The White House is preparing an Executive Order on indefinite detention that will provide periodic reviews of evidence against dozens of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, according to several administration officials.
This story was reported by ProPublica’s Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein. They are among pharma’s most successful speakers, featured at dinner after dinner promoting companies’ favored pills to their peers. Each has earned at least $200,000 since 2009 from this moonlighting. A review of the highest-earning physicians in ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs database offers insight [...]
The Obama administration is preparing to announce the nomination of James M. Cole to serve as deputy attorney general, according to two individuals with first-hand knowledge of the appointment. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Cole and his firm were paid more than $20 million by AIG as part of negotiated settlements reached in 2004 and 2006 between the insurance giant, the Justice Department, the SEC and former New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Although Cole’s oversight role continued into 2009, he did not oversee the credit default swap contracts that led to AIG’s near collapse in September 2008.”
Alessandro Bon was a politically connected entrepreneur and former sales representative for Beretta, the Italian gun manufacturer. But behind that facade, he was leading a ring of Italian arms dealers and Iranian spies who were illegally selling ammunition, helicopters and other military hardware to Iran, according to Italian court documents obtained by ProPublica. As investigators listened in October, Bon gave one of his associates bad news: Some German sniper scopes they had sold to Iran had surfaced among Taliban militants fighting NATO troops in Afghanistan.
“Secretary Geithner ‘did not recall being aware of’ Lehman’s Repo 105 program, but stated: ‘If this had been a bank we were supervising, that [i.e., Lehman’s Repo 105 program] would have been a huge issue for the New York Fed.’” (from Zero Hedge)
Last month when we first wrote about the faux “Census” mailers from the Republican National Committee, we reported that though deceptive, the mailings were likely legal. That could change soon. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives unanimously passed legislation that specifically bans misleading mailings that are designed to look like they’re from the Census Bureau. The new bill requires that any mailing marked “census” include the sender’s name and address, plus a disclaimer that the survey is “not affiliated with the federal government,” reports the Associated Press.
The Supreme Court recently freed corporations to spend more money on aggressive election ads. But if businesses take advantage of this new freedom, the public probably won’t know it, because it’s easy for them to legally hide their political spending. Under current disclosure laws for federal elections, it’s virtually impossible for the public to track how much a business spends, what it’s spending on, or who ultimately benefits. Experts say the transparency problem extends to state and local races as well.
A federal judge who spoke at length with ProPublica about his experience working through about a dozen constitutional challenges mounted by Guantanamo prisoners is being asked by a detainee’s lawyer to remove himself from a pending case based on quoted portions of his interviews.
Three judges on the federal trial court hearing challenges brought by Guantanamo prisoners are calling on Congress and the Obama administration to enact a law to address one of the nation’s most perplexing moral and legal dilemmas: When can the United States indefinitely detain terrorism suspects?
An insurance program funded by American taxpayers was supposed to provide a safety net for Iraqi interpreters and their families in the event of injury or death. Yet for many, the benefits have fallen painfully short of what was promised.
