House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and other top House Republicans are warning President Barack Obama not to issue a proposed executive order requiring disclosure of political donations by federal contractors, calling it "a blatant attempt to intimidate, and potentially silence, certain speakers who are engaged in their constitutionally protected right to free speech."
The proposal, which has not been formally introduced by Obama yet, would require big federal contractors and their top corporate officers and directors, to disclose their political donations, even to outside groups involved in "independent expenditure" campaigns. Business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are already infuriated by the move, and GOP congressional leaders in both chambers have come out against the initiative.
GOP bash Obama on executive order to disclose donations from federal contractors
Filling in the Gaping Holes in WikiLeaks' Guantanamo Detainee Files
Imagine that the more than 700 Guantanamo files released two weeks ago by WikiLeaks contained information explaining how interrogators obtained "intelligence" from "war on terror" detainees captured or sold to US forces after 9/11, such as this firsthand account:
"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold.
7 Deceptions About Bin Laden's Killing Pushed by the Obama Administration
The Obama administration deftly shaped the media coverage of its prized kill by detailing a picture-perfect, morally unambiguous special forces operation, which culminated in the death of Osama bin Laden. Most of the details of that narrative have now unravelled, but the conventional wisdom that the tale established remains.
As Glenn Greenwald put it, that's par for the course: “the narrative is set forever by first-day government falsehoods uncritically amplified by establishment media outlets, which endure no matter how definitively they are disproven in subsequent days.”
Obama forms panel to improve fracking safety
After a series of high-profile natural gas drilling spills, the Energy Department named a panel to recommend ways to improve the safety of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a technique that has expanded the country's potential to extract the fuel.
President Barack Obama asked the DOE to form the panel of academic and environmental experts to identify any immediate steps that can be taken to improve the safety and environmental performance of fracking, the DOE said on Thursday.
Doctors' groups welcome medical company dollars
From the time they arrived to the moment they laid their heads on hotel pillows, the thousands of cardiologists attending this week's Heart Rhythm Society conference have been bombarded with pitches for drugs and medical devices.
St. Jude Medical adorns every hotel key card. Medtronic ads are splashed on buses, banners and the stairs underfoot. Logos splay across shuttle bus headrests, carpets and cellphone-charging stations. And at night, a drug firm gets the last word: A promo for the heart drug Multaq stood on each doctor's nightstand Wednesday.
Who arranged this commercial barrage? The society itself, which sold access to its members and their purchasing power.
Pancreatic Cancer Drug Afinitor Approved By FDA
Pancreatic cancer drug Afinitor by Novartis AG's has been approved by the U.S. FDA for a rare type of pancreatic cancer that has few treatment options, reports Reuters. The Swiss drugmaker said in a statement, "Data show Afinitor delays tumor growth and reduces risk of disease progression in patients with advanced neuroendocrine tumours (NET) of pancreatic origin."
"This marks the first approval of a treatment for this patient population in the United States in nearly 30 years," they added, Reuters reports.
Assange: Facebook is an 'appalling spy machine'
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says Facebook, Google, and Yahoo are actually tools for the U.S. intelligence community.
Speaking to Russian news site RT in an interview published yesterday, Assange was especially critical of the world's top social network. He reportedly said that the information Facebook houses is a potential boon for the U.S. government if it tries to build up a dossier on users.
Failing Grades on Civics Exam Called a ‘Crisis’
Fewer than half of American eighth graders knew the purpose of the Bill of Rights on the most recent national civics examination, and only one in 10 demonstrated acceptable knowledge of the checks and balances among the legislative, executive and judicial branches, according to test results released on Wednesday
high school seniors who took the test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, were unable to demonstrate skills like identifying the effect of United States foreign policy on other nations or naming a power granted to Congress by the Constitution.
Painkiller ignorance adds to liver failure
Ignorance about ingredients found in more than 600 over-the-counter and prescription drugs could account for increasing liver failure, U.S. researchers say.
Senior author Michael Wolf of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago says his study found only 31 percent of participants knew Tylenol contained acetaminophen; 75 percent of participants knew Bayer contained aspirin; 47 percent knew Motrin contained ibuprofen; 19 percent knew Aleve contained naproxen sodium and 19 percent knew Advil contained ibuprofen.
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