Some of President Barack Obama’s political appointees, including the secretary for health and human services, are using secret government email accounts they say are necessary to prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed with unwanted messages, according to a review by the Associated Press.

The scope of using the secret accounts across government remains a mystery: most US agencies have failed to turn over lists of political appointees’ email addresses, which the AP sought under the Freedom …

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With ten days to go before Iran’s presidential election, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, and U.S. neoconservatives are on opposite sides of the regime-change question, as one might expect.

Here’s the reality of Iran’s presidential vote: there isn’t going to be any regime change, despite Khamenei’s fears and the hopes of right-wingers such as Robert Joseph, a former George W. Bush official. The next president of Iran, whoever he is, will settle into …

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Imperialism doesn’t pay. Of course, it never did for the common folk recruited to invade another country, or the natives they conquered. But still, the thought persists that occupying foreign lands—particularly as in the case of Iraq, soaked in oil as well as blood—is a winner.

True, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, with its nonexistent WMDs and virulent hostility to the religious fanatics that attacked us on 9/11, was a false target for a war on terror. …

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More than two months after ExxonMobil’s 65-year-old Pegasus pipeline burst and spewed a gusher of thick Canadian tar sands oil through Mayflower, AR, and into a marsh on Lake Conway—the state’s most popular fishing spot—residents are still complaining of health problems and are worried about poisonous impacts on wildlife and in the environment. Many locals and some scientists have little faith in the continuous rosy assurances from Exxon and the Unified Command that testing results …

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Despite a warning in a new UN report on Syria saying “there is a human cost to the increased availability of weapons” inside the war torn country, the US is sending more military hardware into the region by stationing Patriot missile batteries and F-16 fighter jets in neighboring Jordan.

Though the Pentagon says the weapons are being sent for military exercises, indications were also made that the weapons could remain for an extended period.

As Al-Jazeera reports:

…

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WASHINGTON—The White House on Tuesday announced a set of executive actions by President Barack Obama aimed at reining in certain patent-holding firms, known as “patent trolls” to their detractors, amid concerns that the companies are abusing the patent system and disrupting competition.

Mr. Obama’s actions, which include measures he wants Congress to consider, are intended to target firms that have forced technology companies, financial institutions and others into costly litigation to protect their products. These patent-holding …

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(Reuters) – An Egyptian court gave jail terms to 43 Americans, Europeans, Egyptians and other Arabs on Tuesday in a case against democracy promotion groups that plunged U.S.-Egyptian ties into their worst crisis in decades.

Judge Makram Awad gave five-year sentences in absentia to at least 15 U.S. citizens who left Egypt last year. He sentenced an American who stayed behind to two years in prison, and gave the same sentence to a German woman.

Beginning …

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It may be strange to hear for a person outside Turkey that people are protesting a government over a few trees and a park. But that is the diluted story.

The protests in Taksim Square go beyond a few trees in Gezi Park.

It is important to understand what is at stake and what the big deal is at Gezi Park. This brief document provides a short summary of the underlying issues so that you can place …

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On ABC’s This Week on Sunday, Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington confronted former White House Senior Advisor David Plouffe over the Obama administration’s record on deportation. In the midst of the conversations around the IRS scandal and the Department of Justice going after leaks to journalists, Huffington said there is “a lot of scandal” in the debate over immigration:

HUFFINGTON: It’s what the Obama administration is doing with deportation… More people have …

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A fire at a poultry processing plant in China has killed at least 119 people, officials say.

The fire broke out at a slaughterhouse in Dehui in Jilin province early on Monday.

Accounts speak of explosions prior to the fire, which caused panic and a crush of workers trying to escape. Most exits were said to be locked.

A labour activist told the BBC it was the worst factory fire in living memory.

The fire is now said to …

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