Wednesday, Nov 26th
Last update07:57:04 AM GMT
Domestic Glance
Workers residents have held protests to prevent vehicles shipping parts destined for China from Bain-owned company.
At the age of 86 retired plumber Paul Holz has just been arrested for the first time in his long life. Clutching an American flag, the elderly resident of Freeport, Illinois, was handcuffed by police outside a Sensata car parts plant which is shipping jobs to China and has become a national symbol for the outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs abroad.
A former CIA officer who was charged with repeatedly leaking classified information pleaded guilty in federal court Tuesday to a single charge of disclosing the identity of an undercover CIA operative.
Under the plea agreement, the former officer, John C. Kiriakou, will be sentenced to prison for up to 30 months. The agreement marks the end of a case that involved the spilling of secrets to reporters and that was part of the Obama administration’s unprecedented crackdown on leaks.
Are you, a US citizen, calling cousin Ivor in Budapest, or reaching out to your old pen pal Yasmeen in Sydney? The National Security Agency (NSA) can listen in on your personal cellphone or read what you might be emailing him or her from your personal computer without telling you.
In 2008, the US Senate voted to let the NSA wiretap any US citizens' emails and phone calls internationally in the interest of national security so long as the government's purpose was to collect "foreign intelligence information". In 45 minutes, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) brought a constitutional challenge to the Fisa Amendments Act. As the Director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, Jameel Jaffer, pointed out, the amendments:
A federal appeals court in Manhattan today struck down the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional, becoming the second such court to do so and making it that much more likely that the issue will be decided by the Supreme Court sooner than later.
The Associated Press: The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued its ruling Thursday. The decision upholds a lower court judge who ruled that the 1996 law that defines marriage as involving a man and a woman was unconstitutional. The three-judge panel says the law violates equal protection. A federal appeals court in Boston earlier this year also found it unconstitutional.
During the Bush administration, Israeli-American dual citizen and Director of Homeland Security Chertoff mandated that American police forces be trained by Israeli groups in crowd control, counter-terrorism and intelligence gathering.
Since that time, shootings of unarmed civilians has gone up 500%, attacks on legal political protests by police have become a scandal and huge stockpiles of ammunition and military heavy weaponry have been distributed to law enforcement groups in every region of America, both local and federally controlled.
Two American scholars won the Nobel economics prize Monday for work on match-making - how to pair doctors with hospitals, students with schools, kidneys with transplant recipients and even men with women in marriage.
Lloyd Shapley of UCLA and Alvin Roth, a Harvard University professor currently visiting at Stanford University, found ways to make markets work when traditional economic tools fail.
A US cruiser has collided with a nuclear submarine during naval exercises off the Atlantic coast, reportedly damaging sonar equipment. Nobody was hurt during the incident on Saturday afternoon and both vessels were still able to operate under their own power afterwards, the navy said.
A spokesman said such collisions were "fairly rare" and an inquiry has begun. An anonymous naval source told Reuters the collision had caused the cruiser's sonar dome to collapse.
The dome is a bulbous, rubber device on the bow of the ship beneath the water line.
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