Monica Potts

The Guardian reported Sunday that a cruise ship owned by Royal Caribbean International docked in a walled-off, private beach in Haiti. The ship’s operators tried to justify it by noting the fact it carried aid supplies and were donating the proceeds from the stop, but some of the ship’s passenger’s stayed on board. Via Boing […]

Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has a great post at the New York Times’s Economix blog today noting how little we spend in tax dollars on children compared to other age groups, especially the elderly. It’s particularly important because study after study shows how critical investment in the first […]

Pacifica Radio, the progressive public radio network, occasionally opens its archives for the show “From the Vault.” Apropos for today is the episode in which they discuss Martin Luther King Jr.’s planning in the Spring of 1968 for a Poor People’s March on Washington that he would not live to make. Dr. King would not […]

In case you missed it, Ambassador Raymond Joseph, the Haitian ambassador to the United States, reminded Pat Robertson on The Rachel Maddow Show last night that the United States benefited from the deal with the devil in the form of a really good price on the Louisiana purchase. While that provides a sense of satisfaction, […]

The New York Times and the ACLU’s blog report that a Florida court confined a pregnant woman to bed rest and continued medical care at a hospital against her will. She was at risk for a miscarriage. The ACLU first learned about this case after (Samantha) Burton’s pro bono lawyer, David Abrams, called us for […]

On Tuesday, a judge in Kansas ruled for the second time that he wouldn’t bar Scott Roeder, the 51-year-old accused of killing the Kansas abortion provider George Tiller in May, from arguing that he believed he needed to kill Tiller to protect unborn children. The judge, Warren Wilbert, denied prosecutors requests to bar such argument, […]

While natural disasters are pretty unpredictable no matter how good our detection systems get, the damage they do to a country like Haiti is not. Destruction from a barrage of hurricanes in the last decade was exacerbated by deforestation, in part because the population relies on wood for fuel. There is probably little doubt that […]

The Baltimore Police Department has shifted its focus away from arresting drug offenders to going after those who carry guns, the Christian Science Monitor reports. This law enforcement philosophy is born of the growing acknowledgment that millions of dollars and arrests have done little to slow urban America’s drug trade, and that a fresh strategy […]

The Washington Post has a great story today about the rise of female ambassadors in the past several years, a phenomenon called “the Hillary Effect.” The end of the piece covers a sad truth I’ve written about before. Women who advance to such high levels in their careers often leave their husbands behind: While male […]

Somehow, the point of consciousness-raising efforts like Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me and Eric Schlosser’s investigatory book Fast Food Nation got lost when the organic-loving locavores took over food discussions. The early-aught pieces highlighted problems with companies: how you would find their practices distasteful if you knew about them, and how they were marketing […]