Archives for 2013

Scientists at a conference in Italy have confirmed the discovery of the Higgs Boson, after further experiments performed at the large hadron collider near Geneva in Switzerland, built in the late ’90s by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) with the cooperation of 10,000 scientists. The Higgs Boson is associated with a field that […]

William deBuys writes at Tomdispatch.com Of course, it’s an easy city to pick on. The nation’s 13th largest metropolitan area (nudging out Detroit) crams 4.3 million people into a low bowl in a hot desert, where horrific heat waves and windstorms visit it regularly. It snuggles next to the nation’s largest nuclear plant and, having […]

The selection of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina as the new pope signals the first time the Roman Catholic Church has been headed by a non-European since St. Gregory III (d. 741), who was what we would today call either a Lebanese or a Syrian. (Of course, the church holds that a Palestinian was […]

Journalist Mark Kukis (Time magazine correspondent in Iraq 2006-2009) writes in a guest piece for Informed Comment Iraqis have a phrase they use to describe the U.S. invasion and early occupation. They call it “the collapse,” and in conversation the term is understood to mean the time covering the fall of Saddam Hussein to roughly […]

Social media facts 2013, by the numbers:

Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! airs excerpts from a leaked interview in which Bradley Manning for the first time since his arrest can be heard explaining why he gave government documents to Wikileaks for public release. He wanted to show everyone the “true costs of war” and to “spark a domestic debate on the role of […]

DAVID SCHANZER writes at ISLAMiCOMMENTARY When you cut through the bluster and controversies surrounding the Bradley Manning/Wikileaks case, it raises a difficult unresolved question that has great significance for our democracy: How can the government be held accountable for its national security policies (and mistakes) in a world where there are far too many secrets, […]