Trump said, “We need people to be afraid. Right now many Americans are surprised when protestors are killed, but they’ll get used to it.” Trump did add one suggestion: “Try not to kill white people. That gets too much attention. Stick to protestors of other colors.”   read more

The United Nations is close to adopting a resolution that calls for the end of excessive government surveillance and reaffirms the “human right to privacy.” The resolution was introduced by representatives of Germany and Brazil, following revelations of NSA spying on those countries, as well as on the phone calls of their two leaders, respectively, Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Dilma Rousseff. The resolution was amended under pressure from U.S. officials.   read more

The National Security Agency (NSA) has collected information on the online pornography habits and other sexual activity of individuals considered potential threats or problems to U.S. security. The spy agency considered discrediting half a dozen Muslims with details of porn websites they visited. None of the targeted individuals were accused of being involved in terror plots, according to the document.   read more

Ninety corporations have been identified as the biggest producers of greenhouse gas emissions over the last two centuries, with oil giants Chevron and ExxonMobil topping the list. Fifty-six of the 90 polluters were oil and gas businesses, 37 were coal companies, and seven were cement producers. Together those companies bear responsibility for 914 billion tons of greenhouse gas pollution. Half of those industrial emissions were released only during the last three decades.   read more

The Pentagon has decided to launch its own costly bio-defense drug program, despite a similar effort already underway at another federal agency and despite the recommendations of a panel of experts to avoid taking such action. Defense officials are financing the construction by diverting monies from other military equipment designed to combat chemical or biological weapons.   read more

The United States may be belching 50% more methane gas into the atmosphere than what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has estimated, according to a new academic study. In oil-producing areas, like the south-central U.S., methane emissions may be nearly three times higher than EPA figures, university researchers found. “It will be important to resolve that discrepancy in order to fully understand the impact of these industries on methane emissions,” said lead author Scot Miller.   read more

Here’s the task facing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA): It has about 2,000 employees devoted to inspecting 8 million workplaces throughout the United States. Two thousand inspectors for 8 million locations means 4,000 workplaces per OSHA specialist. No wonder more than 4,300 people lost their lives at work in 2012.   read more

While Republicans in the U.S. House continue to hold up immigration reform, a strong majority of Americans—including a majority of GOP voters—say illegal immigrants should have a way to become citizens. A survey conducted by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute found 63% of respondents support a pathway to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants, who number 11.7 million in the United States.   read more

Parents who vote Republican may do so because of their daughters, researchers have concluded. Sociologists Dalton Conley and Emily Rauscher say families with more girls than boys or those whose first child is a girl are more likely to have parents who identify with the GOP. It also “significantly reduces the likelihood of Democratic identification and significantly increases the strength of Republican Party identification,” Conley and Rauscher found.   read more

Another requirement in the bill calls for the administration to publish foreign aid information on a country-by-country, program-by-program basis on the website, foreignassistance.gov. However, the State Department can waive the transparency requirements on grounds of U.S. national interests or to protect the “health or security” of another country.   read more

Assistant Attorney General Stuart Delery told the courtroom that those living in the U.S. have “no reasonable expectation” to privacy when it comes to the phone calls they make. Delery made his remark while pointing out that because Americans go along with telecommunications companies keeping records of their calls, they have no basis to challenge the NSA’s large-scale collection of that data.   read more

At a recent hearing of the Senate homeland security and government affairs committee, the heads of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) told lawmakers that cyber-attacks were likely to surpass terrorism as a domestic danger over the next decade. “That’s where the bad guys will go,” FBI Director James Comey said. “There are no safe neighborhoods. All of us are neighbors [online].”   read more

So far this year, Vermont shipped prisoners to Arizona and Kentucky; Idaho sent prisoners to Colorado; California exported prisoners to Arizona, Oklahoma and Mississippi; and Hawaii sent prisoners to Arizona. A fifth state, West Virginia, intends to ship 400 inmates to private out-of-state prisons. Prisoners in these private out-of-state facilities are held between 450 and 3,000 miles from their home states.   read more

Numerous specialists in the field were surprised and not pleased by the board’s decision—some saying they expect it to lead to major setbacks. One of them, Dr. Elizabeth Stier of the Boston Medical Center, has been treating male patients for a decade and expected to sign up about 100 men for the anal cancer trial. Those men will have to be replaced with women.   read more

In Lebanon, Ohio, (pop.: 20,033), for example, cops and firefighters can work with a .04 blood alcohol level. Under Ohio law, drivers under 21 can be ticketed for drunk driving for blood alcohol content above .02—meaning an officer could write a ticket to someone more sober than he or she is.   read more

Barely three weeks after largely avoiding historic first-person testimony by Pakistani victims of U.S. drone strikes, Congressional lawmakers killed a proposal to force the government to publish an annual count of the casualties caused by American drone attacks. In fact, none of the 15 members of the House Intelligence Committee who voted against the idea bothered to attend the victims’ hearing.   read more

In 2012, an average family of four in the U.S. was defined as living in poverty if its pre-tax cash income was below $23,492. The rate varies widely from state to state—from 24.2% In Mississippi to 10.0% in New Hampshire.   read more