Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Articles”
The new US Department of Defense Law of War Manual is essentially a guidebook for violating international and domestic law and committing war crimes. The 1,165-page document, dated June 2015 and recently made available online, is not a statement of existing law as much as a compendium of what the Pentagon wishes the law to be. According to the manual, …
Just one week in, an indefinite hunger strike at an all-women’s immigrant detention center in Texas—operated by the for-profit prison company Corrections Corporation of America—has swelled to hundreds of refugees and migrants who are uniting behind a single demand: immediate freedom. While the exact number of participants is unknown, a person who regularly visits the Hutto Detention Center in Taylor …
Washington has been quite successful in its wicked embrace of Syria over the last few weeks. Just imagine, Kerry, in a propaganda-painted gesture of goodwill, forges the Vienna Peace Conference, this past Friday, 30 October. The results are inconclusive, but on to more talks in Geneva; no longer ‘Assad must go’, but rather the concession that “Assad is going to …
There are a lot of seemingly disparate things happening at various levels of scale in the world outside my window these days. But there is one color that describes them more than any other. My world is browning. As deserts grow and forests shrink, as smog, soot and dust clouds fill the skies horizon to horizon, as average heat levels …
We are living in a new time. A new world has emerged. Like many things that are new on such a scale it is at once frightening, disturbing, uncomfortable. We have emerged from the geological epoch of the Holocene into a new epoch designated as the Anthropocene.[1] This notion of the Anthropocene refers to a profound realisation that human aggregate …
For people in the modern world, there may be nothing more difficult to comprehend than the group calling itself the Islamic State, or ISIS. The beheadings, rapes, and other acts of cruelty seem beyond understanding, as does the wanton destruction of priceless ancient monuments. Perhaps most mystifying of all is the way ISIS has been able to recruit young men …
Once upon a time, a dental or medical exam was an opportunity to read a book. No more. The TV blares. It was talking heads discussing whether a football player had been sufficiently punished. The offense was unclear. The question was whether the lashes were sufficient. It brought to mind that punishment has become a primary feature of American, indeed …
The plight of the over-scheduled, over-tested, stressed out student has become the subject of much hand-wringing and several good educational policy prescriptions. But if youth are to escape the educational pressure cooker, we need to understand how the pervasive myth of the meritocracy traps them in it. As the instant classic 2009 film, Race to Nowhere, and its 2015 sequel, Beyond …
Corporate-friendly international agreement like TPP and TTIP, writes Monbiot, “could scarcely be better designed to exacerbate and universalise our multiple crises – financial, social and environmental.” What have governments learned from the financial crisis? I could write a column spelling it out. Or I could do the same job with one word: nothing. Actually, that’s too generous. The lessons learned …
The issue of making college tuition-free has recently come to the fore in American politics, largely because the two leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, have each championed it. Sanders has called for free undergraduate tuition at public colleges and universities, to be financed by a tax on Wall Street speculation, while Clinton has done the same, although …
