May
13
2013
Athens has threatened to arrest high school teachers if they carry out a strike this week, in a move seen as reassurance to Greece’s foreign bailout creditors that the country will not abandon its harsh austerity measures and unpopular reforms.
The announcement marks the third time this year that the Greek government has invoked emergency laws to force strikers to return to work.
Greece is due to receive €7.5 billion in loans soon, the latest tranche of …
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May
13
2013
Murder is our national sport. We murder tens of thousands with our industrial killing machines in Afghanistan and Iraq. We murder thousands more from the skies over Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen with our pilotless drones. We murder each other with reckless abandon. And, as if we were not drenched in enough human blood, we murder prisoners—most of them poor people of color who have been locked up for more than a decade. The United States …
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May
13
2013
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court usually isn’t friendly toward questionable patents, but it came down overwhelmingly on the side of agribusiness giant Monsanto Monday in a case that’s bound to resonate throughout the biotechnology industry.
The court ruled unanimously that an Indiana farmer violated Monsanto’s patent on genetically modified soybeans when he culled some from a grain elevator and used them to replant his own crop in future years.
“If simple copying were a protected use, a …
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May
10
2013
There is an overwhelming sense of disbelief when looking at David Maisel’s aerial photographs of open-pit mines, toxic waste sites, logging, freeways and other scenes that mark the toll humans have left on earth.
But the images found in Maisel’s recent book Black Maps—American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime, published by Steidl, are all unaltered photographs of landscapes and the endless array of colors and strange patterns are abstracted visions of environmental devastation of land.
Maisel first …
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May
10
2013
In Michigan, emergency skews black.
State-appointed emergency managers currently run Detroit along with five other Michigan cities and three school districts. While the cities under emergency management together contain just nine percent of Michigan’s population, they contain, notably, about half of the state’s African-American residents.
Michigan’s Public Act 436 allows the governor to appoint emergency managers with near-absolute power in cash-strapped cities, towns, and school districts. Emergency managers can supersede local ordinances, sell city assets, and break …
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May
10
2013
The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system.
Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf) is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, …
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May
10
2013
Last week the California Assembly’s Judiciary Committee passed AB 5, the Homeless Bill of Rights, by a vote of 7 to 2. At a time when homelessness is increasingly criminalized, this is an important step towards helping people instead of punishing them for not having a home. Advocates overcame strong opposition to the bill, in part through a grassroots movement of homeless and poor people that mobilized hundreds of people to rally and lobby the …
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May
10
2013
The Republican inquisition over the attacks against Americans in Benghazi has never really gone away, but it appears as though in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing and the House Oversight Committee’s Benghazi hearings this week there are renewed psycho-histrionics over Benghazi.
Lindsey Graham and Fox News Channel in particular are each crapping their cages over new allegations from an alleged whistleblower, while they continue to deal in previously debunked falsehoods about the sequence of …
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May
10
2013
Financial services news group Bloomberg was facing questions on Friday about how reporters used information about clients gleaned from its widely-used terminals.
The New York Post reported that journalists at Bloomberg had been caught using the financial news service’s $20,000-a-year terminals to “spy” on Goldman Sachs bankers.
The Guardian also understands that JP Morgan also has concerns about how Bloomberg used information from its terminals while pursuing stories about Bruno Iksil, the trader known as the London …
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May
10
2013
American prisoner Kenneth Bae was head of a Christian mission that aimed to overthrow North Korea’s regime, Pyongyang has claimed.
In the first public comments on Bae’s alleged crimes, a Supreme Court spokesman told state news agency KCNA that the US national had plotted “Operation Jericho” for at least six years before he was arrested in North Korea in November 2012.
The operation, apparently named in reference to the biblical city whose walls were toppled by …
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