Bernanke’s Helicopter, and a Note About 9/11You won’t believe the idea that America’s quintessential foreign policy establishment organ is floating now. Or maybe you will. Foreign Affairs is the journal of the Council of Foreign Relations, the organization that seems to drive much of the consensus foreign policy of the country, and from whose membership the top officials of Republican and Democrat administrations are regularly drawn.
U.S. threatened massive fine to force Yahoo to release dataThe U.S. government threatened to fine Yahoo $250,000 a day in 2008 if it failed to comply with a broad demand to hand over user communications – a request the company believed was unconstitutional – according to court documents unsealed Thursday that illuminate how federal officials forced American tech companies to participate in the National Security Agency’s controversial PRISM program.
Right to Know: The PACER Mess And How to Clean ItPACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) is the government-run online system used by lawyers, the press, and the public to access public federal court records in the United States. The administrators of that system recently announced that a huge number of documents from five federal courts have been permanently removed from its database and are no longer publicly viewable.
Payback Time: Bank of America’s Reckoning — K@WIn the U.S. Justice Department’s largest civil settlement ever with a single entity, Bank of America (BoA) agreed on August 21 to pay $16.65 billion to put to rest allegations by federal and state law enforcement agencies of mortgage-related fraud during the financial crisis era.
New York man claims police brutally beat him in incident caught on videoA New York man says multiple police officers beat and pepper-sprayed him for no reason other than that he asked a question – and video footage seems to back him up. News of the beating comes as police unveil new training methods to limit undue force.
Oregonian arrested for filming SWAT raid (VIDEO)Footage recently posted to YouTube shows an Oregon man being arrested for filming, or “interfering” with, a militarized police raid across the street from his apartment. The man – whose YouTube account is Skylow Production – said he was sleeping at his Gresham, Oregon apartment at around 4 a.m.
CIA torture far exceeded waterboarding, brought suspects ‘to point of death’Reuters/Kevin Lamarque The United States will soon release a long-awaited report detailing the findings of a Senate investigation into the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques, and sources now say those tactics far exceeded what the world was led to believe.
Muslim lawyer sues NYPD after arrest for ‘blocking the sidewalk’ during pro-Palestinian rallyReuters / Eduardo Munoz A Muslim woman, and human rights lawyer has taken her accusations of NYPD’s abuse and racism to court, following her violent detention over blocking the sidewalk after a pro-Palestinian demonstration in New York. The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday, with Chaumtoli Huq stating that the policemen used “unreasonable and wholly unprovoked force,” the Telesur media outlet reported.
Chomsky: U.S. Plunges the Cradle of Civilization into Disaster, While Its Oil-Based Empire Destroys the Earth’s ClimateIt is not pleasant to contemplate the thoughts that must be passing through the mind of the Owl of Minerva as the dusk falls and she undertakes the task of interpreting the era of human civilization, which may now be approaching its inglorious end.
Guatemala defies ‘Monsanto Law’ pushed by US as part of trade agreementThe highest court in Guatemala has suspended the controversial ‘Monsanto Law,’ a provision of a US-Central American trade agreement, that would insulate transnational seed corporations considered to have “discovered” new plant varieties. The Constitutional Court suspended on Friday the law – passed in June and due to go into effect on Sept.
Homeowners challenging lenders’ right to collectSept. 02– Seven years after the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market, New Jersey continues to be a hotbed of home repossessions by lenders, resulting in reams of foreclosure-fraud and improper-debt-collection complaints that mainly target intermediaries known as mortgage servicers. In a federal lawsuit filed in Newark in May against Bank of America and…
Military lawyer resigns in protest of ‘show trial’ of accused 9-11 mastermindLast week, a US military lawyer on the defense team for self-proclaimed 9/11-attacks mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed resigned from the Army in protest of the “show trial” conducted by the US at Guantanamo Bay. Maj. Jason Wright resigned on Aug. 26, according to NPR.
