Saturday, Dec 20th
Last update08:28:16 AM GMT
Domestic Glance
According to a study from the nation's largest food bank operator, the number of Americans in need of food aid has jumped 46 percent in three years, including a 50 percent jump in the number of children needing food assistance, and a 64 percent increase in hunger in senior citizens' homes.
The study, Hunger in America 2010, found that 37 million people, or roughly one in eight US residents, received food aid in 2009. That's a 46 percent jump from a similar survey carried out in 2006.
A Detroit-area imam who died in a shootout with the FBI in October was shot 21 times -- at least once in the back -- and found by police lying down with his wrists in handcuffs behind him, says a local Detroit news report.
The medical examiner's report is scheduled to be released this week, but had been delayed for months after Dearborn police, who are investigating the FBI in the matter, filed a court affidavit requesting the document be kept sealed.
Alleging a plot to tamper with phones in Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu's office in the Hale Boggs Federal Building in downtown New Orleans, the FBI arrested four people Monday, including James O'Keefe, 25, a conservative filmmaker whose undercover videos at ACORN field offices severely damaged the advocacy group's credibility.
The Department of Transportation is expected later this morning to announce a ban on texting by truck and bus drivers while operating their vehicles.
The "nuclear renaissance," hailed in many headlines and speeches over the last few years, started under President George W. Bush.
A federal judge has dismissed AT&T customers' lawsuit over wiretapping conducted under former President George W. Bush, a challenge the judge had allowed to proceed before Congress intervened.
To establish the right to sue, a private citizen must demonstrate a "direct, personal stake in the outcome" and cannot merely claim "a right to have the government follow the law," Walker said. Because the AT&T customers have no evidence that they were personally wiretapped, he said, they cannot differentiate themselves from "the mass of telephone and Internet users in the United States."
"Today's ruling by the Supreme Court strikes at the core of our democracy. The framers could never have imagined, and surely didn't desire, a system in which corporations could pour literally billions of dollars into elections and hold virtually limitless influence over the fate of our elected representatives. Such a system does not promote free speech; it mocks it.
"As Justice Stevens pointed out in his dissent, corporations are not people. They are not citizens. They do not have a right to vote and they can not be given unlimited power to influence elections.
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