Lethality Beyond the Pale In those first minutes, they’ll be stunned. Eyes fixed in a thousand-yard stare, nerve endings numbed. They’ll just stand there. Soon, you’ll notice that they are holding their arms out at a 45-degree angle. Your eyes will be drawn to their hands and you’ll think you mind is playing tricks. But [...]

Dr. T., a medical doctor, is a Palestinian living in Gaza City.  He is still reeling from days of aerial bombardment. When I asked about the children in his community he told me his church would soon be making Christmas preparations to lift the children’s spirits.  Looking at his kindly smile and ruddy cheeks, I [...]

Searching for Signs in the Cosmos, and on Earth Forty years ago, David Bowie asked the musical question, “Is there life on Mars?” Bowie’s song embodied an escapist sensibility, a longing for life elsewhere to break the doldrums and despair of life on Earth. Filled with vivid imagery, the song reflects humankind’s eternal longing to be [...]

On this day in 1945 the United States demonstrated that it was as morally bankrupt as the Nazi machine it had recently vanquished and the Soviet regime with which it was allied. Over Hiroshima, and three days later over Nagasaki, it exploded an atomic device that was the most efficient weapon of genocide in human [...]

You Don’t Need a Clock to Know What Time It Is   With each passing day, the news grows increasingly grim. In recent weeks alone, we’ve seen women’s rights under assault as reactionary forces seek to turn the clock back by decades. Half a world away in Afghanistan, corpses are defiled and more are brutally created, [...]

Faluya aún soporta las secuelas de la guerra; de los escombros de las casas bombardeadas se siguen sacando esqueletos y lo que es peor: la tasa de malformaciones congénitas en nacimientos y en la infancia se han disparado. Se está reconstruyendo, pero los cortes de electricidad y de agua potable prevalecen. El ambiente general de la [...]

(Atención: éste es un remix alternativo de un original del New York Times.) BAGDAD: El Pentágono declaró oficialmente el jueves la muerte de su invasión que costó 3 billones de dólares y suma y sigue, relacionada con la “guerra contra el terror”, ocupación y matanza de la nación iraquí, incluso mientras el país se preparaba para [...]

Una tarea de la Convención Marco sobre Cambio Climático de Naciones Unidas, que en la actualidad está teniendo lugar en Durban, Sudáfrica, es extender las decisiones políticas previas, limitadas en alcance y solamente parcialmente aplicadas. Estas decisiones se remontan a la Convención de 1992 de la ONU y al Protocolo de Kyoto de 1997, al que [...]

A task of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, now under way in Durban, South Africa, is to extend earlier policy decisions that were limited in scope and only partially implemented. These decisions trace back to the U.N. Convention of 1992 and the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which the U.S. refused to join. The [...]

La cultura moderna, desde sus albores en el siglo XVI, está asentada sobre una brutal falta de respeto. Primero hacia la naturaleza, tratada como un torturador trata a su víctima con el propósito de arrancarle todos sus secretos (Bacon). Después, con las poblaciones originarias de América Latina. En su Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de [...]