VIDEO-Sean Penn at Congresswoman Barabara Lee’s Town Hall Meeting

By Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone Earlier this year, the world’s top climate scientists released a definitive report on global warming. It is now “unequivocal,” they concluded, that the planet is heating up. Humans are directly responsible for the planetary heat wave, and only by taking immediate action can the world avert a climate catastrophe. Megadroughts,…

PAMELA HESS, AP The CIA’s waterboarding of a top al-Qaida figure was approved at the top levels of the U.S. government, a former CIA agent said Tuesday as agency director Gen. Michael Hayden prepared for questioning by congressional panels about the destruction of videotapes of terror suspect interrogations. According to the former agent, waterboarding of…

TomDispatch.com By Tom Engelhardt A Journalist Writing Bloody Murder… And No One Notices Despite the fact that the Bush administration is officially at war with Sunni extremism in Iraq (and in the more general Global War on Terror), despite its support for the largely Shiite government, allied to Iran, that it has brought to power…

RAWSTORY, Michael Roston — Democratic leaders in Congress speedily announced this morning that they would conduct thorough oversight on reports that the Federal Bureau of Investigation overstepped the boundaries of its authority under the Patriot Act. The head of the House Judiciary Committee warned that the potential for misconduct by the FBI “is almost without…

By Josh White, Washington Post As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments this week on the rights of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the public is getting another peek at how detainees have been treated there. A leaked copy of a March 2004 manual of Gitmo’s “Standard Operating Procedures” for Camp Delta was…