VICE News | – “During the devastating 50-day war in Israel and Gaza this past summer, around 18,000 homes in Gaza were destroyed or severely damaged, leaving around 120,000 residents homeless. Now, with trouble in neighboring Sinai and infighting between Palestinian factions, reconstruction efforts in the beleaguered Gaza Strip are moving slowly. With the UN […]
The “Christian State” of Idaho?
KXLY ABC | — “Do you think Idaho should be classified as a Christian state? That’s the question the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee will answer Tuesday night. KXLY4’s Aaron Luna reports.” KXLY: “Republicans debating whether Idaho should be a Christian state”
American ‘Exceptionalism’ or just Above the Law? Torture, Drones, Assassination with Impunity
By Alfred W. McCoy | (Tomdispatch.com) – “The sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” said conservative thinker Carl Schmitt in 1922, meaning that a nation’s leader can defy the law to serve the greater good. Though Schmitt’s service as Nazi Germany’s chief jurist and his unwavering support for Hitler from the night of […]
President Obama vetoes Keystone pipeline bill
RT | — As promised, US President Barack Obama has vetoed a bill from Congress which will halt construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. Defying the wishes of the Republican-led House and Senate, the president on Tuesday rejected the years-in-the-making would-be legislation that sought to pave the way for a 1,179-mile pipeline to carry […]
The Dynamism of American Islam
By Joseph Richard Preville and Julie Poucher Harbin | (ISLAMiCommentary) How do Muslims fit into the quilt of American history? Jonathan Curiel investigates this question in his new book, Islam in America (I.B. Tauris, April 28, 2015). “America’s first Muslims,” he writes, “were perceived as less than human – people put in chains, forced to […]
War on Whistleblowers (ft. Edward Snowden & David Carr)
Brave New Films | – Brave New Films: War on Whistleblowers (ft. Edward Snowden & David Carr) War on Whistleblowers highlights recent cases where American government employees and contractors took to the media to expose fraud and abuse. In all cases the whistle-blowing was to the detriment of their professional and personal lives. With President […]
Surprise: Noted Climate Change Denialist Secretly Took Oil Co. Payouts
By Nadia Prupis | (Commondreams.org) A prominent climate change denier and researcher quietly took more than $1.2 million in payouts from the energy industry, including the Koch brothers and other oil lobbyists, for the past 14 years, newly released documents have shown. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, accumulated a […]
‘I would have come forward sooner’ – Snowden on NSA leak regrets
RT | – Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has frequently said that he does not regret blowing the whistle on the agency’s mass surveillance programs. However, he has now stated that he would change one thing if he could do it all again. He would have leaked the information earlier. Snowden made the […]
Leak: Netanyahu’s 2012 Iran Bomb Warning refuted by Israeli Intel
Cenk Uygur | (The Young Turks) – “Benjamin Netanyahu’s dramatic declaration to world leaders in 2012 that Iran was about a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by his own secret service, according to a top-secret Mossad document. It is part of a cache of hundreds of dossiers, files and cables from […]