By Human Rights Watch | Report
Raised on the Registry: The Irreparable Harm of Placing Children on Sex Offender Registries in the US (Washington, DC) – Harsh public registration laws often punish youth sex offenders for life and do little to protect public safety, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. [...]
“There can be no possible justification for such an over-broad collection … These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources … and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.” The Associated Press says the U.S. Department of Justice has [...]
By ACLU of Florida Media Office| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Immediate settlement by school board ends months of delay and efforts to stop 14-year old Bayli Silberstein from establishing safe schools club
CONTACT: ACLU of Florida Media Office, media@aclufl.org, (786) 363-2737
OCALA – Today, just one day after 14-year-old Bayli Silberstein filed suit against [...]
By Brian Magee, American Humanist | For Immediate Release
The National Day of Reason was created “to celebrate reason—a concept all Americans can support—and to raise public awareness about the persistent threat to religious liberty posed by government intrusion into the private sphere of worship.”
(Washington, DC, April 30, 2013)—Two members of Congress are offering [...]
By ACLU Press Release | April 20, 2013
The ACLU shares the public’s relief that the suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has been apprehended. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: media@aclu.org
NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union reacted to the apprehension of the suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing and statements from [...]
By ACLU Florida | FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 12, 2013
New rule created requiring parental consent for club membership; Hundreds attended meeting and 50,000 signed petition supporting 8th-grader’s effort to establish gay-straight alliance
Last night, the Lake County School Board voted 3-2 against a proposed policy that would have banned all non-academic clubs, instead opting [...]
By Gardner | Blog
Even the most cursory examination reveals that the only difference between same-sex platonic couples and same-sex couples is whether the relationship is consummated sexually.
As we enter into a new age in which spousal rights and benefits are being extended to same-sex couples, the next question to be addressed is whether [...]
By Jim Hightower | Otherwords.org
The gagged townspeople of Sanford, New York are suing their town board over the infringement of their First Amendment rights. It’s one thing for Big Oil to bust into our communities, groundwater, and economic well-being with the hydraulic fracturing natural gas boom. Now, in addition to poisoning the [...]
By James Ridgeway | Open Society Foundation
Solitary confinement is a brutal form of prison punishment that has claimed many lives and caused untold suffering. Supermax prisons and solitary confinement units are our domestic black sites—hidden places where human beings endure unspeakable punishments, without benefit of due process in any court of law. [...]
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Quotable Quotes
The good man understands what is right,
the bad man understands profit.
—Confucius
“The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad soil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds — where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough — a modest living— and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities.”
–Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
'He leaves us a lesson, which is to never accept any injustice.'
–The French President, François Hollande, speaking of Stéphane Hessel, dead at age 95.
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered…”
–Thomas Jefferson
Around the web…
Above the law
"The laws, Cicero wrote in the days of the Roman Republic, “are silent in time of war.” But what if the war has no end, no defined enemy, no defined territory? How can markets work if the financial behemoths are too big to fail and too big to jail? If the national security state has the power of life or death above the law, and Wall Street has the power to plunder beyond the law, in what way does this remain a nation of laws? " --Katrina van HeuvelRead it on WP
Waking From My Moral Coma
"It is the killing, it is the permanent war, it is our deranged national priorities. It is the system we live under which requires the serial deaths of all those innocents to maintain our economic health that should appall us. We sup upon the blood and bonemeal that is the byproduct of the idea that is America, and we sleep. And we sleep." -William Rivers PittRead it on Truthout
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Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition
Click image to access report.
Torture: A Laughing Matter?
America Wages War on Sex
By William A. Collins | Otherwords.org
Despite declines in teen pregnancy and abortion rates, some conservatives aren’t ready to celebrate.
Abortion, condoms,
Things that vex,
Those who would
Prohibit sex.
Fewer American teens are getting pregnant and the national abortion rate is falling. Time to break out [...]