Tbilisi, Georgia Orthodox priests led a mob of some 20,000 people in an attack on a small gay-rights rally in the Georgian capital last week. On a new crusade Television images showed priests throwing rocks, punching people, and pounding the buses that were trying to evacuate the marchers. Dozens of people were injured. “I am not able to either condemn […]
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What’s the most forbidden topic in America? asked Timothy Egan. It’s not sex or religion. It’s gun violence. We are “the most armed society in the world,” with more than 300 million guns in private hands, and 9,146 gun homicides in 2009—a rate nearly 20 times higher than that of other supposedly civilized countries. “But don’t bring that up.” Sports […]
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Drinking soda, long known to contribute to childhood obesity, may also have a negative effect on childhood behavior. Columbia University researchers interviewed the parents of about 3,000 5-year-olds in 20 cities about their children’s soda consumption and behavior. They found that 43 percent of the children drank at least one soda per day, and that 4 percent drank four servings […]
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“When we are violent to our enemies, we do violence to ourselves. When we brutalize others, we brutalize ourselves. And eventually we run the risk of becoming our oppressors.” – Arundhati Roy
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Gun violence now costs Americans an estimated $229 billion a year, including the expense of imprisoning gun offenders, medical treatment for the roughly 31,000 people killed and 75,000 wounded each year, lost wages, and loss of quality of life among victims and their families, according to an analysis by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. By the same measures, […]
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One violent movie does not a mass killer make, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. But the pornographic violence that now fills popular films has “the cumulative power to desensitize and destabilize” impressionable minds. Disturbed young men like James Holmes, the accused Aurora, Colo., killer, may be unable to process the nihilistic, sadistically violent world of movies like […]
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A New Mexico teenager is expected to face murder charges after allegedly gunning down five family members with his parents’ rifles. Nehemiah Griego, 15, is accused of using a .22 caliber rifle to shoot his mother while she slept and then kill his siblings—ages 9, 5, and 2—when they awoke. He then allegedly grabbed an assault rifle and waited downstairs […]
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Guatemalans are suffering from “an epidemic of chronic pessimism,” said Jose J. Camacho. We all seem to agree that “everything is bad, nothing is certain, everyone has a price, and something evil lurks behind every good deed.” The media fuel these perceptions by covering every new incidence of violence exhaustively, lavishing special attention on the most frightening and lurid details […]
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“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
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“NONVIOLENCE IS NOT A WEAPON OF THE WEAK. IT IS A WEAPON OF THE STRONGEST AND THE BRAVEST.” – Gandhi
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