Archives for December 2012

Alice K. Ross writes at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism: Last week Amnesty International highlighted just how troubled this tribal region is, charting human rights abuses by both the Pakistani army and the Pakistani Taliban. The Hands of Cruelty demonstrates how the region’s estimated civilian population of three million, is trapped between two opposing yet similarly vicious forces. […]

Tom Giesen writes in a guest column for Informed Comment: Multiple reasons why global warming mitigation will fail Greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing. The yearly increases look like this: • 1990s 2.7%, • 2000 – 2007 3.5%, • 2009 – 2010 5.6%, No action to cut greenhouse gas emissions at the scale or pace […]

Democracy Now! reports on how the gun lobby, the NRA, is outspending the gun control advocates by 10 to 1 on Capitol Hill. And Lisa Graves explains that ALEC isn’t just trying to destroy unions or spread disinformation about climate change, it is also behind legislation to keep military weapons in civilian hands. This is […]

Michael Grabell writes at ProPublica Following months of congressional pressure, the Transportation Security Administration has agreed to contract with the National Academy of Sciences to study the health effects of the agency’s X-ray body scanners. But it is unclear if the academy will conduct its own tests of the scanners or merely review previous studies. […]

and from this site:

Peter van Buren writes at Tomdispatch.com An All-American Nightmare Why Zero Dark Thirty Won’t Settle the Torture Question or Purge Torture From the American System If you look backward you see a nightmare. If you look forward you become the nightmare. There’s one particular nightmare that Americans need to face: in the first decade of […]

It has been an incredible year, with the Republican presidential primary, the mass shootings in Aurora, Wisconsin and at Newtown, Mass.; the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya; and the fall presidential campaign. Informed Comment was there at every step of the way. These are the pieces that went viral in the past […]

Suevon Lee writes at ProPublica: Friday’s deadly rampage at a Connecticut elementary school marked the 13th mass shooting in the United States this year. Among the 11 deadliest shootings in U.S. history, more than half took place in the last five years. During the same period, states have often relaxed their gun laws, making it […]