Germany’s BND intelligence service sends “massive amounts” of intercepts to the NSA daily, according to a report based on Edward Snowden’s leaks. It suggests a tight relationship has been developed between the two agencies – which the BND claims is legal.

Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Snowden and obtained by Der Spiegel revealed that the 500 million pieces of phone and email communications metadata collected by the NSA in Germany last December were “apparently” provided …

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James Risen wants his subpoena scrapped.

Risen is the New York Times reporter at the heart of a juicy court case that sits astride important First Amendment and journalism issues. His 2006 book, “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” contains a chapter describing how the CIA blundered in trying to get a former Russian scientist to screw with Iran by giving the country bogus nuclear weapons plans. In 2010, …

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In the journal Nature on Wednesday, a team of scientists from the University of Washington described the HeLa genome, which they recently sequenced. The project is a tour-de-force of DNA analysis, befitting the best-studied human cells in the world.

But the research is exceptional for another reason. Henrietta Lacks, who was poor, black and uneducated, never consented to her cells’ being studied. For 62 years, her family has been left out of the decision-making about …

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In the wake of the not guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial, there has been a renewed interest in repealing “stand your ground” laws in the state of Florida.

No other case has garnered as much interest or illustrated the misapplication of the controversial law more than that of the case of Marissa Alexander.

Alexander was sentenced to 20 years for firing a warning shot, that hit no one, during a confrontation with her then-husband who …

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Four weeks after the Washington DC City Council passed a bill to hike some retail workers’ wages, DC Mayor Vince Gray has not yet indicated whether he will let it become law. The measure, the Large Retailer Accountability Act, has drawn fierce opposition from Walmart, whose urban expansion ambitions have recently been dealt setbacks by labor groups and allied critics. With the bill so far one vote short of a veto-proof majority, an apparently likely …

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The US is suing the Bank of America for investor fraud over the sale of $850m worth of residential mortgage-backed securities.

The lawsuits are the latest legal headache for the second-largest US bank, which has already agreed to pay in excess of $45bn to settle disputes stemming from the 2008 financial crisis.

While most of the cases Bank of America has already confronted pertain to its acquisitions of brokerage Merrill Lynch and home lender Countrywide, the two …

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It is the largest demonstration of its kind since the latest political crisis began two weeks ago when a prominent opposition politician was assassinated.

Earlier, the constituent assembly was suspended until the government and opposition open negotiations.

The assembly is drawing up a new constitution.
Union call

The protest in central Tunis was called by the opposition to demand the assembly’s dissolution and the resignation of the government, and to mark the six-month anniversary of the assassination of prominent …

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President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law 48 years ago today. But in June, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court struck down a major section of the law, freeing jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to change their voting laws without federal permission. For decades, Section 5 of the VRA required a number of jurisdictions, mostly in the South, to seek the feds’ approval—called preclearance, in legal parlance—before …

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Nine young people are changing the way the country talks about immigration—not from the floor of Congress or a campaign podium, but from a detention center.

On July 22, the undocumented youth deliberately crossed the southern border into the United States, as a protest against immigration policy as well as a symbolic act of resistance to the deportation system that has loomed over them and their families since they first entered the country.

Their carefully orchestrated protest …

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Bradley Manning’s maximum possible sentence for leaking state secrets to WikiLeaks was cut from 136 years to a possible 90 years on Tuesday, marking a rare victory for the defence in a trial that has so far swung almost exclusively in the US government’s direction.

The judge presiding over the court martial, Colonel Denise Lind, granted the most elements of a defence motion calling for some of the 20 counts for which Manning has been found …

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