Portside

Verizon Communications has responded to an explosive report that outlines the telecommunications giant's role in an ongoing domestic spying program. The response, in a memo to employees, seems aimed at containing a public relations disaster. The wording, however, has to adhere to restrictions, imposed on Verizon by the secret court, not to disclose that the company was ordered to hand over phone logs to the FBI and the National Security Agency.

The civil liberties group said leaked details of the case could portray the suspect in a triple murder in Waltham in an unfair light.

Some eager-to-believe progressives heralded the speech as a momentous change, but Obama's actions are often quite different than his rhetoric

The Cold War is ostensibly over but training and arming the bad guys never stopped.

"Terracide." A new word - it's meant to encompass the almost unimaginable -- what the big energy companies are doing on and to our planet right now. Their execs are consciously destroying/melting it for profit and if that doesn't make them terrorists -- or terrarists - what does? And if that doesn't also make the companies themselves the biggest criminal enterprise in history, then how would you define that term?

“Assata is not a threat,” scholar and activist Angela Davis, who herself once occupied a spot on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list, told Democracy Now! “If anything, this is a vendetta.”

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In the ten years following 9/11, the FBI and the Justice Department convicted more than 150 people following sting operations, though few had any connection to real terrorists. The following is an excerpt from The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism by Trevor Aaronson (Ig Publishing, 2012).