The Obama administration's top drug enforcement official will step down next month, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced on Tuesday, after her agency was tarnished by a scandal over sex parties with prostitutes and she broke with President Obama on drug policy.Michele M. Leonhart, the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, told Mr. Holder that she intended to retire, en...Read More
A mother who uses medical marijuana to treat a chronic illness had her son taken from her recently after the child spoke up at his school about the health benefits of cannabis.On April 13, respected investigative journalist Ben Swann broke the heartbreaking story of Shona Banda,whose son was taken from her by Kansas Child Protective Services in late March after the 11-year-old boy spoke positively...Read More
[Citigroup Chief Economist Willem] Buiter's solution to cash's ability to allow people to avoid negative deposit rates is to abolish cash altogether. – Bloomberg Business, April 10, 2015Fractional reserve bankers love money. They don't love cash, in part because it reduces their ability to pyramid loan on top of loan and create new money from which they can extract interest. They...Read More
When Justin Dammann enters his southwestern Iowa cornfield this month, the 35-year-old farmer will sow something these 2,400 acres have not seen in more than a decade — plants grown without genetically modified seeds.The corn, which will head to a processor 20 miles down the road this fall, will likely make its way into tortilla shells, corn chips and other consumable products made by compan...Read More
In the last minutes of the video, Harris lies on the pavement with police on top of him. An officer calls for a Taser, but in place of an electric clicking sound, a gunshot rings out.A voice can be heard saying, "Oh! I shot him! I'm sorry!" Another officer screams out, "He shot him! He shot him!"Harris, who is bleeding, calls out, too. He's losing his breath, he says. A...Read More
The TPP covers a bewildering range of topics. In addition to conventional trade issues like tariff rates, it includes language on labor rights, environmental laws, copyright and patent protections, e-commerce, state-owned enterprises, corruption, and government procurement.Trade deals like the TPP have grown so complex because the global trade community has figured out how to solve a problem that...Read More
Parents around the United States are rallying in support of the mother and father of the so-called "free-range" kids, the ten-year-old and six-year-old brother and sister who were dragged into the national spotlight this year due to the harassment the family has endured at the hands of government officials for the crime of allowing their kids to freely wander the community without adult...Read More
Obama … had a chance to interview "The Wire" creator David Simon this week. … "The challenge, which you depict in the show: Folks go in [to prison], at great expense to the state, many times trained to become harder criminals while in prison, and come out and are basically unemployable and end up looping back in," he said.Simon agreed that even the small drug incarc...Read More
For months, federal law enforcement agencies and industry have been deadlocked on a highly contentious issue: Should tech companies be obliged to guarantee government access to encrypted data on smartphones and other digital devices, and is that even possible without compromising the security of law-abiding customers?Recently, the head of the National Security Agency provided a rare hint of what s...Read More
One of the great ironies in American policing is that because of these highly controversial events that have been documented, there's a perception that the profession is somehow out of control or failing in its responsibilities to engage in fair and impartial policing. That is of great concern. We cannot be believed if we don't take decisive actions when our officers are clearly wrong. Bad...Read More
Although Rand Paul — who declared his bid for the presidency on Tuesday — has spent several years now inching toward the Republican mainstream, there is still a tendency among the political classes to view him as a sideshow candidate. The crankiness of his announcement-week interviews certainly suggests that he's still getting a handle on retail politics. And though his policy view...Read More
A major publisher of scholarly medical and science articles has retracted 43 papers because of "fabricated" peer reviews amid signs of a broader fake peer review racket affecting many more publications …[T]he Committee on Publication Ethics, a multidisciplinary group that includes more than 9,000 journal editors, issued a statementsuggesting a much broader potential problem. The co...Read More
In 2013, Fox News proudly broadcast an interview with a young food stamp recipient who claimed to be using the government benefit to purchase lobster and sushi."This is the way I want to live and I don't really see anything changing," Jason Greenslate explained to Fox. "It's free food; it's awesome."That story fit a longtime conservative suspicion that poor people u...Read More
[T]he economic benefits of immigration may be the mostsettled fact in economics. A recent University of Chicago poll of leading economists could not find a single one who rejected the proposition… Rationally speaking, we should take in far more immigrants than we currently do.So why don't we open up? The chief logical mistake we make is something called the Lump of Labor Fallacy: th...Read More
The biggest affront to gay equality in America today is the fact that same-sex couples in 13 states are still prevented from marrying. The laws of Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Ohio, and Tennessee are discriminatory, callous in their effects, and may violate the Constitution.Overturning those laws is the most u...Read More
Iceland's government is considering a revolutionary monetary proposal – removing the power of commercial banks to create money and handing it to the central bank. The proposal, which would be a turnaround in the history of modern finance, was part of a report written by a lawmaker from the ruling centrist Progress Party, Frosti Sigurjonsson, entitled "A better monetary system for Ic...Read More
Israel spied on Iran's nuclear talks with the United States — and used the information to undermine the Obama administration's position with the GOP-led Congress, according to an explosive report in The Wall Street Journal… A senior official in [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's office fired back, calling the allegations "utterly false" in an interview...Read More
[U]nder the United States' UCC code (uniform commercial code) as long as bitcoins are treated as general intangibles, no high value investor can be sure that an angry Tony Soprano won't show up one day to claim that the bitcoins they thought they received in a completely unencumbered manner are actually his. – FT Alphaville Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency allegedly invented by one "...Read More
The political push for labeling genetically engineered foods is spreading across the country. Groups in more than 20 states are pushing local initiatives. Now Congress could step in, and scuttle all of them. A bipartisan bill to be introduced today by Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) and Rep G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) would bar states from requiring the labeling of foods derived from genetically modified...Read More
House Members Target Patriot Act with "Surveillance State Repeal Act" … U.S. Representatives Mark Pocan (D-Wis., photo on left) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who are seeking to repeal the PATRIOT Act in its entirety and combat any legal provisions that amount to American spying, unveiled their Surveillance State Repeal Act on Tuesday. – New AmericanDominant Social Theme: We need...Read More