News Day

The BBC just told top managers to stop inviting crackpots to give “the other side” of the climate change debate. The Telegraph reported that the BBC Trust firmly rejected an “‘over-rigid application of editorial guidelines on impartiality’ which sought to give the ‘other side’ of the argument, even if that viewpoint was widely dismissed.” Continue reading →

The plight of tens of thousands of children coming from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala is a political football, with slogans substituting for understanding. On July 9, AP published Young immigrants or refugees: 5 things you need to know — but their list omitted crucial information. Here’s essential information you need to know, but wouldn’t find in the AP article. Continue reading →

When I was young, sex education was known as talking about “the facts of life” or “the birds and the bees.” The metaphors might have been a little strange, but today’s birds-and-bees news is all about the facts of life. If we don’t do something — now — to protect the birds and the bees, the facts are that we could lose both their lives and our own.   Continue reading →

The European Court of Justice just made it legal to bury the past. Got an inconvenient disorderly conduct conviction? A history of domestic abuse? Politically inconvenient statements you made ten years ago about — pick one — women’s whining, African American athletic ability, gay marriage? Or maybe just photos of drunken spring break at Fort Lauderdale during your college years? Continue reading →

Never has the promise of the Statue of Liberty seemed more hollow than this summer, as mobs scream invective at frightened children fleeing their home countries to what they hoped would be safe haven in the United States. The contrast between the poem at the Statue of Liberty and the continuing Republican blockage of immigration reform, coupled with the angry hostility toward the waves of Central American child refugees could not be more stark. Continue reading →

Long ago and not so far away, I celebrated the Fourth of July religiously each year. I was a wholehearted patriot, deeply convinced that my country was committed to liberty and justice for all. Even after the news intruded, with realities of segregation and racism and war, I wanted to believe that the real United States was the country of Martin Luther King, Jr., and not the country of Strom Thurmond. I believed that we would win the struggles for civil rights and for fair pay for workers and farmers and farmworkers and for an end to wars. Continue reading →

Need more than sunshine to get the week off to a good start? Try these four good news stories:  Continue reading →

Alberto Monserrate has it right:  Continue reading →

Henry Louis Gates Jr. watched Freedom Summer on television from his hometown of Piedmont, West Virginia. He was thirteen years old that summer. I was, too, and I also watched Freedom Summer on television, from another rural community half a continent away. Continue reading →

End homelessness — a couple of years ago, that sounded to me like an impossible project. Now it seems within the realm of possibility. Continue reading →