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Behind Modi at Facebook
“This service requires its users to route all their traffic to ‘free websites’ through his servers, where the users’ identities are logged so that their traffic can be paid for by Facebook, rather than by them. So the first actual charge is that the poor will be comprehensively surveilled by Facebook, losing any shred of personal privacy, while the rich using the real Internet do not route all their traffic through Facebook.”
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Obama vs. Putin: Syria and Ukraine
“The silence in the chamber came because everything Obama ascribed to others perfectly describes U.S. behavior from the end of the Second World War until today. … Yet Obama on Monday was blaming Russia and China for the mess Washington has created, saying, ‘We see some major powers assert themselves in ways that contravene international law.'”
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Climate Victories: From Shell Arctic Drilling to China Policy
“We have 70-80 percent unemployment in our communities and the only way people can feed themselves is subsistence hunting; our main meat supply comes from the ocean, so drilling in the Arctic is a death sentence for our people. The lease sale area Shell was exploring is right smack in the middle of the North American salmon nursery — this is the last third of the world’s fish. We call for all oil companies to declare the Arctic off limits to drilling.”
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Is the UN Working for Peace?
“The UN needs to scale up and deploy all effective methods to protect civilians. By only focusing on military peacekeeping the summit does not consider effective unarmed methods like unarmed civilian protection (UCP). Over a dozen nongovernmental organizations are directly protecting civilians and deterring violence through nonviolent methods in some of the most violent places on the planet including South Sudan, Palestine and Colombia.”
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* China * Pope on Nukes
“The stirring condemnation of nuclear weapons by Pope Francis today at the United Nations and his call for their prohibition and complete elimination in compliance with promises made in the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), signed by the U.S. in 1970, should give new momentum to the current campaign to start negotiations on a ban treaty.”
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The Pope and Dorothy Day
“Pope Francis, you have condemned ISIS for genocide against Christians, but given the fact that the U.S. military is for the most part Christian with one-third of the force Catholic, it is Christians who have participated in the genocidal killing in predominantly Muslim countries during the last 24 years.”
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Pope’s Call to Stop Arms Trade
“The Pope’s recognition that arms sales can result in the spilling of ‘innocent blood’ is a far cry from the misleading language so often used to justify multi-billion dollar arms deals — that they promote ‘stability’ and are only for ‘defensive purposes.’ As the country that reaps the most money from the international arms trade, the United States bears a responsibility to play a leadership role in curbing weapons trading around the world.”
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Pope’s Blind Spots: * Militarism * Child Sex Abuse
The pope “speaks of some alleged ‘great sacrifice’ made by bishops because of the abuse and cover up crisis. What sacrifice? What bishop takes fewer vacations, drives a smaller car, does his own laundry or has been passed over for promotion because he’s shielding predators and endangering kids? None.”
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* Pope vs. Exxon? * Hunger Strike Against Pipelines and Fracking
“On Friday, Sept. 25, fasters, together with their supporters and leaders from several faiths, ‘will break bread in front of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in D.C. to end a dramatic 18-day fast undertaken to demand that FERC stop issuing permits for the pipelines, storage facilities and LNG export terminals that use fracked natural gas, and instead heed Pope Francis’s call to care for the Earth.'”
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Why is “Radical Pope” Canonizing an Enslaver of Native Americans?
“During his July visit to Bolivia, Pope Francis ‘apologized for the “grave sins” of colonialism against the native people of the Americas,’ USA Today’s Bill Theobald recently reported. ‘I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offense of the church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America,’ the pope said. Why then is Pope Francis canonizing Junípero Serra, the embodiment of crimes committed against native peoples in California?”
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“With a tiny staff, it has managed to place on the air and in newspapers, points of view otherwise excluded from the national debate.”
Howard Zinn