Global
We committed a quiet little war crime the other day. Forty-plus people are dead, taken out with hellfire missiles while they were praying.
Or maybe not. Maybe they were just insurgents. The women and children, if there were any, were . . . come on, you know the lingo, collateral damage. The Pentagon is going to “look into” allegations that what happened last March 16 in the village of al-Jinah in northern Syria was something more serious than a terrorist takeout operation, which, if you read the official commentary, seems like the geopolitical equivalent of rodent control.
The target was “assessed to be a meeting place for al-Qaeda, and we took the strike,” a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command explained. The strike involved two Reaper (as in Grim Reaper) drones and their payload of Hellfire missiles, plus a 500-pound bomb.
BANGKOK, Thailand -- Fearing duplication of 1993's Waco, Texas
bloodshed, thousands of Thai troops and police retreated from their
three-week siege surrounding a Buddhist temple after failing to find
the former abbot who is wanted for alleged financial crimes.
The sensational confrontation on Bangkok's northern edge ended on
March 10 and is widely seen as an embarrassing failure by the
coup-installed military government which deployed 4,000 security
forces in an unsuccessful attempt to arrest one elderly man.
The crackdown against Phra Dhammachayo, who is Dhammakaya temple's
former abbot, is part of a broader shake-up of Thailand's Buddhist
clergy which is frequently tainted by scandals involving sex, drugs,
money and other violations.
Dhammachayo, 72, founded the Dhammakaya temple in the 1970s,
promising fast enlightenment and a better reincarnation in exchange
for big donations.
He reportedly claimed to perform miracles and to have met Apple
computer's late co-founder Steven Jobs in a heavenly encounter.
The last time a U.S. president faced a strong movement for impeachment for actual impeachable offenses, one of the major road blocks was fear that an unpopular vice president would take his place, and this road block was removed when Spiro Agnew resigned in the face of criminal charges of cheating on his taxes.
As every American is aware, including even those who have never heard of impeachment, the primary problem with impeaching Trump is the horror of a president Pence. For a long time I tried to explain to people that this was stupid. Pence is already running the show. Impeachment is about placing the executive branch under the rule of law, not about the trivial matter of what individual holds what office for a few years. A President Pence with a Congress that impeaches people would be better than King Donald with Congress acting as court jesters. Impeachment and removal from office are two different things. Et cetera. It doesn't matter how many reasons you provide, the U.S. public may never support impeachment of Trump as long as Pence is vice president.
Calls on District Attorney and City Commissioners to uphold election integrity
These days, every new console launch is followed by an online flood of complaints about quality control issues. Far too many original Nintendo DS systems showed up with dead pixels. The Xbox 360 was plagued by vague Red Ring of Death “general hardware failures”. The PlayStation 4 is known to spontaneously shut itself off. (Save your games early and often!) So it’s not surprising that people have run into problems with the new hybrid Nintendo Switch. But are its glaring design flaws and Nintendo’s apathetic response a sign that the system was released half-baked – and they just don’t care?
Set around the turn of the last century in New London, Connecticut - where young Eugene had summered - O’Neill’s 1933 Ah, Wilderness! is a marked departure from his usually gloomy plays, fraught with familial Sturm und Drang. Indeed, with their happy if imperfect lives, this comedy’s Millers are the polar opposites of those long suffering characters in his angsty final dramas, such as The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten. Indeed, one could say that the Millers are the family O’Neill wished he had grown up in, rather than the tense, dysfunctional, substance-abusing unit he had the misbegotten misfortune to have been born into.
Donald Trump’s first budget makes his antipathy to the environment clear—and his love for fossil fuels and nuclear power even clearer.
In addition to slashing funding to the Environmental Protection Agency, he also announced this week that he wants massive rollbacks in automotive fuel efficiency standards and billions in new investments in nuclear weapons and storage for commercial nuclear waste.
We have to start winning wars again. I have to say, when I was young, in high school and college, everybody used to say we never lost a war. We never lost a war, remember?...
America never lost. And now we never win a war. We never win. And don’t fight to win. We don’t fight to win. We’ve either got to win or don’t fight at all.