Talking Rights

Spurred by a growing network of activists and ABC’s 20/20 expose, the “Bodies”-style plastination exhibits are under increasing scrutiny nationwide. In Pennsylvania, for example, where the Premier show is housed at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Science Center, state Rep. Michael E. Fleck is preparing a bill that will ban the commercial exhibition of human cadavers without written [...]

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In class yesterday, we were talking about the Cold War. One of the pieces we read was from Anne Applebaum’s excellent Gulag: A History, about the Soviet prison camps that lasted from the Revolution through the 1970s. The two students who led the discussion decided to show this clip from “Dr. Strangelove or: How I [...]

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A message board for investors in Premier Exhibitions reveals mounting panic prior to ABC’s 20/20 piece, to be aired tonight.
Here’s one fascinating message. The “woman in Durham” is our very own Sarah, a dynamo who is largely responsible for bringing together people all over the country to voice their objections to the plastination shows.
Knobs,
…I do [...]

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At 10 pm EST on Friday, February 15, the ABC show 20/20 will be airing an investigation of how plastination companies obtain their bodies. Reported by Brian Ross, the piece is based on a three-month investigation that went “from a body processing factory on the German-Polish border, to Internet sites that offer the plasticized bodies [...]

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I haven’t yet reproduced in this blog an oped in its entirety. But this one, from Tuesday’s Fayetteville (North Carolina) Observer, is exceptional.
Not only is North Carolina America’s most militarized state (per capita); this newspaper includes in its circulation area three of the main bases used to deploy US troops to the Middle East: Fort [...]

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A good snippet from this Denzel Washington film, “The Siege,” released in 1998.
Here’s the Netflix summary:
When U.S. military zealots abduct a Muslim religious leader, constitutional rights are summarily suspended, and martial law is imposed in New York as hard-line Army Gen. William Devereaux (Bruce Willis) cordons off Queens to form a detention camp. FBI agents [...]

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Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) has died, at the age of 80. He was one of the great voices for human rights in the US Congress. Lantos founded and co-chaired the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which highlights human rights violations around the world.
The only Holocaust survivor elected to Congress, Lantos was Hungarian by birth. Largely shaped [...]

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The Washington Post’s Al Kamen awarded Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, his tongue-in-cheek “Loop Award for Water Ballet” in today’s paper.
Kamen chose McConnell, a former admiral in the US Navy, for his performance Tuesday, “when he explained to the Senate intelligence committee that he didn’t really tell the New Yorker that waterboarding is [...]

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Even as the White House confounds us by standing up yet again for torture, the New York Times reports that the CIA destroyed videotapes of the waterboarding of Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah even as federal judge Leonie Brinkema was seeking information on the case against him.
Brinkema,  the first female judge named to the U.S. [...]

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