James Reinl, - Reader Supported News
Stephan: Yet another development arising from the disastrous geopolitical strategy set in motion by the Bush-Cheney Neocons. Let us hope we are not going to face the world condemned by The International Criminal Court as torturers and war criminals. Does it matter that the U.S. is not a signatory to the Court? Legally it may, but morally, and reputationally it is a meaningless detail.
The entrance of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Credit: www.hrw.org
The International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor is studying a US Senate report on the CIA’s torture of terrorism suspects “very, very closely”, she told Middle East Eye on Thursday.
“We’re looking at the report. We’re looking at the report very, very closely. And we will determine what to do, especially if it relates to our jurisdiction in Afghanistan,” said Fatou Bensouda. “This is what we’re doing now; we’re looking at it very, very closely.”
In December, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a five-year review of 6.3 million pages of CIA documents that described waterboarding, week-long bouts of sleep deprivation and a technique of “rectal feeding” being used on detainees.
The CIA interrogation programme was devised by two agency contractors to squeeze information from suspects after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. Interrogations took place in countries that included Afghanistan, Poland and Romania.
ICC prosecutors revealed that they were examining alleged crimes in Afghanistan in 2007. […]
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Jack Jenkins, - Think Progress
Stephan: More on the great demographic shift that is occurring. It has profound political implications, particularly when understood in its context of the country becoming majority-minority, and as we go through climate change. As this shrinkage becomes more and more evident the desperation over the diminishment of the Evangelical community will become more extreme. For Fundamentalist Premillennial Dispensationalists I think the end time fervor and sense of persecution is going to become almost unbearable, and all kinds of crazy acting out will occur.
The great mistake the media makes in even considering these developments is that falling away from organized religion (which will not vanish just become a smaller percentage) means atheism will greatly increase. I do not think that is correct. All the trends point, as I read them, to a growing sense of what we now call spiritual, but which I think we will come to see as our linkage in the great matrix of life. Learning how to deal with the Earth's meta-systems will be required to cope with climate change and that will encourage this trend. The sense of this linkage while often linked to religion does not require and religious belief or affiliation, and that will become culturally recognized.
Credit: Shutterstock
A new study reports that white Christians, long understood to be the primary shapers of American politics and culture, are rapidly losing their majority status across the country — even in traditionally conservative states.
Earlier this week, Jonathan Merritt of the Religion News Service dug into data from the American Values Atlas, a website unveiled late last year by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) that aggregates polling information on the political opinions, values, and religious affiliations of Americans. The wealth of data is a lot to sift through, but Merritt pointed to a striking revelation: white Christians, once the majority in virtually every major population area in America, are now a minority in 19 states.
For their surveys, PRRI defines “white Christian” as evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians who list their identity as “white, non-Hispanic.” (Interestingly, PRRI also includes white Mormons in this group, who are sometimes listed by sociologists as separate from the rest of Christianity due to their unique religious views and texts.)
Taken together, […]
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Saturday, March 7th, 2015
Carl Gibson , Co-Founder of US Uncut - The Huffington Post
Stephan: This is what is doable if communities can reach a critical consensus on something life-affirming through individual choice. In this case it is the internet; its parallel is the story I ran some weeks ago about Burlington, Vermont creating its own power, and becoming independent. As power and communications become cheaper and more comprehensive the effect will be to make it easier for communities to take control of the basic infrastructure of their lives, and this will lead to decentralization. The economic model will change, as social wellness so blatantly becomes obviously the better choice.
Night view across the Tennessee River in Chattanooga
Credit: Frank Kehren Photography
Chattanooga, Tennessee, has provided a model for all American towns who want to see their economies and populations grow quickly. And that model is simple: give sub-par internet providers like Comcast some legitimate competition with publicly-owned municipal broadband networks.
“People understand that high-speed Internet access is quickly becoming a national infrastructure issue just like the highways were in the 1950s,” Chattanooga mayor Andy Berke told CNN Money. “If the private sector is unable to provide that kind of bandwidth because of the steep infrastructure investment, then just like highways in the 1950s, the government has to consider providing that support.”
If you’re sick of having only one cable/internet company in your town and have horror stories about dealing with a global corporation that has a monopoly and doesn’t care about you, you aren’t the only one. According to a 2011 survey by the FCC, 61 percent of Americans have only one cable and internet provider to choose […]
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Saturday, March 7th, 2015
Stephan: I selected this because it is a rare example of how democracy is supposed to work. How it did work until Reagan. Everybody in this story is operating out of self-interest, but they are choosing, if you think about it, of the options available to them the one that is most life-affirming.
This will set in motion an entire trend that is promising. Boehner knows very well what just happened; he is first and foremost a man of the House. It will be interesting to see how this plays out now given the skew to the life-affirming option. Whether Boehner is smart enough to realize that the security of his position with a bipartisan center. Among other things he would act as a counterweight to voter suppression and gerrymandering, by moving the leverage point up a level.
House Speaker John Boehner
Credit: AP/J Scott Applewhite
Tea Party Republicans contemplating a bid to oust Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) shouldn’t count on Democrats to help them unseat the Speaker.
And without their support, there is no chance to topple Boehner in this Congress.
A number of right-wing Republicans, long wary of Boehner’s commitment to GOP efforts attacking President Obama’s policy priorities, have openly considered a coup in an attempt to transfer the gavel into more conservative hands.
But Democrats from across an ideological spectrum say they’d rather see Boehner remain atop the House than replace him with a more conservative Speaker who would almost certainly be less willing to reach across the aisle in search of compromise. Replacing him with a Tea Party Speaker, they say, would only bring the legislative process — already limping along — to a screeching halt.
“I’d probably vote for Boehner [because] who the hell is going to replace him? [Ted] Yoho?” Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) said Wednesday, referencing the Florida Tea Party Republican who’s […]
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Saturday, March 7th, 2015
Staff, - The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
Stephan: This is the first good news I have seen out of Iraq in some time. Opening the National Museum after what happened in Mosul, shows that enough civic self-esteem exists to do this. And there is a nuance, the Baghdad museum was badly looted and destroyed because Paul Bremer didn't think to protect it, in his epochally incompetent management when America occupied Iraq. By extension the government is saying, "and we will do this with Mosul as well." Neither museum will be what it once was but, on balance, I think we ought to see this report as good news.
A man looks at artefacts displayed inside the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad February 28, 2015.
Credit: REUTERS/Khalid al-Mousily
Iraq’s National Museum reopened in the Iraqi capital Saturday after 12 years of efforts to restore nearly 15,000 artifacts stolen during the United State’s occupation in the country, AFP reported.
According to the report, the museum was reopened earlier than planned in response to the destruction and looting of artifacts by Islamic State in Mosul last month.
“The events in Mosul led us to speed up our work and we wanted to open it [the museum] today [Saturday] as a response to what the gangs of IS did,” Qais Hussein Rashid, the deputy tourism and antiquities minister, told AFP.
“This is a very happy day,” which will help heal the wounds of the destruction of artifacts in Mosul, Rashid said in the report.
“For the first time there’s a whole generation of Iraqis who never knew what the national […]
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