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

“Peggy Ryan wore a wire, risked her career, and invested 9 years of her life in this fight," wrote Judge Kelly. "Her lawyers had millions of dollars tied up in this litigation. Nothing would have happened if a whistleblower had not stood up, spoken up, and lawyered up.” Kelly called the Justice Dept. "ridiculous" for shortchanging Ryan. “While they are tight-fisted when it comes to rewarding integrity, they often pull their punches when it comes to fining fraudster companies,” he pointed out.   read more

Huff was talking to his colleague in a hotel when the phone in his pocket unintentionally dialed his office. The call was received by his assistant, Carol Spaw. Spaw listened to Huff’s conversation for 90 minutes, recording portions of it and making notes, believing it involved illegal discrimination. She then passed her material to members of the board. Huff claimed Spaw’s actions—which also included recording a private conversation between Huff and his wife—violated his right to privacy.   read more

Not since the U.S. last sent men to the moon has NASA released a complete photo of the Earth taken from deep space. But on July 6 NASA published a photo of the planet, taken by the Deep Space Climate Observatory with the EPIC camera. It’s in orbit about 1 million miles out between the Earth and the sun. The image shows North and Central America and part of the Caribbean Sea. The last time NASA released such an image was the 1972 Apollo 17 mission that captured the iconic “blue marble” image.   read more

Environmentalists were glad that the state at least required water monitoring. University of Utah geology professor Bill Johnson says there’s a good chance that the operation will pollute water supplies. “Unfortunately, every decision that has been made to date is the (same) as looking out at the sky today and saying it is impossible that water can fall from the sky, and I find that infuriating,” he said at a hearing about the project.   read more

The initiative’s sponsors sought to stop the Pebble mining project, a large-scale copper and gold extraction located 200 miles southwest of Anchorage which has been approved by the state. The mining would take place in the Bristol Bay region, which supports one of the world’s top sockeye salmon fisheries. The initiative required the borough to deny development permits like those associated with Pebble without consideration of any changes that could be made to avoid hurting the environment.   read more

Problems that arose during robotic surgeries included broken instruments falling into patients’ bodies, electrical sparks causing tissue burns and system errors making surgery take longer than planned. “Despite widespread adoption of robotic systems for minimally invasive surgery, a non-negligible number of technical difficulties and complications are still being experienced during procedures,” the study states. The vast majority of robotic surgery (86%) deals with gynecology and urology.   read more

Fata pleaded guilty to multiple counts of health care fraud, money laundering, kickbacks and overbilling Medicare to the tune of $35 million. While the guilty plea covers cases involving 10 patients, it is believed that his victims numbered in the hundreds. In sentencing the physician to 45 years, U.S. District Judge Paul Borman said: “This is a huge, horrific series of criminal acts that were committed by the defendant.” Prosecutors had asked for a sentence of 175 years.   read more

The results revealed that the media was actually underreporting Trump’s rhetorical outbursts. Among the GOP candidates, Trump represented 62% of the Google search traffic, “having been searched for more than six times as often as second-place Bush,” Silver wrote. Still, Trump is not considered a serious bet to win the GOP nomination. His chances are pegged at 4%, compared to Bush’s 41%. Three other candidates are also given a better chance than Trump: Rubio at 16%, Walker 14% and Rand Paul 6%.   read more

The White House announced earlier this month that Basin and Range National Monument in Nevada, Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument in California and Waco Mammoth National Monument in Texas would be protected as public lands. They join 16 other national monuments Obama has already created under the Antiquities Act. The president has set aside “more public lands and waters than any administration in history,” according to his administration.   read more

Many have fled to Canada requesting permanent residence, but often they have been rejected and forced to return to the U.S. Once back on American soil, deserters have been prosecuted by the military, with several sentenced to prison terms of about a year. Canada’s policy on U.S. deserters is markedly different than it was 50 years ago. Part of the change is a result of the U.S. military being an all-volunteer force, while the Vietnam-era resisters were trying to avoid being drafted.   read more

The Sacklers own Purdue Pharma, maker of Oxycontin, a heavy-duty painkiller that has turned millions into addicts. The drug has been blamed for helping cause the increase in prescription drug overdoses. “According to the Centers for Disease Control, of the nearly 44,000 drug overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2013, more than half were from prescribed drugs, and of those deaths, 72% were from opiate overdoses,” AlterNet's Phillip Smith wrote.   read more

Called the geoduck, the clam features a long probing siphon that bulges out of its shell, according to BBC News. The geoduck is the largest burrowing clam in the world, weighing up to 16 pounds. Its siphon can grow as long as three feet, and the clam can live up to 160 years, but most commercial geoducks are harvested when they reach maturity after about six years.   read more

Chinese immigration has almost tripled, while Indian immigration has doubled. The shift is “remarkable” due to how rapidly it occurred, said the Migration Policy Institute. While Indian and Chinese migration has risen steadily, the rate of Mexican immigration has declined at a much more rapid pace. Yet “Latinos still make up the largest racial or ethnic minority group in the United States,” said ThinkProgress. However, Chinese immigrants constitute 65.4% of the foreign-born population.   read more

Haiti’s economy was hit hard by the damage done to its country’s rice farmers after Clinton called for an elimination of tariffs on imported, subsidized U.S. rice. In 2010, Clinton sat before a U.S. Senate committee and conceded “it was a mistake that I was a party to. I am not pointing the finger at anybody. I did that. I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did. Nobody else.”   read more

The Archive said that the documents cleared for release had been identified by Chiquita as the most sensitive of all the records it had given up to the SEC. “Chiquita became the first U.S. company to be convicted for engaging in transactions with a global terrorist organization,” said Michael Evans. “Finally the victims of AUC violence and the general public will get a look at what might be the most important document collection ever assembled on corporate ties to terrorism.”   read more

in the wake of Obama’s recent commutation of 46 prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders and his plans to have Congress change federal sentencing laws, the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys is warning lawmakers and others to not make changes. The group says crime rates will go up if Congress adopts sentencing reforms, and insists “drug trafficking is inherently violent." FAMM's Molly Gill called it a “demonstrably false claim and a shameful scare tactic.”   read more