In a statement signed by El Hadji Malick Sow, chair of the UN working group on arbitrary detention; Juan E Méndez, UN special rapporteur on torture; Ben Emmerson, UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights, and Anand Grover, UN special rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health and supported by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the force-feeding is roundly decried:

Continue Reading...

McAuliffe is a longtime professional fundraiser for the Democratic Party. The dehumanizing stuff was uncovered by (or provided to) BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski who simply posted some clips from the audiotapes of McAuliffe's autobiography. In these clips McAuliffe abandons his wife as she is giving birth to their daughter to go to a party for former Washington Post gossip columnist Lloyd Grove, and then he forces his wife and his literally newborn son to sit in a car, on the way home from the hospital, while he attends a fundraiser. In the second story it is noted that his wife is crying, but the important detail is that he raises a million dollars for the party.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Sources also told the Hollywood Reporter that CNN is not likely to renew Kurtz's contract. "The network is also looking into Kurtz's involvement with the web site The Daily Download after media organizations raised the specter of a conflict of interest between Kurtz's day job and his freelance role at the site that was launched in February 2012," writes THR.

Kurtz was fired from the Daily Beast after wrongly accusing NBA star Jason Collins, who made sports history for coming out as gay in Sports Illustrated this week, for not disclosing the fact that Collins was once engaged. (Collins stated that he was engaged early in the piece). The Daily Beast has since pulled the column and fired Kurtz, who has made serious reporting errors before, including a column in which he misquoted Rep. Darrell Issa's spokesman as Rep. Darrell Issa.

Continue Reading...

The Labor Department report showed the job market is improving despite higher taxes and government spending cuts.

In addition to the April gains, the government said employers added 138,000 jobs in March and 332,000 in February. That's 114,000 more over the two months.

The economy has created an average of 208,000 jobs a month from November through April. That's above the 138,000 added in the previous six months.

A fire overnight at the Labor Department's headquarters shut down the building for most employees. Members of the media were allowed in for the release of the report.

Continue Reading...

“It’s not my decision to make,” he told reporters in Mexico City, but said the agency's decision was based on "solid scientific evidence" and was something he was "comfortable with.” The president also told reporters that he was "concerned" by the FDA's original recommendation to allow emergency contraception to be sold over-the-counter without age or point-of-sale restrictions.

Obama's announcement comes just days after the Department of Justice filed an appeal to overturn a federal court order to lift all age restrictions on emergency contraception. U.S. District Court Judge Edward Korman recently ordered the FDA to make the morning-after pill available without a prescription and without point-of-sale or age restrictions, a ruling intended to go into effect on Sunday.

Korman called the the agency's failure to make emergency contraception available without restrictions an "intolerable delay” amounting to an “administration agency filibuster” of women's access to safe contraception.

Continue Reading...

The New York Times noted that "both his tone and his body language indicated that the assessment process would be careful and deliberate." For some months the Obama administration has called the use of chemical weapons by Assad's regime a "red line" that would prompt military intervention. However, claims that chemical weapons have been used have left Western government equivocating over action. As the Guardian noted, "On Thursday the British defense secretary, Philip Hammond, said the west would have to wait for any further chemical attacks to be sure of Syrian government involvement, because previously gathered evidence had begun to degrade and could not prove a link."

Via the New York Times:

Continue Reading...

Major clothing retailers like Wal-Mart, Joe Fresh, JCPenney and the Children's Place were each found to have subcontracted manufacturing to the crumbling factory in Savar, where workers were making an average of $38 a month and coerced to report to work even after the walls of the building were literally falling apart. In November, fire ravaged another garment factory near the capital city of Dhaka, leaving 112 dead. Again, pieces of clothing from Sears, the Walt Disney Co. and other major retailers were found among the scorched remains.

In the aftermath of such tragic, and preventable, losses of life, many consumers are left asking themselves what role they can play in discouraging disasters like this from happening again. And, fortunately, there are answers. The collective power of workers is a real thing, and the collective power of consumers is, too.

Continue Reading...

So we chatted. The big news: Facebook promises that within just a couple of weeks mobile users will get new controls that will allow us to block specific advertisers. These controls will be similar to those that currently exist for the desktop Facebook experience. Individual Facebook users can decide for themselves how excited they are by this pledge. As I wrote on Wednesday, Facebook's track record on the desktop advertising experience leaves something to be desired. (To be fair, Facebook's spokeperson acknowledged that the company's ad-delivery algorithms are not "perfect.")

Continue Reading...

Finance Minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith spoke as the government cracked down on those it blamed for the disaster in the Dhaka suburb of Savar. It suspended Savar's mayor and arrested an engineer who had called for the building's evacuation last week, but was also accused of helping the owner add three illegal floors to the eight-story structure. The building owner was arrested earlier.

The government appears to be attempting to fend off accusations that it is in part to blame for the tragedy because of weak oversight of the building's construction.

During a visit to the Indian capital New Delhi, Muhith said the disaster would not harm Bangladesh's garment industry, which is by far the country's biggest source of export income.

"The present difficulties ... well, I don't think it is really serious — it's an accident," he said. "And the steps that we have taken in order to make sure that it doesn't happen, they are quite elaborate and I believe that it will be appreciated by all."

Continue Reading...

Gov. Lincoln Chafee signed the bill into law on the Statehouse steps Thursday evening following a final 56-15 vote in the House. The first weddings will take place Aug. 1, when the law takes effect.

"I've been waiting 32 years for this day, and I never thought it would come in my lifetime," said Raymond Beausejour, a 66-year-old gay North Providence man who has been with his partner for 32 years. "For the first time in my life, I feel welcome in my own state."

After Chafee signed the bill, the hundreds of people who gathered on the Statehouse grounds erupted into cheers as a chorus sang "Chapel of Love."

"Now, at long last, you are free to marry the person that you love," Chafee told the crowd.

The day was bittersweet for Deborah Tevyaw, whose wife, state corrections officer Pat Baker, succumbed to lung cancer two years ago. Months before she died, Baker, relying on an oxygen tank, angrily told lawmakers it was unfair that Tevyaw wasn't considered her wife in Rhode Island despite their marriage in Massachusetts.

Continue Reading...

Two law enforcement officials told The New York Times that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who survives, admitted the plans two days after he was captured in a suburban Boston backyard on April 19.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev also confessed that he and his older brother had watched online sermons of radical American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki before carrying out the attacks, according to the Times sources.

The Tsarnaev brothers moved up the date of the attack to April 15, Patriot Day in Boston, when they finished making their pressure-cooker bombs ahead of schedule, according to the officials. The paper said the bombs were assembled in the Cambridge, Mass., apartment of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a shootout with police.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev's body had lain unclaimed, but Boston Department of Public Safety spokesman Terrel Harris said a funeral home retained by the 26-year-old's family picked up the remains Thursday afternoon.

He said he had no more information about plans for the remains.

Continue Reading...

I'm a month into my 30s, an age I always looked forward to because by then I should have my life together, know what I want, know my purpose, and know who I am.

As is the irony of life, my life is in shambles, I am unemployed (for almost a year!) and in debt. I want to be a paid television writer. I think writing is part of my life's purpose, but I haven't had any success due to a series of compulsively squandered job opportunities and years hiding in the petrifying fear of showing up to my career -- all of which I blamed on my youth. I am still, at the age of 30, on the square before square one while many of my peers have passed me by and are writing on successful shows.

Even though I was wrong about most of what achieving 30 would mean, I, with the help of five years in a 12-step program, thought I knew who I was, or at least what I was not. I recently discovered I qualified for three additional programs in addition to my first. So, instead of victorious self-awareness, I've had a whole new surprising part of me exposed, a part that was a total mystery, one of which is my debtor behavior.  

Continue Reading...

Given the popularity of the after-school program, in which Daly introduced a countdown of hit music videos and interviewed musicians, all while tweenage girls shrieked in the studio, the joke was lost on no one. Amid the candy-colored universe of Britney videos, girls who wanted to meet Justin so bad, and in-studio Mariah breakdowns, the stolid host seemed ... well ... a bit dull.

Maybe there's a reason why vanilla is such a popular flavor. Carson Daly -- a massive tool, we all agree -- is the MTV star who survived. Sure, you probably don't watch his late-late-night talk show "Last Call." But somebody does: It was recently renewed for a 13th season. He's the host NBC turns to on New Year's Eve, to counter first Dick Clark and now Ryan Seacrest on ABC. When speculation grew that Matt Lauer was on the outs on "Today," Daly's name not only made the list of potential replacements, but he seemed to be trying out, subbing for Willie Geist during the 9 a.m. hour and joining the panel of "Today's Professionals."

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Actually, you probably did miss the news because most major media outlets didn't cover it in a serious way, if at all. Instead, they and their audiences evidently view such information as far less news-, buzz- and tweet-worthy than (among other things) the opening of George W. Bush's library and President Obama's jokes at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Such an appetite for distraction, no doubt, comes from both those who deny the problem of climate change and those who acknowledge the crisis but nonetheless look away from what feels like an unsolvable mess.

That sense of hopelessness is understandable. After all, some of the most hyped ways to reduce carbon emissions -- electric cars, mass-scale renewable energy power plants, etc. -- require the kind of technological transformations that can seem impossibly unrealistic at a time when Congress can't even pass a budget.

Continue Reading...

Earlier today the paper posted this column he wrote about Jason Collins becoming the first active gay player in the NBA -- and it might well be the most foul, ignorant and reprehensible piece of journalism written on Collins.

Here are the essential claims Nielsen makes, followed by the direct quotes from his piece:

Collins is making a lifestyle choice, and it's comparable to the lifestyle choice to have many children with many different mothers:

"Years ago Jackie Robinson fought a courageous, pioneering battle — a battle that was unfair for a man to have to fight just because he was born with a certain color of skin.

To compare the plight of Collins with his own lifestyle choice to Robinson’s should really insult Jackie’s family today. It even bothers me.

Still we have people calling Collins a pioneer.

I never heard that, and rightfully so, when NBA player Shawn Kemp had fathered several illegitimate children with different women."

Continue Reading...

The report, from the liberal Institute for Policy Studies, finds that between 2009 and 2011, top executives at the 90 publicly held corporate members of the Fix the Debt coalition raked in at least $953 million -- and as much as $1.6 billion -- through the “performance pay” loophole, which counts some executive compensation as a tax-deductible business expense, instead of a salary. Fix the Debt, founded by Alan  Simpson and Erskine Bowles, is one of the many groups tied to Wall Streeter cum policy entrepreneur Pete Peterson, who has spent the last 20 years trying to reduce the debt, in large part through cuts to programs like Social Security and Medicare. The group has attracted some of the largest corporations in the country as sponsors, as well as former lawmakers, giving it serious clout in Washington.

Continue Reading...

CNN reports:

While Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre is widely known as the face of the NRA, Keene had an active role in publicity and media appearances, especially in the wake of the Newtown elementary school massacre that left 26 people dead.

Porter has been serving as the NRA's first vice president, and before that he served as the group's second vice president. The presidency, an unpaid position, is the next stop in the NRA's leadership rotation.

Continue Reading...

Shakur was herself wounded by police shots during the Jersey Turnpike shootout and one of her militant comrades was killed. Despite the case's verdict, many of Shakur's supporters -- and commentators rightly skeptical of the criminal justice's system treatment of black liberation activists at the time -- question Shakur's murder conviction. Deserving of further questioning: Why, after 40 years, is Shakur (whose chosen name means "she who struggles") worthy of a $2 million bounty and a spot among the FBI's most wanted?

Continue Reading...