Saturday, May 25th
Last update10:41:15 PM GMT
The Vatican bank, long a source of secret and scandal for the Holy See, plans to publish its annual report online as part of its efforts to be more financially transparent.
An American diplomat was briefly detained by the Russian State Security Service and then ordered to leave the country after being accused of trying to recruit a Russian officer to work as a U.S. agent, Russian officials said Tuesday.
The Russian Foreign Ministry posted a statement on its Web site saying it had declared Ryan C. Fogle, who is listed as the third secretary in the political section at the U.S. Embassy, persona non grata. Fogle must leave the country quickly, the Foreign Ministry said.
I’ve always liked the following snippet of purple prose.
Before the beginning, after the great war between heaven and hell, God created the Earth and gave dominion over it to the crafty ape he called man… and to each generation was born a Creature of Light and a Creature of Darkness… and great armies clashed by night in the ancient war between good and evil. There was magic then. Nobility. And unimaginable cruelty. And so it was until the day that a false sun exploded over Trinity, and man forever traded away wonder for reason. -- Season One opening narration from the HBO series Carnivàle
I don’t buy into the “god” part, heaven and hell, or the idea that after the bomb humanity embraced reason. But the seemingly forever war of Good vs. Evil … resonates.
Keith Fossen never expected to join a grassroots environmental group, let alone help organize one from the ground up.
"I was so far over there on the conservative side … whenever I heard of anyone trying to do something for the environment, I was suspicious," Fossen said during an interview with Truthout. "I thought anything environmental was trying to control business."
The Obama administration on Monday filed a last-minute appeal to delay the sale of the morning-after contraceptive pill to girls of any age without a prescription.
The legal paperwork asked the second US circuit court of appeals in Manhattan to postpone a federal judge's ruling that eliminated age limits on the pill while the government appeals that overall decision.
Hunger-strikers being force fed at Guantánamo Bay are shackled to a chair, fitted with a mask and have tubes inserted through their nose and into their stomachs for up to two hours at a time, according to revised guidelines in use at the camp.
The guidelines, which were updated after the latest protest by inmates began in February, detail the process of involuntary feeding and how after the sessions, detainees are kept in a "dry cell" to prevent them vomiting. News of the 30-page Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) manual – which was first published on Monday, by al-Jazeera, and has since been confirmed to be genuine by the US military – comes amid fresh questions over the ethics of force-feeding protesters at the prison.
The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.
The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.
The world's two biggest fashion retailers Inditex and H&M have backed an accord aimed at preventing a repeat of last month's collapse of a Bangladesh factory building that killed more than 1,100 people.
The agreement on fire and building safety, which is being driven by the International Labour Organisation, trade unions and other lobby groups, has been under negotiation since the factory collapsed on April 24.
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