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By Ryan Quinn
$14.99
By Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar
$ 19.77
$20
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Abode of Chaos
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Physicists worldwide are majorly bummed to learn that the new particle discovered this year that supposedly meant a big change in the way we understand the building blocks of our universe is merely “the simplest—and most boring—variety of Higgs boson.”
Posted on Nov 14, 2012
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Wikimedia Commons
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Do you know the story of the Higgs boson? It is also called the “God particle” in scientific circles, although certain conservatives would probably not approve, and it has been a kind of physicists’ Holy Grail for decades.
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payvand.com
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American diplomats are gearing up to carefully broach the topic of Tehran’s nuclear program with their Iranian counterparts during a summit on the subject in Geneva on Thursday, thus potentially going further than President Obama had been able to venture in earlier negotiation efforts.
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Clearly, several dozen delegates at the United Nations anti-racism conference in Geneva, Switzerland, disagreed with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s assessment of Israel as a “racist government” on Monday.
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AP photo / Nam Y. Huh
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By Chris Hedges — Israel and the United States will together boycott the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Geneva. Racism, an endemic feature of Israeli and American society, is not, we have decided, open for international inspection. It’s times like this President Obama would do well to heed the sermons of his former pastor.
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Flickr / mknobil
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World AIDS Day turns 20 today, and while we still don’t have a vaccine, researchers continue to make lifesaving breakthroughs. A team at the World Health Organization in Geneva recently came up with a “thought experiment” that, according to a mathematical model, could end the AIDS epidemic in Africa in only a decade.
Posted on Dec 1, 2008
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Wikimedia/Efloch
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He might have steered clear of last week’s Democratic National Convention, claiming that politicians were the proper stars of that show, but George Clooney didn’t miss his chance to charm some $900K out of American supporters of Barack Obama at a fundraiser in Switzerland on Tuesday.
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CNN’s ubiquitous anchor Wolf Blitzer point-blanked Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney last weekend about what exactly constitutes torture and whether techniques like waterboarding are ever defensible, but Romney deferred to the popular national security rationale, implying that in “ticking time bomb” circumstances, a president may elect to use certain unpopular techniques.
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The International Committee of the Red Cross will contact the White House to address concerns over U.S. torture policy’s compliance with the Geneva Conventions.
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When Bush asserts that the Geneva Convention is vague, because it prohibits “outrages upon human dignity,” the host of “The Daily Show” tees off.
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NPR/Patrick Kovarik
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In an interview with NPR’s “Morning Edition,” former President Bill Clinton vigorously argued against Bush’s torture plans, citing both moral and practical reasons: “We have a system of laws here where nobody should be above the law, and you don’t need blanket advanced approval for blanket torture.”
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On Monday, Stephen Colbert went after Bushs proposed re-imagining of the Geneva Convention by inviting the president to come on the Report and demonstrate his preferred interrogation techniques. Mocking the presidents assertion that the treaty banning torture lacks clarity, Colbert observed: I personally think the image of the president saying specifically what, to him, is not an outrage on human dignity will make everyone see his position very clearly….
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The AP is reporting that the president is transferring 14 key terrorist leaders, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, above, from secret CIA custody to the U.S. military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to be prepared for eventual trials. The prisoners will apparently be afforded some rights consistent with the Geneva conventions.
Yeah, well, Bush also signed a bill in December outlawing the torture of detainees, and then made a “signing statement” announcing his intention to flout that law. So excuse us for being cynical about the president’s motives and intentions here.
UPDATE: Former DOJ lawyer and law prof Marty Lederman says Bush’s new bill actually authorizes “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
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Associated Press
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Yielding to pressure from humanitarian groups, Congress and the Supreme Court, the U.S. Army will release a new field manual that affords all detainees protection from torture under the Geneva Convention. The new document will ban several ?interrogation? methods that have drawn criticism, including simulated drowning and the use of dogs to terrorize detainees.
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The Water Torture--Facsimile of a woodcut in J. Damhoudre's "Praxis Rerum Criminalium:"
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Christine Axsmith, a software contractor for the CIA, was fired when she posted a blog entry to the agency’s closed network stating her opposition to torture. The post started like this: “Waterboarding is Torture and Torture is Wrong.” Such a sad confirmation of our government’s dismal human rights policies that so obvious a statement qualifies as grounds for termination.
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From antiwar.com
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The White House said this morning that every prisoner in Gitmo and in U.S. military custody everywhere is entitled to Geneva Convention protections. Bush spokesman Tony Snow claimed that this apparent about-face is “not really a reversal of policy,” while admitting that it stems directly from the Supreme Court’s striking down of Bush’s military tribunals.
Reminder: This is far from total victory. Constitutional expert Glenn Greenwald reminds us that the Hamdan ruling also removed any conceivable argument to support Bush’s illegal wiretapping programs, and we haven’t heard about any policy shift on that front….
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Specifically, today’s Supreme Court ruling held that the president overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees.
But more important, Think Progress interprets the ruling to mean that “the Authorization for the Use of Military Force—issued by Congress in the days after 9/11—is not a blank check for the administration.”
Also, SCOTUSblog says the ruling means that the Geneva Convention does apply to the conflict with Al Qaeda, and consequently “this almost certainly means that the CIA’s interrogation tactics of waterboarding and hypothermia (and others) violate the War Crimes Act.”
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Glaciers Are Melting Slowly but Surely
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