Obama Ordered to Release Guantanamo Force-Feeding Video

The government has argued against redacting and releasing the footage, but a federal court has upheld the ruling it must go public. The U.S. government has been ordered to redact and release footage of the force-feeding of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay Prison after a federal Court of Appeals rejected on Friday the Obama administration's arguments for withholding the classified videos from the public.
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Officer rescued from floodwaters in Sachse

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The Missing Statistics of Criminal Justice

An abundance of data has fueled the reform movement, but from prisons to prosecutors, crucial questions remain unquantified.
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Voyager

When they embarked on an epic adventure, the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft launched humanity on a bold new era of exploration.
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Grandmother who ran her granddaughter to death sentenced to life in prison

That is what Alabama grandmother Joyce Hardin Garrard told her granddaughter’s bus driver, Raeanna Holmes, when Holmes stopped at the house on her end-of-day route on Feb. 17, 2012: Savannah Hardin was in trouble for lying about some candy she took from a classmate. As punishment, her grandmother told the 9-year-old to run.
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Books, Gadgets, and Freedom

In this essay from 1987, Mario Vargas Llosa reflected on freedom’s intimate connection to literary imagination.
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When Palmyra Rivaled the Roman Empire

The history of Palmyra stretches back to the dawn of human civilization, but it was not until the Roman era that Palmyra reached the level of prosperity needed to build the magnificent ruins now under threat from Islamic State.
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Inside Google’s Secret War Against Ad Fraud

Elite underground squad battles the bots that waste $6.3 billion in digital advertising dollars
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John Kerry cuts short week-long trip after bicycling accident

The secretary of state, who is returning to Boston for treatment, suffered a broken right femur.
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Why one of the world’s most wanted suspected Nazis never faced justice

Vladimir Katriuk, accused of being "a particularly active participant" in the brutal Khatyn massacre, died in Canada at the age of 93.
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CNN 35th Anniversary Blooper Reel

Blooper reel from CNN's 35 years on the air.
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War Clouds Over South China Sea As U.S. Declares Right To Waters And U.S. Warship Arrives At Subic

The drumbeat of war on distant horizons is reverberating through Southeast Asia with increasingly strong declarations of U.S. determination to stop the Chinese from expanding their writ over the South China Sea, notably islands claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei.
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Sunk: How Ross Ulbricht ended up in prison for life

Inside the trial that brought down a darknet pirate. On October 1, 2013, the last day that Ross Ulbricht would be free, he didn't leave his San Francisco home until nearly 3:00pm. When he did finally step outside, he walked ten minutes to the Bello Cafe on Monterey Avenue but found it full, so he went next door to the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library. There, he sat down at a table by a well-lit window in the library's small science fiction section and opened his laptop.
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Proposal to Massively Expand FBI's Legal Hacking Abilities Moves Forward

Oh, good. A Department of Justice-proposed rule change that would make it way easier for FBI agents to obtain warrants to hack a computer from basically anywhere was just approved by a US Court committee. Which is to say, we’re one step closer to having our digital privacy rights eviscerated in the name of federal investigations.
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Ginsburg urges young women to wage inspiring fights

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday advised young women to fight for things they care about, but to do so in a way that inspires others to join their cause.
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Wising Up to the Wise Men of American Foreign Policy

George Kennan was not such a Wise Man after all, a new book argues.
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Emptywheel: Richard Burr Wants to Label People Who Make Threats and Carry Guns “Terrorists”

The bill Senate Intelligence Chair Richard Burr released last Friday is bad enough for the way it expanded the existing illegal dragnet. I argued here Burr’s bill would give the Intelligence Community everything they lost in 2009 and 2011.
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U.S. police have shot dead 385 people in five months

U.S. police have shot and killed 385 people during the first five months of this year, a rate of more than two a day, the Washington Post reported on Saturday. The death rate is more than twice that tallied by the federal government over the past decade, a count that officials concede is incomplete, the newspaper said.
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The Story Behind America's First Drone Strike

The CIA’s then-secret weapon missed the Taliban's leader, starting a 14-year fight over who controls the U.S. drone program.
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House bill would require gun owners to have liability insurance

House Democrat Rep. Carolyn Maloney (N.Y.) has introduced a bill that would require gun owners to carry liability insurance. The Firearm Risk Protection Act, unveiled Friday, would require gun buyers to have liability insurance coverage before being allowed to purchase a weapon, and would impose a fine of $10,000 if an owner is found not to have it. Service members and law enforcement officers, however, would be exempt from the requirement.
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Japan Earthquake: Magnitude 8.5 Quake Strikes off East Coast

A magnitude 8.5 earthquake struck off the east coast of Japan on Saturday, shaking buildings in Tokyo, but there was no danger of a tsunami and no immediate reports of damage since the quake was extremely deep.
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Air strikes kill at least 80 in deadliest bombings of Yemen war

Saudi-led air strikes killed at least 80 people near Yemen's border with Saudi Arabia and in the capital Sanaa on Wednesday, residents said, the deadliest day of bombing in over two months of war in Yemen. Iranian-backed Houthi rebels seized Sanaa last September and then thrust into central and south Yemen. Seeing the Houthi advance as a bridgehead for Iranian influence in the region, a Saudi-led coalition...
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Beau Biden, vice president’s son, dies of brain cancer

The vice president said in a statement Saturday that his son had died at 46 after battling brain cancer.
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Jeb Bush’s claim that Islamic State ‘didn’t exist when my brother was president’

The former Florida governor earns Four Pinocchios for a claim that rewrites history.
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Modernity Has Come to China’s Countryside. Modern Garbage Disposal Hasn’t.

When I first rode into rural areas in northern Hebei province, I was immediately impressed with the scenery. It was not flashy, like Guilin, or some such mountainous region covered by mist. Instead, it was wide, flat, and empty. There were a few skinny...
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What We Now Know About The Men Who Led The Impeachment Of Clinton

It took 17 years to get the full story.
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Boulder Cops Declare ‘Rock Stacking’ a Jailable Offense to Stop Local Artist Who Spent 7 Years Creating Sculptures

Cops in Colorado seem to be cracking down on art.
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CBS' Bob Schieffer Retires Sunday As Last Of The Old-School TV Anchors

Bob Schieffer, anchor of CBS' Face the Nation, retires Sunday after 46 years at the network.
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World hunger drops below 800 million for the first time in 25 years

In promising news, a new report has revealed that there are now less then 800 million hungry people around the world, despite significant population growth - the lowest number since the United Nations (UN) first started counting back in 1990. Obviously we can't celebrate the fact that there are still 795 million people worldwide who don't have sufficient access to food, but that's 216 million fewer than in 1990-92, and the UN believes it's on track to...
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Judge Tells Defendant She Can Serve Jail Time Or Be Pepper-Sprayed By Victim

An assault suspect who pepper-sprayed someone in the face at a fast-food restaurant received similar treatment in court as punishment from a Cleveland-area judge embracing the principle of “an eye for an eye.” Painesville Municipal Court Judge Michael Cicconetti on Thursday told Diamond Gaston she could serve 30 days in jail or be pepper-sprayed by her victim, and she chose the second option.
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Parasites Are Wiping Out Entire Honeybee Colonies. Threat Magnitude Much Higher Than Previously Expected

Bees around the world are at risk from a number of threats including habitat loss and the effect of pesticides, plus bacterial disease like American foulbrood. Bee colonies are also at risk from mites (especially Varroa mite parasite) and parasites. Although parasites have long been associated with “colony collapse disorder”, where entire hives are wiped out, it is only recently that the magnitude of the threat has been fully realised.
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Google is not the answer: How the digital age imperils history

From floppy disks to thumb drives, we get better at storing things -- while trapping history in obsolete formats
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Police Called Over Ice-Cream Cone With Not Enough Sprinkles

After receiving an ice-cream cone with not enough sprinkles over the weekend, a woman in Michigan decided to take matters into her own hands — literally — by screaming at a store clerk and attempting to punch the friend trying to calm her down. The unnamed woman entered a local gas station on Saturday and ordered an ice-cream cone. When the clerk put too few sprinkles on it, she began to throw a tantrum.
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Mary Ellen Mark And The Caged Prostitutes Of Mumbai

The photographer, who died this week, turned her lens on the marginal people of the world. One of her most acclaimed projects was her series of photos taken in the brothels of Mumbai.
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Russia releases 89-name EU travel blacklist

Moscow has released a blacklist of European Union politicians barred from Russia in response to EU sanctions over Crimea and Ukraine, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said on Friday. "Russia yesterday handed over a list of people to diverse EU embassies who may not enter Russia any longer," Rutte said at a weekly press conference, adding that two Dutch MPs and a Dutch MEP were on the list. The list contains 89 names, according to a letter from Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders tweeted by...
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Tropical Storm Andres Forms in the Northeast Pacific; Not a Threat to Mexico

The Northeast Pacific's first named storm of 2015 is here.
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Reality Checks in Debate Over Surveillance Laws

There is little evidence in the history of the expiring Patriot Act powers to bolster the arguments that either supporters or opponents are making. By Charlie Savage.
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Conan Doyle’s Poison Pen and “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot”

Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” published in 1910, pivots on a fictional poisonous plant, radix pedis diaboli. As a third-year medical student at the University of Edinburgh, Doyle embarked on his own experiment with a toxic root, gelsemium.
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Award-Winning Teacher Fired for Reading an Allen Ginsberg Poem

Defenders of Connecticut teacher David Olio say one mistake shouldn’t have cost him his job. But why is the work of a towering figure of 20th-century American poetry out of bounds?
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Michael Jackson's Former Neverland Ranch up for Sale at $100 Million

Neverland, the onetime ranch of international superstar Michael Jackson in Los Olivos, is up for sale at $100 million.
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Mexican taxis promise to 'hunt down' Uber drivers

Uber, beware: Mexican taxi drivers will hunt you down. A leader of Mexico State's taxi drivers said as much. "We are not going to leave (Uber cars) alone. We are tracking these colleagues and hunting them down," Esteban Meza, who represents about 13,000 cabbies, told the country's top-selling newspaper, El Universal.
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Ted Cruz adopts a new posture on disaster aid

When Hurricane Sandy devastated the Northeast, Ted Cruz opposed emergency relief. In the wake of Texas flooding, however, he's found a new position.
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Stop Calling the TPP a Trade Agreement – It Isn’t

Trade is a good thing. But enabling companies to move $30/hour jobs to countries with $.60/hour wages so a few billionaires can pocket the difference is not trade.
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The Conservatives Who Gutted the Voting Rights Act Are Now Challenging ‘One Person, One Vote’

The newest challenge to voting rights would be a dramatic powergrab for the GOP. 
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Biker arrested in Waco shooting files federal lawsuit

A 30-year old father and former firefighter who is also a member of a motorcycle club has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging he was illegally swept up in the police dragnet following this month's Twin Peaks biker shootout in Waco. Matthew Clendennen of Hewitt is a member of the Scimitars motorcycle club and was at Twin Peaks on May 17.
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A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite

The bizarre tale of one of the largest homemade bombs in U.S. history—and the mad genius behind it. By Adam Higginbotham.
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Don Lemon’s Most Embarrassing Moments in One Head-Slapping Video

The news anchor chair is now rarely filled by veterans like Walter Cronkite or Jim Lehrer, evening news anchors we trusted, admired, and respected. Some get close, but some … well, they just don’t. And in one astonishingly bad interview and on-air declaration after another, Don Lemon has proved that...
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Wasting water is a luxury we can no longer afford

Worrying about how much water to drink each day is misleading – our real problem is the growing shortage that threatens four billion people on Earth
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How the media can manipulate our viewpoint

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Sepp Blatter re-elected as Fifa president for fifth term

Sepp Blatter has been officially re-elected as Fifa’s president for a fifth term by the world governing body’s 209 member associations
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