This Saturday marks one full year since the US military began its still-undeclared war against Islamic State that the government officials openly acknowledge will last indefinitely. What do we have to show for it? So far, billions of dollars have been spent, thousands of bombs have been dropped, hundreds of civilians have been killed and Isis is no weaker than it was last August, when the airstrik...Read More

Lex the police dog from central Illinois is far from top dog in drug-sniffing skills.That's the core finding of a potentially influential new ruling from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which considered the question of how much police should rely on their K-9 partners to justify searches when a dog's own competence, as in Lex's case, is itself suspect.The opinion stems from an a...Read More

Some time in the next year, Starbucks will likely become the world's largest restaurant company based on market value, eclipsing McDonald's $95 billion capitalization. The Golden Arches have been tarnished in recent years, but this impending milestone is testament largely to the success of Starbucks, whose shares have rallied 49% in the past 12 months.The Seattle-based chain, with a market...Read More

CHRIS CHRISTIE: This is not theoretical to me. I went to the funerals. We lost friends of ours in the Trade Center that day. My own wife was two blocks from the Trade Center that day, at her office, having gone through it that morning.When you actually have to be responsible for doing this, you can do it, and we did it, for seven years in my office, respecting civil liberties and protecting the ho...Read More

History has shown that when a government wants to solidify its power, it has to turn its subjects into taxpayers. The Roman Empire demanded high tribute payments from every tribe it had newly conquered. And the United States developed from a commonwealth to a federal state when, in the 18th century, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton achieved uniform duties and taxes for the entire union, initi...Read More

Investors throughout China are waiting for the government to step in and buy more stocks so they can close out their positions, but many are losing hope.Yang Cheng, a farmer in the remote town of Panzhihua in southwest China, was one of many Chinese citizens who started buying up stocks after the government began promoting equity investment as part of a larger plan to expand the country's econ...Read More

When police officers shoot people under questionable circumstances, Dr. [William J.] Lewinski is often there to defend their actions. Among the most influential voices on the subject, he has testified in or consulted in nearly 200 cases over the last decade or so and has helped justify countless shootings around the country.His conclusions are consistent: The officer acted appropriately, even when...Read More

Former President Jimmy Carter spoke with the Thom Hartmann Program earlier this week about "political bribery" in the United States, saying it's created "a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors."Carter was asked about Supreme Court cases like Citizens United, which he said has turned America into an "oligarchy.""It viol...Read More

Predictive policing, an unproven and controversial data-mining method intended to anticipate the location and participants or victims in future crimes, is now an integral part of the largest police department in the United States. During a recent panel, New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton declared that predictive policing "is the wave of the future," and that "the '...Read More

Sam Wilkin is an economist and has been studying the very rich for most of his working life. And he's not talking about ordinarily loaded here… No, he's talking about 'a fortune of yachts and personal helicopters, of diamond-encrusted light fixtures, of stately homes and private islands, of your name emblazoned upon landmark buildings and a charitable foundation bravely tackling...Read More

Sandra Bland was pulled over for failing to signal while changing lanes. A lot of readers have watched the traffic stop which led to Bland's arrest for assaulting an officer. If you haven't, you should.The Bland video brings up an overlooked problem with the law of police-citizen encounters. The police can back up their orders with force because it's often a crime to disobey a lawful o...Read More

In a patent application filed today, Apple proposes a new e-commerce system that uses a mobile phone to deliver targeted ads to users based on what they can actually afford…Broken down simply, the system sits on your phone, tracks the status of your credit or debit cards, sees what the balance on them is, and then targets ads at you based on what you can actually afford. This is a genuinely...Read More

The great 20th-century conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter thought the left had overlooked a major selling point in pressing the case for public — i.e., government — control over productive capital. "One of the most significant titles to superiority," he suggested, was that public ownership produced profits, which means not having to depend on taxes to raise money.The bu...Read More

The Jeep's strange behavior wasn't entirely unexpected. I'd come to St. Louis to be Miller and Valasek's digital crash-test dummy, a willing subject on whom they could test the car-hacking research they'd been doing over the past year. The result of their work was a hacking technique—what the security industry calls a zero-day exploit—that can target Jeep Cherokees...Read More

Retired general and former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark on Friday called for World War II-style internment camps to be revived for "disloyal Americans." In an interview with MSNBC's Thomas Roberts in the wake of the mass shooting in Chatanooga, Tennessee, Clark said that during World War II, "if someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States...Read More

Before the crisis that started in 2007, both of us believed that the financial system was fragile and unsustainable, contrary to the near ubiquitous analyses at the time.Now, there is something vastly riskier facing us, with risks that entail the survival of the global ecosystem — not the financial system. This time, the fight is against the current promotion of genetically modified organism...Read More

A Republican Congressman wants to strip the Federal Reserve Bank of New York of one of its key powers, and it could have a big impact on when and how the Fed makes its next rate decision.Next Wednesday, in the House Financial Services Committee Monetary Policy and Trade Subcommittee hearing on Federal Reserve reform, it is expected Michigan Republican Bill Huizenga will pitch legislation to kill t...Read More

President Obama's former top military intelligence official has launched a scathing attack on the White House's counter-terrorism strategy, including the administration's handling of the ISIL threat in Iraq and Syria and the US military's drone war.In a forthcoming interview with Al Jazeera English's 'Head to Head', retired US Lt. General Michael Flynn, who quit as head...Read More

Suppose you own a car dealership in San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico, and you want to sell new Fords. The only way to get them to the island is by boat – but not just any boat.In 1920, Congress passed a law restricting all trade between U.S. ports to American-flagged vessels crewed by U.S. citizens. After the First World War, Congress's idea was to protect the country's merchant...Read More

President Barack Obama is heralding his nuclear deal with Iran as "another chapter in the pursuit of a more helpful and more hopeful world." I don't think so. Iran has a history of funding terrorism around the world, and they are Israel's worst enemy. We are alienating our decades-long allies and cozying up to their enemies and ours.Donald J. Trump was exactly right when he said,...Read More