Your daily news round-up
The new President is busy overturning close to a decade of insane and borderline-psychotic policies:
- A lift on the ban on stem cell research.
- Dropping the global gag rule.
- Banning 'enhanced interrogation' and rendition - or as we like to call it, torture and kidnapping.
- Pledging to close Guantanamo Bay, and all ghost prisons.
Other stuff has also happened that shock me beyond words:
The good:
- Laurent Nkunda is captured in Rwanda. If you don't know who General Nkunda is, he's a born-again Christian who happens to be the leader of the rebel armies doing their fair of raping, killing and mutilating across the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC has requested that Nkunda be extradited. The worry now is that a deal may be struck or, worse, that he may be executed. Neither one of these options fills me with joy. But not having him running about with the killing and the mutilating and the raping? Plus, there is a small but still present chance that he might be put on trial. Which - would be a blessed miracle indeed.
The bad:
- New evidence of Gaza child deaths - what's shocking about this is not that children died (because when you wage a war in the middle of a city you're going to primarily kill civilians, let's not kid ourselves), but that Israel is still insisting that people were shooting at them. Looking at several of their targets - UN facilities, schools, groups of children - that's starting to wear a little thin. I'd like a real answer - and an investigation - of this.
- UN accuses Israel of using white phosphorous. For those who don't know what phosphorus does, imagine something that clings to you, that can't be removed, and that will stick until it burns right through you, through skin and muscle and bone. Now throw that stuff at a bunch of civilians, and watch even the smallest wound kill. The reports that this might have been used against civilians horrifying. I'm going to be following the investigation of this very closely indeed.
- Artic melt 20 years ahead of climate models - US researchers claim to have found evidence that accelerated melting has crossed a "tipping point" from which there is no going back.
***
Something not related to the Real World - and we can all be grateful -
Nextwave slash, by apiphile. I leave you with the image of the Captain helping Aaron try out his latest attachment. And I run away in the opposite direction.
- A lift on the ban on stem cell research.
- Dropping the global gag rule.
- Banning 'enhanced interrogation' and rendition - or as we like to call it, torture and kidnapping.
- Pledging to close Guantanamo Bay, and all ghost prisons.
Other stuff has also happened that shock me beyond words:
The good:
- Laurent Nkunda is captured in Rwanda. If you don't know who General Nkunda is, he's a born-again Christian who happens to be the leader of the rebel armies doing their fair of raping, killing and mutilating across the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC has requested that Nkunda be extradited. The worry now is that a deal may be struck or, worse, that he may be executed. Neither one of these options fills me with joy. But not having him running about with the killing and the mutilating and the raping? Plus, there is a small but still present chance that he might be put on trial. Which - would be a blessed miracle indeed.
The bad:
- New evidence of Gaza child deaths - what's shocking about this is not that children died (because when you wage a war in the middle of a city you're going to primarily kill civilians, let's not kid ourselves), but that Israel is still insisting that people were shooting at them. Looking at several of their targets - UN facilities, schools, groups of children - that's starting to wear a little thin. I'd like a real answer - and an investigation - of this.
- UN accuses Israel of using white phosphorous. For those who don't know what phosphorus does, imagine something that clings to you, that can't be removed, and that will stick until it burns right through you, through skin and muscle and bone. Now throw that stuff at a bunch of civilians, and watch even the smallest wound kill. The reports that this might have been used against civilians horrifying. I'm going to be following the investigation of this very closely indeed.
- Artic melt 20 years ahead of climate models - US researchers claim to have found evidence that accelerated melting has crossed a "tipping point" from which there is no going back.
***
Something not related to the Real World - and we can all be grateful -
Nextwave slash, by apiphile. I leave you with the image of the Captain helping Aaron try out his latest attachment. And I run away in the opposite direction.