Rare Coalition Urges Limits on Mortgage-Related Bank LawsuitsBankers, housing advocates team up in effort to ease mortgage access for borrowers with weaker credit A rare coalition of mortgage lenders and left-leaning consumer advocates are calling on the Obama administration to ease up on lawsuits they say are driving banks away from making loans to borrowers with weak credit histories.

Snowden documentary filmmaker sues US over years of harassmentOscar-winning film director Laura Poitras is suing the US government to find out why she has been searched, questioned and subjected to enhanced security screenings over the past six years, being stopped over 90 times during the course of her travels.

JPMorgan to pay over $125M to settle debt probesThe states will split some $95 million, while the CFPB will get $30 million, the people said. JPMorgan Chase and the CFPB did not return calls for comment. A spokesman for Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, who has been leading a group of states in probing JPMorgan’s debt sales and collection actions, declined to comment.

Bush-era officials can be sued for abuse of 9/11 detainees – courtA federal appeals court reinstated a lawsuit against former Justice Department and law enforcement officials for violating the rights of men perceived as Arab or Muslim who were rounded up after 9/11 and held for months, sometimes in solitary confinement.

Hank Greenberg scores pyrrhic victory in AIG lawsuit – FT.comHank Greenberg, the 90-year-old former chief executive and largest shareholder of AIG, has scored a pyrrhic victory in his lawsuit against the US government over the terms of its 2008 bailout of the ailing insurance group. Judge Thomas Wheeler ruled

Ohio activists ask judge for arrests in Tamir Rice case using obscure lawCleveland community leaders are bypassing the criminal justice system and taking the law into their own hands in the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, using an obscure Ohio statute to ask a judge to request murder charges against the officers who shot him.

The Lawsuit Machine Going After Student DebtorsIn 2003, Adam Beverly borrowed $30,000 from Bank One, now owned by JPMorgan Chase, to help cover the cost of attending Ohio State University. He never graduated. Three years later he found himself being sued by National Collegiate Student Loan Trust, which claimed he owed more than $45,000 with interest and penalties.

The Counted: people killed by police in the United States in 2015 – interactiveThe Counted is a special Guardian project to record all people killed by police in the United States this year. We have gathered information from official databases and crowdsourced counts to create a full and detailed view of killings by law enforcement agents in the US.

‘Stop illegal NSA spying’: Rand Paul vows to let USA Patriot Act expireThe Republican Senator and 2016 presidential candidate Rand Paul has announced a crusade against the Patriot Act, promising he will delay Sunday’s debate and force the expiration of controversial provisions that allow bulk spying on US citizens. “I will force the expiration of the NSA illegal spy program,” the Senator from Kentucky wrote in a statement on his presidential campaign website.

Clinton Foundation hit with racketeering lawsuitBill and Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation have been hit with a racketeering lawsuit in Florida court. The lawsuit, filed by Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch, includes a legal request to have the Florida judge seize the private server on which Hillary Clinton and her aides hosted their emails while she served as secretary of state.

Seeding campaigns to remake state supreme courtsEureka entrepreneur Robin Arkley II helped seed organizations that fund efforts to elect conservative supreme court justices across the country. Such groups are turning their attention to elect Republican state attorneys general. Judicial Crisis Network likely will become active if President Baracl Obama has more U.S. Supreme Court vacancies.

Lawsuit revived against big debt collection firm in New YorkThe 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said Encore’s Midland Funding and Midland Credit Management units did not qualify as national banks, and did not deserve protections such banks get against claims brought under state usury laws.

It’s Not My Bill, Woman Sues Debt Collector Wins $83 MillionBusiness A Missouri woman won $83 million in a lawsuit against a debt collector who tried to sue her for a credit card bill that wasn’t hers. Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC, acted maliciously when it tried to squeeze $1,000 from Maria Guadalupe Mejia when the debt actually belonged to a man in another state with a similar sounding name, a jury found.

Police violence, executions, Gitmo: US grilled by UN human rights panelThe UN Human Rights Council called out the US over the disturbing trend of excessive force being used against minorities by law enforcement agencies, adding that the US has “largely failed” to follow up on recommendations made in 2010.

U.S. Government: We Can Classify Anything and Judges Can’t Stop UsAt a hearing today on a lawsuit seeking to make videotapes of force-feedings at Guantánamo public, Justice Department attorneys argued that the courts cannot order evidence used in trial to be unsealed if it has been classified by the government. “We don’t think there is a First Amendment right to classified documents,” stated Justice Department lawyer Catherine Dorsey.

NSA’s telephone metadata collection not authorized by Patriot Act – appeals courtThe collection of telephone metadata by United States intelligence services “exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized,” a federal appeals court has ruled in a major blow to the National Security Agency.

Study accuses psychologists group of complicity in CIA torture programThe American Psychologists Association, the largest professional scientific organization of its kind, was secretly complicit in the adoption of torturous interrogation tactics used by the United States against detainees, a new report suggests.

​Lawmakers look to reform anti-hacking law by reintroducing bill for Aaron SwartzA , or CFAA, would introduce reform proposed updateto the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act “to better target serious criminals and curb overzealous prosecutions for non-malicious computer and Internet offenses,” according to its authors. So far, their offering has already garnered bipartisan support in both the House and Senate.

Fix the Flaws in Forensic ScienceTHE F.B.I. stunned the legal community on Monday with its acknowledgment that testimony by its forensic scientists about hair identification was scientifically indefensible in nearly every one of more than 250 cases reviewed. But the conclusion should come as no surprise to scientists.

‘Crimes and Impunity’: Amnesty slams US failure to act on torture reportAmnesty International has accused Washington of “sweeping under the carpet” a December Senate report that the CIA tortured militants using the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” during the post 9/11 War on Terror. Naureen Shah, a researcher for Amnesty, accused the Obama administration of ignoring the painstaking five year investigation, which culminated in the Senate Report.