Global

Evan Knappenberger, veteran turned peace activist, put together the following data and map.

Needless to say, most of the dead in recent U.S. wars are on the non-U.S. side -- about 97% in fact. These are one-sided slaughters. But that doesn't mean there aren't deaths on the side of the aggressor. And beyond the deaths, far more injuries, and far more suffering PTSD and moral injury.

Needless to say, as well, both Republican and Democratic party leaders in Washington have supported these wars and continue to do so.

Texas Baptists confirm Obama’s comments about Christian crimes

The American torture president and self-professed Christian, George W. Bush, gratefully accepted an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree from the Christian-ideology-based University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Texas, on February 11, in a “public” event that was closed to most of the public. The only direct media coverage allowed for the event was by Fox News and the college public relations team.

Even though it might have been headlined as “Christians Honor War Criminal,” there were apparently no national news stories about the former president’s award. Five days after the fact, the Washington-insider publication, the Hill ran a short summary noting that Bush had said, “Evil is evil.” 

When Jen Paine first moved to Columbus in 2006, the Canadian native made an immediate web search for a curling club. She found exactly what she was looking in the Columbus Curling Club, located at 2999 Silver Drive in Columbus.

On February 26th, the Federal Communications Commission (better known as the FCC) will be voting on whether to classify broadband internet as a Title II service - something that would give it the same open legal status as telephone lines, a concept called net neutrality. For those of us who regularly read, stream and, yes, even torrent from online sources, this is more than just a vague formality. Losing net neutrality could have a massive and possibly permanent impact on how we get not just entertainment but news and other information. And while some in Washington are speaking out on the side of an open internet, Republicans are already tossing out meaningless reactionary phrases like “Obamacare for the internet” to try to secure the tubes for their corporate sponsors.

  The concept of net neutrality is a simple one: Your internet service provider is not allowed to filter, throttle or otherwise meddle with what you’re accessing. They can’t block sites or slow down streaming from certain sources.

"It's behind us," Fernando Gonzales of the Cuban Five said with a smile when I told him just a few moments ago that I was sorry for the U.S. government having locked him in a cage for 15 years. It was nice of the New York Times to editorialize in favor of negotiations to release the remaining three, he said, especially since that paper had never reported on the story at all.

Gonzales said there is no ground for the United States keeping Cuba on its terrorist list. That there are Basques in Cuba is through an agreement with Spain, he said. The idea that Cuba is fighting wars in Central America is false, he added, noting that Colombian peace talks are underway here in Havana. "The President of the United States knows this," Gonzales said, "which is why he asked for the list to be reviewed."

What can I be sure of after only one week in Havana? Very little. There are exceptions to every pattern, and sometimes more exceptions than patterns. But a few claims, I think, are possible:

1. The sea and this island in it are stupendously beautiful even to someone longing for people and places up north.

Today in Havana, Mariela Castro Espin, director of the national center for sexual education and daughter of the president of Cuba, gave us a truly enlightened talk and question-and-answer session on LGBT rights, sex education, pornography (and why young people should avoid it if they want to have good sex) -- plus her view of what the Cuban government is doing and should be doing on these issues. She advocates equal rights for same-sex couples and a ban on discrimination, for example.

The U.S. began a 12-day annual, multinational
Cobra Gold military exercise on Monday (February 9), despite the
biggest pro-democracy protest in months displaying coup leader Gen.
Prayuth Chan-ocha as a gigantic faux Teletubby authoritarian.

In a sign of disapproval against the coup, Washington scaled-down
Cobra Gold, its biggest military exercise in the Asia-Pacific, and
this year sent about 3,600 U.S. troops instead of last year's 4,300.

"The large-scale, live-fire exercise associated w/ amphibious landing
was cancelled," American Embassy charge d'affaires W. Patrick Murphy
tweeted on Tuesday (February 10).

Other lethal exercises will be included.

A "non-combatant evacuation" from Thailand's tourist-packed Pattaya
beach near Bangkok is also scheduled, plus a "field training exercise"
involving troops in various formations.

Thailand is a key non-NATO ally of the U.S. in Southeast Asia.

Gen. Prayuth staged a bloodless coup on May 22, toppling a popularly
elected prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra.

Experts have put urban violence under the microscope. You might call it the sociology of dead kids.

There’s a lot less here than meets the eye, or so it seemed when I read about a new study by researchers at Yale called “Tragic, but not random: The social contagion of nonfatal gunshot injuries.” It’s an attempt to create categories of likely future shooting victims in Chicago and, thus, determine who among us is most in danger. Well, sure, why not? But in the process, the study, at least as it was reported a few days ago in the Chicago Sun-Times, utterly depersonalized the potential victims, along with the communities in which they lived, reducing them to components in a mathematical formula.

The researchers “sought to go beyond a racial explanation for nonfatal shootings,” according to the Sun-Times. “They were trying to explain why a specific young African-American male in a high-crime neighborhood becomes a shooting victim, while another young black man in the same neighborhood doesn’t, the study said.”

“Russian aggression” – the bad faith mantra of dishonest brokers

Just as NATO allies Germany and France were undertaking a peace initiative with Russia and Ukraine, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry turned up in Kiev at the same time, seeking to poison the talks before they started by spouting yet again the ritual U.S. accusation of “Russian aggression.” The incantation is meaningless without context. Its purpose is mesmerize a false consciousness. “Russian aggression” may or may not exist in the events of the past year, just like “Russian self-defense.” Reporting on the ground has been too unreliable to support any firm analysis, never mind the provocative “Russian aggression” the U.S. brandishes as a virtual call for war.