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By Karen Armstrong $18.45
Sam Harris $11.53
$35
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 AP/Khalid Mohammed)
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Two days of discussion over Iran’s nuclear program ended in uncertainty Thursday, with Iran maintaining it has the right to enrich nuclear fuel and the lead negotiator for the European Union stating vaguely that “significant problems remain” with the Iranian position. Negotiations are set to resume in June.
Posted on May 24, 2012
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By Patrick Chappatte, The International Herald Tribune —
Posted on May 6, 2012
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Rep. Dennis Kucinich takes “nothing good” from the president’s visit to Afghanistan, Robert Scheer on China, Occupiers and organizers, and California’s autism unfairness.
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 Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Rep. Dennis Kucinich takes “nothing good” from the president’s visit to Afghanistan, Robert Scheer on China, Occupiers and organizers, and California’s autism unfairness.
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 AP/Shannon Stapleton
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By Robert Scheer — We do not care a whit now—nor have we ever cared—about their human rights or any other aspect of their lives as long as they satiate our unbridled appetites.
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 foto.bulle (CC BY 2.0)
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Workers at a Chinese factory owned by the electronics manufacturer Foxconn threatened to leap from the roof of a building in Wuhan in a protest over wages and working conditions, echoing the tragedy of laborers who jumped to their deaths for similar reasons two years earlier at other company plants.
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 dilmarousseff (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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By Pepe Escobar, TomDispatch —
Here’s the multi-trillion dollar question: Does the emergence of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa as economic powers signal that we have truly entered a new multipolar world?
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 s4n8eep (CC-BY)
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Chinese Internet users were prevented from accessing all foreign websites for about an hour Thursday morning, prompting questions as to whether the problem resulted from a technical failure or was a test of the government’s censorship system.
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 carst (CC-BY)
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Health experts say the coming decades will see an epidemic of asbestos-related diseases in Asian countries where the material is still used in construction. China and India, with their rapidly developing economies and huge populations, are expected to be the hardest hit.
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 Photo by ctj71081 (CC-BY)
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By William Pfaff — Is the United States in decline? It’s clear to anyone who has been to Europe or the major Asian states recently, where everything works beautifully, even if Europe’s debts are not paid off.
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Throughout the recession, Apple’s growth has brought hope to many; China’s creative class and human capital cannot catch up to the U.S.’; meanwhile, Western intervention in Afghanistan has obviously failed, but by how much? These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on Apr 3, 2012
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 INFZM.com via Engadget
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Electronics manufacturer Foxconn has taken some considerable hits to its public image in recent years as reports about shocking labor conditions at the Apple supplier’s factories cropped up with more frequency than new iPad product launches. On Sunday, Foxconn’s chairman said that the company is changing its ways.
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 Flickr / PanARMENIAN_Photo
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Former United Nations secretary-general and current U.N. and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan said Tuesday that his bid to get Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (above) and his administration to accept a peace plan Annan proposed has been successful. Enacting it, however, is another matter.
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 AP/The Public Theater, Stan Barouh
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Even after “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” Mike Daisey’s one-man staged attack on Apple’s manufacturing practices, turned out to be troublingly fact-challenged, the monologist bafflingly continued to stand by his play for a time, chalking the liberties he took with the truth up to a kind of dramatic license. No longer.
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“This American Life” host Ira Glass gave monologist Mike Daisey every opportunity to explain the lies in his “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” performance, which became the basis for one of the radio show’s most popular and talked about episodes. Daisey’s rationalization for lying turns out to be, like much of his show, bullshit.
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 Dave Morris, jenspie3 (CC-BY)
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A new report predicts urban air pollution will become the No. 1 cause of premature death in the coming decades, beating out poor sanitation and dirty drinking water to take more than 3.5 million lives per year.
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 AP / Richard Drew
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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton paid a visit to the United Nations Security Council on Monday to appeal once again to the international community about the crisis in Syria, making pointed remarks in the general direction of China and Russia as she urged all member nations to get with the regime change program, and soon.
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 Gamma Man (CC-BY)
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By Ellen Brown, Truthout —
Conventional wisdom holds that government bureaucrats are bad businesspeople. But around the world, the many countries with strong public banking sectors generally have strong, stable economies.
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 AP / Vincent Yu
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It seems the voice of the people has been heard in the Chinese village of Wukan, where residents voted to elect a committee of local leaders after winning a protracted battle for self-determination against Chinese authorities.
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A look inside Foxconn gives us a new perspective on workers’ conditions; one solution to the “right to be forgotten” dilemma may be to implement mandatory online insurance; meanwhile, a Columbia grad in New York has been converting pay phone booths into libraries. These discoveries and more after the jump.
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 FreedomHouse (CC-BY)
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Fear and bloodshed remain a constant in the Syrian capital of Damascus, where at least one person was killed and several were injured Saturday when security forces opened fire at the funeral of three youths killed Friday during a protest against President Bashar al-Assad.
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What is it about this particular election cycle that’s causing Republican candidates’ fortunes to rise and fall so rapidly the pundits are practically getting whiplash? And does our nation’s debt problem have more to do with defense spending or so-called entitlement programs?
Posted on Feb 17, 2012
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By David Sirota — For the last two decades, we’ve heard many myths purporting to explain the loss of American manufacturing jobs.
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By Eugene Robinson — China, for better or worse, is a serious country. The United States had better start acting like one.
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 How I See Life (CC-BY)
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By Noam Chomsky, TomDispatch —
In the years of America’s conscious, self-inflicted decline at home, “losses” have continued to mount elsewhere.
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 emilio labrador (CC-BY)
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By Noam Chomsky, TomDispatch —
Significant anniversaries are sometimes ignored. At the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam and later all of Indochina.
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 bbc.co.uk
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On Tuesday, Barack Obama played host to China’s Vice President Xi Jinping at the White House to discuss trade, human rights and other diplomatic topics. Why all the fuss over a VP? For one, Xi was returning a gesture that his American counterpart, Joe Biden, recently made.
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 mayu** (CC-BY)
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Chinese authorities demonstrated their continued disregard for free speech and human rights as they sentenced a democratic dissident to seven years in jail for sending a poem he had written and other messages over the Internet, the man’s son told reporters. The verdict cited Zhu Yufu’s online calls for a democratic political movement, the son said.
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 AP / Local Coordination Committees in Syria
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Bashar al-Assad’s government rained more than 200 bombs on the opposition-controlled city of Homs on Wednesday, killing an unconfirmed 27 people and demolishing homes. The Russian and Chinese governments maintained their policy of nonintervention while leaders of Western and Arab nations scrambled to decide how, if at all, to get involved.
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 AP / Kin Cheung
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We’ve learned a lot in the last few weeks about the inhumane treatment suffered by the workers who polish, assemble and build Apple’s iPhones and iPads. Troubled consumers have generously offered to pay more for those products to offset the cost to Apple should it choose to treat its workers fairly, but there’s really no need. (more)
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 DoD / MC1 Chad J. McNeeley
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By William Pfaff — Americans might do better to give up their China obsession and go back to their traditional vision of a European threat.
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 Elliott Brown (CC-BY)
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The BBC reports that while the United States and the U.K. have made a habit of buying too-big-to-fail banks and then looking the other way, the safest banks in the world aren’t just owned but operated by civil governments.
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 AP / Local Coordination Committees in Syria
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As the crisis in Syria reached new levels of urgency Friday, the United Nations Security Council met to work up a resolution pressuring Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down. The U.N. group faced a formidable challenge, however, from a prominent and permanent member, according to the BBC.
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 AP / Matt Rourke
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By Bill Boyarsky — With financial and political interests ranging from Las Vegas to Israel to China, Sheldon Adelson, who is bankrolling the super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich, is a powerful illustration of the dangers of unlimited campaign contributions.
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 Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: David Cay Johnston reveals the hidden scandal lurking in Romney’s tax returns; Robert Scheer and Kathy Kiely shine sunlight on super PACs, and Doug Henwood deflates China’s real estate bubble.
Posted on Jan 27, 2012
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: David Cay Johnston reveals the hidden scandal lurking in Romney’s tax returns; Robert Scheer and Kathy Kiely shine sunlight on super PACs, and Doug Henwood deflates China’s real estate bubble.
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 Yutaka Tsutano (CC-BY)
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Deadly conditions, long hours, cramped quarters and little pay. Reports of Apple suppliers’ derelict manufacturing practices and their devastating effects on Chinese factory workers have been appearing in the press for a while now. After an explosion that killed a supervisor in charge of iPad construction in Chengdu, The New York Times adds a new exhibit to the case.
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 AP / Saul Loeb
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By Robert Scheer — I get angry because betrayal by the “good guys” for whom I have ended up voting has become the norm.
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 Wikimedia Commons / Raymond (CC-BY-SA)
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Savvy Truthdig readers (as if there were any other kind) already know that the drug business is highly political here in the States, but the story of the Chinese malaria remedy artemisinin takes it up several notches on the international stage with a saga spanning several decades. Oh, and Chairman Mao is also involved.
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 Gage Skidmore (CC-BY-SA)
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People often knock polls, but in the case of Jon Huntsman, the numbers didn’t lie. After trailing most candidates for the majority of the race, Huntsman has reportedly decided to quit the stump and endorse fellow Mormon and alleged moderate Mitt Romney. Updated
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 bbc.co.uk
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Republicans weren’t the only ones irked at our nation’s leader this week. President Obama has also ruffled some feathers in the Chinese government with his newly hatched military strategy, which he announced in a rare news conference at the Pentagon on Thursday, and which apparently strikes the Chinese as a potentially unwelcome display of U.S. prowess on their side of the globe.
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 AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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On Thursday, President Obama dropped in at the Pentagon to outline some sizable changes he’s making to America’s defense strategy in this last year of his first elected term. His plans will no doubt lay him open to criticism on the campaign trail, but at least it seems to make room for the possibility of focusing funds on the home front.
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 dominikfoto (CC-BY)
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The name Steve Jobs has been sweet on the lips of techno-capitalist fankids pining for a cultural hero since long before the Apple CEO succumbed to cancer late last year. Since his death, an author and an actor have taken some of the first shots at shaping his legacy. With an eye on the man’s cruelty toward his employees at home and abroad, n+1 reviewer Gary Sernovitz tries to fill in the blanks.
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 U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Nathanael Callon
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This colonialism thing ain’t what it used to be. Without spending the hundreds of billions of dollars and countless lives the United States has invested in the effort to determine Afghanistan’s future, the Chinese government managed to swoop in and walk away with as many as 87 million barrels of the country’s oil.
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An Israeli woman is relegated to the back of the bus by a group of Orthodox Jews; New York celebs party with the Occupiers; and studying fish may be the key to understanding why uninformed voters are a necessary evil in our democracy. These discoveries and more after the jump.
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 Fanghong (CC-BY-SA)
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Villagers in Southern China have accused authorities of seizing their land and killing a village representative in custody. The BBC reports that residents of Wukan in Guangdong province, one of China’s red-hot economic zones, are in a standoff with police.
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