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Uprising’s guest expert Maya Rockeymoore, President of the Center for Global Policy Solutions, a social change non-profit dedicated to making policy work for people and their environment, analyzes today’s news headlines:

The internet tech giant Yahoo has released more than 1,500 pages of documentation to prove it was strong armed by the US government into turning over user data. The documentation, which was kept secret until now, are FISA court proceedings from a case in 2007 over Yahoo’s refusal to turn over user information to the National Security Agency (NSA) for its PRISM Surveillance program. The existence and reach of PRISM was one of many spying programs that whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed in the past year. Yahoo fought to declassify the documents which reveal that it was threatened with a quarter of a million dollars per day in fines if it refused to comply. The company said, “We refused to comply with what we viewed as unconstitutional and overbroad surveillance and challenged the U.S. Government’s authority.” Click here for a Guardian newspaper article about the story.

The US is not having much luck in expanding its coalition of international partners in the fight against the rebel group calling itself the Islamic State. As Secretary of State John Kerry tours the Arab world this week to win partners, the New York Times reports that, “Egypt, Jordan and Turkey [are] all finding ways …to avoid specific commitments to President Obama’s expanded military campaign.” Obama’s tricky task the Times opined, is to, “try to confront the group without aiding Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, or appearing to side with Mr. Assad’s Shiite allies, Iran and the militant group Hezbollah, against discontented Sunnis across the Arab world.” Click here for a New York Times article about the story.

And finally here in the US, California’s Attorney General for the first time revealed in a report, school truancy data, broken down by race and income. The numbers are stark, with African American students in elementary grades, being 4 times more truant than other students. AP reported that, “The absences were highest at the kindergarten and first-grade levels when children learn to read.” Folding in income into the picture, the study found that 90% of students who missed 36 days or more of the entire school year, came from low-income households. Click here for an AP article about this story.