WASHINGTON — Bank lobbyists are not leaving it to lawmakers to draft legislation that softens financial regulations. Instead, the lobbyists are helping to write it themselves.

One bill that sailed through the House Financial Services Committee this month — over the objections of the Treasury Department — was essentially Citigroup’s, according to e-mails reviewed by The New York Times. The bill would exempt broad swathes of trades from new regulation.

In a sign of Wall Street’s resurgent …

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Better, but not nearly good enough.

Human and civil rights groups generally responded to Obama’s foreign policy speech by saying that though they welcomed the president’s decision to directly address long-ignored issues—including extrajudicial killings, drone attacks, the permanent war footing of the US military, and the ongoing crisis at the Guantanamo Bay prison—there remained enormous problems with many of his declarations and formulations surrounding these controversial policies.

From the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR):

…

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Three Harvard grad students experimented with whether there was ethnic prejudice in local election administration by emailing every local or county election official, commission and supervisor in 48 states with Latino-sounding and non-Latino-sounding names and examined the responses. What they found were that local election officials were three-and-a-half to four-times more likely to respond to the emails that came from the non-Latino name, Greg Walsh, than the Latino name, Luis Rodriguez.

The gap in those responses …

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LUCKNOW: A blistering heat wave has swept across most parts of north and western India, causing massive electricity cuts and leading angry residents to protest and even attack power company officials and property.
In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, enraged citizens have set fire to a power station and held power company employees hostage for several hours. Police said yesterday that at least 21 people have been arrested for the violence and for damaging government …

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As WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange approaches the one-year anniversary of his confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, a report released Wednesday reveals that donations to the secret-spilling site have dwindled to a trickle.

The organization managed to attract only $68,000 in donations, according to an accounting report published by the Wau Holland foundation (.pdf), a German nonprofit organization that processes most of the financial contributions for the group.

This despite constant pleadings for donations from Assange …

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As Congress fails to make progress on reforming the nation’s gun laws, state legislatures have filled the void. A number of states around the country, and not just deep-blue ones, have taken steps to crack down on gun violence. Even some very conservative states have defeated National Rifle Association (NRA) supported bills that would have significantly weakened state gun laws.

Here’s a run-down of ten instances of state progress that were in some cases mere proposals …

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For their secret meeting, they’ve chosen a very small village surrounded by forest in Kpaka Chiefdom in southern Sierra Leone. About one hundred men – chiefs, elders and youth leaders from all over the chiefdom – have gathered in the shade of a very large tree. Conspicuously absent is their Paramount Chief, the supreme traditional authority in the chiefdom, without whose approval they should not even be here. But this is no ordinary meeting; its …

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NEW YORK (AP) — The nation’s record-low teen birth rate stems from robust declines in nearly every state, but most dramatically in several Mountain States and among Hispanics, according to a new government report.

All states but West Virginia and North Dakota showed significant drops over five years. But the Mountain States of Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and Utah saw rates fall by 30 percent or more.

In 22 states, teen Hispanic birth rates plunged at least …

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A lawsuit filed by the advocacy group Freedom to Work alleges that ExxonMobil discriminated against a prospective employee because the individual was gay.

After the oil and gas giant failed to adopt a nondiscrimination policy that included protections for sexual orientation and gender identity, Freedom to Work ran a “paired resume” experiment to see if the company actively discriminated in its hiring practices. The LGBT worker advocacy group submitted two fictitious resumes in response to a …

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President Obama’s counterterrorism speech was interrupted by a heckler, identified as Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin by reporters at the speech, who spoke about the Administration’s use of drones and the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

“I’m willing to cut the young lady who interrupted me so slack, because it’s worth being passionate about,” Obama said. He added: “I obviously don’t agree with much of what she said.”

“Will you tell the Muslim people their lives are as precious …

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