Russ McBee

As the sun finally begins to rise and banish the darkness of the Bush years, we continue to witness an alarming chain of eleventh-hour regulations emanating from the White House. The latest of those offenses against decency was published today: The Bush administration yesterday granted sweeping new protections to health workers who refuse to ...

Foreign Policy has a short but fascinating interview with former Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who was the chief architect of the 1995 Dayton Agreement, which ended the war in Bosnia. He discusses the recent arrest of the fugitive Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic, and its parallels with the recent indictment of Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan ...

A couple of days ago, the Pope apologized again, this time in Sydney, for the Catholic Church's global sex abuse scandal: Speaking in Sydney, where he is participating in World Youth Day celebrations, the pontiff called the abuses 'a grave betrayal of trust' that deserved condemnation and called for the victims to receive 'care and ...

The Pope said this in his 2007 Urbi et Orbi speech: Benedict said he was turning his thoughts this Christmas to victims of other injustices, citing women, children and the elderly, as well as refugees and victims of environmental disasters and religious and ethnic tensions. He said he hoped Christmas would bring consolation to ''those who are ...

This week, the UN's Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee (the ''Third Committee'') approved a resolution calling for a global moratorium on the death penalty; the resolution will go to the full General Assembly for consideration, possibly as soon as next month. Of course, the United States voted with the medieval contingent: The ...

This article provides an in-depth survey of the current state of international arms trading. A couple of choice quotes: Vast government subsidies are sought after in the pursuit of arms trading. US and European corporations receive enormous tax breaks and even lend money to other countries to purchase weapons from them. Therefore tax payers ...

One year ago today, President Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This malignant, perfidious law gives the president the authority to suspend habeas corpus for anyone he chooses. It also sanctifies the admissibility of evidence obtained through torture. For a full year now, our country has been deprived of one of its most ...

Finally: The American Psychological Association ruled Sunday that psychologists can no longer be associated with several interrogation techniques that have been used against terrorism detainees at U.S. facilities because the methods are immoral, psychologically damaging and counterproductive in eliciting useful information. Psychologists who ...

Jose Padilla was convicted yesterday on terrorism support charges, after spending five years in legal limbo. His guilt or innocence long ago stopped being the primary issue in this case; rather, the issue has been whether we as a society are willing to allow United States citizens to be ''disappeared'' into a military gulag and then tortured. The ...

One of the flashpoint issues of the 1965 Watts riot was the lack of a hospital in that inner-city LA district. As a result of the riots, Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital was built. Its recent failures of care and performance have made headlines; to make the headlines go away, the hospital has been shut down rather than being fixed. Now, ...