Truthout

The conviction of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt is unprecedented. Never has a previous head of state been convicted of genocide or crimes against humanity in his own country. Members of the judiciary, including Claudia Paz y Paz, the first female Attorney General of the country, courageously pursued the court case in spite of numerous threats against them and their families and efforts by the current president to halt the proceedings. With evidence that the United States government under Reagan and the current president of Guatemala were complicit, one might even hope this event will start a chain reaction of accountability and turn the tide on globalism.

However, it was the hundred or so Ixil Mayan witnesses, people who barely escaped the 1982-83 atrocities of the government that tens of thousands suffered, whose courage brought forth the court’s verdict. A population of less than 1% of the country, they suffered through the unimaginable horrors perpetrated by the government’s militia and supported by American money, weapons and consultants. Declassified CIA documents reveal knowledge of the atrocities and decisions to do nothing about them. Like "Indians" throughout the Americas, the victims were not combatants for the most part, but peaceful villagers who were massacred  under mandates from the oligarchy, essentially to protect its and the US investors who backed it by preventing land reform by the Indigenous Peoples of Guatemala.

The following petition, signed by over a dozen experts on Latin America and the media, was sent today to Margaret Sullivan, Public Editor of The New York Times:

May 14, 2013

Dear Margaret Sullivan,

In a recent column (4/12/13), you observed:

Although individual words and phrases may not amount to very much in the great flow produced each day, language matters. When news organizations accept the government’s way of speaking, they seem to accept the government’s way of thinking. In The Times, these decisions carry even more weight.

In light of this comment we encourage you to compare The New York Times’s characterization of the leadership of the late Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and that of Roberto Micheletti and Porfirio Lobo in Honduras.

Despite media exposes and a public backlash, a lot of meat today continues to be treated with gasses to keep it looking red. Like mercury in tuna, just because the risks are exposed and the public is outraged doesn’t mean the producers change anything. They know the furor will die down and the public will forget.

Treating meat with carbon monoxide keeps its oxymyoglobin, what makes it red, from turning brown or gray. In defending the use of gasses to keep meat looking fresh, the meat industry says that meat turning brown is no different than apples turning brown when exposed to the air–a harmless discoloration that does not affect wholesomeness. Right. But the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service and the European Commission’s Scientific Committee on Food have voiced concerns about meat food appearing fresher than it is because of the artificial hues.

The Boston Bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is arguably most hated man in America.  He also may be the man who hates America most.  He also believed in America as much as he hated it.  He believed in America even more than some other Americans, who claim they love America, believe in America.

He believed in the Superman myth, the one that proclaimed belief in "Truth, Justice, and the American Way."

But let us put Tsarnaev aside for a moment.  Let us look at the Superman myth and the American way: Superman believed the American Way is embodied in the Sixth Amendment.  

It's rare for news media to recycle headliners. A few years ago, the title "the house of horrors" was used to describe the gruesome findings ofeleven African-American women who had been murdered and hidden in a Cleveland home by Anthony Sowell. This week, as the case of Ariel Castro unfolds with details of how he abducted, raped, and held three women captive in his Cleveland home, the "house of horrors" cloud has once again descended on the Cleveland skyline.

The questions and inquiries as to how so many women went missing and were held in common houses, plotted on ordinary streets with everyday activity bustling around them has raised intense questions over the consequences of the United States cultural proclivity to live in, as Connie Schultz describes, "a community of strangers." How did these women disappear without a trace? How did community fail these women?

The environmental challenges we face today, from spreading deserts to rising oceans, compel us to reconsider the conventional concepts of growth and recognize that they cannot easily be reconciled with the dangerous implications of runaway consumption and unlimited development.

Above all, we must get away from a speculative economy born of an irrational dependence on finance, which has becoming increasingly unstable as digital technology accelerates and financial transactions take place without any objective review. We must return to a stable and long-term economy. In part, that process concerns the restoration of regulation on the banking system, but the change must also involve the very conception of finance and banking. Finance must be aimed at stable, long-term projects which have relevance for ordinary people.

Corn is in 3 out of every 4 products you buy at the grocery store. There's some things you should know about it. Here's a link to an info-graphic on it, and the sources for that info-graphic are at the bottom of it. ...This is segment two from episode 4 of the Moment of Clarity show.

A carpet cleaning service that got bad reviews on Yelp should not be able to use the courts to find out the identities of its critics, Public Citizen told the Virginia Court of Appeals today.

Further, a lower court ruling that Yelp must provide identifying information about seven critics of the company, Hadeed Carpet Cleaning Inc., should be reversed, according to the brief, available here.

Although many courts throughout the country have adopted standards that spell out when anonymous Internet critics can be identified and when they can't, Virginia courts have not. If no legal standard exists, or if a lax standard exists, businesses and their lawyers could use litigation to intimidate dissatisfied consumers into silence.

The House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats gathered information today regarding concerns being raised about imports of food from China that are entering the U.S.

"We don't trust, for good reason, the Chinese to supply ingredients for our dog and cat food," said hearing witness Mark A. Kastel, Senior Farm Policy Analyst at The Cornucopia Institute. "Why," Kastel asked, "should we trust Chinese exporters for the food that we are feeding our children and families?"

A light look on the distorted perception of reality in which one seeks for meaning and fulfilment through consumption, while ignoring the consequences.

Sound design by Isaac Ray.