"TIME Magazine senior national correspondent, Mike Grunwald, who is also ghost writing former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's book, put this tweet out on Saturday. He has since deleted the tweet." Continue reading →
"A Tennessee tea party Republican state legislator told a frightened little girl at a town hall meeting on Thursday in Murfreesboro, TN that laws are laws and that her undocumented father is going to have to be deported. According to ProgressivePopulist.org, 11-year-old Josie Molina told state Rep. Scott Desjarlais (R) that she has papers but her father does not. The tea party crowd whooped and applauded wildly as the little girl took her seat, head down. Progressive Populist reported that Josie Molina’s father is currently in the process of being deported and that the girl is seeing a child psychologist in order to cope with the stress and anxiety." Continue reading →
"Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, Sibel Edmonds, Karen Kwiatkowski, Gary Webb, Danny Casolaro, John Stockwell, Daniel Ellsberg, Mike Gravel, A. Ernest Fitzgerald, Whitaker Chambers, Benjamin Gitlow, and Smedley Darlington Butler are heroes and heroines in the pantheon of whistleblowers who put their conscientious dedication to first principles ahead of a pretended allegiance to duplicitous cabals within a criminal state which had betrayed the fiduciary trust and essential liberties of the people." Continue reading →
"When Judge Shira A. Scheindlin, of Federal District Court in Manhattan, ruled on Monday that the city’s stop-and-frisk program was unconstitutional and ordered that police officers in certain precincts strap tiny cameras to their uniforms to record their dealings with the public, Mr. Bloomberg’s response was immediate and emphatic. 'It would be a nightmare,' he said. 'We can’t have your cameraman follow you around and film things without people questioning whether they deliberately chose an angle, whether they got the whole picture in.'" Continue reading →
"In Pennsylvania and other states, police can force landlords to evict tenants who officers consider to be a nuisance. According to the New York Times, under so-called 'nuisance property' laws, individuals like domestic violence victim Lakisha Briggs of Norristown, PA can be told by police that if they call 911 one more time, they’ll be forced out of their homes. The nuisance ordinances are intended to protect residential neighborhoods from rowdy, disruptive households, but in cases like Briggs’, they can leave victims of violence in an impossible situation, needing to call for help, but knowing it could cost them their home." Continue reading →
"For the past year Forbes has been tracing Isabel dos Santos’ path to riches, reviewing a score of documents and speaking with dozens of people on the ground. As best as we can trace, every major Angolan investment held by Dos Santos stems either from taking a chunk of a company that wants to do business in the country or from a stroke of the president’s pen that cut her into the action. Her story is a rare window into the same, tragic kleptocratic narrative that grips resource-rich countries around the world. For President Dos Santos it’s a foolproof way to extract money from his country, while keeping a putative arm’s-length distance away." Continue reading →
"For the past year Forbes has been tracing Isabel dos Santos’ path to riches, reviewing a score of documents and speaking with dozens of people on the ground. As best as we can trace, every major Angolan investment held by Dos Santos stems either from taking a chunk of a company that wants to do business in the country or from a stroke of the president’s pen that cut her into the action. Her story is a rare window into the same, tragic kleptocratic narrative that grips resource-rich countries around the world. For President Dos Santos it’s a foolproof way to extract money from his country, while keeping a putative arm’s-length distance away." Continue reading →
"Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. said the $50 million was necessary to provide the minimum staffing needed for the basic safety of the district’s 136,000 students. In June, the district closed 24 schools and laid off 3,783 employees, including 127 assistant principals, 646 teachers and more than 1,200 aides, leaving no one even to answer phones. For a number of years, Mayor Michael A. Nutter and the City Council have been working, with some success and a fair amount of taxpayer pain, to shore up the city’s finances, which have been troubled by mounting debt, a shrinking tax base and unfunded pension and health care obligations to retirees." Continue reading →
"Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. said the $50 million was necessary to provide the minimum staffing needed for the basic safety of the district’s 136,000 students. In June, the district closed 24 schools and laid off 3,783 employees, including 127 assistant principals, 646 teachers and more than 1,200 aides, leaving no one even to answer phones. For a number of years, Mayor Michael A. Nutter and the City Council have been working, with some success and a fair amount of taxpayer pain, to shore up the city’s finances, which have been troubled by mounting debt, a shrinking tax base and unfunded pension and health care obligations to retirees." Continue reading →
"Data from hundreds of weather stations located around the U.S. appear to show the planet is getting warmer, but some critics say it's the government's books that are getting cooked -- thanks to temperature readings from sweltering parking lots, airports and other locations that distort the true state of the climate. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has closed some 600 out of nearly 9,000 weather stations over the past two years that it has deemed problematic or unnecessary, after a long campaign by one critic highlighting the problem of using unreliable data." Continue reading →