In the fall of 2007, workers at the Byron nuclear power plant in Illinois were using a wire brush to clean a badly corroded steel pipe — one in a series that circulate cooling water to essential emergency equipment — when something unexpected happened: the brush poked through.
The resulting leak caused a 12-day shutdown of the two reactors for repairs.
The plant’s owner, the Exelon Corporation, had long known that corrosion was thinning most of these pipes. But rather than fix them, it repeatedly lowered the minimum thickness it deemed safe. By the time the pipe broke, Exelon had declared that pipe walls just three-hundredths of an inch thick — less than one-tenth the original minimum thickness — would be good enough.
Most of the people in our society are sheep. We may be in the most violent times in history but, [in America,] violence is still remarkable rare. This is because most citizens are kind, decent people who are not capable of hurting each other except by accident or under extreme provocation. They are sheep.
It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”
The FBI has seized control of a Russian cybercrime enterprise, but to kill it completely, officials may ask to rip some malware out of your computer. US diplomatic secrets could be at stake. The FBI might be asking your permission soon to reach into your computer and rip something out. And you don’t know it’s there.
No stranger to controversy — the cliché fits Tony Kushner, whose groundbreaking play cycle Angels in America (subtitle A Gay Fantasia on National Themes) was one of the major flashpoints in the modern culture war. (It is still a sore subject in some places, as Studio 360 reported in 2009.) Now Kushner's views are once again subject of debate, this time from an unexpected quarter. 
Osama bin Laden's possible al-Qaida successor, Anwar al-Awlaki, was targeted but missed by a U.S. drone attack in Yemen, military officials said.
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."
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:
