Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “United States”
Two news items this morning caught my eye. The first involves Edward Snowden, the security contractor who revealed massive (and ongoing) spying by the National Security Agency (NSA), much of it illegal. Snowden says he will consider returning to the United States if he is given a fair trial (he is currently in Russia, where he’s been granted asylum and a residency permit for three years). Watching …
For more than two millennia, friendship has been lauded as a key to personal fulfillment. Many of the most memorable works of western literature celebrate friendship. Achilles and Patroclus, David and Jonathan, and Damon and Pythias are only a few of the famous literary depictions of intimate friendship. Many today fear that a hyper-individualistic, highly mobile society has undermined the capacity for …
Trees are like our planet’s lungs. Every second of every day, they’re absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere, and converting it into energy. In fact, according to a study by researchers at NASA, each year, tropical rainforests absorb a staggering 1.4 billion metric tons of CO2 from Earth’s atmosphere. Through the process of photosynthesis, they’re “inhaling” that CO2, and keeping it …
We live in a powerfully secular culture, strongly influenced by the methods and findings of science, by a widespread reliance on technology, and by ubiquitous seductive commercial enticements. There is, in consequence, considerable risk of people rejecting the religion of theirparents’ and grandparents’ culture, never to reconsider deeply this vital aspect of their lives. Young children all exhibit some degree …
I hate to spoil a happy ending. The movie “Selma,”like this week’s commemorations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s march from Selma, Ala., 50 years ago, celebrates America’s giant leap from apartheid. Half a century ago Alabama state troopers and a mob of racist thugs beat African-Americans and others as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, demanding no more than the …
Food is more than just what we eat. It connects us to each other and our environment. And how we treat it is of tremendous importance to our democracy. Right now, the future of our food is being decided behind closed doors. The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive trade and investment deal being negotiated by the United States and 11 Pacific …
This accusation is everywhere, isn’t it? Respectable doctors say it on live TV, trying to sound like they have sympathy for those of us who just weren’t smart enough to avoid being duped by a pretty young thing with big boobs. Journalists never fail to mention it in stories about whatever the current vaccine-preventable epidemic is. It’s talked about on …
New documents from the cache of files leaked by Edward Snowden show that New Zealand’s intelligence agency has been collecting in bulk the cell phone, email, and internet files of people across the Pacific Island nations and handing that data over to the U.S. National Security Agency in an operation one angered lawmaker now describes as a “giant vaccum cleaner …
Venezuela In Crisis: Chavez Coup 2.0 in the Making? Each day the news out of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, it seems, gets worse. A shattered economy, out-of-control inflation, pervasive food shortages and mounting protests in the streets have kept President Nicolás Maduro on edge and on the defensive putting out fires since taking the country’s helm after the death …
At least a dozen Arkansas farmers have joined hundreds of farmers in 19 other states in almost 800 lawsuits against Swiss seed maker Syngenta over genetically modified corn seed, a case that has been widely reported in the media. But one of the lawsuits, filed on behalf of two Newport farms, contains a previously unreported twist: an allegation that Syngenta, …
