The movies have taken us to some fascinating places over the years, including the past, the future and a galaxy far, far away. With Inside Out, Disney and Pixar take us to the most unexpected place of all: an adolescent girl’s brain.

It’s an ingenious concept, and one that Pixar attacks with its usual blend of laughter, tears and glorious animation.

Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias) is a cheerful girl living in Minnesota. We know she’s happy because we experience her childhood from the viewpoint of the five emotions who live inside her head and influence her every thought and action. Of the five, Joy (Amy Poehler) is the most dominant, easily keeping Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust at bay while Riley grows into a fun-loving, hockey-playing 11-year-old.

Then Dad (Kyle MacLachlan) uproots the family to take a job in San Francisco, and the girl’s contented existence starts to unravel. Not only is her new home dirty and run-down, but she misses her friends, and the neighborhood pizza joint serves only pies topped with her least-favorite vegetable: broccoli.

Al-Qaeda has a makeover – and now they're the good guys

If you want to know why our “war on terrorism” has failed so miserably – if you want to understand how and why the harder we fight the more enemies we have to face – then read this recent piece in the Wall Street Journal on the evolution of the Syrian civil war, which opens with this startling query:

“In the three-way war ravaging Syria, should the local al Qaeda branch be seen as the lesser evil to be wooed rather than bombed?”

I’m not sure if there’s been a better written book published yet this year than Ukraine: Zbig’s Grand Chessboard and How the West Was Checkmated, but I’m confident there’s not been a more important one. With some 17,000 nuclear bombs in the world, the United States and Russia have about 16,000 of them. The United States is aggressively flirting with World War III, the people of the United States have not the foggiest notion of how or why, and authors Natylie Baldwin and Kermit Heartsong explain it all quite clearly. Go ahead and tell me there’s nothing you’re now spending your time on that’s less important than this.

This book may very well be the best written one I’ve read this year. It puts all the relevant facts — those I knew and many I didn’t — together concisely and with perfect organization. It does it with an informed worldview. It leaves me nothing to complain about at all, which is almost unheard of in my book reviews. I find it refreshing to encounter writers so well-informed who also grasp the significance of their information.

More than a hundred people gathered outside the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) headquarters today, June 15, trying to stop the bailouts of dirty coal plants and the Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Ohio. The rally was tightly controlled by the Ohio Sierra Club, who sent five members inside to deliver letters to the PUCO meeting. The outcome of the decision is not yet known. For more information on the issue, please see: No bailouts for First Energy’s Davis-Besse nuclear reactor by Pat Marida, chair, Ohio Sierra Club Nuclear Issues Committee.

Photos by Tekla Lewin

The international community is extraordinarily concerned about the Chinese construction on small islands and atolls in disputed waters off China, Vietnam, Taiwan and Japan.  Over the past 18 months, the Chinese government has created islands out of atolls and larger islands out of small ones.

With the Obama administration’s “pivot” of the United States military and economic strategy to Asia and the Pacific, the Chinese have seen military construction in their front yard. 

I’ve just returned from my third trip to Jeju Island, South Korea. Jeju is called the Island of Peace.  However, its where the South Korean military has almost finished construction of a new naval base, the first military base on this strategically located island south of the mainland of Korea that is littered with U.S. and South Korean military bases, leftover from the Korean war and that are a part of the U.S. “defense” of South Korea from  “aggression” from North Korea.