By Human Rights Watch | Report
Raised on the Registry: The Irreparable Harm of Placing Children on Sex Offender Registries in the US (Washington, DC) – Harsh public registration laws often punish youth sex offenders for life and do little to protect public safety, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. [...]
“There can be no possible justification for such an over-broad collection … These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources … and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.” The Associated Press says the U.S. Department of Justice has [...]
By Hans Hogrefe | Open Society Foundations
As many as 130 prisoners of Guantanomo are on a hunger strike. And what is the US government’s response to this ongoing crisis? Force feeding, a procedure that amounts to torture.
Almost every medical school student takes an oath upon graduation based on the classic 4th [...]
By Emily Schwartz Greco and William A. Collins | Otherwords.org
Thirty years after Ríos Montt’s atrocities, U.S. military policy in Latin America remains a human rights disaster.
With Syria’s strife, the NRA’s annual meeting, and Kim Kardashian’s prenatal woes to report, Central America doesn’t exactly dominate U.S. headlines these days. So we [...]
By Eric Michael Johnson | YES! Magazine
A new theory of human origins says cooperation—not competition—is instinctive.
A century ago, industrialists like Andrew Carnegie believed that Darwin’s theories justified an economy of vicious competition and inequality. They left us with an ideological legacy that says the corporate economy, in which wealth concentrates in [...]
By ACLU of Florida Media Office| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Immediate settlement by school board ends months of delay and efforts to stop 14-year old Bayli Silberstein from establishing safe schools club
CONTACT: ACLU of Florida Media Office, media@aclufl.org, (786) 363-2737
OCALA – Today, just one day after 14-year-old Bayli Silberstein filed suit against [...]
By William A. Collins | Otherwords.org
Despite declines in teen pregnancy and abortion rates, some conservatives aren’t ready to celebrate.
Abortion, condoms,
Things that vex,
Those who would
Prohibit sex.
Fewer American teens are getting pregnant and the national abortion rate is falling. Time to break out [...]
By Sam Pizzigati | Otherwords.org
Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff write learned economic papers that make champions of austerity happy — and help smash the life prospects of average working families.
Aging baby boomers may remember a 1960s rock band that sported an all-time great name. That band — Question Mark [...]
By Brian Magee, American Humanist | For Immediate Release
The National Day of Reason was created “to celebrate reason—a concept all Americans can support—and to raise public awareness about the persistent threat to religious liberty posed by government intrusion into the private sphere of worship.”
(Washington, DC, April 30, 2013)—Two members of Congress are offering [...]
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New on bluetabletalk…
- The Parched Truth About American Jobs
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- The Case for Platonic Marriage
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Quotable Quotes
The good man understands what is right,
the bad man understands profit.
—Confucius
“The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad soil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds — where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough — a modest living— and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities.”
–Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
'He leaves us a lesson, which is to never accept any injustice.'
–The French President, François Hollande, speaking of Stéphane Hessel, dead at age 95.
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered…”
–Thomas Jefferson
Around the web…
Above the law
"The laws, Cicero wrote in the days of the Roman Republic, “are silent in time of war.” But what if the war has no end, no defined enemy, no defined territory? How can markets work if the financial behemoths are too big to fail and too big to jail? If the national security state has the power of life or death above the law, and Wall Street has the power to plunder beyond the law, in what way does this remain a nation of laws? " --Katrina van HeuvelRead it on WP
Waking From My Moral Coma
"It is the killing, it is the permanent war, it is our deranged national priorities. It is the system we live under which requires the serial deaths of all those innocents to maintain our economic health that should appall us. We sup upon the blood and bonemeal that is the byproduct of the idea that is America, and we sleep. And we sleep." -William Rivers PittRead it on Truthout
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Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition
Click image to access report.
Torture: A Laughing Matter?
The Parched Truth About American Jobs
By Jim Hightower | Otherwords.org
The recent good news about job creation obscures the bad news facing the nation’s middle class. At last, some excellent economic news for folks long-mired in the stagnant labor market.
“Jobs Spring Back,” exclaimed a typical headline on recent reports that 165,000 private-sector jobs were added in April. [...]