Monday, October 22nd, 2012
JANE MAYER, - The New Yorker
Stephan:
Teresa Sharp is fifty-three years old and has lived in a modest single-family house on Millsdale Street, in a suburb of Cincinnati, for nearly thirty-three years. A lifelong Democrat, she has voted in every Presidential election since she turned eighteen. So she was agitated when an official summons from the Hamilton County Board of Elections arrived in the mail last month. Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, is one of the most populous regions of the most fiercely contested state in the 2012 election. No Republican candidate has ever won the Presidency without carrying Ohio, and recent polls show Barack Obama and Mitt Romney almost even in the state. Every vote may matter, including those cast by the seven members of the Sharp family-Teresa, her husband, four grown children, and an elderly aunt-living in the Millsdale Street house.
The letter, which cited arcane legal statutes and was printed on government letterhead, was dated September 4th. ‘You are hereby notified that your right to vote has been challenged by a qualified elector,
No Comments
Monday, October 22nd, 2012
MICHAEL WARREN, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: It is a measure of the waning influence of the U.S. that other countries have had it with our War on Drugs, and our Rightist social values, and are going their own way, trying other approaches to drugs and abortion.
Everyone knows about Holland but, surprisingly, few seem to know Portugal's drug laws were changed in 2000 and went into effect in July 2001. The new law maintained the status of illegality for using or possessing any drug for personal use without authorization. However, the offense was changed from a criminal one to an administrative procedure so long as the amount possessed was no more than ten days' supply of that substance. Functionally Marijuana usage is ignored.
What happened? In 1999, Portugal had the highest rate of HIV amongst injecting drug users in the European Union. Since the new laws have been in place the rate has decreased.
According to a study done by the conservative Cato Institute, 'Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success.' Glenn Greenwald, who conducted the research said, 'It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.'
Now we have Uruguay.
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay – Uruguayans used to call their country the Switzerland of Latin America, but its faded grey capital seems a bit more like Amsterdam now that its congress has legalized abortion and is drawing up plans to sell government-grown marijuana.
Both measures would be unthinkable in many other countries. Cuba is the only other nation in the region that makes first-trimester abortions accessible to all women, and no country in the world produces and sells pot for drug users to enjoy.
But President Jose ‘Pepe’ Mujica, a flower-farming former leftist guerrilla, vowed to sign whatever bill congress could settle on that can minimize the 30,000 illegal abortions his government says Uruguayan women suffer annually.
And while lawmakers have yet to debate pot sales, Mujica’s ruling Broad Front coalition staked its ground in August by openly declaring that the drug war has failed. Smoking pot – if not growing and selling it – is already legal in Uruguay, and supplying the weed is a $30 million business, the government said.
This is democracy ‘a la Uruguaya’ – the Uruguayan way – a phrase that reflects both the pride and the unmet promises of a society where finding common ground is a highly shared value, […]
No Comments
Sunday, October 21st, 2012
PAUL HARRIS, - The Observer (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is something that should deeply concern all of us. Our children are entering puberty at unnaturally young ages. First the research was about girls, now it extends to boys. My prediction is that diet and our water supply hold the answer. The growth hormones in the food supply, resulting from their overuse with livestock and poultry, and the flushing into our rivers and waterways of these and other substances fed to animals and birds, I believe, will ultimately be found to be the cause.
We are literally putting corporate profit above our children's health.
t is a truism common to nearly all family gatherings that grandparents will frequently remark on how fast their beloved grandchildren seem to be growing up these days.
But now, instead of provoking a bout of eye-rolling at such platitudes, a new report seems to show the old folks were right: boys are indeed hitting puberty at an earlier age than they used to.
A comprehensive study by the American Academy of Pediatrics was published on Saturday. Widely seen as the best measure of the onset of puberty in American boys, it showed that they are showing signs of puberty six months to two years earlier than previously assumed.
The surprise finding builds on previous discoveries that appeared to show girls have also been developing faster. A study in 2010, which was published in the US Journal of Pediatrics, created headlines when it revealed girls were hitting puberty earlier, with some developing breasts at seven. Nor was it just in the US. Other studies have revealed the same trend in girls all over the world.
Now the AAP study, officially unveiled at a national conference in the US, is showing the same trends in boys. It primarily identified the signs of puberty as the […]
No Comments
Sunday, October 21st, 2012
ALEXANDER BOLTON, - The Hill
Stephan: Here is a very sad story, indeed. American democracy is no longer to be trusted. Like banana republics, and totalitarian states around the world, our elections have to be monitored independently for voter suppression or falsification. Worse yet, there are prominent conservatives opposed to this. Why would that be, do you think?
United Nations-affiliated election monitors from Europe and central Asia will be at polling places around the U.S. looking for voter suppression activities by conservative groups, a concern raised by civil rights groups during a meeting this week. The intervention has drawn criticism from a prominent conservative-leaning group combating election fraud.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a United Nations partner on democratization and human rights projects, will deploy 44 observers around the county on Election Day to monitor an array of activities, including potential disputes at polling places.
Liberal-leaning civil rights groups met with representatives from the OSCE this week to raise their fears about what they say are systematic efforts to suppress minority voters likely to vote for President Obama.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP and the ACLU, among other groups, warned this month in a letter to Daan Everts, a senior official with OSCE, of ‘a coordinated political effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans – particularly traditionally disenfranchised groups like minorities.
No Comments
Sunday, October 21st, 2012
FIONA HARVEY, - The Guardian (U.K.)/Raw Story
Stephan: How ironic it is that the largest producer of petroleum is actively pursuing a policy of becoming energy independent of petroleum. One has to ask: What do they know that we don't? Or, put another way: Why can the Saudis muster the political will to be free of petroleum and we cannot?
Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer, has plans to become 100% powered by renewable and low-carbon forms of energy, according to an influential member of the royal family.
But the process is likely to take decades, and some observers are sceptical as to whether it is any more than window-dressing.
Prince Turki Al Faisal Al Saud, founder of the King Faisal Foundation and one of the state’s top spokesmen, told the Global Economic Symposium in Brazil that he hoped the kingdom might be powered entirely by low-carbon energy within his lifetime – he is 67 – but that he thought it was likely to take longer.
However, he insisted Saudi was moving ahead with investment in renewable energy, nuclear power and other alternatives to fossil fuels and that it could use its vast oil reserves for other goods, such as plastics and polymers.
‘Oil is more precious for us underground than as a fuel source,
No Comments
