Friday, Dec 13th
Last update12:39:55 AM GMT
Domestic Glance
Dozens of people demanding better pay and conditions for Walmart workers were arrested at a protest in Los Angeles which organisers called the single biggest act of disobedience against the retail chain.
Police detained 54 people on Thursday night, including Walmart workers, union representatives and clergy members who sat in the street outside a Walmart store in Chinatown and refused to move, prompting officers to declare an unlawful assembly and move in.
The company announced three recalls on Friday. It wants to inspect the trucks and says only 453,000 will likely need repairs.
The first case covers 842,400 Ram 2500 and 3500 trucks from 2003 through 2008.
The FBI monitored a prominent anti-war website for years, in part because agents mistakenly believed it had threatened to hack the bureau’s own site.
Internal documents show that the FBI’s monitoring of antiwar.com, a news and commentary website critical of US foreign policy, was sparked in significant measure by a judgment that it had threatened to “hack the FBI website” and involved a formal assessment of the “threat” the site posed to US national security.
Apple. Inc. on Tuesday released its first report on the numbers of requests it received in the first half of this year from governments seeking customer account and data information, and - no surprise here - the United States outpaced the rest of the world combined.
But the company couldn't disclose precisely how many U.S. government requests it received and the extent to which it complied. That's because U.S. restrictions required Apple to combine national security orders with account-based law enforcement requests - subpoenas, court orders and warrants - and report only the combined amounts in increments of 1,000.
Voters in Portland, Me., made their city the first on the East Coast to legalize marijuana on Tuesday.
Shortly after the polls closed, the Portland Press Herald said the measure would pass easily, and supporters had already claimed victory.
The Portland law will allow residents to possess up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana. Proponents spent $2,500 to buy pro-pot billboards on city buses and in bus shelters to get it passed.
After months of efforts by marriage equality advocates, the Illinois House has passed marriage equality. The vote passed the Illinois House by a margin of 61-54. It had previously passed the Illinois Senate in February, so the law will go to Governor Pat Quinn, who has urged its passage and said he will sign it.
The marriage equality law was supported by businesses such as Groupon, religious leaders such as United Methodist Bishop Sally Dyck, elected leaders such as Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and President Obama, and even the former chair of the Illinois Republican Party, Pat Brady. Last month, thousands rallied in Springfield, calling for marriage equality to be passed.
The general counsel of the National Security Agency on Monday compared the agency’s telephone metadata collection program to the highly controversial “stop-and-frisk” practice used by law enforcement officers, saying the agency uses that same standard to choose which phone numbers to query in its database.
“It’s effectively the same standard as stop-and-frisk,” Rajesh De said in an attempt to explain the evidentiary use of “reasonable and articulable suspicion” to identify which phone numbers to target from the agency’s huge database of stored cellphone records.
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