In the Academy Award-winning documentary Hearts and Minds, Daniel Ellsberg, who secretly copied and then released the Pentagon Papers, offers a catalog of presidential lying about the U.S. role in Vietnam: Truman lied. Eisenhower lied. Kennedy lied. Johnson “lied and lied and lied.” Nixon lied.

Ellsberg concludes: “The American public was lied to month by month by each of these five administrations. As I say, it’s a tribute to the American public that their leaders perceived …

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Jakarta, Indonesia (CNN) — After clashes between police and protesters, Indonesia’s parliament Monday night voted to revise the national budget and allow an increase of up to 44% in the prices of subsidized gas and diesel fuel.

Earlier Monday, protesters who rejected the increase clashed with police outside the parliament building in Jakarta. Police fired tear gas and water cannons at thousands of them before legislators began voting on the budget revisions.

There were smaller protests in …

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The rumors are true. Amazon is providing cloud services to the CIA. But what’s most intriguing about the multi-million-dollar deal is not what Amazon is doing, but how the company is doing it — and what that means for the future of that thing called cloud computing.

Word of the deal broke in mid-March by way of a publication called FCW, which reported that the king of cloud computing had inked a contract with the Central …

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The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, says he is fit enough to spend another five years inside the tiny Ecuadorean embassy in London, Ecuador’s foreign minister said on Monday, as it was announced that British and Ecuadorean legal experts would try to resolve the impasse.

Despite the news of the legal talks – which followed a meeting on Monday morning between the British foreign secretary, William Hague, and his Ecuadorean counterpart, Ricardo Patiño – neither London nor …

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Follow one of Fire Island’s quaint footpaths away from the ferry dock, past modest cottages and better-appointed vacation homes, to an elegant modern beach house that extends across three lots. A composition in bold, unadorned planes, it has a perimeter of green and two separate entrances, each outfitted with the long ramps that are the local custom.

Its most interesting feature, however, is not architectural, but financial. The house, which is owned by John Sexton, …

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Afghanistan’s lower house of parliament, or Wolesi Jirga, has given the country’s Information and Culture Minister a one-month deadline to ban “anti-Islamic” television broadcasts.

According to Afghanistan’s TOLO News, Minister Sayed Makhdoom Raheen said at a legislative session on Saturday, June 15 that, “A number of media organizations and journalists are insulting the country’s respected personalities and their broadcasting is un-Islamic. However, we are trying to strengthen the ‘freedom of speech’ in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, media organisations …

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Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed a bill on Friday that blocks local governments from implementing paid sick leave legislation, the Orlando Sentinel reports. He made his decision quickly, only taking four of the 15 days he legally had to review the bill before he signed it.

In signing the bill, Scott sided with big business interests including Disney World, Darden Restaurants (owner of Olive Garden and Red Lobster), and the Florida Chamber of Commerce. The …

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The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) recently adopted a “model” bill from an oil-industry lobby group, that would limit the ability of states to negotiate regional “low-carbon fuel standards” (LCFS), a mechanism designed to reduce the carbon intensity of transportation fuels. If agreed by states, LCFS could have a significant impact on the sale of fuels derived from Canadian tar sands in the United States, regardless of any decision the Obama administration makes over the …

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You gotta feel for ExxonMobil.

Mere months after the oil giant was mildly stung by a $1.7 million fine for its 2011 spill in Yellowstone River, federal and Arkansas prosecutors have filed a lawsuit against the company seeking compensation and cleanup costs related to this year’s tar-sands oil pipeline rupture in Mayflower, Ark.

From the L.A. Times:

The Justice Department and the state of Arkansas filed suit against the oil giant ExxonMobil over a …

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The fight over public education in Philadelphia escalated Monday, when two local parents and two school district employees initiated a hunger strike to protest the closure of 23 schools and firing of 3,783 education professionals.

The four hunger strikers camped out on the steps in front of Gov. Tom Corbett’s Philadelphia office, where they say they will remain without food until the city and state governments do something to reduce layoffs and improve student safety.

“I care …

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