Calls for a pardon for Snowden

With the release of the film Snowden, there have been renewed calls for president Obama to pardon him or at least provide some means so that he can return to the US. Currently he faces draconian charges under the Espionage Act that could enable the Obama administration to immediately take him out of circulation and prevent him from any contact with the outside world and deny him all due process rights. Snowden himself has made a moral case for a pardon, saying that people had benefited from his actions.
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Film review: Snowden (2016)

I saw this Oliver Stone film a couple of days ago that tells the story of Edward Snowden (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) over the period 2003 to 2013, ending with his trip to Moscow. The films starts on June 3, 2013 with Snowden holed up in a hotel in Hong Kong making contact with journalists Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Ewan MacAskill for the first time and telling them his story, though he had already given them the encrypted documents that would explode into the world that week.
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Sri Lanka regresses on women’s rights

I have written before about how Sri Lanka has had women heads of state since 1960 and women have occupied high positions in government, academia, and business for a long time. This does not mean that they are treated equally in all spheres (they still tend to be expected to be the primary homemakers, child rearers, and care givers irrespective of their positions and responsibilities outside the home) but it does mean that one did not see obvious signs of women being restricted.
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The carnage in Syria gets worse

The deaths of at least 62 Syrian troops and more than 100 injured by a US bombing attack that apparently went awry and struck them instead of an ISIS target has threatened the partial cease-fire that was supposed to be just getting underway. The repeated bombings of wrong targets undermines the constant reassurances we get from the US government of the reliability of their smart weaponry.
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Bernie Sanders makes the case for Hillary Clinton

He talks with Seth Meyers about why we should get beyond personalities and whether we like or dislike a candidate, why Hillary Clinton’s policies are far superior to those of Donald Trump, where the Democratic party has failed, and what it still needs to do. Elsewhere, Sanders said that Trump’s campaign was based on bigotry and his focus on president Obama’s birth certificate was emblematic of that.
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