News & Features

The American Psychiatric Association gave its final approval to the latest guide to psychiatric disorders, despite strong criticism that it created new mental disorders when none exist and could lead to misdiagnosis and unnecessary medication. The first rewrite in 20 years of the diagnostic Bible of psychiatry was approved in the midst of heated controversy. The guide, known as DSM-5, defines a host of symptoms that are categorized to help doctors identify specific mental disorders. 

Will the U.S. economy go over the “fiscal cliff” after New Years Day? If so, what will that mean to the country’s most financially vulnerable people? Former White House economic advisor Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) told reporters on a national telephone briefing Thursday, organized by New America Media and CBPP, that he believes Democrats and Republicans will take the budget negotiations to and possibly over the cliff’s edge. 

The Tea Party’s brand of patented loose cannon obstructionism is too threatening to a GOP still reeling from the election flop. The ouster of the Tea Party hardliners and desertions by GOP bigwigs from the movement was hardly the first rumbling that the lights are dimming for the Tea Party. A year earlier, polls showed that far more Americans had an unfavorable view of the Tea Party than when it roared on the scene a couple of years earlier. The disaffection cut across all lines and that included many conservatives. 

Five years ago the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) described the Iraqi refugee crisis as “the largest long-term population movement in the Middle East since the displacement of Palestinians following the creation of Israel in 1948." Not much has changed at the end of 2012, a year after US forces pulled out of Iraq. “Some one million people remain displaced throughout the country, of whom hundreds of thousands live in dire conditions,” the UNHCR recently noted. 

Obama has called tougher gun control laws “common sense.” This signals that if there is enough public outcry and push that one or more of the gun control measures could finally make it out of a house or senate committee. Obama is not running for re-election and does not have to look nervously over his shoulder and worry about enraged gun owners raking him over the coals for putting his White House muscle behind one of the bills. That and the eventual passage of fresh gun restrictions would at least send the right signal that the gun lobby is not invincible and that millions of Americans want and demand anything that will at least potentially head off the next rampage.

This past week might very well mark the beginning of the end of the war on drugs as we know it, with recreational use of marijuana becoming legal in the state of Washington as a result of its citizens' vote. Coloradoans approved a similar measure and established an exchange in which citizens can grow and purchase the drug for medicinal use. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that 54 percent of Americans support legalizing the drug, while 44 percent oppose it. As states slowly begin to decriminalize marijuana, it remains to be seen whether President Obama and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will continue to enforce federal oversight to arrest and prosecute offenders, no matter a state's laws. 

The war in Iraq started with Operation Shock and Awe but ended with a fizzle, and, some would argue, as an epic exercise in human futility -- neither victory nor defeat was clear. Instead, with the exit of the last American troops, the final meaning of the war is muddled.  In its wake, the war left us with more questions than answers: Is this the victory we had longed for since Vietnam? Is this all we could muster after we invaded and occupied Iraq for nine years, supposedly to find weapons of mass destruction? Is Iraq now truly a free and sovereign nation, given the unending conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims there? 

Last week Mehtab Alam, 29, decapitated his sister Nilofer, 22, with a ceremonial sword, left her bleeding body on the street, and walked into the local thana with her severed head in one hand and the bloody sword in the other and surrendered to the police. His sister’s crime? The woman, a mother of two, married off at the age of 14, had run away from home to live with an old boyfriend, a rickshaw driver. Mehtab had already beaten up the rickshaw driver once for his earlier liaison with the sister. This time he tracked her down to the man’s house, dragged her out onto the street and killed her.