Tomgram: Rory Fanning, The Courage to Say No

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She began cutting school on Fridays and simply sitting on the steps of the Swedish parliament. Her name was Greta Thunberg. She was 15 years old, with a mind of her own and a sign demanding a school strike against climate change. Her parents wanted her to go back to school, but Friday after read more

Tomgram: Stephanie Savell, U.S. Counterterror Missions Across the Planet

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“Training.” It sounds so innocuous. It also sounds like something expected of a military. All professional soldiers undergo some sort of basic training. Think: calisthenics, negotiating obstacle courses, and marksmanship. Soldiers require instruction, otherwise they’re little more than rabble.

Sometimes soldiers from one country even train the troops of another, imparting read more

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Hail, Caesar!

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Veni, Vidi, Tweeti (I Came, I Saw, I Tweeted)
An Obituary for the Republic
By Tom Engelhardt

What dreamers they were! They imagined a kind of global power that would leave even Rome at its Augustan height in the shade. They imagined a world made for one, a planet that could be swallowed by a single great power. No, not just great, but beyond anything ever seen before — read more

Tomgram: Arnold Isaacs, A Catalog of Heartlessness

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Think of it as the real-world feedback loop from hell. In October 2001, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and launched a “war on terror.” With the invasion of Iraq a year and a half later, that war would begin to spread across much of the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa. It would, in the end, collapse states, turn cities into rubble, read more