Thursday, Apr 02nd
Last update07:11:27 AM GMT
Domestic Glance
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.
The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions.
The United States Justice Department indicted four Israeli businessmen Tuesday for allegedly attempting to bribe the defense minister of an African country in order to secure a multimillion-dollar contract to supply his country with military equipment. 18 other businessmen were indicted in the same case.
It is true that Mikey is not on the federal government’s “no-fly” list, which includes about 2,500 people, less than 10 percent of them from the United States. But his name appears to be among some 13,500 on the larger “selectee” list, which sets off a high level of security screening.
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