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With the nuclear crisis in Japan, suddenly the safety of nuclear energy is of interest everywhere. What will the United States do under Obama? If forgotten history is any measure, perhaps not nearly enough.
Anyone watching the devastation in Japan must certainly wonder what we as individuals should be doing to help. For some insight, we turn to Richard Walden, a most unusual leader of a most unusual humanitarian relief group, called Operation USA. His organization’s efforts are well known to WhoWhatWhy, and they tend to be practical and modest and effective. In a just-published item on Huffington Post, Richard cuts against the conventional mass reaction to a crisis like this. We reprint his remarks here in their entirety:
When I wrote a piece the other day about a scandal rocking National Public Radio over “inappropriate” comments NPR fundraising executives make on edited hidden-camera footage, I wondered whether raw footage might provide some useful context. I did not know at the time that such raw footage was there to be scrutinized.
Today’s edition of Worth Reading includes two videos “Worth Watching”. Sometimes a picture, or in this case film, is worth a thousand words. Warning: The video on the conflict in Libya contains graphic images.
The uproar over indiscretions by NPR executives misses the real story: what really did the NPR folks do wrong? And who is behind the attempts to embarrass the network, and why?
Corporations are hitting record profits this year so where are all the jobs? Despite massive tax incentives for job creation, companies like Verizon and GE are cutting back their workforce rather than increasing it. Perhaps it’s time to provide them with some disincentives to turn the tide for America’s unemployed.
Anyone concerned about excessive government spending—and looking to make cuts to be financially prudent—would look at the biggest cost categories. Right? Wrong.
In all the talk about the outrageous salaries and benefits of teachers and government employees, how much discussion is there about the budget for the military and the spy establishment? Well, um, almost none at all.
Next Mideast revolts predicted. The Koch Brothers Love…the ACLU(?) And FYI on GMOS.
Iraq invasion skeptics, listen up. You’re right: it was always about oil.
Now the other shoe is dropping – in India of all places. That’s where the oil and money connection back to Iraq can be found.
The evidence is buried in a New York Times article headlined “BP to Pay $7.2 Billion for Stake in Oil Fields in India.”
With the recent events in the Middle East and the union busting in Wisconsin, Americans can learn something useful about fighting back from our neighbors across the pond. In the UK, a group of ordinary citizens decided to disrupt business as usual: By spreading the word on Twitter and holding nation-wide protests of the largest cell phone provider Vodafone, they demanded the company pay up for billions in taxes owed.
While the US government expresses outrage over the brutality of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi toward his own people, we’re missing a complex but significant wrinkle that ties Qaddafi to America’s cover-up of the true path to war in Iraq.
In May, 2009, a man named Ibn Shaikh al-Libi supposedly committed suicide while being held in a Libyan jail. Al-Libi is a deeply, deeply interesting fellow. Back in 2002, he was tortured by Egypt under US direction. It appears that the reason the US government had him tortured was not to stop some imminent attack on the United States, but to generate alleged—and false— links between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that could justify invading Iraq.
It seems unusual for a staid, respected publication (one that has received three National Magazine Awards in just this past decade) to start treating a celebrated journalist (who himself has won two National Magazine Awards in just this past decade) as if he were nothing more than a paranoid crank. [Read the rest]