By CAN TV
“America has a torture story, ladies and gentlemen.”
Organized by Amnesty International, human rights activists gathered on Friday to commemorate the International Day of Support of Torture Survivors.
Posted on June 30, 2015
Kathy, Linda & Ron: A Love Story
By MediaBurn
“Studs Terkel recounts the story of two lesbian mothers, Kathy Fagin and Linda Gagnon, and the gay doctor Ron Sable who helped they have a family.”
Posted on June 29, 2015
Living Apart: How The Government Betrayed A Landmark Civil Rights Law
By Nikole Hannah-Jones/ProPublica
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the landmark federal Fair Housing Act protects Americans from discrimination in where they choose to live, even when the discrimination is unintentional. In its 5-4 ruling, the Court held that governments or lending institutions can be sued based in part on statistical evidence that certain categories of residents had suffered what is known as “disparate impact,” as a consequence of housing or lending policies.
ProPublica in 2012 detailed how the U.S. government rarely enforced the many provisions of the Fair Housing Act. And earlier this year, we looked at the issues at stake in the “disparate impact” case decided Thursday.
Original story, published Oct. 29, 2012:
A few months after Congress passed a landmark law directing the federal government to dismantle segregation in the nation’s housing, President Nixon’s housing chief began plotting a stealth campaign.
The plan, George Romney wrote in a confidential memo to aides, was to use his power as secretary of Housing and Urban Development to remake America’s housing patterns, which he described as a “high-income white noose” around the black inner city.
Posted on June 26, 2015
5 Tips For Donating After Disasters
By ProPublica
Earlier this month we published an investigation with NPR into the American Red Cross’ failures in Haiti. We’ve gotten a lot of questions from readers (including on Reddit) wondering what to do next time a big disaster hits.
What should you do if you want to help? To whom should you send money?
Posted on June 23, 2015
Read The Fucking Torture Report, People
By Last Week Tonight
“The U.S. Senate Torture Report revealed horrifying details of America’s interrogation program. Helen Mirren will fill you in.”
Posted on June 22, 2015
The Reality Of Bail
By Last Week Tonight
John Oliver explains why America’s bail system is better for the reality TV industry than it is for the justice system.
Posted on June 9, 2015
Obama Secretly Expanded NSA Spying To Internet
By Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson/ProPublica, Charlie Savage/New York Times, and Henrik Moltke/Special to ProPublica
This story was co-published with the New York Times.
Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified NSA documents.
In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad – including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show.
The Justice Department allowed the agency to monitor only addresses and “cybersignatures” – patterns associated with computer intrusions – that it could tie to foreign governments. But the documents also note that the NSA sought to target hackers even when it could not establish any links to foreign powers.
Posted on June 4, 2015
Obama Worst FOIA President Ever
By Human Rights Watch
On May 20, 2015, Human Rights Watch sent this letter to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for its hearing “Ensuring Transparency through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA),” on June 2, 2015, to detail the many recent problems we’ve encountered attempting to use FOIA in our research gathering.
May 20, 2015
The Honorable Jason Chaffetz, Chairman
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
United States House of Representatives
2157 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
The Honorable Elijah Cummings, Ranking Member
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
United States House of Representatives
2157 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
RE: Freedom of Information Act requests by Human Rights Watch
Dear Chairman Chaffetz and Ranking Member Cummings,
The US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a critical instrument to ensure accountable government and make effective the American people’s right to know information of public interest. At Human Rights Watch, we rely on the law as an essential tool to help document potential rights abuses by US agencies, as we did in our reports on the use of far and frequent detention transfers within the immigration system and the impact of US border prosecutions. However, as the Oversight Committee is aware, we are witnessing what the Associated Press has recently described as a procedural and substantive breakdown of the system. Our own recent experience using FOIA is unfortunately consistent with the Associated Press’s accounts of government agencies denying requests, delaying responses, charging exorbitant fees, censoring responses and generally obfuscating records requests at unprecedented levels.
Posted on June 3, 2015