By Yeganeh Torbati/Reuters

BELIZE CITY, Belize – Burdened by chronic back pain, Belize Prime Minister Dean Barrow avoids traveling abroad, his colleagues say. But in January, he flew to Washington and visited one government agency after another on a singular mission: reconnecting his country to the U.S. financial system.
A U.S.-educated lawyer, Barrow made his case before agencies with chief oversight of American banks, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the U.S. Treasury’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
His Belizean delegation described how their country had been shunned over the last year by large, reputable American banks, a trend that threatens its tiny economy.

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Posted on July 14, 2016

By Cezary Podkul/ProPublica, Anne Skjerning and Tor Johannesson/Børsen
Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and other international banks have profited for years by arranging short-term loans of stock in Danish companies, a maneuver that has helped shareholders but deprived Denmark of substantial tax revenues.
With the banks’ help, stock owners avoid paying Danish authorities the dividend taxes they would otherwise owe on their holdings of companies like Maersk, Novo Nordisk, Danske Bank, Tryg and Carlsberg, among others.

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Posted on July 13, 2016

By Ammo.com

President Barack Obama has received much credit for drawing down American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, but less attention has been paid to his administration’s embrace of armed drones.
His expansion of covert drone strikes goes far beyond that of former President George W. Bush, and has blurred the line between warfare and assassination.
The classified processes used by the White House for approving these remote killings in foreign countries – countries which the U.S. is not officially at war with – has people questioning not only the Obama administration’s tactics, but also the collateral damage of civilian casualties left in its wake.

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Posted on July 8, 2016

By Nadia Prupis/Common Dreams

In anticipation of an impending White House announcement on civilian deaths from drone strikes, international human rights group Reprieve has released a report which finds that there is significant evidence the U.S. government is lying about the human toll of the aerial bombing campaign.
President Barack Obama is expected to announce as early as Friday that since 2009, U.S. military and CIA airstrikes have inadvertently killed only about 100 people in nations that are not officially recognized as battlefields, such as Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The numbers for active war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, on the other hand, will not be included.
But according to Reprieve’s report, Opaque Transparency, every previous statement made by the Obama administration on the civilian casualties from drone strikes has been misleading at best, with some being outright false.

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Posted on July 1, 2016

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Tor Project and dozens of other organizations are calling on citizens and website operators to take action to block a new rule pushed by the U.S. Justice Department that would greatly expand the government’s ability to hack users’ computers and interfere with anonymity on the web.
EFF and over 40 partner organizations held a day of action for a new campaign – noglobalwarrants.org – to engage citizens about the dangers of Rule 41 and push U.S. lawmakers to oppose it. The process for updating these rules – which govern federal criminal court processes – was intended to deal exclusively with procedural issues. But this year a U.S. judicial committee approved changes in the rule that will expand judicial authority to grant warrants for government hacking.

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Posted on June 22, 2016

By Adam Harris/ProPublica

Last June, a gunman opened fire at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church – a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Nine people were killed, and the subsequent investigation resulted in federal hate crime charges against the alleged shooter, Dylann Roof.
The shooting was one of the thousands of reported hate crimes in the United States every year. Nearly half of the reports involved race. However, due in large part to spotty tracking of hate crime statistics, establishing a definitive understanding of how many hate crimes occur each year has proved elusive.

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Posted on June 14, 2016

By Frederic Lemieux/The Conversation

America has experienced yet another mass shooting – this time at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. It is the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
As a criminologist, I have reviewed recent research in hopes of debunking some of the common misconceptions I hear creeping into discussions that spring up whenever a mass shooting occurs.

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Posted on June 13, 2016

By Cezary Podkul/ProPublica

The German Parliament voted Thursday to end a trading strategy that helps foreign investors, many of them Americans, avoid an estimated $1 billion or more a year in taxes on dividends paid by German companies.
The trades were exposed in a joint ProPublica investigation last month with the Washington Post and German news outlets Handelsblatt and Bayerischer Rundfunk. The report prompted widespread outrage among German lawmakers, some of whom called the maneuver “criminal.”

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Posted on June 11, 2016

By Joshua Schneyer and M.B. Pell/Reuters

LEETONIA, Ohio – When Jennifer Sekerak took son Joshua for his age-one check-up, the pediatrician saw no need to test for lead poisoning. The baby wasn’t yet walking, she recalls the doctor saying, so was unlikely to be playing around hazards like lead paint.
Over the next year or so, Joshua was twice hospitalized for mysterious symptoms. He began refusing food and eating dirt. There was violent head-banging, sleeplessness, skin lesions, vomiting.
“He stopped talking, he wanted to eat dirt, and he would scream like a banshee,” Sekerak said. “To be honest, he was like a wild animal.”
Once, Joshua was rushed to the hospital in Boardman, Ohio, and diagnosed with severe anemia, a common finding in lead-poisoned children. Hospital staff told Sekerak her son, enrolled in Medicaid, might have lead poisoning. But the hospital, Akron Children’s at Boardman, did not test his blood for lead, she says. Citing federal privacy rules, a hospital spokeswoman declined comment.
At the mother’s urging, a new pediatrician tested him at age two. His blood lead concentration was 19 micrograms per deciliter, nearly four times the level Ohio defines as lead poisoning and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers elevated. Had Joshua been tested earlier – as Medicaid and Ohio rules required – the family could have more quickly removed him from a lead-infested rental house, Sekerak said.
Joshua’s case is not unique, a Reuters investigation found. Nationwide, millions of children are falling through the cracks of early childhood lead testing requirements.

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Posted on June 9, 2016

By Brendan Cantwell/The Conversation

A recent report by the Boston-based Pioneer Institute points out how out-of-state enrollments at the University of Massachusetts are limiting opportunities for in-state students.
For the right-leaning Pioneer Institute, UMass is an example of the public sector run amok. But Pioneer is not alone. There are others who have voiced similar concerns. For example, a state audit came out with a scathing criticism of the University of California for discriminating against local students. And recent federal data show 43 of the 50 state flagship schools enrolled fewer local students in 2014 than they did a decade earlier.
My experience as a higher education researcher suggests it is important to understand why colleges and universities are enrolling students from out of state. Years of underfunding and the growth of market-based practices such as competition for tuition revenue have created incentives for colleges and universities to enroll nonresidents. The consequence of this has been added financial strain on lower-income students.

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Posted on June 7, 2016