This was shown on Britain’s Channel 4. I haven’t been watching any US TV but I wonder if any US news outlets aired or will air this short message by one of the most significant political figures of 2013 and possibly the decade. [Read more…]
Edward Snowden gives 14 hours of interviews to Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, one of the reporters who has been given access to his documents. The article summarizes much of what he has done but in the excerpts below, I give some bits that describe how and why he did what he did and what his life is now like in Russia. [Read more…]
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has denied the appeal by the state of Utah to issue a stay of the US District Court judge’s ruling to overturn the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. In its ruling it said: [Read more…]
After the US District Court judge Robert Shelby declared on Friday that the Utah ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, marriage licenses started being issued while the government filed a motion with him asking him to stay his order pending appeal. The government, perhaps fearing that many more same-sex couples would get married while the judge considered their motion for a stay, also filed an emergency motion with the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals asking them to immediately impose a stay. [Read more…]
I wrote recently about the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties case that is pending before the US Supreme Court that will test the limits of the Free Exercise of religion clause of the First Amendment and the reach of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 that says that any government action that impinges on a person’s religious freedom must have ‘compelling interest’ and no other less restrictive choice of action to achieve its ends. [Read more…]
The good news out of Ohio is that the Medicaid expansion program has been upheld by the courts. This was part of the Affordable Care Act that was meant to take care of the people who fell into a gap, who earned too much (although still poor) to be eligible for Medicaid but did not earn enough to get affordable insurance through the new health exchanges. [Read more…]
The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a unanimous that the ban on same-sex marriage in unconstitutional, making it the 17th state to do so. This was not such a big surprise. The same court had ruled in August 22 of this year that a photographer could not deny services to a same-sex couple. (I will write more about this case later because it offers some interesting features.) [Read more…]
Stephen Colbert takes a look at what the NSA is up to in the virtual worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, while the FBI spies on people through their computer webcams. It is easy to see how the people doing this might have started out justifying it as a way of fighting terrorism but that it acquired a life of its own and became an addiction. Like World of Warcraft and Second Life, in fact. [Read more…]
President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies tasked to review NSA procedures has released its report and I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. Given that the committee was stacked with intelligence services insiders, I had expected it to offer merely superficial changes but that was not the case. While it did not go as far as I would have liked, it was not a rubber stamp for existing programs either. This may be because there has been so much publicly expressed skepticism about this committee that it made it hard for them to appear to confirm those suspicions. [Read more…]