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bbc / Christopher Landau , BBC Religious Affairs Correspondent If ever a religious movement has been defined in the public imagination by its depiction in a novel, it is the Catholic group Opus Dei. Dan Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code portrayed a mysterious, cult-like organisation, shrouded from the wider world. Opus Dei insists the reality is very different and I was given a rare chance to see the wide variety of initiatives they undertake in Rome. Less than a year after the enclave of South Ossetia erupted in war, this tinder box of the Caucasus is primed to flare up again, writes Shaun Walker Friday, 3 July 2009  Russian troops patrol Tskhinvali in South Ossetia last August, after the war between Russia and Georgia It’s easy to see how things could spiral out of control: the two sides are braced for combat. At Ergneti on Georgia’s border with South Ossetia, Georgian military police stand guard behind high barricades made of sandbags and two metre-high slabs of concrete. Out of sight barely 20 metres away, the forces of South Ossetia and Russia are mustered behind barricades of their own, their national flags fluttering. Everyone is appropriately outraged that the former head of the CIA unit which hunted Bin Laden for almost a decade – Michael Scheur – told Glenn Beck:
But people aren’t putting this in context. In fact, many Neocons have also stated a desperate yearning for another attack on America (and see this). But there is another story here as well. Mark Weisbrot | guardian.co.uk The Obama administration’s condemnation of the coup in Honduras has been lukewarm compared to the rest of the world The military coup that overthrew Honduras’s elected president, Manuel Zelaya, brought unanimous international condemnation. But some country’s responses have been more reluctant than others, and Washington’s ambivalence has begun to raise suspicions about what the US government is really trying to accomplish in this situation.
Danger Room | Wired.com / Noah Shachtman Mechanical engineer and defense entrepreneur Regina Dugan has been named the new director of Darpa, the Pentagon’s premier research arm. Dugan will now be in charge of more than $3.2 billion of high-risk science and technology projects — everything from thinking computers to shape-shifting machines to soldier telepathy. Monday, after the military coup in Honduras. Limbaugh went on the air and said this:
Goldman Sachs has played a crucial role in creating every market bubble since the 1920s — and has profited from not only the bubbles, but from the crash that followed as well, says a new expose in Rolling Stone magazine. An article in the July 9-23 issue of the magazine, written by Matt Taibbi, lists five asset bubbles that the 140-year-old investment bank helped create — and one that Taibbi asserts the firm is currently working to make happen. The five bubbles the article says Goldman was central to creating are the Wall Street stock bubble in the 1920s, which led to the Great Depression; the tech-stock bubble of the late 1990s, which ended in the 2001 recession; the housing bubble of the past decade, which resulted in the current economic crisis; the oil price run-up last summer, when oil shot up to $140 a barrel, likely helping tilt the entire world into recession; and what Taibbi describes as “rigging the bailout,” when Goldman Sachs’ well-placed alumni inside the U.S. government engineered last fall’s bank bailout in such a way that the company profited massively. BuzzFlash.org
When I went to study Spanish in Guatemala in 2002, I only had a basic knowledge of the 36-year civil war that had, until recently, ravaged the small Central American nation. My instructor — in the process of explaining reflexive verbs, strangely enough — told me that Guatemala invented a special use of the word “disappear.” In Guatemala, the government could “disappear” you, and no one would ever hear from you again. But my instructor was wrong. The U.S. military “invented” that. They taught Guatemalans, Chileans, Salvadorans and even Hondurans how to disappear people who were considered a threat to their power. They taught soldiers all over Latin America how to assassinate, torture, imprison without charge, and carry out mass murder. They organized these soldiers into death squads. And the school in which they taught all of this is still around today, albeit with a little name change. It’s known as the School of the Americas (although the U.S. military renamed it the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Operation), and its fingerprints are all over the recent coup d’etat in Honduras. |
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