Election Forecasts - FiveThirtyEight Blog - NYTimes.com

NYPD: Muslim spying led to no leads, terror cases By ADAM GOLDMAN and MATT APUZZO Associated Press Posted: 08/20/2012 11:47:54 PM PDT0 Comments|Updated: about a year ago NEW YORK—In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday. The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames. Police hoped the Demographics Unit would serve as an early warning system for terrorism.

Katha Pollitt What should we call the position that the woman who is pregnant should decide whether she keeps the pregnancy or ends it? My column on Planned Parenthood’s semi-retirement of the word “pro-choice” got a lot of responses. Pro-rights, pro-woman, pro-freedom, pro-liberty, plus some thumbs-up for pro-choice—after all, we already know what it means. Here’s a selection of e-mail responses and comments I received when I sent my column out to my usual list, but forgot to use bcc, sparking a lively discussion (and a few irate demands to be left in peace). Start, Join and Win Campaigns for Change The world’s platform for change Victories every day. Start a petition Victory Meriam Yehya Ibrahim saved from execution in Sudan One million people from around the globe signed Emily Clarke's petition, joining a chorus of international voices demanding freedom and justice for Meriam, a Sudanese woman who was sentenced to death because of her...

Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics - About - Joel van der Reijden Purpose The Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics is a project that ran from 2004 to 2013. It was a surprisingly successful attempt to analyze the various establishments of the western world and to see how they interact with both each other and national governments. ISGP has been a unique project for some of the following reasons: It put together a list of about 1,000 important privately-funded non-government institutes (NGOs) and the key persons who form an international "permanent establishment".

Chris Hedges, Columnist Chris Hedges Chris Hedges, whose column is published weekly on Truthdig, has written 11 books, including the New York Times best seller “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe Sacco. Some of his other books include “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and the best selling “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2008). Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy Thank You, Rolling Stone | BLOG ENTRY Today is my last day at Rolling Stone. As of this week, I’m leaving to work for First Look Media, the new organization that’s already home to reporters like Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras. I’ll have... February 20, 2014 10:35 AM ET Ex-Morgan Stanley Chief Jams Foot in Mouth, Complains of CEO Abuse | BLOG ENTRY There's a ton of interesting stuff going on in the Wall Street sphere of late – I'm trying to find some time to do a proper write-up of the extraordinary lawsuit just filed by the Better Markets... February 13, 2014 5:30 PM ET The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks' Most Devious Scam Yet | ARTICLE Call it the loophole that destroyed the world. It's 1999, the tail end of the Clinton years.

Oversight of United States covert operations Since 1954, oversight of United States covert operations has been carried out by a series of sub-committees of the United States National Security Council. Oversight of United States covert operations[edit] NSC 5412/2 Special Group[edit] The Official Paul Krugman Web Page News!! I am starting up my Princeton web site. It is at www.wws.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/

James Fallows This morning I had the privilege of giving the commencement address at the University of Vermont—UVM, home of the Catamounts, in Burlington. My wife Deb and I, and our colleague John Tierney, visited UVM several years ago and wrote about it in our American Futures series, notably with John’s piece about the school’s emergence as a “public Ivy.” Seven Days, the financially-and-journalistically successful weekly based in Burlington (which I’ve also written about), has a story about today’s commencement, here.

Naomi Klein Published at The Intercept Now that it seems virtually certain that Donald Trump will withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, and the climate movement is quite rightly mobilizing in the face of this latest dystopian lurch, it’s time to get real about something: Pretty much everything that is weak, disappointing, and inadequate about that deal is the result of U.S. lobbying since 2009. The fact that the agreement only commits governments to keeping warming below an increase of 2 degrees, rather than a much safer firm target of 1.5 degrees, was lobbied for and won by the United States. The fact that the agreement left it to individual nations to determine how much they were willing to do to reach that temperature target, allowing them to come to Paris with commitments that collectively put us on a disastrous course toward more than 3 degrees of warming, was lobbied for and won by the United States.