“According to a just released South Korean poll, 80 percent of South Koreans want inter-Korean dialogue with North Koreans. 60 percent of Americans, regardless of political affiliation, support direct negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang.”
“Ideally, America would stop giving out all foreign aid, but a good place to start would be nixing aid to countries with horrible human rights records.”
“Federal law enforcement officers are raking in hundreds of millions of dollars a year with little oversight or constitutional protections for property owners. Most of these types of seizures are never challenged. The I.G. found petitions were filed in only 20 percent of the DEA cash seizures it reviewed. Of those that were challenged, though, 40 percent saw money fully or partially returned to the owner, indicating that there may be a significant number of unfounded seizures going unchallenged.”
Read more: http://reason.com/archives/2017/06/11/the-deas-warrantless-cash-grab
“The city council felled an entire stretch of this Urban Food Street, even preventing residents from collecting the fruit before the destruction.”
Read more: http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/7-years-of-work-on-food-forest-destroyed-over-permit/
“After destroying a hospital yesterday in the same part of Raqqa, the US has not publicly commented on today’s strike. Such incidents rarely make it into the official Pentagon list of civilian casualties in the two nations, which is usually around 10% of the actual death toll as calculated by private NGOs.”
Read more: http://news.antiwar.com/2017/06/03/us-airstrikes-hit-apartments-in-raqqa-kill-43-civilians/
“Exemplified by the hundred and some odd people they’ve killed in the last 48 hours, the US is struggling mightily with the narrative that they are taking extraordinary care to limit the number of civilian casualties in the air war in Syria, and are rapidly losing any pretense of a moral high ground.”
Read more: http://news.antiwar.com/2017/05/26/us-is-killing-more-civilians-in-syria-air-war-than-assad-is/
“Doctors in Lebanon are trying to control an outbreak of a centuries-old disease that has re-emerged because of the war in Syria. The ‘Aleppo boil’, named after the northern Syrian city, had largely been contained before the start of the conflict. Health workers treating refugees fear it could get worse.”
“Lola’s travel papers had expired in 1969, five years after we arrived in the U.S. She’d come on a special passport linked to my father’s job. After a series of fallings-out with his superiors, Dad quit the consulate and declared his intent to stay in the United States. He arranged for permanent-resident status for his family, but Lola wasn’t eligible. He was supposed to send her back. Lola’s legal status became what Filipinos call tago nang tago, or TNT—’on the run.’ She stayed TNT for almost 20 years.”
Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-story/524490/
“The FBI’s decision to create a fake media company raises critical questions about the federal government’s practice of impersonating the press.”
“The directive instructs federal prosecutors to pursue the most serious, readily provable offense. It thus resurrects the emphasis on mandatory minimum sentencing requirements, which have required judges to impose draconian sentences for drug crimes, even when they don’t believe these sentences are warranted. Sessions’ memo rescinds and reverses the reforms implemented by former Attorney General Eric Holder, which urged prosecutors to charge people with low-level drug cases to avoid triggering mandatory minimum sentences. Nearly half (or 92,000) of the people in federal prison are serving sentences for drug convictions.”