, and they aren’t finding any. What’s
more, take a look at their capex (capital expenditures for exploration
and development) numbers and you see that after a decade of increasingly
frenzied and expensive searching for new oil fields, with
ever-diminishing returns, the industry has virtually stopped looking. Which brings us once again to the shoals of peak oil.
Oil hypists have been declaring the “theory” of peak oil to be dead
since the phrase was first used. Never more enthusiastically than when
the shale oil “revolution,” a.k.a. the fracking boom, took hold in
America five years ago. The assault on logic and uncommon sense was
massive, well funded and for a time successful: for a while, the term
“peak oil” became synonymous with “loser.” Not any more. Peak oil is
back, and Rex Tillerson is, if anything, more terrified than he was at
the beginning of the year.
TomDispatch | The stock market continued its meteoric rise in anticipation of a
banker-friendly conclusion to the legislation that would deregulate
their industry. Rising consumer confidence reflected the nation’s
fondness for the markets and lack of empathy with the rest of the
world’s economic plight. On March 29, 1999, the Dow Jones Industrial
Average closed above 10,000 for the first time. Six weeks later, on May
6th, the Financial Services Modernization Act passed the Senate. It
legalized, after the fact, the merger that created the nation’s biggest
bank. Citigroup, the marriage of Citibank and Travelers, had been
finalized the previous October.
It was not until that point that one of Glass-Steagall’s main
assassins decided to leave Washington. Six days after the bill passed
the Senate, on May 12, 1999, Robert Rubin abruptly announced his
resignation. As Clinton wrote, “I believed he had been the best and most
important treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton... He had played a
decisive role in our efforts to restore economic growth and spread its
benefits to more Americans.”
Clinton named Larry Summers to succeed Rubin. Two weeks later, BusinessWeek reported
signs of trouble in merger paradise -- in the form of a growing rift
between John Reed, the former Chairman of Citibank, and Sandy Weill at
the new Citigroup. As Reed said, “Co-CEOs are hard.” Perhaps to patch
their rift, or simply to take advantage of a political opportunity, the
two men enlisted a third person to join their relationship -- none other
than Robert Rubin.
Rubin’s resignation from Treasury became effective on July 2nd. At
that time, he announced, “This almost six and a half years has been
all-consuming, and I think it is time for me to go home to New York and
to do whatever I’m going to do next.” Rubin became chairman of
Citigroup’s executive committee and a member of the newly created
“office of the chairman.” His initial annual compensation package was
worth around $40 million. It was more than worth the “hit” he took when
he left Goldman for the Treasury post.
Three days after the conference committee endorsed the
Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill, Rubin assumed his Citigroup position, joining
the institution destined to dominate the financial industry. That very
same day, Reed and Weill issued a joint statement praising Washington
for “liberating our financial companies from an antiquated regulatory
structure,” stating that “this legislation will unleash the creativity
of our industry and ensure our global competitiveness.”
On November 4th, the Senate approved the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act by a
vote of 90 to 8. (The House voted 362–57 in favor.) Critics famously
referred to it as the Citigroup Authorization Act.
Mirth abounded in Clinton’s White House. “Today Congress voted to
update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great
Depression and replace them with a system for the twenty-first century,”
Summers said. “This historic legislation will better enable American
companies to compete in the new economy.”
But the happiness was misguided. Deregulating the banking industry
might have helped the titans of Wall Street but not people on Main
Street. The Clinton era epitomized the vast difference between
appearance and reality, spin and actuality. As the decade drew to a
close, Clinton basked in the glow of a lofty stock market, a budget
surplus, and the passage of this key banking “modernization.” It would
be revealed in the 2000s that many corporate profits of the 1990s were
based on inflated evaluations, manipulation, and fraud. When Clinton
left office, the gap between rich and poor was greater than it had been
in 1992, and yet the Democrats heralded him as some sort of prosperity
hero.
When he resigned in 1997, Robert Reich, Clinton’s labor secretary,
said, “America is prospering, but the prosperity is not being widely
shared, certainly not as widely shared as it once was... We have made
progress in growing the economy. But growing together again must be our
central goal in the future.” Instead, the growth of wealth inequality
in the United States accelerated, as the men yielding the most financial
power wielded it with increasingly less culpability or restriction. By
2015, that wealth or prosperity gap would stand near historic highs.
sputniknews | Torture is being practiced in the United States’ prison system,
formerly incarcerated Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) whistleblower
John Kiriakou told a public meeting in Washington, DC.
“I want to talk about the kind of torture that
still goes on in our own prisons today,” Kiriakou said on Wednesday. “I
want to talk about why the UN [United Nations] Special Rapporteur
on Human Rights is not allowed into our prisons,” he added.
Kiriakou was recently released from house arrest after serving more
than 23 months in a maximum security US federal prison in Loretto,
Pennsylvania for exposing the CIA’s post-September 11 torture program.
The United States does not allow UN inspectors into its prisons “because
we have something to hide,” Kiriakou said. “Their human rights are
being violated and we are covering it up.”
While serving his sentence, Kiriakou witnessed prisoners being
beaten, having medication withheld, living in dangerously overcrowded
conditions as well as being kept in solitary confinement for prolonged
periods.
“I have come to believe that solitary is a form of torture,” he commented.
After leaving prison, Kiriakou announced he will focus on prison and
criminal justice reform at the social justice organization, the
Institute for Policy Studies.
Kiriakou stressed that the lack of effective oversight by the US
Congress means the un-redacted US Senate Intelligence committee torture
report, documenting the CIA's enhanced interrogation program, will
likely not come to light.
“There is no oversight on Capitol Hill,”
Kiriakou said on Wednesday commenting on the possibility of the full
torture report being released by Congress. “We have these oversight
committees… they act as nothing more than cheerleaders for the agencies
they are supposed to have jurisdiction over.”
thenation | The public exposure in mid-2004 of a government-sanctioned and highly
bureaucratized program of torture and cruel treatment caused a
political crisis that threatened to derail the Bush administration’s
interrogation and detention policies. In the wake of that crisis, some
American Psychological Association (APA) senior staff members and
leaders colluded, secretly, with officials from the White House, Defense
Department and CIA to enable psychologists’ continuing participation in
interrogations at CIA black sites, Guantánamo, and other overseas
facilities. One result of this collusion was a revision in 2005 of the
APA’s code of ethics for interrogations in order to provide cover for
psychologists working in these facilities.
The participation of psychologists was essential for the CIA’s
torture program to continue during the Bush years. The legal authority
for CIA interrogations was based on then-classified Office of Legal
Counsel memos. The first set of memos, authored by John Yoo, signed by
OLC head Jay Bybee and dated August 1, 2002, were withdrawn in late 2003
by Jack Goldsmith (who replaced Bybee when he became a federal judge).
In June 2004, one of the Yoo/Bybee “torture memos” was leaked to the
press, and public outcry about the legal reasoning—especially among
lawyers—created pressure on the Bush administration to release some
additional legal memos and policy directives relevant to prisoner
policies. In December 2004, acting OLC head Daniel Levin revised the
narrow definition of torture in the Yoo/Bybee memos but reaffirmed their
legal opinions. In the spring of 2005, the CIA requested new legal
opinions to validate the techniques in use, and OLC head Stephen
Bradbury authored three new memos in May. All of these OLC opinions were
a “golden shield” against future prosecutions of officials responsible
for the CIA program. According to Bradbury’s 2005 memos, the involvement
of health professionals in monitoring and assessing the effects of
“enhanced” techniques was necessary in order for them to be considered
legal.
Why was the APA’s secret collusion so essential for continuance of
the program? A key reason was because other physicians and psychiatrists
were increasingly reluctant to participate in national security
interrogations. In June 2005, doctors in the CIA’s Office of Medical
Services refused a new role required by the Bradbury memos to engage in
monitoring and research to determine whether the treatment and
conditions to which a detainee was subjected were cruel, inhumane, and
degrading. In 2006 the American Psychiatric Association and the American
Medical Association passed directives barring their members from
participating in such interrogations on professional ethical grounds.
The APA, in collaboration with the Bush administration, was willing to
allow psychologists to fill the role balked at by other health
professionals.
Details of this collusion—which APA officials have concealed and denied for a decade—are the subject of a new report, All the President’s Psychologists,
authored by Drs. Stephen Soldz and Steven Reisner, and Nathaniel
Raymond. The information comes from 638 e-mails from the accounts of a
RAND Corporation researcher and CIA contractor, Scott Gerwehr, who died
in 2008. James Risen, a New York Times journalist and author, most recently, of Pay Any Price, obtained the e-mails through Freedom of Information Act litigation and shared them with the report’s authors.
HuffPo | A government psychologist who helped craft policies central to the
CIA’s torture program is now advising an FBI-led interrogation project,
according to a series of emails revealed in a new independent report.
The
High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group is the Obama administration’s
response to the now-defunct CIA effort. Its members are dispatched to
question terror suspects. Dr. Susan Brandon leads the HIG’s research
committee, which studies and recommends the most effective methods of
noncoercive interrogation.
But as a Bush White House official,
the new report says, Brandon helped that administration base the
legality of the CIA’s interrogation techniques -- now widely denounced
as torture -- on the assessments of psychologists present during the
interrogations.
“Susan Brandon ... played a central role in the development of the
2005 [Psychological Ethics and National Security] policy,” states the
report, which examined the complicity of psychologists in the CIA’s
torture program. The language that Brandon helped write, the report
says, has served to protect former torturers and their superiors from
prosecution.
The report, titled "All The President’s Psychologists,"
was released last week on the heels of a separate inquiry examining the
potential complicity of the American Psychological Association (APA) in
the torture program. The latest investigation came from a group of
university-affiliated psychologists, other medical professionals and
human rights investigators.
Emails from the mid-2000s, cited in
the report, tie Brandon to CIA contract psychologists Bruce Jessen and
James Mitchell, masterminds of the torture program. She had personal
contact with them at a conference she arranged in 2003 and, according to
emails, appears to have been in regular contact with their CIA
supervisor. The extent of Brandon’s knowledge about Mitchell and
Jessen’s activities at the time is unknown, though she is included on an
email that discusses them as “doing special things to special people in
special places.”
"What we see is associations. And the
associations with the apparent supervisor of Mitchell and Jessen at each
step of the process over a period of three years,” said Nathaniel
Raymond, one of the report's co-authors and a program director with the
Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. “The issue here is not about what she
thinks about torture; the issue is about what she did in the past to
knowingly or unknowingly create a legal heat shield for the president
using the ethics of the APA. That’s the issue. This is not a question of
torture. It’s a question of alleged corruption."
theatlantic | Hillary Clinton has already staked
out multiple stances that contrast starkly with Bill Clinton's policies.
This week, in Las Vegas, she laid out a set of immigration policies
including "full and equal citizenship" for undocumented immigrants,
protecting the parents of young "Dreamer" undocumented immigrants from
deportation, and softening deportation policies. Bill Clinton, on the other hand,
signed several restrictive immigration measures during his tenure,
speeding deportations, increasing penalties, and making it harder for
the undocumented to gain legal status. The measures were passed by the
Republican Congress at the time.
Hillary Clinton recently expressed hope that the Supreme Court would make same-sex marriage
a constitutional right; her announcement video even featured a gay
couple talking about their upcoming wedding. Bill Clinton, in 1996,
signed the Defense of Marriage Act to deny federal marriage protections
to same sex couples—a law that the Supreme Court ruled largely
unconstitutional in 2013.
As the campaign continues, progressives can be expected to push
Hillary Clinton to take more stances that contravene Bill Clinton's
record. Trade and financial regulation are two notable areas of liberal
angst: Many critics blame Bill Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagall
Act for the 2008 financial crisis, and the North American Free Trade
Agreement, which he championed, is frequently cited in the current
debate over trade authority as an example of a bad free-trade deal.
Welfare reform is another Bill Clinton compromise that many modern-day
progressives reject. The Hillary Clinton of 2016 has yet to take a
position on these issues, though she issued a statement
expressing concern about the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade
deal. Obama strongly supports the deal, and Hillary Clinton previously
advocated it as secretary of state.
NYTimes | There are many ways for journalists to gain access to an inaccessible
presidential candidate. Hang on the rope line and shout. Fire off
questions via e-mail to media reps. Stake out. Ambush!
Now comes what we’ll call the “air question.” In a post this afternoon,
New York Times reporter Amy Chozick notes that Democratic presidential
hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton has answered seven questions since
launching her campaign on April 12. Or roughly three-tenths of a
question per day.
Given that rate, Chozick and the New York Times
have decided to disclose the questions they would have posed to Clinton
if only they’d had the opportunity. Coming off of Clinton’s remarks
Tuesday about immigration reform, the Times launches the first in a
series:
“President Obama said his
executive action on immigration went as far as the law will allow. You
say you would go beyond what he did. How could you stretch the law
further than the president of your own party and his Justice Department
says it can go?”
The Erik Wemple Blog pledges
another post on this series if the Times air-questions Clinton on her
sparse Q-and-A availability, which would be a glorious meta-media
moment.
charleshughsmith | Despite
the PR about how corporate profits benefit widows and orphans, this
vast wealth is concentrated in the top 1% and the top 5%.
I am honored to share a remarkable data base of Corporate Fines and Settlements from the early 1990s to the present compiled by Jon Morse. Here
is Jon's description of his project to assemble a comprehensive list of
all corporate fines and settlements that can be verified by media
reports:
"This spreadsheet is
all the corporate fines/settlements I’ve been able to find sourced
articles about, mostly in the period from the 1990’s up to today (with a
few 80’s and 70’s). This is by far the most comprehensive list of such
things online. At least that I could find, because the lack of any
decent list is what made me start compiling this list in the first
place."What struck me was the sheer number of corporate violations of laws and regulations--thousands
upon thousands, the vast majority of which occurred since corporate
profits began their incredible ascent in the early 2000s--and the list
of those paying hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and
settlements, which reads like a who's who of Corporate America and Top 100 Global Corporations.
I encourage you to open one of the three alphabetical tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet on Google Docs and scroll down to find your favorite super-profitable corporation.
Many have a long list of
fines and settlements, and many of the fines are in excess of $100
million. Many are for blatant cartel price-fixing, not disclosing the
dangers of the company's heavily promoted medications, destroying
documents to thwart an investigation of wrong-doing, etc.
In other words, these were not wrist-slaps for minor oversights of complex regulations-- these are blatant violations of core laws of the land.
mises | Mr. Max Ehrendfreund, writing in the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, believes that he has discovered something new: that the world is producing too much
and doesn’t know what to do with it. His solution, of course, is to
confiscate the overproduced products, such as oil and cotton, from its
rightful owners and give it to the people who need it. This phony
problem and its statist solution goes back at least as far at the 1930’s
socialist calls for “production for use” vs. the hated capitalist concept of “production for profit“.
Mr. Ehrenfreund commiserates that a “surplus…challenges some basic
principles of conventional economics…”. Ah, now we see why Mr.
Ehrenfreund has a problem; he understands only “conventional economics”.
Austrians have no such problem understanding why many commodities are
currently in surplus. Our understanding of Austrian business cycle
theory tells us that years of interest rate suppression by monetary
authorities worldwide has disrupted the time structure of production;
i.e., that artificially low interest rates have led entrepreneurs and
their business partners to believe that sufficient resources exist for
the profitable completion of longer term projects, such as increasing
investment in oil and cotton production. Austrians do not contend that
there cannot be a surplus of some goods. Of course, there can! But we
know that a surplus of some goods means that there is a scarcity of
others. Resources were “malinvested” in some projects instead of those
more urgently desired by the public.
Here’s a rather humorous example. A good friend was teaching in West
Germany during the age of Tito, when he and his wife decided to
vacation along Yugoslavia’s beautiful Adriatic coast. While there they
tried in vain to find swimming accessories, like fins and masks, but
shop after shop sold only one product. That one product? Panama hats!
True story. So here is a good example of zero demand for Panama hats and
a scarcity of swimming accessories in one of the most beautiful seaside
vacation spots in the world. But these surpluses and scarcities are not
always so obviously related. A surplus of oil and cotton may mean that
there is a scarcity of millions of other goods that could otherwise have
been produced.
The socialist dogma, to which Mr. Ehrenfeund seems to be enamored,
blinds him to the concept that a successful economy does not need
centralized control. In fact a successful economy needs no guidance at
all, except the rational decisions of the owners of the means of
production to put their resources to the most desired use. How do they
know what that “most desired use” is? The price system tells them! A
dynamic economy is controlled by millions upon millions of people making
billions upon billions of decisions that are in constant flux.
Manipulating the price of any factor of production, such as cotton
prices, will cause disruptions. But our governments have done much worse
than manipulate the price of a few major factors o f production; they
have manipulated the price of money itself, the medium of exchange that
is the lubricating and knowledge transmission device for ALL economic
decisions.
So, Mr. Ehrendreund, brush up on your Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, Habeler, and Garrison.
Your confusion will disappear to be replaced, no doubt, by exasperation
that you ever could have harbored such silly notions as those you
espouse in your article.
Guardian | Behold the shopping mall – the built epitome, according to its
critics, of the mindless, car-bound consumerism of white-bread suburban
America. Yet Southdale Center, the first fully enclosed,
climate-controlled collection of shops from which all the 1,100 or so
similarly designed malls now standing across the United States descend, came from the mind of an anti-car, pro-pedestrian European Jewish socialist.
Victor Gruen, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, arrived in
America in 1938 with high architectural aims. He soon launched a career
creating New York City storefronts for urban businesses, like Ciro’s on
Fifth Avenue and Steckler’s on Broadway, 14 years into which he received
a commission to design something else entirely: a shopping centre 10
miles outside Minneapolis.
This job offered Gruen a blank canvas on which to realise his
long-imagined utopian vision of an indoor city centre that would import
the urbanity of his native Vienna into his fast-growing adopted
homeland. Southdale itself went up as he had imagined it – but nothing
else went according to plan. By the 1970s, Gruen had returned to Austria
to live out his days having all-too-clearly realised what a suburban
monster he’d created.
Though few built environments now seem as prosaic as that of the
shopping mall, it looked downright radical when Gruen first came up with
it. He first publicly submitted such a design in 1943, to Architectural
Forum magazine’s competition “Architecture 194X”, which called upon
modern architects to imagine the city of the post-war future. Alas
Gruen’s entry, with its full enclosure and lack of a central square,
struck even those forward-thinking editors as a bit much, and they sent
him back to the drawing board.
The real postwar America proved far more accommodating to Gruen’s vision
than the imagined one. The 1952 commission that brought Southdale into
the world came from the Dayton family, a name synonymous with department
stores in 1950s Minneapolis. They wanted a shopping centre to
complement the new Dayton’s location that was planned for the suburb of
Edina, a growing town of 15,000 people located — in line with the
concerns of cold war America — just outside the blast radius of a
nuclear bomb dropped on the city.
Free To A Good Home
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I know what gooning is same as I know what felching is but I don't care to
remind myself all that often about it. The Internet just keeps exposing the
ni...
If Free Will Is False, Destiny Is True
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Free will is like God: perhaps dead, its absence having something to say
about morality (what Nietzsche meant by “Gott ist tot” was that the
Christian God ...
FREE BOOK: On Nonviolence
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“Michael Barker’s interrogation of nonviolent protest tactics and regime
change is both timely and important. Drawing on cases ranging from American
democr...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
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(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
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With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
them convicted and jailed is going to do too much better than your run of
the mill ...
