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 complaint says police and legal officials engaged in a “stunning pattern” of evidence destruction, presumably to cover up the issuing of 850,000 bogus summonses resulting from the NYPD’s quota system. “It is simply not tenable that Commissioner Kelly and Chief Esposito did not — in the entire period of 2007 through the present — write or receive emails using terms” related to the word “summons,” wrote Suttons. NYPD is also accused of shredding crime statistics documents.   read more

The great television numbers will not be matched by the money going to the U.S. women’s team, which will receive only $2 million for winning the title from FIFA, soccer’s governing body. Last year’s victor of the World Cup, Germany, got $35 million. That team was composed of men, of course. The teams that lost in the first round got $8 million. The men’s teams played for a total of $576 million in World Cup prizes last year.   read more

Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito have created potential conflicts of interest by participating in decisions that potentially affected their stock portfolio. The study focused on 19 cases in which the three justices owned stock in companies that filed “friend of the court” briefs. The report says that 68% of the time they sided with the companies in which they owned stock. Not once did any of them recuse himself from a case due to such conflicts.   read more

The law signed by Governor Dan Malloy gives employees the ability to collect double the amount owed to them by their employers. Studies show that $50 billion in earnings per year is stolen from U.S. workers. Bhandary-Alexander called wage theft “the biggest crime wave in the country.” Labor advocates hailed the new law, though some said it did not go far enough in punishing employers. Organizer Megan Fountain said that 10 other states require employers to pay triple damages.   read more

Relying on cheap labor is nothing new for Suniva, the third-largest producer of solar modules in the U.S., which was using factories in Asia until 18 months ago to keep costs down. Signing a contract with UNICOR has enabled them to transfer their operations. “By making panels in the U.S., Suniva has been able to capture lucrative federal contracts, avoid U.S. government tariffs on Chinese-made panels, and appeal to private sector customers who want American-made products,” said Reuters.   read more

Rand Paul got an “A” grade for his support of states to establish their own marijuana policies. He also backs decriminalization of small-quantity pot possession. Chris Christie earned an "F." He opposes legalization and the New Jersey medical marijuana law. He also said that he would restore federal prosecution of Colorado pot smokers. Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton got a B-. She supports states that legalized pot, but hasn’t taken a position on decriminalization.   read more

In his dissenting opinion, Roberts wrote that allowing homosexuals to lawfully wed could result in polygamists making the same legal argument to sanction and legalize their definition of marriage as well. Collier married his first wife, Victoria, in 2000. He applied for a second marriage license with the clerk in Billings to marry his second wife, Christine, after hearing what Roberts wrote. “It’s about marriage equality,” Collier told AP. “You can't have this without polygamy.”   read more

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) keeps a count of police killings, but their list is woefully incomplete, as they rely on voluntary reporting by police agencies. The FBI’s count of police killings has hovered around 400 for the past several years. The Guardian also keeps a list and theirs does include the killing of Gray and others who die from means other than gunshots. That list had 550 names on it for the year as of last week.   read more

Hood County residents Jim Cato and Joe Stapleton, who have been together 27 years, still can’t get a marriage license from Lang’s office. Lang's excuse? She says it will take three weeks to acquire the necessary forms for the licenses. When it was pointed out that more than 200 other Texas counties are issuing the licenses from forms readily available over the Internet, Lang stood firm.   read more

Independent studies have shown time and again that abstinence-only education is not effective in preventing pregnancies or sexually-transmitted diseases. Programs such as CTB’s often perpetuate dangerous gender stereotypes, in one instance saying: “‘Occasional suggestions and assistance’ from women ‘may be alright, but too much of it will lessen a man’s confidence or even turn him away from his princess.’”   read more

Correction officers make up a significant portion of the national workforce. According to federal government statistics, the ratio of correction officers to prisoners has remained at about 3.3 to 1 over the past 30 years. However, the number of inmates has more than tripled from 223,551 in 1983 to 735,601 in 2011. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are currently about 163,000 local correctional officers in the United States.   read more

The case arose out of a 2009 complaint by Teleta Dashiell, who found that Maryland State Police Sgt. John Maiello, thinking he had hung up, had left a message on her voice mail that contained a racial slur. Dashiell complained to the State Police about the message and was later told that the incident had been investigated and action had been taken.   read more

The State Department said in its 2014 Human Rights Report, which was released last week, that the Bahraini government restricts civil liberties and limits its citizens’ ability to alter the makeup of its government, which is a constitutional monarchy. Pro-democracy opposition leaders continue to be thrown in prison and the country bars international election monitors. However, the U.S. Fifth Fleet is based there, its headquarters serving as a key command post.   read more

At least 103 Florida murder and attempted murder cases have been reopened, often resulting in lighter sentences, because of bad wording in the jury instructions. Among the more than 100 cases affected by the jury instructions, dozens of murderers received new trials or the chance to make plea agreements. Curtis Krueger found that 31 of the defendants received shorter prison sentences   read more

Rosalba Vargas-Ortiz has lived legally in the United States for more than two decades. The immigration service says they have no record of her and that she should be deported. Vargas showed the court three documents with her photograph and fingerprints, issued by USCIS. The judge found it perplexing that the agency can’t explain the documents in Ortiz’s possession.   read more

The U.S. Spanish-speaking population is now second in the world, behind only Mexico, which has 121 million people. Between the United States and Spain is Colombia, with 48 million Spanish speakers.   read more