Global

Since Tuesday and continuing for the coming three weeks, an amazing trial is happening in U.S. District Court at 401 Courthouse Square in Alexandria, Va. The trial is open to the public, and among the upcoming witnesses is Condoleezza Rice, but -- unlike the Chelsea Manning trial -- most of the seats at this somewhat similar event are empty.

The media is mostly MIA, and during lunch break the two tables at the cafe across the street are occupied, one by the defendant and his lawyers, the other by a small group of activists, including former CIA officer Ray McGovern, blogger Marcy Wheeler (follow her report of every detail at ExposeFacts.org), and Norman Solomon who has organized a petition at DropTheCharges.org -- the name of which speaks for itself.

“Je suis Charlie. Tout est pardonné.”

Muhammad in tears adorns the new cover of Charlie Hebdo: “I am Charlie. All is forgiven.” This is bigger than satire.

I take a deep breath, uncertain how to write about last week’s insane shooting spree in Paris. My daughter and her husband live there. “Things are normal,” she told me a few days afterward, “but there’s a presence — this thing that has happened. It’s in the air.”

A few days later I came upon this headline at the McClatchy Washington bureau website: “U.S. airstrike in Syria may have killed 50 civilians.”

The story reports: “The civilians were being held in a makeshift jail in the town of Al Bab, close to the Turkish border, when the aircraft struck on the evening of Dec. 28, the witnesses said. The building, called the Al Saraya, a government center, was leveled in the airstrike. It was days before civil defense workers could dig out the victims’ bodies.”

‘Tis Midwinter, and that means network television is either showing reruns or airing new miniseries to fill time until the regular shows return from their mid-season breaks. In the case of Agents of SHIELD, the television arm of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the angst of waiting to find out just what the heck is going on with Skye and Raina is lessened by a new spin-off prequel series all about one of the founding members of the organization, Agent Peggy Carter.

The MCU excels at giving characters the kinds of stories they need to be in, and so far Marvel’s Agent Carter is much more of a postwar spy story than a superhero one, a period piece set in the aftermath of World War II. Unlike Agents of SHIELD, this is a firmly pre-Avengers world, and the only superhero it has known is the now-MIA Captain America. There are no Asgardians or Inhumans here. But there is a Stark: Howard, Iron Man Tony Stark’s father, who is every bit as brilliant and badly behaved as his son. The “super” element here isn’t aliens or magic but good old super-science.

In the wake of the Ohio Republican legislature (with a few Democrats) passing Senate Bill 310 in June of 2014 – a bill that put Ohio’s renewable and energy efficiency programs on hold – American Electric Power and Duke Energy have followed up by petitioning the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) for ratepayer bailouts for their oldest and dirtiest coal plants. FirstEnergy, with its base in Northern Ohio, is petitioning for a bailout for its Davis-Besse atomic reactor on Lake Erie as well as its polluting coal plants. These bailouts, called power purchase agreements, would be a line item on electric bills that no costumer could avoid, even if they’re buying power from a different company than the one that is delivering power to the customer’s home.

AEP and Duke kicked the process off and both have separate cases before the PUCO seeking to secure riders for power purchase agreements for two almost 60-year-old coal plants – Kyger Creek in Ohio and Clifty Creek in Indiana. See the Sierra Club Coal Campaign’s fact sheet on Kyger Creek as an example of how dirty and inefficient these coal plants are.

I’m a private practice psychiatrist in southern Ohio for over 22 years. As a physician, it’s become intolerable to see the abuse of power our state pushes on its population because supposedly “mainstream medicine” has an opinion that marijuana is deadly. It’s a shame our legislature doesn’t listen to their constituents, nor to the specialists that they quote. Marijuana is not a dangerous compound. Even so, our state is keeping increasingly more people incarcerated and disabled due to possessing marijuana, which is simply despicable and dangerous.

Our legal system, reliant on busting far too many level blacks and Latinos for marijuana offenses, is unjustifiable. Not only can race alone raise economic barriers, an arrest translates into a criminal record that squelches economic opportunity and places required licenses and certifications off limits. Even with probation, it’s exquisitely difficult to escape the web of an un-recalcitrant legal system.

The Columbus Free Press welcomes hockey fans to the 2015 NHL All Star game at Nationwide Arena, here in Columbus. Now that you are in town, we need you to put down your bags, head to our local casino and start gambling. Oh – and we need you to lose … and lose big.

Our Beautiful (Now) Taxpayer Funded Arena

You will soon see Nationwide Arena in the newly-developed Arena District, which fifteen years ago was the blighted and deteriorating site of the former Ohio State Penitentiary. The state of Ohio sold the site to the City of Columbus in 1995, and the City of Columbus remediated environmental issues and added infrastructure before leasing the 22 acres to Nationwide Insurance to redevelop.

When asked who he thought was the most valuable player for the Ohio State football team’s drive to the national championship game, Evan Spencer carefully weighed his options.

“I don’t even know. There are so many people who have been so valuable to us,” the senior wide receiver said at a media day before the team’s trip to the inaugural national championship game Jan. 12 in Arlington, Texas. “It could be (quarterbacks) J.T. Barrett, Cardale Jones, (wide receiver) Devin Smith or (running back) Zeke (Elliott). Name whoever you want to.”

Asked the same question, coach Urban Meyer had one name jump quickly to his mind.

“(Spencer) is the MVP of our team,” Meyer said. “He's the leader of our team. I'll probably make an executive decision and make him a captain. He's really what, to me, football is all about.”

Spencer made a strong case for the honor in a 42-35 victory over top ranked Alabama in the Jan. 1 Allstate Sugar Bowl. Although he was limited to one reception for seven yards, Spencer:

* tossed a 13-yard touchdown pass to Michael Thomas;

Freedom Fighters Gun Strike in Europe Is Said to Have Killed 12 Militants

PARIS, France — At least 12 foreign militants were believed to have been killed in a freedom fighter gun strike in the North Paris tribal region on Wednesday morning, a Liberation security official said.

The Liberation official said guns fired 128 precision bullets into a compound in the Cafe Au Lait subdistrict at 6:40 a.m. The area is close to the headquarters of numerous French businesses.

“The guns targeted a base of a French commander known as Francoise, killing 12 French militants. Two militants are wounded,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the news media.

When the news arrived from the White House yesterday that Barack Obama would veto the proposed Keystone pipeline bill, I thought back to a poll that the National Journal conducted of its “energy insiders” in the fall of 2011, just when then issue was heating up. Nearly 92% of those insiders thought Obama’s administration would approve the pipeline, and almost 71% said it would happen by the end of that year.

Keystone’s not dead yet -- feckless Democrats in the Congress could make some kind of deal, and the president could still yield down the road to the endlessly corrupt State Department bureaucracy that continues to push the pipeline -- but the President's veto threat shows what happens when people organize.

By pledging to veto the Keystone XL bill, President Obama took an important step towards backing up his climate talk yesterday, and we should applaud that. He showed the kind of courage that will be needed to stop this pipeline and begin to turn the tide against the fossil fuel industry.

Oh, the moral force of a snub.

Several hundred cops turn their backs on New York’s mayor as he eulogizes one of their own, killed in the line of duty, and the media have another us-vs.-them story to report. Bill de Blasio’s in trouble, accused of playing politics with the lives of heroes. And, of course, the story goes no deeper than the dramatic accusation.

As the sign of a lone protester at the officer’s funeral proclaimed: “God bless the NYPD: Dump de Blasio.”

There’s nothing like a good, righteous condemnation to stop a national discussion. Criticizing police tactics means contributing to an anti-police atmosphere. End of debate.

Personally, I view the snub, by some New York police, as de Blasio’s red badge of courage more than his moral condemnation. He stood for something outside the zone of official righteousness. He met with protesters. He ended stop-and-frisk, the tactic of warrantless street searches that primarily targeted blacks and Hispanics. He told his biracial son to “take special care in any encounter he has with police officers,” in other words, refused to sugarcoat a pragmatic truth.