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President Obama Signs Indefinite Detention Into Law – American Civil Liberties Union : President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) today, allowing indefinite detention to be codified into law. As you know, the White House had threatened to veto an earlier version of the NDAA but reversed course shortly before Congress voted on the final bill… Science News : Groundwater dropping globally – Satellites find supply falling mostly due to agriculture. Groundwater levels have dropped in many places across the globe over the past nine years, a pair of gravity-monitoring satellites finds. This trend raises concerns that farmers …
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A panel of three federal judges unanimously ruled Thursday that citizens cannot seek damages from private telecommunications companies that assist the US government as it conducts massive warrantless surveillance of American’s telephone conversations, e-mail correspondences and text messaging. The panel from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other plaintiffs who had sued the nation’s largest telecommunications companies because they were revealed to be cooperating with the federal government, which has been conducting massive surveillance on Americans since shortly after the terror attacks in 2001. In 2008, Congress passed a law that granted …
[ Continue Reading... ]At year’s end stock markets across the globe are reported to have lost over 12 percent of their value over the course of 2011. In the US, the Dow and S&P both closed the year essentially flat, the FTSE 500 fell 5.5 percent and the European blue chip stocks lost 11 percent of their worth. In its reporting, the Financial Times noted that Asian markets lost even more of their value; “Asian equity markets were hit particularly hard with Japan’s Nikkei index losing 17.3 percent this year, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index 20 percent and the Shanghai Composite 22 percent.” …
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In the wake of government reporting that reveals that illegal cross border immigration between the US and Mexico is at its lowest level in 40 years voices from both sides of the American political spectrum have responded. The Democratic administration’s answer to the dramatic reduction in unauthorized border crossings is to implement an increase in military operations on the border, and Republican presidential contenders and state’s legislatures have responded by instituting regulations that are historically analogous to measures enacted by regimes that have been described by our own leaders as totalitarian and threatening to further garrison the 1000 mile southern …
[ Continue Reading... ]The federal law enforcement agency called the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has begun to deploy brigades of agents to perform what it calls “suspicionless searches” in several US cities. A spokesperson for the TSA said that the agency determined that the “presence of officers with explosive detection dogs, radiation monitors” and “other devices” will act as a “deterrent” inside train stations, bus stations and on the streets of American cities. The spokesperson for the TSA did not specify if the effort was meant to deter terrorism or constitutional democracy. Civil liberty and privacy advocates have questioned both the constitutionality and the effectiveness of …
[ Continue Reading... ]an aggregation utility chronicling the demise published by the editors of redstateupdate.net and bank run blog, and the collected acme artists
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