What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
Last week 12 Latin American governments gathered in Guayaquil, Ecuador to craft a common response to an increasingly common menace: costly “investor-state” suits in which foreign corporations are dragging sovereign governments to extrajudicial courts to demand taxpayer compensation for health, environmental, and other public interest policies.
The demand for American sperm is increasing around the world, & not because of what you think:
It’s not about the superior fitness of American males, exactly. One reason is that the US’s immigration history means lots of ethnic diversity. For some would-be mothers from other parts of the world, this can give US product a leg up over places like Denmark, another sperm exporting powerhouse.
Another is all that tracking and testing: the U.S. has some of the world’s highest standards for disease testing and donor screening. The FDA defines sperm as human tissue, and regulates it much as it does the donation of organs.
Guantanamo’s hunger strike story is not in the media. As Amy Davidson points out in the New Yorker, the US Administration seems intent on hiding the fact that 1 in 5 of the 166 inmates of the illegal prison are on a hunger strike. More than half of the inmates have been cleared for release (there is no evidence to legally hold them in prison), yet are being held without reason.
The numbers strike one as all wrong—not incorrect, that is, but proof that something has gone very wrong at Guantánamo. The right numbers—the ones one would expect from a prison run by a country of laws—are a hundred and sixty-six facing trials, and zero held for no good reason. ……….. Taking a dozen prisoners a day to a room where they are force-fed with tubes stuck into their noses should not be part of the normal routine at Guantánamo, or at any American prison.
Most of us won’t care about it- yet, the US corporate sponsored TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) will soon inflict more misery on the world through an intricate, very secretive partnership between countries that is being pushed though their respective parliaments to become law. Essentially, the plan is to skirt domestic laws and courts and privately enforce the terms of a public treaty by directly challenging governments’ public interest policies before foreign tribunals to demand unlimited sums of taxpayer compensation. The premise for including such extreme extra-judicial enforcement procedures in past agreements has been that the domestic legal systems of developing country trade partners have not been sufficiently trustworthy. Japan is the latest country getting ready to sign up.
Watched an episode of “Chronicle of the Third Reich” on SBS this evening.
Could very easily replace Germany of the 1930’s USofA – & the viewer would get a fairly identical repetition of history. The protagonists might be different, but the story (political, economic & social) remains nearly identical.
Agents accused over mistreatment of British detainees like Binyam Mohamed who ended up in Guantánamo Bay
Illegal detention, torture, injustice, & denial are a hallmark of the powers that be, behind the mask of goodness & liberty.
This sickening video of US Marines, urinating on dead Afghan men is another demonstration of the perverse “justice” that the US & it’s All-Lies seem intent on distributing to anyone who’s unwilling to toe their corporatist agenda.
Britain, France, Spain, …all have laws supporting a dying business model of the entertainment industry that are pushed through an ignorant political leadership.
Just the support the USA needs to push through SOPA????