Wednesday, Dec 10th
Last update09:17:38 AM GMT
On Tuesday we will all turn into pumpkins if the Republican controlled House doesn't pass the Senate budget bill. With this fiscal 'crisis' in mind, let's debunk the favorite talking point from the Conservatives: 'We can't afford that,' or 'we're broke.'
The reality check: the US prints its own money, unlike Greece that's dependent on the German Euro we can print our own, and as much as we need to make the economy work.
A Russian court has ordered 20 Greenpeace activists from around the world to be held in custody for two months pending further investigation over a protest against offshore oil drilling in the Arctic, drawing condemnation and a vow to appeal.
In proceedings that Greenpeace said evoked Soviet-era scare tactics, activists from a ship used in the protest at an oil rig were led to court in the port of Murmansk in handcuffs and held in cages for a series of hearings that ended early on Friday.
Goodbye, US passport.
That's not a concept that Americans contemplate lightly. But it's one that many of them seem to be considering - and acting on.
The number of expatriates renouncing their US citizenship surged in the second quarter of 2013, compared with the same period the year before - 1,131 cases to 189 in 2012. It's still a small proportion of the estimated six million Americans abroad, but it's a significant rise.
Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.
It doesn't take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist".
Leading scientists said on Friday they were more certain than ever before that humans are the main culprits for climate change and predicted the impact from greenhouse gas emissions could linger for centuries.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a report that the current hiatus in warming, when temperatures have risen more slowly despite growing emissions, was a natural variation that would not last.
The lawyer who defended Chelsea Manning against charges of leaking classified information said Wednesday that his client is being assessed at a military prison for gender identity disorder, and that he's hopeful the military will allow Manning to receive hormone therapy.
Civilian attorney David Coombs spoke to more than 150 students and faculty at Roger Williams University School of Law, where he has taught. Manning, previously known as Bradley, is serving a 35-year sentence for a July conviction on espionage and other offenses for sending more than 700,000 documents and some battlefield video to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. She said after she was sentenced that she wishes to live as a woman and receive hormone therapy. The military previously said it does not provide it.
Dozens of Nepalese migrant labourers have died in Qatar in recent weeks and thousands more are enduring appalling labour abuses, a Guardian investigation has found, raising serious questions about Qatar's preparations to host the 2022 World Cup.
This summer, Nepalese workers died at a rate of almost one a day in Qatar, many of them young men who had sudden heart attacks. The investigation found evidence to suggest that thousands of Nepalese, who make up the single largest group of labourers in Qatar, face exploitation and abuses that amount to modern-day slavery, as defined by the International Labour Organisation, during a building binge paving the way for 2022.
For all the public scrutiny of military sexual assault this year — from hearings to heated Senate debates — congressional efforts are only just beginning to challenge the Pentagon’s overarching strategy on the issue for the past 25 years: secrecy.
From tracking the extent of the problem to showing how cases are resolved, the military has consistently and forcefully resisted fully airing details.
In spite of concerns about “sticker shock,” rates for individual coverage on the new health insurance marketplaces appear to be lower than expected in most states due mainly to robust competition among insurers, the Obama administration reported Wednesday.
With prices all but finalized in most states, a new report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that monthly premiums in 47 states and the District of Columbia, on average, will be 16 percent lower next year than the Congressional Budget Office projected they would be in 2016 – when the marketplaces are at full capacity.
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