Ludmila Savchuk, who once worked for the organization that produced the hoaxes, revealed that workers have a quota to write a certain number of items, sometimes involving hoaxes, other times articles describing how terrible conditions are in the European Union. Ukraine is also a target. Other articles praise Russian leaders. A Louisiana chemical hoax was one in a wave of similar attacks last year. Phony news reports tried to scare people of Atlanta into thinking there was an Ebola outbreak.   read more

“Offshore fracking has been shrouded in secrecy, but this settlement will finally force the government to tell us where oil companies are using this toxic technique,” said plaintiff's attorney Kristen Monsell. “Fracking pollution is a huge threat to marine animals, and the high pressures used to frack offshore wells increase the risk of another devastating oil spill.” Added Sakashita: “The thing that I find shocking is...this is the agency that’s supposed to be regulating offshore drilling."   read more

The planes managed in just one month to conduct more than a hundred flights in 11 states. The missions targeted both large cities and unincorporated areas, the AP reported. The planes carry high-tech cameras and sometimes even sophisticated equipment that can track cell phones, raising questions of whether this surveillance has violated people’s privacy. The FBI’s air force was in the skies over Baltimore during the recent protests of the death of Freddie Gray in the hands of the police.   read more

Undercover investigators posed as passengers at dozens of the nation’s busiest airports to test the ability of TSA workers who conduct pat downs. “In one test an undercover agent was stopped after setting off an alarm...but TSA screeners failed to detect a fake explosive device that was taped to his back,” said ABC News. The report also said that $540 million spent on a checked-luggage screening system and $11 million for training failed to have any positive effect on security.   read more

What about all the scaremongering, warning Americans of a terrorist attack without Section 215? In fact, the government has never provided a single instance of a terrorist plot being thwarted by that tool. So are Americans now free of NSA spying? Not at all. Section 215 was “only one of a number of largely overlapping surveillance authorities, and the loss of the current version of the law will leave the government with a range of tools that is still incredibly powerful,” reported the EFF.   read more

The idea that the United States is the world’s older brother, ready to take care of any bullies that show up on a street corner, is relatively recent. For the first 165 years of its existence, the United States had one such treaty, signed with France during the Revolutionary War, according to Beckley. After World War II though, organizations such as NATO, formed in the early days of the Cold War, obligated the U.S. to jump in if a member nation were to be attacked.   read more

A South Carolina town trying to replace memorials that segregate the war dead into “white” and “colored” soldiers is being stymied by a state law forbidding such monuments from being changed. “Plaintiffs believe the racially segregated plaques of the earlier wars are tragic reflections of former times and no longer legitimate,” the complaint says. Mayor Adams countered: “It’s a huge overreach...to tell a group of great Americans what they can or cannot do with a monument they paid for.”   read more

Sen. Ernie Chambers, the bill’s sponsor, said he has tried to repeal the death penalty 37 times and wouldn’t have accomplished it this year without conservative votes. The bill was passed by “winning the support of Republican legislators who said they believed capital punishment was inefficient, expensive and out of place with their party’s values, as well as that of lawmakers who cited religious or moral reasons for supporting the repeal,” reported The New York Times.   read more

The Justice Department has indicted 14 people so far on charges of racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy. Conspicuously not mentioned in the indictments was FIFA President Sepp Blatter, whom some call the most powerful person in sports. He might not be out of the woods yet though. One U.S. law enforcement official said that Blatter’s fate would “depend on where the investigation goes from here.” Said acting U.S. Atty. Currie: “I want to be very clear: This is the beginning.”   read more

It took 900 pages to create Obamacare as law, but it may take only four words of that bill to cost millions of Americans their healthcare subsidies and raise their health costs. Those four words opened the door to this legal challenge to Obamacare, but it seems to be something of a mystery as to how they got into the law in the first place. Former Sen. Jeff Bingaman said the words appeared to be a “drafting error,” while Sen. Olympia Snowe called it "inadvertent language."   read more

Boasberg, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, appears to be the go-to judge if you don’t want something released to the public. Judicial Watch filed an FOIA request in 2011 to force the release of images of Osama Bin Laden’s death and burial, but Boasberg ruled against the group. In his latest ruling, Boasberg said letters sent to the CIA by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California), the former Senate intelligence chairman, revealed Congress has not relinquished control over the report   read more

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) on May 18 signed a bill that would preempt municipalities’ right to regulate fracking within their borders. Other states’ Republican-controlled legislatures have seemed just as eager to comply with the wishes of their corporate donors: Missouri’s legislature passed a law banning local ordinances that outlaw plastic grocery bags. Forty-five states have, at the behest of the National Rifle Association, preempted local ordinances governing gun safety.   read more

“For more than five years, traders in ‘The Cartel’ used a private electronic chat room to manipulate the spot market’s exchange rate between euros and dollars using coded language to conceal their collusion,” said Attorney General Lynch. In one conversation, a Barclays employee said: “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.” Lynch said the currency manipulation “inflated the banks’ profits while harming countless consumers, investors and institutions...including the banks’ own customers.”   read more

WTO ruled that American regulations that require the meat industry to use country of origin labels (COOL) represent a violation of NAFTA. “This is just the latest example of how multinational companies use the global trade system to attack basic protections for U.S. consumers,” said Wenonah Hauter. “The meat industry has been trying – and failing – for years to get rid of COOL through the U.S. system, so it had to use unaccountable, unelected trade officials at the WTO to do its dirty work.”   read more

The Republican-dominated state has adopted a new law which outlaws the collecting of ecological data on private and public lands. Violations can result in a year of prison time and fines of $5,000. It also makes any samples inadmissible as evidence in court, even if they show environmental hazards. The law prohibits photos and soil samples used for ecological purposes, even in state and national parks. Opponents say it is so broad, it would prevent taking photos at Yellowstone National Park.   read more

Iran has been a great bogeyman for American merchants of war by helping boost billions of dollars in military sales to oil-rich states in the Middle East. In the last five years, U.S. arms purchases by Gulf Arab countries have skyrocketed by 70%. Saudi Arabia alone has paid out $90 billion to American arms firms in that time. U.S. defense contractors have benefited by selling weapons systems and munitions to Persian Gulf countries that have worried about Iranian military plans in the region.   read more