Mar
29
2013
On Saturday, March 23, sixteen year-old Kimani Gray was buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, surrounded by family and friends. Gray had been killed two weeks earlier by a pair of plainclothes New York City police officers, who shot him seven times on an East Flatbush sidewalk. The officers claim the teenager pointed a gun at them, but witnesses, along with family and friends, vehemently dispute the NYPD’s narrative. In the days before Gray’s …
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Mar
29
2013
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
HARTMANN: I’m curious about your thoughts on what’s going on in Cyprus and how this is all playing out and why.
FINGLETON: Well, I think we’re all very curious Thom. I wrote a blog for Forbes amidst the original news about this saying this is inexplicable and it’s still inexplicable. I can’t understand why they are being so clumsy basically, if that is …
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Mar
29
2013
TUCSON, Ariz. — A campaign promising free shotguns for people to protect themselves in Tucson’s most troubled neighborhoods has divided some residents in a community still reeling from a shooting rampage in 2011that killed six people, left a congresswoman and several others wounded, and made the city a symbol of gun violence in America.
The Armed Citizen Project is part of a national campaign to give shotguns to single women and homeowners in the nation’s crime-ridden …
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Mar
29
2013
A panel made up mostly of Los Angeles political insiders will spend the next six to eight months developing strategies for addressing two problems that have bedeviled City Hall — how to eliminate a persistent budget gap and create more jobs after a deep economic downturn.
City Council President Herb Wesson, appearing with lawyer and former U.S. Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor, said Thursday that the 12-member L.A. 2020 commission will submit proposals later this year to …
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Mar
29
2013
Rep. Don Young (R-AK) on Thursday night stood by his use of a racial slur to describe Latinos, saying that he “meant no disrespect” when he told an Alaska radio interviewer, “We used to hire 50 to 60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes”:
“During a sit down interview with Ketchikan Public Radio this week, I used a term that was commonly used during my days growing up on a farm in Central California,” …
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Mar
28
2013
One Michigan Republican National Committeeman promoted an article’s claim that “part of the homosexual agenda is to get the public to affirm their filthy lifestyle,” Slate reported Wednesday.
Dave Agema, a former member of the Michigan House of Representatives, took to his personal Facebook page (only viewable by Agema’s friends) to express his views on the gay and lesbian community, sharing an article titled “Everyone Should Know These Statistics on Homosexuals.”
In addition to labeling gays and …
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Mar
28
2013
In early 1995, I led a Greenpeace expedition to Antarctica during which, among other things, we stopped off at King George Island, in the South Shetland Islands just off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, to pay an official but cordial visit to some of the bases there.
King George Island, and particularly the extremity known as Fildes Peninsula, is host to an abundance of research stations: three Chilean, one Chinese, one Russian, and one Uruguayan, …
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Mar
28
2013
WASHINGTON — The acting chief of the CIA’s operations wing ran a secret “black site” prison overseas after the 2001 terrorist attacks and later signed off on the decision to destroy videotapes of brutal interrogations, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The woman, who remains undercover, now is one of several candidates that CIA chief John Brennan is considering to head the National Clandestine Service, which conducts espionage overseas and runs the agency’s paramilitary operations. …
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Mar
28
2013
The districts that contain Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City ranked last in terms of federal gun law enforcement in 2012, according to a new report from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks federal data.
Federal gun crimes include illegal possession of a firearm in a school zone, illegal sale of a firearm to a juvenile, felon, or drug addict, and illegal transport of a firearm across state lines. In Chicago, the majority …
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Mar
28
2013
There isn’t much going on in Dahlak Kebir, so long as you discount a Human Rights Watch report, and various corroborating evidence , about the island being home to a secret prison camp for political dissidents. Ignore that, and little else seems to be hidden away on Kebir, save for a few archeological sites, a dilapidating runway, some mostly-unpaved roads, and miles of untouched coastline. It is a remote place made all the more …
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