Virtual Issues

If the icy tropics of 700 million years ago were covered in dust, this could have helped melt the ice

Copenhagen Summit Must Reject Genocide Policy

Kabul, Afghanistan – An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates for sometimes weeks at a time and without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.

The site consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each lighted by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day, where detainees said that their only contact with another human being was at twice-daily interrogation sessions.

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Jail, anyone? Perhaps that’s too harsh, and at any rate premature, but is anyone ever going to be held accountable for the behind-the-scenes sweetheart deals that passed tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through the AIG shell game to the very banks that caused the financial meltdown? Or for the many other acts of double-dealing that left one out of three American homeowners owing much more than their houses were worth while the folks who swindled them were rewarded with hundreds of billions in public money?

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Pretoria – The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) ended one of Africa’s longest and complex civil wars, with nominal agreement reached on security, wealth sharing, and governance issues. But there are renewed fears that conflict could erupt again in the country as divisions between the north and the south deepen.

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Washington – The United Nations nuclear agency blasted Iran in a resolution Friday for obstructing investigations into its suspected nuclear-weapons program and demanded that the Islamic Republic stop enriching uranium at a once-secret facility.

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Boston – Is there such a thing as communications malpractice? If so, we might consider the case of Women v. the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.

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As conglomerate Dubai World delays debt payments, most analysts look for Arab Monetary Fund to step in to avert a crisis in financial markets. That’s not likely, though, until Sunday.

New York – How can Dubai, a tiny emirate on the Persian Gulf, shake financial markets from Shanghai to New York?

The answer is familiar to tens of thousands of Americans struggling to make payments on their mortgages or credit cards: too much debt.

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With Obama pushing a huge troop escalation in Afghanistan, history may well repeat itself with a vengeance. And it’s not just the apt comparison to LBJ, who destroyed his presidency on the battlefields of Vietnam with an escalation that delivered power to Nixon and the GOP.

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Buenos Aires, Argentina – In July 1977, when Ana Maria Careaga was just sixteen years old, she was kidnapped off a major intersection in Buenos Aires by forces from Argentina’s last dictatorship. She was taken to what she later found out was "Club Atletico," a torture center and secret prison in a federal police station just blocks from the bustling downtown. According to court documents, for three and a half months, she was savagely tortured – beaten, hung by her wrists and ankles, and electrocuted.

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