Stephan: If, as President Obama asserts, the 'preferred answer to drug crime (is) economic growth, strengthened rule of law and sound law enforcement' how is it that billions of dollars spent in the U.S. has resulted in nothing but the death of thousands, endless misery, and the largest gulag the world has ever seen? His statements are so blatantly false one has to ask: Who is Obama speaking to, and why?
Speaking in a country that has been ravaged by the narcotics trade for decades, President Barack Obama on Saturday told a forum of leaders from the Americas that legalization was not the answer to the drug war, according to The Associated Press.
Obama was participating in the meeting in Cartagena, Colombia, and the news agency says Latin America has seen growing calls for decriminalization as a way of ending the violence of the drug trade.
Mexican authorities revealed in January that nearly 50,000 people had died as a result of the drug war in that country since the government enlisted the army to combat narcotics cartels in 2006.
According to the AP, Obama said he was not opposed to the discussion of legalization but that he doubted any agreement could be reached to make this a reality.
Instead, Obama reportedly said his preferred answer to drug crime was economic growth, strengthened rule of law and sound law enforcement, according to the news agency.
The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that Obama was likely to face a rocky reception in Cartagena as many were under pressure to find a way to stop the killing.
According to The Times, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos was to ask the […]
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DAVID EDWARDS, - Raw story
Stephan: The Theocratic Right's profound sexual dysfunctionality issues -- which is why so much of the Right's political focus centers on sexual issues -- has become so extreme that scientists are beginning to study it. Here is a report on one of the insights emerging.
People who have negative feelings toward homosexuality often have secret attractions to the same sex - and are more likely to have grown up in households that forbid homosexual feelings, according to a recent study.
A research team from the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara found that ‘[h]omophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires.
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Stephan: This may look like a news report, and it is, but that isn't why I chose to publish it. I chose it because it is an example of a very bad trend. We are starting to see the consequences of climate change, and it is going to cost us billions, maybe even trillions. That's the price of willful ignorance, and choosing to spend our time worrying over hand holding teenagers because handholding is 'a gateway' to sexual activity, instead of things that really matter.
Click through for some amazing pictures.
Dozens of tornadoes were spotted across the Midwest and Plains Saturday as an outbreak of unusually strong weather seized the region, and forecasters sternly warned that ‘life-threatening’ weather could intensify overnight.
Storms were reported in Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska and Oklahoma. Emergency officials in Iowa said that high winds or a tornado damaged a hospital in Creston, but no injuries were reported. Authorities also said about 75 percent of the small western Iowa community of Thurman was destroyed, with no injuries reported there either.
In Nebraska, baseball-sized hail shattered windows and ripped siding from houses. In Oklahoma, more than 5,000 people gathered for a rattlesnake hunt in Woods County scattered when a tornado touched down there, said the county’s emergency management director, Steve Foster.
National Weather Service forecasters issued sobering outlooks that the worst of the weather would hit around nightfall, predicting that conditions were right for exceptionally strong tornadoes. Weather officials and emergency management officials worried most about what would happen if strong storms hit when people were sleeping, not paying attention to weather reports and unlikely to hear warning sirens. When it’s dark, it’s also more difficult for weather spotters to clearly see funnel clouds or tornadoes.
‘This could go into, certainly, to […]
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Saturday, April 14th, 2012
Stephan: We don't hear much about AIDS anymore but it is still a major health issue. Here, finally, is what may be a major breakthrough.
Although there is currently no cure for HIV, the body does already contain cells that fight the virus – the problem is, there just aren’t enough of them to completely get rid of it. In 2009, scientists at UCLA performed a proof-of-concept experiment, in which they were able to grow these CD8 cytotoxic T lymphocytes (better known as infection-fighting ‘T cells
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Saturday, April 14th, 2012
Stephan: Our national priorities are completely out of whack.
Something as massive and amorphous as America’s War on Drugs can be difficult to imagine in concrete terms. This web of failed policies is so huge, so persistent and so deeply woven into the fabric of our nation that it’s hard to envision an alternative - or even appreciate what the conflict is currently siphoning resources away from.
That’s why the past week has been so important for the cause of ending the drug war - because it has provided three tragic examples of how that war harms not only its dead and/or incarcerated victims, but also how it makes society as a whole more susceptible to horrific crimes.
In Boulder, Colo., for example, the Daily Camera reports that ‘the University of Colorado announced a new plan to snuff out the Boulder campus’s 4/20 smoke-out, warning that police will ticket pot smokers at this month’s event.
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