Does a nonviolent drug trafficker need 15 years in prison to learn his lesson? The Washington Post Magazine’s cover story this past Sunday says some politicians are beginning to wonder.

This story follows a New York Times article about a drug massacre that left the town of Villa Ahumada, like many others in Mexico today, with a gutted local police force, terrified citizens, and helpless authorities and investigators. In the last 18 months, over 4,000 people have been killed throughout Mexico in similar attacks and gun battles. In many towns, the local police and officials are on the payroll of drug lords.

So in light of this sort of terrorizing violence just over the border, and with illegal immigration a continuing problem in the U.S., how should the U.S. punish drug traffickers?

Currently, drug offenders get a minimum of 10 years for a first time violation of trafficking or possessing 50 grams of crack. Since the passing of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, the federal prison population has grown from 38,000 to more than 200,000—over half of which are drug offenders, cites the Washington Post.

These kinds of figures motivate representatives like Texas’s Sheila Jackson Lee to propose legislation that will cut down, perhaps in half, the sentences of thousands of federal inmates convicted of nonviolent crimes. Such legislation is meant to return nonviolent offenders to society so they can be productive citizens.

Michael Short, for example, was not a violent offender, had no previous criminal history and was a “very minor player” in the trafficking ring, according to the Post Magazine article; yet he spent more time in prison than many murderers.

The idea of long sentences acting as a deterrent doesn’t always hold true either. Short thought he was too small a “peon” to warrant any attention from investigators so he ignored warnings of the penalties.

Some believe that governments’ wars on drugs are doing very little to actually stop the trade. In an article posted the end of April, Slate Magazine said that, what it described as a “boom in smuggling and international crime,” is occurring “despite (and in some cases because of) the ‘wars’—as they have been labeled—that governments everywhere are fighting against international traffickers.” Unlike Civil wars and international wars, “smuggling is not bound by time or space, and it is now growing faster than ever.”

At the same time, drug use in one’s youth has become almost normal adolescent behavior. The DailyKos chides mainstream new sources for trying to make a big deal of Barak Obama’s dabbling in drugs while in college, saying his “experience appears to mirror the majority of adolescents who engaged in casual drug use.”

New film Baby Mama, released the end of April, tells the story of a successful, single businesswoman who decides, at 37, to have a child. Unable to get pregnant herself, she allows a South Philly working girl to become her surrogate.

The film has already pulled in over $32 million at the Box Office, perhaps because it reflects the trend – seen everywhere from Hollywood to Newsweek – that motherhood is hip.

It seems that every other Hollywood star, from Nicole Kidman to Jessica Alba to Baby Mama’s Amy Poehler herself, is sporting a Versace-draped baby bump. Other women who put off having children to establish a career are suddenly realizing there is something missing and are trying to rectify it. Newsweek ‘s April 7^th cover story looks at couples who turn to surrogate mothers to bear their biological children, and “gestational carrier” mothers who use surrogacy to supplement family incomes.

Technology makes these late pregnancies easier: Millions of children have been born using in vitro fertilization, and more women in their 30s, 40s, and even 50s are getting pregnant using donor eggs from younger women.

All of this allows women to have children on demand, when and how they want them. Is this a renewed realization of “pro-life” vibes in our society, or simply another way of being “pro-choice”: Women can have children if it is what they want, when they want them?

While Hollywood is producing films like Baby Mama and last December’s drama Juno, the L.A. Times and other newspapers are reporting stories like these:

California’s ‘safe surrender’ program, allowing parents to leave unwanted newborns at fire stations and hospitals without penalty, has become an orphan, with little money and no state agency responsible for publicizing or overseeing it.

Homeless man finds newborn girl in trash bin, alive.

A 37-year-old taxi driver in Maryland was charged earlier this month with murdering a newborn. Days before, she’d been rushed to a hospital, bleeding — and denied being pregnant even though doctors found a placenta in her womb.

So, with motherhood becoming hip while stories of infanticide pop up in the papers, what should an onlooker think? Are more people seeing the value of new life? Or is it just about convenient motherhood?

An Iran-made movie based on the Islamic version of the life of Jesus is stirring controversy among Christians for its portrayal of Christ as a tormented Judean prophet foretelling the coming of Muhammad, the founder of the Muslim faith.

“Jesus, the Spirit of God,” claims Jesus was compassionate, performed miracles and spoke parables, but was not divine nor was he crucified and resurrected.

Some claim this movie is a step toward bringing more understanding between the two faiths. Director Nader Talebzadeh believes it will show the common ground between Muslims and Christians. He told AFP that he saw his movie as an Islamic answer to Western productions he sees as simply wrong, such as Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.”

“I pray for Christians. They’ve been misled. They will realize one day the true story,” Talebzadeh told the LA Times. His film has been screened at international film festivals and is being marketed for wider release.

The film has certainly sparked dialogue, which is part of what Talebzadeh wanted. Bloggers have been disputing the film for months now. In January, one responded to an article about the film saying, “The Islamic-fascists will go to the ends of the earth, whether by blood or bombs, to try to delude their people with their Nazi like propaganda.”

But why be up in arms? Don’t Christians try to spread their version of Mohammad’s life and teachings? In a conversation about this film, one Christian blogger spouted that “Islam preaches hatred of non-believers. Muhammad was a pagan general who created Islam to unify his forces. He only picked and chose what he liked in Judaism and Christianity and added his violent outlook.”

Would Talebzadeh see these comments about his faith the same way Christians view his film? Or would he say they are worse since he at least portrays Jesus as a powerful and kind prophet?

As another blogger more recently commented, “Don’t we as Christians spend our time trying to prove that the beliefs of Islam are false? Don’t get me wrong, I totally disbelieve Islam and what it stands for but, in the same breath, to act as though we don’t try and silence them also is a bit naive. What makes our actions any better than theirs… other than the fact we believe in the true word of God but I am sure they feel the same way about their beliefs?”

With school violence filling the headlines and the anniversary of the Virginia Tech shooting approaching, the conservative response is predictable: video games, Hollywood violence, the 60s, a corrupt culture, etc. But are these satisfactory answers?

Recent headlines document youth tragedy. “As [an 18-year-old student] left a South Side high school that afternoon, he was fatally shot, in broad daylight and in plain view of other students,” read the lead of a recent Washington Post article. “Two teachers at a Baltimore, Maryland, high school say they were attacked by students, and one says such assaults are commonplace,” read a CNN lead. MSNBC ran a recent story about nine third-graders who brought weapons and handcuffs to school in an alleged plan to knock-out, handcuff, and stab their teacher.

What’s the solution? In a recent article called “The Cost of Killing,” Beliefnet.com suggests one possibility:

Just think of what could happen if we got out of Iraq and redirected that $400 million A DAY we now spend [in Iraq] to revitalize quality public education for all, create alternative life-giving work experiences, training and jobs for disaffected youth, [and] enable universal health care. Enabling youth to complete school [and] find meaningful employment would staunch the one way train to prison (which also costs us $25,000 per person annually). We have the resources. Do we have the will?

Conservatives usually blame instead the lack of religion in schools or the pervasive immorality in the Hollywood culture. But in an article entitled “Praise the Lord, Pass the Ammo,” Steve Chapman says it doesn’t make sense that the decline of religion causes adolescent violence. America, one of the most religious countries in the world, is also one of the most violent compared to Britain, France, Australia, or Sweden. “The Bible Belt has more than its share of both praying and killing,” Chapman says. “Louisiana has the highest churchgoing rate in the country, but its murder rate is more than twice the national average.”

The article’s conclusion — “Religion and violence seem to go hand in hand” — may confuse correlation and causation. But David Greenberg’s piece, published shortly after the Columbine shooting, makes more sense:

Judging by the coverage, you’d think that children are by nature innocent, free of violent or sexual thoughts until corrupted by our culture. That schools have traditionally been safe. That the recent spate of killings is unprecedented. History says otherwise.

If Christians agree that no one is born innocent, can we blame the violence on modern culture?

How far does presidential authority go? A controversial military memo tests the limits.

The Bush administration publicly disclosed the 2003 Justice Department memo this week. Written by John Yoo, then the second-ranking official at the Office of Legal Counsel, the memo largely exempts military interrogators from laws prohibiting assault, maiming, and other harsh treatments.

It also narrowly defines torture: pain intense and severe enough to “be associated with serious physical injury” producing death, organ failure or permanent physical damage.

It uses the president’s authority as commander-in-chief to grant interrogators the power to use extreme interrogation methods. “In wartime, it is for the President alone to decide what methods to use to best prevail against the enemy,” the memo states (Memo: part 1/ part 2). According to a New York Times article, the memo gave the Pentagon much the same authority that another memo gave the CIA months earlier.

Officials eventually withdrew both memos, “But they show how sweeping the Justice Department viewed presidential power to be after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,” writes the Wall Street Journal.

“This is a monument to executive supremacy and the imperial presidency,” Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School and the Washington College of Law at American University, told NYT. Thomas J. Romig, who at the time was the Army’s judge advocate general, told the Washington Post that the memo appears to argue there are no rules in a time of war. Slate Magazine agreed, saying the memo implies that “military interrogators didn’t have to follow the law because they were defending the country.”

Last year, Bush narrowed the list of approved interrogation techniques in an executive order. According to NYT, intelligence officials have said that such methods as waterboarding are not on the list of currently approved techniques, but that President Bush could still authorize their use during an emergency.

In an article posted in February, Slate argued that Americans are becoming slowly calloused to torture:

Our views on water-boarding seem to be on the same trajectory as our views on sexual humiliation and stress positions—it looked sort of awful at first, but after a few months it seemed more like a fraternity prank. That’s the road we’re headed down with water-boarding. We’ve gone from banning it to trivializing it to justifying it. We are becoming inured to torture at approximately the same rate that it’s becoming legal. How convenient.

Embryonic research is taking a new turn in Great Britain with a bill that allows the creation of hybrid embryos using the “shell” of an animal embryo with adult human DNA added. The cell would be 99.9 percent genetically human.

The bill also allows parents to use in-vitro fertilization to create “savior siblings” to act as blood or tissue donors for older children with illnesses like sickle-cell anemia. The British government already allows this practice, but only in cases where children have potentially fatal diseases.

“I believe this Bill has the right balance,” Prime Minister Gordon Brown said. “It is really important that people understand what admixed embryos enable us to do. They enable us to develop test-tube models of disease that allow us to look at the nature of a disease such as Alzheimer’s so we can accelerate our understanding of it much more readily than would have been possible otherwise.”

Despite the British government’s optimism about the bill, it has faced strong opposition, especially from Catholic MPs and clergymen who want Brown to give MPs a free vote on the issue. Three Catholic Cabinet Ministers are reportedly considering resigning if they have to support the bill. During Easter weekend especially, ministers condemned the Bill from pulpits across Great Britain.

“It’s a very important part of our society and a very important part of the Christian faith that you should have respect for human embryos,” the Bishop of Lichfield, the Rt Revd Jonathan Gledhill, told a British new source.

“If you stop obeying God you start to limit the rights of human beings and this is a case in point,” he continued. “A society has to be judged by the way that it treats its poorest and most vulnerable and weakest. And what can be weaker than an unborn child?”

According to a Times Online article, Brown believes the Church leaders have misrepresented the Bill by ignoring “important safeguards that are built into the legislation.” Brown is currently giving Labour MPs a partially free vote on admixed embryos and two other clauses in the Bill when it comes up for debate in May.

New movie Stop-Loss tells the story of a soldier who decides he’s not going back to war. A recent article in the Washington Post tells the story of 16,000 American soldiers who made the same decision.

Phil McDowell joined the Army after 9/11. He served his tour in Iraq and became a sergeant, but he also became disillusioned about the war through personal research and bitterness over the apathy he found back home.

When the Army rescinded his discharge, McDowell joined an estimated 200 Iraq war deserters who have fled to Canada with no promise of asylum. “It would’ve been easy to go to Iraq and have it done with again. But being a sellout to my own beliefs—I just felt it was wrong on so many levels,” McDowell told the Post.

As Senior Airman Preston Reeves told BBC, “Tragedies do happen in war.” MSNBC reported in 2006 that nearly one in 10 American solders who served in Iraq was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. The military death toll just passed 4,000.

But McDowell thinks the government lied to him about the reasons for going to and staying in Iraq. To mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Slate Magazine asked a number of writers who originally supported the war to answer the question, “Why did we get it wrong?” One soldier wrote, “I came home in September 2006 frustrated with the strategic direction of the war and alienated from the country that sent me there.”

In an article posted last fall, Slate examined the appropriateness of military dissent among generals when they disagree with the Commander in Chief: “What should the generals do? Disobey? Rally resistance from within? Resign in protest? Retire quietly? Or salute and execute the mission?”

Likewise, what do enlisted men do when they come to the conclusion that their country is wrong? They swore an oath to support, defend, and obey. Do they stand by that commitment when they no longer agree with the decisions being made?

“Individual service members can’t be allowed to make policy,” Lieutenant Commander Travis Moger, a Navy Chaplain and combat veteran who served with Marines in Iraq, told WoW. “You can’t wage war by referendum. Every member of the military knew when he volunteered that he might have to go to war, even an unpopular or unnecessary war. We live in a post-Vietnam America. There is little excuse for someone believing that there was no chance they would ever have to serve in a protracted, problematic conflict.”

McDowell confessed to the Post that the question still haunts him: “What does it mean to desert the Army and abandon your country?”