Author: Carma Henry

       Florida Power & Light Company (FPL) surprised 10 outstanding students with scholarships aimed at supporting their pursuit of higher education and future careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

    When word came down that USAID was being dismantled in Nicaragua, I was sorting through old documents amid the chaos of the mission close-out. On the desk next to mine sat a book abandoned by a colleague: The Dictator’s Handbook, by political scientists Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, which lays out, in plain and clinical language, how dictators actually operate.

     “These are not social Dumocrats, these are hardcore, godless communists.” And they will:

How Do You Feel Now About How You Voted In 2024?

    Donald Trump kicked up the cultural sparks in all three cases and started what I believe is legitimately called our Trumpster fire, surfacing live embers into an environment ready for a fiery backlash amongst aggrieved sectors of America, clearly acting out of the rage Trump spoke. It evolved into a political rally culture featuring racism, sexism, and hatred of those who came to America seeking refuge—often from the wars overseas that the US either started or fueled. His crude speech was exactly what angry sectors of the US loved, and they elected him—twice.

    SIPRI’s annual report for 2025 notes: “More people were killed in armed conflict, were forced from their homes or needed humanitarian assistance than in recent years, probably for decades. On many battlefronts, peacemaking was non-existent or stalled.” 

      For generations, Americans were told that diplomacy and war were different roads. Diplomacy was supposed to keep armies from moving, create room for compromise and end violence already underway. Military force, by contrast, was the failure of that process — or at least its last resort. The Trump administration is erasing that distinction. It is treating talks and attacks as instruments that can be used at the same time, against the same country, for the same political objective.

    We once took for granted that everyone concerned with global warming outside the Trump administration’s orbit accepted the scientists’ conclusion that 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming was the critical threshold. Following on its pullout from the Paris Accords, the administration has ignored climate scientists’ overwhelming findings on the human causes of global warming and stifled publication of their research.

     With the Axis powers tottering toward defeat in World War II, Roosevelt reported that the recently concluded Yalta conference of Allied leaders had agreed upon “a common ground for peace.”  It would “spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries―and have always failed.”  These approaches would be replaced by “a universal organization,” a “permanent structure of peace upon which we can begin to build . . . that better world in which our children and grandchildren . . . must live, and can live.”

Chekhov, the military budget, and endless wars