Meredith Bennett-Smith | Huffington Post | September 19, 2013
Did an American pastor with a penchant for anti-gay activism inspire Russia’s new anti-gay laws?
Scott Lively, an outspoken Massachusetts-based Christian leader who previously attracted attention for his support of attempts to criminalize homosexuality in Uganda, now claims that he also helped inspire Russia’s new anti-gay propaganda legislation.
“Yes, I think I influenced the Russian law,” Lively told NBC News.
NORMAL-logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Elizabeth Chuck, Martha C. White | NBC News | Reader Supported News | September 2, 2013
he Department of Justice’s decision on Thursday not to sue Washington and Colorado for permitting recreational marijuana use is being celebrated by advocates as such a huge national step for pot legalization, it’s comparable to the end of Prohibition.
“In my lifetime, it was by far the most important change in marijuana federal policy on the federal level,” said Keith Stroup, founder and legal counsel at the non-profit National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).
“All of sudden, they have decided to let the states experiment with different levels of legalization. That’s precisely what happened at the end of alcohol prohibition.”
Aamer Madhani | USA Today | Reader Supported News | August 30, 2013
Nearly 80% of Americans say President Obama should seek congressional approval before taking any military action in Syria, according to an NBC News poll published Friday.
Seventy-nine percent of respondents say they want the president to receive congressional approval before taking any action.
The tough poll numbers for the White House come one day after members of Obama’s national security team provided 26 lawmakers with an unclassified briefing to detail some of the intelligence they say shows regime loyalists linked to Syrian President Bashar Assad were responsible for a chemical attack Aug. 21 outside Damascus that left hundreds dead. The British Parliament voted Thursday to reject taking limited military action against Syria, despite the U.K. government releasing intelligence that shows the regime has deployed chemical weapons 15 times against the Syrian opposition. Overall, 50% of Americans say they oppose the United States taking military action against Assad, and 42% support it, according to the new poll.
Michael Isikoff | National Investigative Correspondent | NBC News | June 8, 2013
The National Security Agency has at times mistakenly intercepted the private email messages and phone calls of Americans who had no link to terrorism, requiring Justice Department officials to report the errors to a secret national security court and destroy the data, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials.
At least some of the phone calls and emails were pulled from among the hundreds of millions stored by telecommunications companies as part of an NSA surveillance program. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, Thursday night publicly acknowledged what he called “a sensitive intelligence collection program” after its existence was disclosed by the Guardian newspaper.
Ret. Adm. Dennis Blair, who served as President Obama’s DNI in 2009 and 2010, told NBC News that, in one instance in 2009, analysts entered a phone number into agency computers and “put one digit wrong,” and mined a large volume of information about Americans with no connection to terror. The matter was reported to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose judges required that all the data be destroyed, he said.
William Boardman | Reader Supported News | May 30, 2013
How does the IRS doing its job become a made-up political outrage?
Almost everything you hear and read in the media about the current IRS “scandal” is based on deliberate falsification of basic facts. Some might call it lying.
Here’s a reasonably typical media-framing of the IRS lie, from the usually careful and accurate Economist, posted May 23: “Even before this month’s revelation that conservative political groups applying for 501(c)(4) status were being singled out for special scrutiny … ”
You see this false framing of the IRS story across the media spectrum, from Infowars to ABC News and NBC News to the Economist to DemocracyNOW (the latter on May 24: “the scandal over the targeted vetting of right-wing groups …”). Even the usually reliable Wonkblog at the Washington Post doesn’t get the story right, apparently because it hasn’t read the relevant law.
An exception to this remarkable mental stampede in the wrong direction was Jeffrey Toobin (New Yorker, May 14) who wondered, “Did the I.R.S. actually do anything wrong?” His answer started to put the story in reasonable perspective, with a focus on tax law and political money: ” … the scandal isn’t what’s illegal – it’s what’s legal. It’s what society chooses not to punish that tells us most about the prevailing ethical standards of the time.”
Dan Avery | Queerty | March 27, 2013
Another network news personality has come out! No, not Shepard Smith—weekend Today show anchor Jenna Wolfe announced on today’s episode of the NBC morning show that she and her girlfriend of three years, NBC News correspondent Stephanie Gosk, were expecting a baby.
“I have big news, this is big for me” Wolfe, 39, told Matt Lauer. “I’m actually pregnant — I’m quite pregnant, actually! My girlfriend Stephanie, who works here at NBC— we’re expecting a baby girl in the end of August.”
Wolfe calls creating a family “the adventure of a lifetime.”
In this week’s issue of People, Wolfe explained her decision to be open in her life came from her not wanting “to bring my daughter into a world where I’m not comfortable telling everyone who I am and who her mother is.”
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