A federal judge has ruled that the US government must release photographs of the abuse that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that the Bush and Obama administrations have fought vigorously to suppress. The ACLU has been seeking the release of the photos under FOIA since 2004. While some of the infamous photos had leaked earlier, there are an estimated 2,000 still being kept under wraps. The US government had argued that their release would endanger its troops but the judge ruled that with only about 5,000 US troops still in Iraq and serving as advisors rather than in active combat, that danger had not been proven by the outgoing defense secretary.
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The current heating up of the rhetoric in US-Russia relations was triggered in the US by the events in the Ukraine that Cold War warriors in the US say is a sign that Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin are trying to expand the country’s borders and resurrect the Soviet empire, and it shows that they cannot be trusted.
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I was struck by the way the Washington establishment is responding to the way that Donald Trump is dismissing the leaks from the CIA that the Russian government has been manipulating US elections. Take these comments from Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democratic party in the US senate.
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The Guardian has profiles of some new members of Congress, many who ran on progressive platforms and won. They also represent a diverse set of backgrounds. Let’s hope that they can influence the Democratic party away from its neoliberal policies and into a genuine alternative to the Republicans.

As president Obama’s term in office comes to an end, everyone seems to be evaluating his terms in office. We might as well start with the one issue that never goes away in America, and that is race. The president and his family carried the heavy burden of being ‘firsts’, people who are the first members of any community in a high office that they have not occupied before. Such people know that the members of their community are fervently hoping for just one thing: Don’t mess up. Because if they do mess up in any way, they know that those who oppose any advancement of their group will point to the failure as signs that they are incompetent and cannot be trusted with such responsibilities. Obama has undoubtedly passed that test, making it a little easier for the next person of color or another ‘first’, be it a woman or Latino or LGBT or atheist or member of some other group hitherto excluded, but they will still feel that pressure from their community.
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Monica Crowley is one of those right-wing pundits who seems to have a permanent sneer on her face, especially when she is attacking the already marginalized. So naturally she was tapped for a position in the Trump administration as “senior director of strategic communications at the National Security Council”. But it turns out that she is a serial plagiarizer who has lifted verbatim, without citation, entire passages from other sources not only for her articles but even for her doctoral thesis for Columbia University. This seems to have been a little too much for even an administration that disdains ethics as much as the incoming one does and despite some earlier statements of support from them, she has withdrawn from the position, presumably to ‘spend more time with her family’.
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