May
10
2013
Last week the California Assembly’s Judiciary Committee passed AB 5, the Homeless Bill of Rights, by a vote of 7 to 2. At a time when homelessness is increasingly criminalized, this is an important step towards helping people instead of punishing them for not having a home. Advocates overcame strong opposition to the bill, in part through a grassroots movement of homeless and poor people that mobilized hundreds of people to rally and lobby the …
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May
10
2013
The Republican inquisition over the attacks against Americans in Benghazi has never really gone away, but it appears as though in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing and the House Oversight Committee’s Benghazi hearings this week there are renewed psycho-histrionics over Benghazi.
Lindsey Graham and Fox News Channel in particular are each crapping their cages over new allegations from an alleged whistleblower, while they continue to deal in previously debunked falsehoods about the sequence of …
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May
10
2013
Financial services news group Bloomberg was facing questions on Friday about how reporters used information about clients gleaned from its widely-used terminals.
The New York Post reported that journalists at Bloomberg had been caught using the financial news service’s $20,000-a-year terminals to “spy” on Goldman Sachs bankers.
The Guardian also understands that JP Morgan also has concerns about how Bloomberg used information from its terminals while pursuing stories about Bruno Iksil, the trader known as the London …
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May
10
2013
American prisoner Kenneth Bae was head of a Christian mission that aimed to overthrow North Korea’s regime, Pyongyang has claimed.
In the first public comments on Bae’s alleged crimes, a Supreme Court spokesman told state news agency KCNA that the US national had plotted “Operation Jericho” for at least six years before he was arrested in North Korea in November 2012.
The operation, apparently named in reference to the biblical city whose walls were toppled by …
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May
10
2013
A growing number of protesters in North Carolina, angered by a series of policy decisions by Gov. Pat McCrory, are being arrested and jailed for their roles in various acts of civil disobedience.
So far, the protests have led to the arrests of dozens of North Carolinians, from a group of college students and religious and labor leaders to an 83-year-old grandmother. They are part of a group of civil rights and advocacy groups in North …
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May
10
2013
An instrument near the summit of Mauna Loa in Hawaii recorded a long-awaited climate milestone today: the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere there has exceeded 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in 55 years of measurement—and probably more than 3 million years of Earth history.
The last time the concentration of Earth’s main greenhouse gas reached this mark, horses and camels lived in the high Arctic. Seas were at least …
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May
10
2013
The United States government is investing tens of millions of dollars each year on offensive hacking operations in order to exploit vulnerabilities in the computers of its adversaries, Reuters reports.
According to an in-depth article published Friday by journalist Joseph Menn, the US and its Department of Defense contractors are increasingly pursuing efforts to hack the computers of foreign competitors, in turn exposing a rarely discussed aspect of the nation’s clandestine cyber operations.
In a time when …
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May
10
2013
An international protest planned for later this month against biotechnology company Monsanto is slated to span six continents and include demonstrations in dozens of countries around the globe.
Amid growing concerns over St. Louis, Missouri-based Monsanto and the impact the company is having on agriculture, activists have planned rallies for later this month in 36 countries.
Monsanto, a titan of the emerging biotech industry, has come under attack from environmentalists, agriculturalists and average consumers over the company’s …
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May
10
2013
Thousands of teachers and students have taken to streets across Spain to protest spending cuts they say are destroying the country’s public education system.
In Madrid, the protesters – many of them wearing green T-shirts that have become a symbol of their movement against the budget cuts – marched to the education ministry on Thursday. The demonstrators called on Jose Ignacio Wert, education minister, to resign.
“We have a small budget and they are reducing it more …
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May
10
2013
When NSFWCORP sent me to Victorville this January, I little expected that the neighboring town of Adelanto would become ground zero for a fight between billionaires on one side, and poor, vulnerable minority parents and children on the other.
I first heard about the fight through the local right-wing paper, the Victorville Daily Press, which gleefully announced on its front page that a local school, Desert Trails Elementary, had just made history as the first school …
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