Mitt Romney is running for president – for president! – promising an across-the-board 20 percent tax cut without offering any details about how that’s going to be paid for. Forget being battered by the press, he and his little sidekick Ryan should both be tossed off the playing field for even trying something like that. This race for the White House, this isn’t some frat prank. This is serious. This is for grownups, for God’s …

Read more

Religious leaders in Pakistan have condemned the shooting of teenage education rights activist Malala Yousafzai, during a special day of prayer across the country.

Clerics on Friday declared the attempt on her life, made by Pakistani Taliban gunmen while the 14-year-old girl was on her way home from school in the Swat valley, to be “un-Islamic”.

The joint fatwa, or religious edict, was issued by at least 50 scholars associated with the Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC), and …

Read more

Saudi-funded groups have run ads against Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat in Missouri, as well as in support of Tommy Thompson, a Republican in Wisconsin. But in both cases, they’ve been able to conceal the spending behind a wall of secrecy, and under the banner of groups with “American” in the name.

SuperPACs have to disclose their donors, so for a foreign corporation to spend big without ever revealing itself, a more practical vehicle to influence …

Read more

BEIJING — Forced evictions are accelerating in China, leading to violent disturbances and deaths, a new report by Amnesty International asserted Thursday. The human-rights group said it had collected reports on more than 40 cases in which people resisting relocation had set themselves on fire between 2009 and 2011, a sharp rise from previous years.

Forced evictions are a well-documented issue in China. For years, local governments have been seizing land, selling off development rights and …

Read more

As anyone in the U.S. government will tell you, democracy is messy.

The latest group subjected to its unkempt ways is the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

For those of you following along, the mercurial branch has been trying to refine its voting process for the Academy Awards for years. In its latest iteration, announced in January, the branch instituted two new policies: first, that every member of the documentary branch …

Read more

For the second time in five days – and also the second time in Walmart’s five decades – workers at multiple US Walmart stores are on strike. This morning, workers walked off the job at stores in Dallas, Texas; Miami, Florida; Seattle, Washington; Laurel, Maryland; and Northern, Central, and Southern California. No end date has been announced; some plan to remain on strike at least through tomorrow, when they’ll join other Walmart workers for a …

Read more

The nation’s unemployment rate dropped sharply to 7.8 percent in September, its lowest level since the month President Obama took office, the Labor Department said Friday.

While employers added only a modest 114,000 jobs last month, the jobless rate declined from 8.1 percent in August. The unemployment rate fell because more people were working, not because discouraged job seekers stopped looking, the numbers showed.

Adding to the positive news, job gains were revised upward by 40,000 …

Read more

Anglo American Platinum fired 12,000 striking miners Friday for staging an unlawful strike that is one of several that are slowly paralyzing South Africa’s crucial mining sector.

About 80,000 miners, representing 16 percent of the country’s mine workforce, are currently striking in a wave of wildcat work stoppages that have serious economic and political implications for South Africa.

Strike leader Gaddafi Mdoda, a mineworker at Anglo American Platinum, or Amplats, said he was one of the workers …

Read more

California became the first state to ban therapy aimed at changing a minor’s sexual orientation from gay to straight after Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Sunday prohibiting the so-called “conversion” therapy.

“This bill bans non-scientific ‘therapies’ that have driven young people to depression and suicide,” Brown said in a statement Sunday. “These practices have no basis in science or medicine and they will now be relegated to the dustbin of quackery.”

Sen. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance), who introduced …

Read more

On Monday and Tuesday Mother Jones published exclusive video that captured Mitt Romney speaking to donors at a May 17 fundraiser, which was held at the home of private equity mogul Mark Leder. Responding to a question about the “Palestinian problem,” Romney said peace in the Middle East is not possible and a Palestinian state is not feasible, telling donors that Palestinians have “no interest whatsoever in establishing peace and that the pathway to peace …

Read more