Jun
05
2013
Nawaz Sharif was formally sworn in as Pakistan’s new prime minister Wednesday, and took the opportunity to denounce the patterns of drone strikes and terrorism plaguing the country.
“This daily business of drones has to stop immediately,” Sharif told parliament Wednesday. “Other countries must respect our sovereignty and address our concerns. We have to end lawlessness and terrorism.”
63-year-old Sharif, who was deposed in a coup in 1999 and sent into exile, was elected during Wednesday’s …
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Jun
05
2013
The legal headaches besetting billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corp. now include a grand jury in Los Angeles, part of a federal money-laundering probe of his Nevada-based casinos, The Huffington Post has learned.
The involvement of a federal grand jury, not previously reported, suggests an escalation of the money-laundering investigation into Sands and one of its executives, being led by the U.S. attorney for Los Angeles, according to a person with direct knowledge of the …
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Jun
05
2013
Today begins the court-martial of Private First Class Bradley Manning, Wikileaks’ source inside the US military. Because Manning was arrested over three years ago, the global news media have already written much about the young soldier from Crescent, Oklahoma. And though news accounts have frequently gotten the facts right (he’s 25, was deployed to FOB Hammer in the Mada’in Qada desert of Iraq, is 5 foot 2), most reports have written about the big issues …
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Jun
05
2013
As hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” has boomed in Ohio, Pennsylvania and nearby states in recent years, waste wells in Ohio have absorbed millions of barrels of liquid waste from oil-and-gas drilling operations in the region. Environmentalists and other observers are now calling Ohio a “dumping ground” for the fracking industry. Drillers now want to dump potentially radioactive waste mud, drill cuttings and frack sand from fracking operations in municipal landfills in the state, and environmentalists …
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Jun
05
2013
WASHINGTON – The U.S. government announced Tuesday that it would be going forward with long-discussed plans to auction federal leases off the Atlantic Ocean coast for the development of offshore wind energy.
The sales, to take place in late July, will be the first time that federal lands have been offered on a competitive basis for the United States’ nascent offshore wind business. Proponents say the industry has significant potential, but for decades it has …
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Jun
05
2013
Of all the charges against Bradley Manning, the most pernicious—and revealing—is “aiding the enemy.”
A blogger at The New Yorker, Amy Davidson, raised a pair of big questions that now loom over the courtroom at Fort Meade and over the entire country:
* “Would it aid the enemy, for example, to expose war crimes committed by American forces or lies told by the American government?”
* “In that case, who is aiding the enemy—the whistleblower or …
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Jun
05
2013
Loliondo Region, Tanzania
Tens of thousands of Masai herders in northern Tanzania this spring are protesting a government plan to remove them from their grazing lands to make way for a private hunting firm from the Persian Gulf.
Tanzania plans a new “wildlife corridor” on 600 square miles of Masai village land in the Loliondo Region, which borders the Serengeti National Park. The move, which the government reaffirmed May 23, will evict 30,000 Masai – and allow …
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Jun
05
2013
In six states, plus the District of Columbia, blacks are over five times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites are. The national average? Black Americans are arrested nearly four times as much. And it’s not because of increased use of the drug: according to the New York Times’s report, black and white Americans have about the same rates of marijuana use overall. So what’s going on?
Essentially, the Times explains, it’s …
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Jun
05
2013
New federal data released today by an advocacy group reveals that in the last four years, at least 1,366 kids were locked up in adult immigration detention centers for more than three days. The majority were held in the jails for more than a week and 15 for more than six months. Federal rules require that minors be released from the facilities in less than three days.
The data, obtained by the National Immigrant Justice …
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Jun
05
2013
A client sits before me, seeking help untangling his relationship problems. As a psychotherapist, I strive to be warm, nonjudgmental and encouraging. I am a bit unsettled, then, when in the midst of describing his painful experiences, he says, “I’m sorry for being so negative.”
A crucial goal of therapy is to learn to acknowledge and express a full range of emotions, and here was a client apologizing for doing just that. In my psychotherapy …
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