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

The federal government sucked a total of $150 million out of seniors’ checks in 2013 to satisfy student loan debt, according to the Government Accountability Office, which also made it clear that 82% of senior still owe money for their own student loans rather than those of their children or other dependents.   read more

Prosecutions for crimes such as mail fraud, healthcare fraud and other such offenses are off almost 37% from their peak during the Clinton administration. In 1995, the number of prosecutions was about 11,000 and that number has dropped steadily since then, with the exception of a spike during the first three years of the Obama administration.   read more

The FBI has found that it can’t match salaries offered by the private sector. In addition, its strict background checks weed out those who have smoked marijuana within three years or used other drugs within 10 years. One thing the Army isn’t doing to fill its ranks is cut its standards.   read more

Under the settlement, the Federal Bureau of Prisons will acknowledge humanism as a worldview that deserves the same recognition as theistic religious beliefs. Inmates will be able to have humanist study groups and to observe Darwin Day just as Christians celebrate Christmas. Naturalist Charles Darwin’s birthday on February 12 is widely celebrated among humanists.   read more

The new standard could get in the way of the Obama administration’s interrogations of detainees that still involve the use of psychologists, such as the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, which has been sent overseas to interrogate terror suspects or those associated with them. The administration also uses psychologists at the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they oversee voluntary interrogations requested by a detainee.   read more

During the first third of this year, 42.2 million individuals 18-34 years old lived on their own, according to U.S. Census Bureau numbers analyzed by Pew researchers. That’s fewer than in 2007, before the downturn, when 42.7 million headed their own households. Looking at just the post-recessionary period, the trend is for millennials is to stay with their parents. In 2010, 69% of this group lived independently. Five years later, the number has fallen to 67%.   read more

The Nonhuman Rights Project contended that “Hercules and Leo are autonomous and self-determining beings who possess the New York common law right to bodily liberty protected by the New York common law of habeas corpus.” Judge Jaffe denied this claim. “Animals, including chimpanzees and other highly intelligent mammals, are considered property under the law,” she ruled. “They are accorded no legal rights beyond being guaranteed the right to be free from physical abuse and other mistreatment.”   read more

The report, whose findings didn’t make it into the Environmental Impact Report, recommended that oil and gas development near homes, hospitals and schools be stopped. It warned of insufficient knowledge about the dangers of shallow fracking, used by 75% of the state’s frackers, and recommended that it be halted until more was known.   read more

Reeder moved to the Senate Finance Committee as senior benefits counsel for the Democratic staff May 2009. He returned to the Treasury Department in March 2013 as senior benefits counsel for the Internal Revenue Service.   read more

"Most users really have no idea how much information Facebook collects about them or how Facebook is able to infer from even a post...what their political orientation might be,” said EPIC's Rotenberg. “Facebook knows everything you’ve said, everything you’ve posted, everything you’ve clicked on.” Said Rand Paul strategist Vincent Harris: “Think about how powerful this is. It’s a fundraising tool [and] a persuasion tool... Facebook is actually everything. And this is what scares people.”   read more

The law, signed in 1965 by President Johnson, was established to prevent attempts to keep blacks from voting. But in recent years, Republican-led legislatures have used the excuse of voter fraud to adopt laws that have instituted new ID requirements, rolled back early voting, and eliminated same-day registration. Conservatives on the Supreme Court have also participated by gutting the law's Section 5, which required certain jurisdictions to clear election law changes with the Justice Dept,   read more

The Malaysian government wants in on the TPP, but that couldn’t happen unless the U.S. upgraded its rating on the country’s human rights record. So the State Dept. under President Obama improved its ranking from Tier 3 to Tier 2. The change angered human rights advocates who say Malaysian officials have done little to stop sex slavery. Mass graves holding more than 130 human trafficking victims were discovered in April, yet now Malaysia’s human rights record has improved, says the State Dept.   read more

The local district attorney, Chris Connolly, is fighting the woman's request and has even gone so far as to ask the juvenile court hearing the case to strip Doe of her parental rights, which would legally bar her from ending her pregnancy. “It appears to me that what the state is attempting to do is turn Jane Doe into a vessel, and control every aspect of her life, forcing her to give birth to a baby, which she has decided she does not want to do,” said one of Doe's attorneys, Randall Marshall.   read more

Boston Globe columnist Shirley Leung says the decision came down to a tussle between the Old and New sides of Boston, with the former having “smothered” the latter. “Here’s the issue: New Boston acts a lot like Old Boston. We still put up a fierce fight when someone tries something novel. Given the chance to think big about our future, we tied ourselves up in the minutiae of tax breaks and traffic studies. Accusations quickly replaced ambitions,” she wrote.   read more

On Friday, the members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will vote to decide which city will host the 2022 Winter Olympics. Originally, there were three finalists, but in October, the favorite, Oslo, withdrew. With the withdrawal of Oslo, the Olympic Movement has found itself in a crisis. Both of the cities left in the running, Beijing and Almaty, are located in countries that are ruled by repressive dictatorships: China and Kazakhstan.   read more

A test pilot who flew an F-35 said 17 dogfights demonstrated that the plane could not compete with the F-16, which was introduced in the 1970s and is the plane the F-35 is supposed to replace. The F-35 program, which will cost more than $1 trillion if fully produced, has had other serious problems exposed: vulnerability to lightning strikes, and an inaccurate and unstable software system   read more