Obama’s Expanding Surveillance Universe

On the website of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services there is a list of rights belonging to all Americans. Chief among them: Freedom to express yourself. Abdiwali Warsame must have taken them literally. Two days after he became a U.S. citizen, he created a...

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The Prisoner

Why didn't Edward Snowden agree to be jailed, abused, silenced, and quite possibly tortured? This is what Melissa Harris-Perry wants to know. Harris-Perry is one of MSNBC's minor weekend anchors, a professor currently at Tulane University who started out retailing her...

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Iraqi Shoppers Targeted on Revolution Anniversary: 77 Killed, 223 Wounded

A number of late-day, coordinated attacks targeted markets and bakeries to take advantage of food shopping right before the Iftar evening meal, which breaks Ramadan fasting for the day. July 14 also marks the 55th anniversary of the coup which installed the regime that ended with the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein. At least 77 Iraqis were killed and 223 more were wounded.
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Obama’s Many Middle East Miseries Multiply

No doubt the administration of President Barack Obama had hoped that this week’s foreign policy news would be dominated by the high-level U.S.-China Strategic and Economic and Dialogue (S&ED) that just ended here Thursday. That would have furthered the...

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How We Got Warrior Cops

High-profile police response to terrorism threats – as in the case of the Boston bombing – grab headlines, but it wasn’t the paranoias of our post-9/11 world that made cops often indistinguishable from an army. It started earlier. It started with the war on drugs. The...

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The Meaning of Words

In February 2011, a series of protests began in North Africa, spreading from Tunisia to Egypt and then into Syria and the Arabian Peninsula. It was described as a popular revolt demanding more democracy, and dubbed the "Arab Spring." Soon however, details...

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