The Guardian: Earlier this week, British lawyer and legal correspondent for the New Statesman David Allen Green generated a fair amount of attention by announcing that he would use his objective legal expertise to bust what he called "legal myths about the Assange extradition." These myths, he said, are being irresponsibly spread by Assange defenders and "are like 'zombie facts' which stagger on even when shot down."
Great video about Barack Obama and the failure of capitalist 'democracy'
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Montreal Gazette: Newly revealed "secret history" written by U.S. officials has detailed how successive administrations provided refuge to Nazi war criminals in the aftermath of the Second World War. "America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted became -in some small measure -a safe haven for the persecutors as well," said a report from the Office of Special Investigations, first revealed by the New York Times.
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NY Times: He said he still felt sickened that no weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq. Yet former President George W. Bush said that his worst moment in the Oval Office came when the rap star Kanye West claimed that the president didn’t care about black people. NBC News’s Matt Lauer spoke with President George W. Bush in his first one-on-one TV interview since leaving the Oval Office. “The suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low,” Mr. Bush told a surprised Matt Lauer on NBC on Monday night.
The Globe: The United States’ failure to recognize the lesser culpability of juveniles, at every stage of the incarceration and trial of Canadian Omar Khadr, shows that country’s military-justice system in a poor light. The jury’s sentence of 40 years – on top of the eight Mr. Khadr already served in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – takes the breath away. Mr. Khadr was, by the evidence of the U.S. justice department, no older than 11 when his parents left Canada and began raising him in the terrorist camps of al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan.
Al Jazeera: The leader of a small church in the US state of Florida says he is determined to go through with his plan to burn copies of the Quran on September 11, despite an international outcry against it. Terry Jones, the pastor, said on Wednesday that he has received encouragement for his protest, with supporters mailing copies of the Islamic holy text to his church in Gainesville. The plan is to incinerate the Qurans in a bonfire on Saturday to mark the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.
NY Times: A federal judge’s forceful opinion Wednesday in favor of same-sex marriage is only the beginning of a process that is likely to go all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The ultimate outcome of the California case cannot be predicted, but appeals court judges and the justices at the highest court in the land could find themselves boxed in by the careful logic and structure of Judge Vaughn R. Walker’s opinion, legal experts said. In his ruling, Judge Walker found that California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage irrationally discriminates against gay men and women.
Macleans: This month, President Barack Obama signed into law a financial reform bill aimed at preventing another financial crisis. It cost him financial backers on Wall Street, but gave consumers new protections and government more regulatory oversight powers. The financial reform bill came on the heels of the hard-fought health-care reform law, which for the first time provides insurance coverage for all Americans. That in turn followed the successful rescue of the U.S.
CNN: President Barack Obama on Wednesday replaced Gen. Stanley McChrystal as commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan and nominated Gen. David Petraeus to replace him while affirming support for a counterinsurgency strategy encountering problems. The dramatic shift came a day after McChrystal's disparaging comments about America's civilian leadership surfaced, and reignited the national debate on the war in Afghanistan -- now in its eighth year with a June death toll of coalition forces that is close to becoming the highest of the war.
NY Times: BP engineers struggled Friday to plug a gushing oil well a mile under the sea, but as of late in the day they had made little headway in stemming the flow. Amid mixed messages about problems and progress, the effort — called a “top kill” — continued for a third day, with engineers describing a painstaking process of trying to plug the hole, using different weights of mud and sizes of debris like golf balls and tires, and then watching and waiting. They cannot use brute force because they risk making the leak worse if they damage the pipes leading down to the well.