Portugal is one of those countries that decided that increased austerity for its people was the way to go in dealing with its financial crisis and the result has been massive hardship for many. This has led to protests outside parliament and other venues where prominent government leaders are assembled. A professional opera singer Ana Maria Pinto attended one such protest last October that took an unexpected turn. [Read more…]
I wrote last year about a lawsuit that was brought by the group Freedom From Religion Foundation to require the IRS to enforce its current rule against religious organizations that engage in direct politicking and revoke their tax exempt status if they were found to be engaged in blatant politicking. [Read more…]
Today the German news magazine Der Spiegel has released more information based on NSA revelation by Edward Snowden that the US has been systematically spying on UN governments and delegations.
Der Spiegel said the European Union and the U.N.’s Vienna-based nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), were among those targeted by U.S. intelligence agents. [Read more…]
I have written before of how one failing of our politics is that it focuses more on how we feel about the people who are on the side of the issues, and less on the issues themselves. Here is another example of that phenomenon, with a contributor to the liberal website Balloon-Juice smacking down Noam Chomsky. [Read more…]
The singer Linda Ronstadt has said that she is suffering from Parkinson’s disease that has progressed to such a stage that she is no longer able to sing. That is sad because she had a lovely voice. [Read more…]
The provincial government of Quebec is reportedly moving forward on legislation that would ban the wearing of some religious apparel by public employees. [Read more…]
More revelations have emerged that despite the NSA’s claims of strict safeguards to prevent abuse of its spying capabilities, the it systematically violated its pown privacy requirements in thousands of cases and committed even more illegal acts, with a judge ruling back in 2011 that the NSA had also been deliberately misleading the courts about what it has been doing. What a surprise! This information emerged as a result of the declassification of some documents in the wake of the uproar over what the Snowden revelations told us about the government spying on its own citizens. [Read more…]
A few days ago I linked to a story of Kadra Abdi, a young Somali-American woman who was profiled and harassed by immigration authorities on her return from a trip to Sweden. Now comes along an even worse story of TSA harassment on a domestic trip of Aditya Mukerjee, a young man of Indian origin. Mukerjee gives detailed account of his ordeal. [Read more…]
Whenever whistleblower reveals government actions, especially those that seriously embarrass the government, their reaction is that they are angry because the leaks have endangered nation al security and/or put people’s lives at risk. This was dutifully picked up by the lapdog media and trumpeted far and wide. This was the charge made against Chelsea Manning and then against Edward Snowden. But at Manning’s trial, the prosecution could not make the case that her revelations had actually put people’s lives at risk. [Read more…]