Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Beatings, sleep deprivation, menacing and other brutal tactics have led to persistent mental health problems among detainees held in secret C.I.A. prisons and at Guantánamo. Before the United States permitted a terrifying way of interrogating prisoners, government lawyers and intelligence officials assured themselves of one crucial outcome. They knew that the methods inflicted on terrorism…
cxenseparse_start The White House blasted what it called “rapid onset buyer’s remorse” after House and Senate leaders conceded problems with the 9/11 lawsuit bill Congress just enacted into law over President Obama’s veto. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., suggested that the House might take up a bill to fix problems with the Justice Against Sponsors…
Live shot of the Times copy desk.Gus Pasquerella/Public domain/via Wikipedia 1. Thursday morning libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson went on MSNBC and responded to a question about Aleppo, Syria, by saying he didn’t know what Aleppo was. 2. The New York Times ran a story about Johnson’s gaffe that itself misidentified Aleppo as the…
The Times‘ Gary Johnson/Aleppo story.Screenshot/New York Times Libertarian presidential candidate and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson went on MSNBC’s Morning Joe today and admitted in response to a question about Aleppo, Syria, that he had no idea what “Aleppo” was. This was a pretty big mistake for someone who is likely to get…
The soldier pointed his AK-47 at the female aid worker and gave her a choice. “Either you have sex with me, or we make every man here rape you and then we shoot you in the head,” she remembers him saying. She didn’t really have a choice: by the end of the evening, she had…
Buzzfeed’s Chris Hamby is out today with the first installment of a promised four-part investigative report into the system of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). Like all such reports, it needs a spectacular headline and summary to draw clicks, and this one’s a doozy: The Court That Rules the World A parallel legal universe, open only…
Imagine a private, global super court that empowers corporations to bend countries to their will. Say a nation tries to prosecute a corrupt CEO or ban dangerous pollution. Imagine that a company could turn to this super court and sue the whole country for daring to interfere with its profits, demanding hundreds of millions or even billions…
Almost a year and a half into Saudi Arabia’s U.S.-backed bombing campaign in Yemen, the humanitarian toll has become so extensive that the International Committee of the Red Cross has taken the unusual step of donating entire morgue units to Yemeni hospitals. “The hospitals were not able to cope,” said Rima Kamal, a Yemen-based spokesperson…
Photo Anne Frank, left. At right, Rouwaida Hanoun, a Syrian 5-year-old who was wounded during an airstrike on Aleppo last week. Credit Left, Anne Frank Fonds — Basel, via Getty Images AMSTERDAM — On April 30, 1941, a Jewish man here in Amsterdam wrote a desperate letter to an American friend, pleading for help emigrating…
An exclusive investigation by reported.ly has traced the manufacture and shipping of bomb components from the European Union to the United Arab Emirates, and also discovered the use of bombs made by the European manufacturer in attacks by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, where potentially unlawful civilian deaths have been documented. The Germany-based manufacturer of the bomb components, Rheinmetall AG, is…