The Raw Story

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Tuesday, 16 December 2014

Torture blame game: CIA maybe went too far - Author of interrogation memo

© CNN As former Vice President Dick Cheney argued on Sunday that the CIA's aggressive interrogation of terrorism suspects did not amount to torture, the man who provided the legal rationale for the program said that in some cases it had perhaps gone too far.Former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo said the sleep deprivation, rectal feeding and other harsh treatment outlined in a U.S. Senate report last week could violate anti-torture laws. "If...

'Stupid' US sanctions won't undo my government: Venezuelan president

© AFP Photo/Miguel AnguloVenezuelan President Nicolas Maduro speaks during the broadcast of a TV programme at the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas on December 11, 2014 in this photo from the Presidencia President Nicolas Maduro charged Saturday that tighter, "stupid" new US sanctions are just further straining to undermine military staff loyalty after Venezuela derailed a bid to oust him."These sanctions are a threat -- to see if they can...

US Supreme Court Allows Traffic Stop Searches When No Law Violated

US Supreme Court holds that traffic stops and searches may be conducted even when police officers are wrong about the law.Police officer may stop and search drivers who have done absolutely nothing wrong. In an 8 to 1 decision Monday, the US Supreme Court ruled that a police officer can be wrong about a traffic law being violated, but the stop will be upheld as valid as long as he the officer's mistake was "reasonable.""An officer might, for example,...

Labeling GMO food is a no-brainer

© The Bodleian Library, Oxford, Public Domain Bring up genetically engineered foods, and most people focus on the obvious but most vexing questions: are they safe to eat? Or how might they make me sick? Such questions and the inability of current science to provide clear answers, have triggered a polarizing debate about labeling of a scale unprecedented in the history of food labeling. The result has been a slew of proposed state laws, international...

Cop Was Not Fired Despite 75 Counts of Stalking and Harassment — Now He Just Shot a Mother and Her Daughter

PHILADELPHIA — A mother and her daughter have been gunned down in a deadly shooting incident that happened Monday night in Glenolden.Valerie Morrow, the mother, has been pronounced dead. Her daughter suffered bullet wounds but is now recovering.The shooter has been identified as Officer Stephen Rozniakowski, according to a report by NBC 10.Officer Rozniakowski was an employee of the Colwyn Borough Police Department.According to reports, Officer...

SOTT FOCUS: SOTT Exclusive: Monotheistic religions - Playground for psychopaths

© www.dawn.comBlasphemy: the accused Religious statutes permit Muslims to take the law in their own hands, kill alleged blasphemers and attack minority communities. In Pakistan, a mere accusation of blasphemy is often enough to put an individual and their community in extreme danger.Is this only true to Islam or are there similarities at work in other religious systems as well? Let's look at recent events to illustrate the concern:Blasphemy : Utter-ly...

Freedom of speech in Illinois? Not if you are an attorney

© Nationalreview.com The Illinois Registration and Disciplinary Commission has just issued a recommendation for a three year suspension of the license to practice law of yet another activist attorney.The prosecution of attorney JoAnne Denison by the IARDC goes to the heart of the amalgamation of the legal system in the US into one streamlined cruise missile. The weaponization of the legal system has been part and parcel of the general attack on...

French aerospace org. to aid Chile's official UFO investigation

© 3AFDinner on October 30, 2014 From left to right: General (ret) Ricardo Bermudez (Director of CEFAA), Michel Scheller (President of 3AF). The Aeronautical and Astronautical Association of France (3AF) has signed an agreement with Chile's Committee for the Studies of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena (CEFAA) to cooperate on the study of UFOs. 3AF posted an article on their website late last month explaining their newly founded relationship with CEFAA.3AF...

Police union boss flips out over cartoon showing kids telling Santa, "Keep us safe from the police"

Enter Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 President John McNesby.In a scathing letter yesterday . . . McNesby demanded an apology from the Bucks County Courier Times for the cartoon.“Surprisingly, you have at least one reader of that excuse for a newspaper you run,” McNesby wrote. “The one reader forwarded a copy of your disgraceful and highly offensive ‘cartoon.’ . . .“There is a special place in hell for you miserable parasites in the...

Ignorance is no excuse for wrongdoing, unless you're a cop

"[I]f the individual is no longer to be sovereign, if the police can pick him up whenever they do not like the cut of his jib, if they can 'seize' and 'search' him in their discretion, we enter a new regime." - U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, dissenting in (1968) © AP Photo/Ben Margot With Orwellian irony, the U.S. Supreme Court chose December 15, National Bill of Rights Day to deliver its crushing blow to the Fourth Amendment. Although...

Villagers in Kazakhstan are falling asleep en masse for no apparent reason

© Flickr/Tinou BaoNot residents of Kalachi, but very sleepy people nonetheless. Residents of a small village in Kazakhstan are falling asleep at random, sometimes for days at a time, and no one knows why. Since the spring of 2013, the village of Kalachi in the Akmolinsk district (whose name derives from , a Kazakh term that ominously translates to white tomb), 150 miles south of the Russian border, has suffered from at least four outbreaks of the...

Go West, Young Han

© Bloomberg via Getty Images As Washington "Pivots" to Asia, China Does the Eurasian Pirouette.November 18, 2014: It's a day that should live forever in history. On that day, in the city of Yiwu in China's Zhejiang province, 300 kilometers south of Shanghai, the first train carrying 82 containers of export goods weighing more than 1,000 tons left a massive warehouse complex heading for Madrid. It arrived on December 9th.Welcome to the new trans-Eurasia...
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