By Kate Tummarello/The Electronic Frontier Foundation

It’s been a busy year on a number of fronts as we continue to fight to rein in the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance of innocent people.
Since the 2013 leaks by former government contractor Edward Snowden, the secretive and powerful agency has been at the top of mind for those thinking about unconstitutional surveillance of innocent Americans and individuals abroad.
In 2016, the courts, lawmakers and others continued to grapple with questions of how much we know about NSA surveillance.

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Posted on December 31, 2016

By Andrea Germanos/Common Dreams

The world’s wealthiest can celebrate 2016 as a banner year.
That’s according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Bloomberg writes:

The biggest fortunes on the planet whipsawed through $4.8 trillion of daily net worth gains and losses during the year, rising 5.7 percent to $4.4 trillion by the close of trading Dec. 27.

That translates to $237 billion more for the uber-wealthy than they started the year with.

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Posted on December 30, 2016

By Matthew Sharpe/The Conversation

No one said Trump would win the Republican nomination. He did.
No one said he’d win the Presidency. He has.
Many commentators have fears that Trump will become a tyrant. Will he?
And how will we tell, as events look set to unfold after his inauguration in January?

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Posted on December 28, 2016

By Tracy Rucinski/Reuters

Peabody Energy failed to explain how it will cover future mine cleanup costs in a reorganization plan filed late Thursday, triggering concerns over the company’s use of “self-bonds.”
Under a federal program called “self-bonding,” large miners like Peabody have been allowed to extract coal without setting aside cash or collateral to ensure mined land is returned to its natural setting, as required by law.
The practice came under scrutiny following bankruptcy filings by some of the largest U.S. coal miners because, without collateral set aside for mine reclamation, taxpayers are potentially exposed to billions of dollars in cleanup costs.

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Posted on December 26, 2016

By Joseph Menn/Reuters

Yahoo’s secret scanning of customer e-mails at the behest of a U.S. spy agency is part of a growing push by officials to loosen constitutional protections Americans have against arbitrary governmental searches, according to legal documents and people briefed on closed court hearings.
The order on Yahoo from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court last year resulted from the government’s drive to change decades of interpretation of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment right of people to be secure against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” intelligence officials and others familiar with the strategy told Reuters.

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Posted on December 22, 2016

By Aeon

The President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future act of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
Written in haste and passed by the U.S. Congress in the days after September 11, 2001, the ambiguously worded Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) greatly expanded the war powers of the executive branch, granting U.S. presidents the choice to bomb, raid, detain and monitor nation-states and organizations around the world as they see fit.
Centered around an interview with Representative Barbara Lee, the sole member of congress to vote against the AUMF, War Authority examines how the authorization’s vague language – invoked at least 18 times by former President George W. Bush and at least 19 times by President Barack Obama – has shaped modern U.S. foreign policy and affected people around the world.

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Posted on December 21, 2016

By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

Here are some key recent findings about the youth of New Orleans during the last year: Their numbers are up five percent from 2014 to 2015 – but the number of black children living in the city during the same period dropped.
More are graduating from high school, but the average price of college is higher for low-income students. While the city’s youth poverty rate dropped six percentage points to 37 percent from 2014 to 2015, it still surpasses the state and national rates of 28 percent and 20 percent respectively.
These findings come from the Data Center’s newly released New Orleans Youth Index 2016, of which I am the lead author. The report provides a statistical snapshot of New Orleans children and youth. Borne out of the efforts of youth-centered service providers, the Index publishes baseline tools using data that help advocates develop strategies for improving academic, social, and behavioral outcomes of children and youth up to age 24.
But there’s a problem: Basic data that might inform ways of solving pressing education problems weren’t included in the final document because the state did not make the data available.

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Posted on December 20, 2016

By Stephen Grey and Amina Ismail/Reuters

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt – At around 2 a.m. on Saturday, April 9, a large blue fishing boat carrying hundreds of African migrants and their children capsized just off the coast of Egypt.
Some drowned quickly. Others thrashed in the water, yelling for help in Arabic, Somali or Afan Oromo. The few with lifejackets blew whistles that pierced through the shrieks.
A solitary electric torch probed the moonless darkness. It came from a smaller boat that was circling, tantalizingly close. The men on that boat, the people-smugglers who had brought their human cargo to this point, were searching only for their comrades. They ignored the screams of the migrants and beat some back into the water.

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Posted on December 18, 2016

By Abhijith Ganapavaram and Tom Bergin/Reuters

McDonald’s said earlier this month it would move its international tax base to the United Kingdom from Luxembourg after coming under increased scrutiny from European Union regulators over its tax arrangements in the small country.
McDonald’s said it would create a new international holding company domiciled in the UK that would receive the majority of royalties from licensing deals outside the United States.
“We are aligning our corporate structure with the way we do business, which is no longer in geographies, but in segments that group together countries with common market and growth characteristics,” McDonald’s said in a statement.
The move will also help to cut costs, McDonald’s said.

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Posted on December 17, 2016

By Deirdre Fulton/Common Dreams

Besides comprising the wealthiest administration in modern U.S. history, President-elect Donald Trump’s 17 ultra-rich cabinet-level picks thus far have a combined wealth that surpasses that of the 43 million least wealthy American households combined.
That’s according to a Quartz analysis published Thursday, based on data from the 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances. It shows that the $9.5 billion held by Trump’s cabinet or cabinet-level nominees is greater than that of 43 million U.S. households combined – over one-third of the 126 million households total in the United States. (Other analyses have shown the Trump administration to have an even higher combined wealth.)
“Even if we just compare the wealth of Trump’s cabinet to the median household, it is still an impressive concentration of riches,” Dan Kopf wrote for Quartz. “It would take about 120,000 households with the United States median net worth of about $83,200 to match the wealth of just the four richest members of Trump’s cabinet – Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross Jr., Linda McMahon, and Rex Tillerson.”

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Posted on December 16, 2016