If this country’s news media were rational and not preoccupied with trifles, the ALL-CAPS front-page headlines every day would be the following:
- TOP 1% OWN MORE THAN 90% OF WEALTH
- MOST INCARCERATED SOCIETY IN THE WORLD: PRISON RAPE RAMPANT
- WAR OF AGGRESSION STILL GOING UNPUNISHED: WAR CRIMES INCLUDE CHILD RAPE, GENITAL TORTURE
…and probably also NSA MONITORING ALL INTERNET TRAFFIC. Anyway, here’s some other news I’ve been meaning to write some blog posts about for the past few months, but I’m a procrastinator, so now most of it isn’t news anymore, but I’m still linking to the articles since you may have missed some of them:
drug decriminalization in Latin America
FBI can “assess” any individual without suspicion
British high court rules that seven paragraphs describing the torture of Binyam Mohamed should be released, Obama administration predictably objects
two-year-old denied health insurance for being too small, rape is also a preexisting condition; meanwhile, Obama not demanding public option, even though 57% of Americans favor it (but honestly, I can barely keep up with all the hourly changes in the status of the public option)
ASCAP thinks you owe them money for “public performance” of your ringtone
Remind me never to move to Virginia
REAL ID is back
Irish Peace Prize winner calls Obama award “sad”
Obama administration considers phone companies “an arm of the government,” Congress an appendage to executive branch
the alternative economy
you can’t get a “sacrilegious” name change in New York, because apparently we have an establishment of religion in this country (old article that I randomly came across on Wikipedia)
CIA invests in web monitoring firm
“anonymized” medical records not so anonymous: “87 percent of the U.S. population can be uniquely identified simply from their birthdate, gender and zip code”
leaked e-mail about GE’s PAC
AI CCTVs will stop crime before it occurs, LOL WUT
massive FBI data-mining system: do you shop like a terrorist?
man helps release public documents to public, FBI investigates him
Also I was going to link to some article about states giving police the authority to draw blood from DUI suspects, but it disappeared, so you can just pretend that I linked you to it.
And here are some interesting blog posts:
student loans are the new indentured servitude
US torture worse than Gestapo torture that was punished by execution
Taibbi on the Democratic Party and the Nobel Peace Prize
Sibel Edmonds on National Security Letters