A variety of links to articles/interviews on current topics that may be of interest.

The United States closed its embassy in Syria today, in response to continuing attacks by security forces in Homs that have escalated the death toll in the uprising. Nothing that the international community has done thus far has led to any pullback in efforts by Bashar al-Assad to use his security forces to crush the uprising.

Hours after a horrific massacre in Homs, China and Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution on Syria, one which was already watered down in an attempt to get the support of the Russians.

Russia had one simple demand on the UN draft resolution on Syria: the resolution must not allow for military intervention. In fact, it must ban intervention specifically in the text.

Well, the UN negotiators haven’t gone that far, to my knowledge. But they did drop the demand that Bashar al-Assad step down and hand over control of the country to his deputy.

At some point everyone of a certain age must have dreamed of being an astronaut, of flying into space, boldly going where man had gone before. I grew up with a dad who was a human factor specialist for NASA, basically an on-earth test astronaut. Richard Garriott–one of our guests tonight and the subject of Man on a Mission–is the son of an astronaut, Owen Garriott who rode aboard Skylab 2; he wanted to follow in his dad’s footsteps. Fate, and bad eyesight, prevented him from becoming an official astronaut so he set off to make his dreams come true (and along the way, he became the father of a whole generation of computer gamers.)

Protests in Russia over the weekend, after a rigged Parliamentary election that still saw Vladimir Putin’s party lose ground, has led to an additional challenge for Putin in next year’s Presidential race. The near-term ramifications for this open dissent is that it offers an opportunity to potentially challenge Putin in the elections, and one Russian billionaire will take up that effort.

So there I was, doing my daily surfing of various news and web sites when I noticed this from CNN about folks in Russia protesting the recent election that returned Vladimir Putin to the Russian leadership…

The title, Who Are We, signals a questioning about identity and begins an exploration of its “vexed terrain.” Gary Younge, columnist for the Guardian and The Nation and the author of two previous books, lifts our understanding of identity from the taken-for-granted where it is too often treated as a fixed and done thing. Instead, Younge brings us into layers of our identities from micro to macro, from the personal to the political, revealing paradoxes both in how we know ourselves and how others (too often wrongly) ascribe identity to us.

You can see a kind of good cop-bad cop scenario emerging in Libya. The rebels have offered amnesty to any member of the Gadhafi regime who defects and joins the opposition. Given what we know about reports of brutality in Benghazi toward people connected with the regime, I’m not sure this offer is believable. But it’s out there. At the same time, British attack helicopters made a rare daytime raid, destroying guard towers at the Gadhafi compound. And they let leak the preparation of 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs for future attacks. So there’s this olive branch of reconciliation, amid the persistent destruction of airstrikes.

I’m willing to accept that mechanical failure was to blame. I’m no longer willing to accept the pleadings of those who want to defend this action that it’s not technically a war. This may have happened in a training exercise in the same place over the Mediterranean, but we know that it happens during a war.