It rained last night, and more coming. In some ways, this is good news, because it means we don’t have to pay so much to irrigate our “dry season” crop. But it is bad news for the south, which is still recovering from the devestating storm that killed over a thousand people..
Superficially, the storm makes […]

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The NYTimes has an article about problems with the Global fund to fight AIDS.
It seems that they checked the books and found some of the money was stolen or diverted, and as a result, a lot of European donors are not giving any more money until the problem is cleared up.
You want honesty at […]

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Whenever I try to give credit to Ronald Reagan for participating in the fall of the Soviet Union, I often hear that its fall was an inevitability, and it just so happened to occur on Reagan’s watch. I have to point out to them that Reagan was the first President to come along with an […]

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It’s been 8 months since Arab Spring revolution swept Egypt and led to the end of Mubarak’s regime.
The uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak in February has hammered the economy and sparked a wave of sectarian and other violence that the ruling army and its interim cabinet has struggled to control.
Fearing the radical Islamic movement of […]

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A lot of Republican bloggers in the US are rolling their eyes up in mockery at the report that President Obama plans to send in US troops to fight the so called “Lord’s Resistance army” in Uganda.
A typical response is this, from the National Review Blog The Corner:
This is even crazier than getting involved in […]

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Debates on whether aid works, how much aid budgets should be and how they are spent ought not to be the only focus, says the India800 Foundation, a charity that will present its work at the House of Lords in London on Monday. […]

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What can only be described as a North Korean regime’s propaganda video is being promoted by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a U.S. government agency charged with providing uncensored radio, TV, and Internet news to countries without free media, BBG Watch, a nongovernmental citizen watch group reported. Read From BBG website: Pyongyang is a […]

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It was a cute photo, so I place it on my blog. a great photo of a happy young teenager holding a water sprayer, somewhat wet herself, and smiling happily.
There is enough bad news in the world, so I like to post stuff that reminds us that not all of life is war and […]

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My summer reading this year kicked off with Cambodia’s Curse: the Modern History of a Troubled Land by former New York Times reporter Joel Brinkley. Brinkley won a Pulitzer in 1980 for his coverage (at the Louisville Courier Journal) of the fall of the Khmer Rouge.
The title Cambodia’s Curse bugs me. Though cultures resistant to […]

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A lot of Americans seem puzzled about why NATO is so eager to get rid of Khadafi in Libya. Yes, he was behind the TWA bombing, but why get rid of him now?
But what the US press also misses is why Libyans are angry. To paraphrase James Carville: It’s the corruption, stupid. Khadafi has billions […]

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I am old enough to remember when women were exiled into specific specialties in medicine (quick: how many women Urologists do you know), and a similar problem was seen in college (few women in my advanced science classes) and in the newspaper (where women often were expected to write fluffy reports for the fashion and […]

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This is a guest article by author D. Alan Johnson. His latest book Asgard is set in Africa and looks at the role of Private Military Contractors. David himself is a Military Contractor and has been since […]

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Many years ago, conspiracy theorists claimed the US was fighting in Viet Nam in order to exploit the oil fields in the Spratlys islands.
This fact allowed the anti war humanitarians to dismiss the story that the US was there because a communist takeover of the region that would result in hundreds of thousand sent to […]

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(Westminster) The Coalition Government plans to scrap the Disability Living Allowance in next week’s Budget which will be introduced by Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne in the House of Commons in Parliament. The Government plans to save over £1 billion pounds in the budget by scrapping the disability living allowance by 2014/15.
The Coalition […]

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I’ve been too busy to watch the US news on our cable network, but the BBC reports are mainly about the fighting in Libya.
But here in the Philippines, the headlines are about our workers. You see, there are at least 25,000 Filipino OFW’s (”overseas foreign workers”) in Libya, and although the government has arranged a […]

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The temporary shutdown in Egypt of Internet and other telecommunication services, as well as similar interruptions in other Middle East countries experiencing large-scale protests and rebellions, has galvanized hackers and human rights activists as well as U.S. foreign policy makers. The consequences may be not be what anyone expected.
The technologies for secure, private, fault tolerant […]

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While the US headlines were full of Charlie Sheen’s rants and news of labor union protests in Wisconsin,  here in the Philippines, the headlines are about our stranded OFW (overseas foreign workers) in Libya.
Every paper has photos of those who escaped arriving at the Manila airport, and the Philippine Inquirer notes that the government arranged […]

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People all over the world have been urged to join the UK Autism Foundation’s call for a World Autism Awareness Day Twitter Storm on Saturday 2nd April 2011. The event is being organised to mark the fourth United Nations World Autism Awareness Day.
World Autism Awareness Day was launched on the 2nd of April 2008 by […]

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FreeMediaOnline.orgTruckee, CA, USA, February 21, 2011 — As reported by PiratesWeek and Kim Andrew Elliott, a Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) employee who publishes his own private international broadcasting website, the BBG-managed Voice of America (VOA) websites were hacked on February 21, 2011, apparently by the “Iranian Cyber Army.” In 2009, VOA websites were […]

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The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, James Anaya, has urged Panama’s government to ensure the safety of indigenous peoples, farmers and others protesting against new reforms to the country’s mining code.
Dozens of men, women and children  have been injured and arrested since the protests began on February 7, when Panama’s […]

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Autism Campaigners around the world are planning an Autism Sunday Twitter Storm to mark the international event on Sunday 13th February. People have been asked to tweet and re-tweet on autism, on the serious issues on autism or just simply celebrate the lives of all people with
autism across the globe. There are 67 million people […]

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Protesters fed up with political repression, corruption and poverty have toppled the government of Tunisia. They threaten to do the same in other countries throughout the Middle East as pundits hail the “Twitter and Facebook revolution”. But repressive governments have as much compunction about shutting down communication services as they do about torturing dissidents. Egypt […]

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What is going on in Egypt may have little to do Islamic fundamentalism or democracy per se.
It is probably the result of many factors, and many of us will probably compare the demonstrations to the uprising in Iran against the Shah.
Egypt’s government is corrupt, and the US has been propping up that regime for […]

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Autism Sunday falls on Sunday 13th February this year. Cathedrals, churches, organisations, community groups will be marking Autism Sunday with church services and autism awareness raising events around the world.
Autism Sunday was launched in 2002 by British parents and carers, Ivan and Charika Corea. What was a small acorn of an idea hatched in their […]

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Peace on Earth, Goodwill to men…except in the headlines.
You see headlines about NATO troops killed in Afghanistan. Yes, that nasty war is still going on. But the headlines don’t put it into perspective: the Taliban wants to stop education of girls, and any western type education for anyone. But the headlines don’t talk about positive […]

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China has already used it’s economic clout to intimidate many countries to boycott the Nobel Prize cermony that honors their poet Liu Xiaobo.
This boycott has gotten them criticism from some human rights groups, including those in our Philippines.
The ability and willingness of China to use it’s economic clout for political purposes is a very important […]

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As an Asian, I am aghast that Thomas Friedman is picking up the propaganda line coming out of China and disseminating it on the New York Times editorial page.
From today’s editorial:
What if China had a WikiLeaker and we could see what its embassy in Washington was reporting about America?
Reality check:
China would jail anyone who even […]

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by Ted Lipien
Opinia.US Truckee, CA, November 29, 2010 — Leaked secret State Department cables may help to resolve the mystery as to why President Obama chose September 17, 2009 to make his announcement on canceling President Bush’s missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. The announcement pleased the Kremlin, which had been pushing […]

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TedLipien.com, Truckee, CA, November 13, 2010 — Bruce Chapman of the Discovery Institute in Seattle has asked all the right questions about a recent Russian media report suggesting that Russian killers have been dispatched to the United States to execute a former Russian spy. He had supposedly betrayed the ring of Russian “illegals” recently […]

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By William ChurchDirectorPalestine Israel Media Analysis Group (PIMAG)A stealth, seismic shift occurred October 22 in Jerusalem at the Conference on the Future of the Jewish People.  Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the conference and suggested that there will be no troop withdrawal in the West Bank even after a peace deal.  He also re-enforced […]

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