Wednesday Linkage

21 August 2013, 1312 EDT

While the IR blogosphere navel-gazes, history marches on:

Media is reporting a massive civilian casualties from a chemical weapons attack in Syria.
The UN is holding an emergency meeting. More from Reuters. Great coverage w/ updates at NuclearDiner.

In sharp contrast, an elementary school clerk in Georgia prevented a school massacre by deploying empathy, respectful language and an appeal to a gunman’s human dignity.

Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison yesterday for his leaking of classified documents. Joshua Foust and Scott Lemieux discuss.

Pervez Musharraf has been indicted in the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto. WAPOS’s Max Fisher has thoughts on these developments.

new study finds aid worker deaths are down from last year but attacks are at an all time high.

John Sides on public broadcasting and public current events literacy.

Maryn McKenna on censorship and public health.

Charli Carpenter is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of 'Innocent Women and Children': Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Ashgate, 2006), Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights
Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond (Columbia, 2010), and ‘Lost’ Causes: Agenda-Setting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security (Cornell, 2014). Her main research interests include national security ethics, the protection of civilians, the laws of war, global agenda-setting, gender and political violence, humanitarian affairs, the role of information technology in human security, and the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security.