In 2001, Miami Federal Judge Joan Lenard sentenced five Cuban agents to long prison terms for conspiracy to commit espionage (although no evidence of espionage appeared during the trial). Rene Gonzalez, 55, like the other four, denied he ever engaged in or conspired to commit espionage.

Rene will be released on October 7. Lenard’s conditions demand that Rene remain in Miami for three years and be monitored by parole officers, and that he not have any contact with terrorists.

Neither condition makes sense. An admitted Cuban agent living in Miami; a man who infiltrated the anti-Castro Brothers to the Rescue and could not find an insurance company to write a policy on his life. Bookies would be taking bets on when – not if – he gets assassinated. Hit men abound in the area.

Alec Johnson has. Like in that Anne Feeney song that asks this question, the Columbus-based activist took a stand by sitting down near the White House in August. He and hundreds of other protesters spent more than two days in a D.C. jail as a way to tell President Obama to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline plan that would transport tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada to Houston, Texas.

“It’s one of many tools we can use. There are hundreds of them that we can be effective with, but in this particular case, it (getting arrested) really drew attention to the issue. The fact that we got more than 1,250 people to do it over the course of two weeks was huge.”

Johnson said it was the largest nonviolent civil disobedience action in the environmental movement’s history.

Those in the peak oil, deep ecology and anarcho-primitivism movements say we can't use technology to solve our environmental crises. Local activist Chuck Lynd disagrees. “I believe in what E.F. Schumacher called ‘appropriate technology' ...That’s true in agriculture, in industry, and in high technology. We’re creative and innovative. We just need to apply it in healthy, sustainable ways.”

But the fossil and fissile fuel industry is getting in the way of that, said Lynd, during a protest against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project during Obama's visit to Columbus on Sept 12.

“We can move now to solar, wind, and geothermal energy. There are technologies that are just in the waiting. We just have policies that support and subsidize what Harvey Wasserman calls King CONG---coal, oil, nuclear, and (natural) gas.”

Juan Williams’ 2011 book, Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate, contains information relevant to the lack of public-access television in Columbus. Williams wrote the book in response to his firing from National Public Radio in 2010.

NPR gave Williams the ax because he publicly admitted to feeling nervous when seeing people dressed in Muslim garb while he’s boarding airplanes. NPR’s ire was not allayed by the fact that in the same interview, Williams said we need to override such fearful emotions with a rational recognition that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful and not connected to terrorism.

Concerning the media’s extensive coverage of his firing, Williams states: “I am struck by how little of it tells the full story of what actually happened. Basic facts were distorted, important context was not provided, and personal attacks were treated as truth. The lack of honest reporting about the firing and the events that led up to it was not just unfair – most of it was flat-out lies.”

BANGKOK, Thailand -- When voters recently elected a crude, joke-cracking, former massage parlor tycoon to parliament, no one expected him to immediately unleash a video sting against Thailand's biggest illegal casino, and topple the country's chief of police, plus the military-installed head of the National Security Council.

"I have been removed for a reason which has nothing to do with my ability or my shortcomings," Thawil Pliensri, the ousted National Security Council secretary-general, said on September 7.

All the chaos and drama is thanks to the wise guy tactics of Chuvit Kamolvisit, who has even upset the U.S. State Department.

The American Embassy refused to issue Mr. Chuvit a visa to meet his two daughters and former wife in San Diego, California, because he previously owned several huge Bangkok massage parlors packed with sex workers and openly admitted to bribing police, he said.

"I stopped my massage parlors," a reformed Mr. Chuvit said in an interview while waxing nostalgic about his life in America in 1985 when he worked as a doorman at a sleazy sex club in New York City's Times Square.