When Pope John Paul II visited Damascus in May 2001, Bashar used his welcoming speech to denounce the Jews, saying, “They tried to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ and the same way they tried to betray and kill the Prophet Muhammad.”   read more

Millions of Americans have had their DNA stored at popular genealogy companies Ancestry.com or 23andMe. But doing so comes with the risk that their genetic samples will be turned over to law enforcement conducting investigations, even with no evidence tying them to a crime. Both companies have privacy policies that claim to protect DNA from unauthorized use. But these policies contain exemptions buried within them that state they will deliver DNA samples to police requesting them.   read more

Legal and health experts said they could not think of another modern example of a court ordering offenders to give blood in lieu of payment, or face jail time. “What happened is wrong in about 3,000 ways,” said professor Caplan. “You’re basically sentencing someone to an invasive procedure that doesn’t benefit them and isn’t protecting the public health.” The Southern Poverty Law Center filed an ethics complaint against the judge, saying he had committed “a violation of bodily integrity.”   read more

Rubens and Graves “inappropriately used their positions of authority for personal and financial benefit,” said the VA’s IG. The two senior executives “gamed VA’s moving-expense system for a total of $400,000” using “questionable reimbursements.” The scheming has caught the attention of Congress, which planned to investigate the VA and learn how it allowed Rubens and Graves to pull off what the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs called a “shockingly unethical misuse of funds.”   read more

“It’s exactly what we thought the tax would do,” said professor Barry Popkin. Advocates here have argued that one way to help reduce obesity is to tax sodas, making them more expensive to purchase. The key is to put the tax on the producer, so the price of the drinks is raised, rather than treating it like a sales tax, which is added on to the price. Although it was too soon for the study of Mexico’s tax to draw conclusions about fighting obesity, it did show the effects of the tax on sales.   read more

Laura Pitter of Human Rights Watch, who has investigated torture, said the CIA was being “entirely disingenuous” in claiming it waterboarded only three people. “First, more than three people were waterboarded,” she said. “But second, the CIA used water to torture detainees in a variety of ways that cannot escape classification as torture. ...They induced near suffocation using water. And whether you call it ‘waterboarding’ or ‘water dousing,’ that’s torture – plain and simple.”   read more

"The vast majority of news stories made no mention that Iraqi and Afghan civilians might also have been harmed by the U.S. military’s burning of waste,” wrote Bonds. “When journalists describe the pollution itself, how it billowed over military bases and covered living quarters with ash and soot, such accounts never mention that this pollution would not have stopped at the cement barricades...at base boundaries, but must have also settled over civilians’ homes and the surrounding landscapes.”   read more

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) “quietly published” a list of titles of its restricted reports that have not been publicly released because they contain “classified information or controlled unclassified information.” GAO officials said the list was published in an effort to inform lawmakers, federal agencies and the public about those reports. The list goes back only as far as September 30, 2014, and it does “not cite titles that are themselves classified,” Steven Aftergood wrote.   read more

Gifford said coming out as a teenager was challenging, but that his life has changed completely since then. “I came out when I was 18... It was a huge struggle. I had no gay role models... I was riddled with self-hatred and self-doubt, and a lack of any understanding of what my life would be like in the future. There were many, many days when you didn’t want to wake up the next morning, but you can’t even imagine those days now—they seem like another lifetime.”   read more

The union representing workers at the National Weather Service (NWS) has filed a legal complaint against the agency’s recent introduction of employee nondisclosure agreements, claiming managers are trying to “gag” staff from talking about internal issues. The NWS’ nondisclosure orders forbid disclosing information about activities related to workforce planning, settlement of grievance disputes and the collective bargaining process.   read more

During one year, U.S. drone strikes killed more than 200 people—but only 35 of them were the intended targets. “These eye-opening disclosures make a mockery of U.S. government claims that its lethal force operations are based on reliable intelligence and limited to lawful targets,” said ACLU. “The government often claims successes that are really tragic losses." Said the whistleblower: "Assigning...death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield...was, from the [beginning], wrong.”   read more

Criminal prosecutions of corporations declined by nearly 30% from 2004 to 2014. The hands-off approach by the Obama administration began at the end of the Bush years, when Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip told federal prosecutors in 2008 “take into account the possible substantial consequences to a corporation’s employees, investors, pensioners and customers” when thinking of going after a company. There were 21% fewer corporate prosecutions in the five years after the Filip memo.   read more

The greater numbers of people now experiencing the effects of climate change have contributed to the switch. “The drought issue is affecting big regions of the country,” said Rabe. “Drought is not just a narrow, localized issue now.” Fifty-six percent of Republicans support the evidence behind global warming. That’s the highest that number has been since 2008, just as the GOP establishment began to attack President Barack Obama and his policies, including climate change mitigation.   read more

It was revealed at trial that DuPont knew of the potential toxicity of C8 since the 1950s. Even DuPont’s defense witnesses presented damning testimony. One employee admitted he had 400 parts per billion of C8 in his blood, about 100 times the national average. “I knew there were a lot of other people who had much higher levels, and so I didn’t think mine was anything to worry about,” he said. “Everything is toxic.” Another ex-employee said he had a possibly cancerous spot on his kidney.   read more

The announcement was made the month after Shell gave up on its exploration efforts in the Alaskan Arctic after spending seven years and $7 billion on the efforts. The decision also came as the price of oil stabilized around the $50-per-barrel mark with a glut of the product in the U.S. For now, it means an estimated 13% of the world’s unexplored oil reserves will remain in the ground, perhaps slowing the effects of climate change on the fragile Alaskan landscape.   read more

Onaga’s action is being fought by Japan’s central government, but a revocation would likely come with a political cost to the prime minister. Already, many of Abe’s national security actions have triggered widespread opposition. Okinawans have been eager to get U.S. forces off their island. Two notorious rapes committed by U.S. personnel, one a gang-rape of a 12-year-old girl in 1995, have caused considerable antipathy toward Americans,   read more

As of 2014, 248,608 federal employees were classified as disabled, including veterans with 30% or more disability. That’s 13.6% of the federal workforce, an increase of 0.8% over 2013’s numbers. It’s also the largest number and highest percentage of disabled federal employees since 1980. Obama signed an executive order in 2010 requiring the hiring of 100,000 disabled workers by the federal government within five years. OPM reports that agencies are “on track” to meet Obama’s requirement.   read more