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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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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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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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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The Congressional Republicans who brought us the mindless budget cuts known as the sequester have shown remarkable indifference to life-sustaining government services, American jobs and other programs. So what do they make of the country’s commitments to American Indians, its longstanding obligations to tribal governments under the Constitution and treaties dating back centuries?

Very little, it seems. The sequester will impose cuts of 5 percent across the Indian Health Service, the modestly financed agency within …

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WASHINGTON – Schools on Minnesota’s American Indian reservations are already suffering from the across-the-board budget cuts of the federal sequester, taking a hit months before the rest of the country’s classrooms will feel the effects of reduced funding.

The White Earth Reservation could cut the school year short at its federally funded tribal school.

The Red Lake School District, where the high school was the site of a shooting that left seven people dead in 2005, has …

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The FBI’s “top priority” in 2013 is to modernize surveillance law so authorities can monitor in real time the Web activities of Americans suspected of committing crimes, the FBI’s general counsel said.

At a luncheon for the American Bar Association in Washington last week, Andrew Weissman said that a 1994 federal law designed to help law enforcement conduct lawful surveillance was not keeping up with modern forms of communication.

The law, known as the Communications Assistance for …

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Over the past decade, the WSF has been credited with a number of important international collaborations. For example, the global antiwar demonstrations in February 15, 2003, which have been called the largest protests in history, came out of a call from European Social Forum participants. In the US, labor activists who received international attention for a successful factory take-over in 2008 at Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors factory said inspiration came from workers in Brazil …

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TRANSCRIPT:
Laurel Erickson: No one says the folks in Compton live on Easy Street. It’s one of the poorest places in L.A. County. They’ve even talked about bankruptcy. But it may also be a place for easy money.

Lucrative contracts, unpaid loans, money for meetings that last just minutes. It’s all part of our three-month investigation into Compton City Hall.

Erickson [to Council Member Willie O. Jones]: You’re getting $7,800 a year and the city is just 10 …

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Tens of thousands of Los Angeles County’s low-income renters could see a loss in their housing subsidy because of the federal sequester, leading to higher rent payments and a spike in homelessness, according to local officials.

City and county officials are in Washington D.C. this week lobbying to try to soften the blow of the cuts, pushing for permission to increase rents so they don’t have to throw most recipients off the program altogether.

“This is absolutely …

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