Local school board races used to be decided by local voters, but not anymore, at least in Los Angeles. Tuesday’s elections have attracted millions of dollars from outsiders who have a stake in the future of school reform in the country’s second-largest district. In fact, there is nothing ordinary about the races for three Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education:
Does anyone seriously doubt that, if America had the same national referendum system that Switzerland does, voters in the United States would vote just as aggressively as the Swiss have to curb CEO abuses?The Federal Palace of Switzerland, which houses parliament and other government offices. (Wikimedia Commons)
The State Department issued its draft environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline on Friday. While this report was mainly an environmental review, the State Department's final conclusion that "approval or denial of the proposed project is unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands, or on the amount of heavy crude oil refined in the Gulf Coast area" is completely at odds with the economic reality in Alberta at the moment.
I was in a military courtroom at Fort Meade in Maryland on Thursday as Pfc. Bradley Manning admitted giving classified government documents to WikiLeaks. The hundreds of thousands of leaked documents exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as government misconduct. A statement that Manning made to the court was a powerful and moving treatise on the importance of placing conscience above personal safety, the necessity of sacrificing careers and liberty for the public good, and the moral imperative of carrying out acts of defiance.
Two Sundays ago, I traveled to the nation’s capital to attend what was billed as “the largest climate rally in history” and I haven’t been able to get the experience -- or a question that haunted me -- out of my mind. Where was everybody?Forward on Climate rally in Washington, D.C., on February 17. (Flickr/Ted Eytan)
We cannot intimidate others into behaving well when we ourselves are misbehaving. Yet that is precisely what nations armed with nuclear weapons hope to do by censuring North Korea for its nuclear tests and sounding alarm bells over Iran's pursuit of enriched uranium.
Members of the Afghan Peace Volunteers gathered in protest outside the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission in Kabul in Sunday to protest the killing of two boys, aged 7 and 8, by NATO military forces. (Photo: Courtesy of Afghan Peace Volunteers)Two young Afghan boys herding cattle in Uruzgan Province of Afghanistan were mistakenly killed by NATO forces last week.
My story is no different from that of many other Palestinian young people who were born and have lived their whole lives under Israeli occupation. At 17, I was arrested for the first time, and jailed for two years. I was arrested again in my early 20s, at the height of the second intifada in Ramallah, during an Israeli invasion of numerous cities in the West Bank – what Israel called Operation Defensive Shield. I was sentenced to 30 years in prison on charges relating to my resistance to the occupation.
ordinary about the races for three Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education:
