As Flint deals with a water crisis, the GOP Senate attempts to repeal clean water rules. The Supreme Court agrees to hear a major immigration case. And what rights do workers have to complain about their employer on social media? Also, the Sentinel team takes a close look at an increasingly hostile relationship between the Obama administration and federal inspectors general. Keep Reading
The Senate Minority Leader said that Republicans’ attempts to scuttle regulations protecting water systems around the nation is “unconscionable” given the current state of affairs in Michigan. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) made the remarks Thursday, just before the Republican-led body tried and failed to override a presidential veto of a Clean Water Rule repeal. “While we’re doing this waste of time here in the senate today—Flint, Michigan is in a state of emergency,” he said ahead of the vote. Fifty-two senators ended up backing the nullification and 40 senators voted… Keep Reading
A government watchdog that examines nation-building in Afghanistan told senators that the Pentagon may be concealing evidence of rampant Department of Defense waste and fraud in the country. John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) on Wednesday alleged that the department has not been forthright with his office about the activities of the now-shuttered Task Force on Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO). “The data provided is substantially inadequate,” he told a Senate Armed Services subcommittee. “That seems extraordinary for an organization that lasted for 5 years and employed… Keep Reading
President Obama’s executive order protecting four million undocumented immigrants from deportation will be reviewed this year by the Supreme Court, the body’s justices announced Tuesday. The high court agreed to hear the White House’s appeal of a November 2015 decision by the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. That ruling upheld a District Judge’s move to enjoin the so-called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—first issued in 2012, and expanded in November 2014. The Presidential decree was challenged in February 2015 by state officials from Texas and 25 other… Keep Reading
The detainee population at Guantanamo drops to below 100 for first time since 2002. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign starts to “feel the Bern,” and immediately goes negative. A financial giant is deemed “Too Big to Fail,” and agrees to break itself up. Also, Alex Main, the Senior Associate for International Policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, is on the show to discuss the administration’s new “pivot” to Central America and the recent deportation raids stateside. Keep Reading
For the first time since 2002, there are fewer than 100 detainees at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay. The Department of Defense announced Thursday that it had transferred ten prisoners out of the facility and into the custody of the government of Oman. Each individual was unanimously approved for transfer by the Guantanamo Review Task Force, the Pentagon reported. While there were only 15 detainee transfers in all of 2015, there have already been 14 releases from Guantanamo this year alone—a sign that President… Keep Reading
Nearly half a billion dollars spent by the US government to develop Afghanistan’s mining industry is at risk of being wasted, according to a Department of Defense inspector general investigation published Thursday. The majority of the projects that raised concerns internally originated from a now-shuttered Pentagon agency that has already been accused by the comptroller several times of profligate spending in the impoverished, war-ravaged nation: the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO). Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko reported that after… Keep Reading
One of the largest liberal groups in the country endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for president on Tuesday, after announcing that the democratic socialist garnered the support of nearly 80 percent of its membership. MoveOn.org, which boasts a membership of 8 million, described the results of their internal democratic process that led to the endorsement as “overwhelming.” Sanders collected a “record-setting” 78.6 percent of the 340,000 votes cast by the group’s rank-and-file. The organization reported the win was “the largest total and widest margin in… Keep Reading
Billionaires and corporate interest groups bent the ear of the Supreme Court on Monday in their bid to deprive government employee unions of funding. Early press accounts following oral arguments suggest that justices were sympathetic to plaintiff’s anti-union arguments in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. Politico reported that the court “signaled willingness” to strike down the fees. The Washington Post noted that a majority of justices appeared to agree that it infringed upon Americans’ “First Amendment rights to be forced to pay dues to the state’s teachers union,” while The… Keep Reading
The Pentagon announced Monday that it released a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay into Saudi Arabian custody, bringing the total number of individuals left at the military prison camp to 103. The transfer of Muhammed Abd Al Rahman Awn Al-Shamrani, who was sent to Guantanamo in 2002, was cleared by the president’s Periodic Review Board in September 2015. The panel determined that the ongoing detention of the Saudi national “does not remain necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”… Keep Reading
Thousands of Central American men, women, and children in the US are being rounded up by the Department of Homeland Security and deported back to their home countries, in what’s being described by a leading presidential candidate as an “inhumane” assault on vulnerable families. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Thursday called on President Obama to “immediately end” the mass raids being carried out across the country. The operations are targeting families who in recent years escaped violence gripping their home countries–namely Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.… Keep Reading