The self-proclaimed Saudi cleric Fayan Al-Ghamdi has been accused of raping and torturing his own 5-year-old daughter, Lama Al-Ghamdi, to death. Dr. Mohammed Mehdi, the medical examiner in Lama’s case reported to Asharq Al-Awsat that the “offender committed all sorts of physical abuse on the victim” and that the 5-year-old girl suffered from clear evidence of sexual abuse and rape, including “swelling in the region of the genitals and laceration in her anal area.”

The father …

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Four of the tightest Senate races took place in states with some of the largest percentages of Native Americans: Arizona, New Mexico, North Dakota and Montana. The Native vote in three of those states helped Democrats win key victories and maintain control of the Senate.

Yet the 2012 election in these states also revealed just how hard Native communities still must work to participate in democracy—and just how little they are getting in return for their …

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Thom Hartmann discusses the non-profit 501c4 loophole being used to hide campaign contributions with Eric T. Schneiderman Attorney General for the State of New York. In the 2012 election cycle about $500 million dollars was laundered through 501c4 non profits. Schneiderman is proposing rules which would mandate all non-profit groups to reveal what percent of their spending is going toward federal, state and local election …

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The FBI is using a racial and ethnic mapping program to collect intelligence on American communities – and it doesn’t want you to know which ones it’s spying on, or how it’s using census data to do so. The ACLU and the ACLU of Michigan filed a brief in federal court on Friday to challenge the FBI’s secrecy over its profiling practices.

FBI documents we already secured show that the Bureau is profiling some communities for …

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The detailed circumstances in which a US government may order the killing of an American citizen who is a high-ranking member of al-Qaida have been revealed in a leaked memo prepared by Obama administration lawyers.

The document, acquired by NBC and dating from 2011, lays out for the first time the precise rationale for carrying out targeted killings of senior al-Qaida members who are US citizens, and who are believed to pose an “imminent threat of …

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For millions of undocumented migrants who have spent years in the US legal shadows, the rupture of the political deadlock on immigration was the realisation of what once seemed a forlorn hope.

But even if the moves to fix America’s broken immigration system result in a deal that once seemed so elusive, for many others it will come too late. Those are the people for whom the pressure of living without proper legal status bore down …

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Rape culture exists because we don’t believe it does. From tacit acceptance of misogyny in everything from casual conversations with our peers to the media we consume, we accept the degradation of women and posit uncontrollable hyper-sexuality of men as the norm. But rape is endemic to our culture because there’s no widely accepted cultural definition of what it actually is. As Nation contributor and co-editor of the anthology Yes Means Yes Jessica …

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The corporate state has made it clear there will be no more Occupy encampments. The corporate state is seeking through the persistent harassment of activists and the passage of draconian laws such as Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act—and we will be in court next Wednesday to fight the Obama administration’s appeal of the Southern District Court of New York’s ruling declaring Section 1021 unconstitutional—to shut down all legitimate dissent. The corporate state …

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U.S. President Barack Obama has been granted sweeping powers to order preemptive cyber-strikes on any given country, anonymous officials involved in a “secret legal review” of U.S. cyber warfare rules, told the New York Times Monday.

Speaking to the Times, the unnamed officials said quickly advancing tactics of cyber-warfare can be unleashed exclusively via the direct orders of the President—should the administration suspect signs of a major digital attack. If the president approves a strike, the …

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As members of Canada’s House of Commons returned to work last week in Ottawa, they found several hundred protesters waiting for them under a heavy snowfall on Parliament Hill. Many were dressed in traditional clothing of Canada’s First Nations. Their chants were punctuated by drumbeats.

Similar protests took place in Halifax, Calgary, Winnipeg, Montreal, Vancouver and other cities across Canada and in the United States. They were part of a “world day of action” organized under …

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