News & Features

Subtle rumors that the Sixth Circuit Court had purposefully ruled to uphold same-sex marriage bans in order to force the hand of the Supreme Court quickly surfaced. This was fueled in part by Judge Martha C. Daughtrey, the sole dissent in the 2-1 vote of the Sixth Circuit Court decision, who wrote that this may have in fact been the majority’s ulterior motive because the “correct result” of the court’s ruling should be sufficiently “obvious.” 

The FBI and police groups have followed this tact. The no name campaign is horrific recognition of what studies show and that’s that mass killers know exactly what they’re doing, and bank heavily on turning their killing spree into warped and perverse mass theater and spectacle. They know this is the kind of gory sensationalism that much of the media feeds on, and they’ll get the sick and sordid attention they crave. In less than a week after the Oregon college mass killing, there were shootings at Northern Arizona University, and Texas Southern University.

He knows that his nutty quips will be spreadeagled over every media outlet and roil legions on Facebook and social media. He’s at or near the top of the heap in some polls as a top GOP presidential candidate and that show him even more implausibly actually beating Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical head-to-head showdown. But beyond his endless milking of his rags-to-successful-neurosurgeon story and the inane quips about President Obama and Democrats before packs of ultraconservative fawners and groupies, what makes him real political timber, let alone presidential stuff?

Impelled by severe drought conditions, residents have been seriously saving water in the last few months of summer. Californians cut water use by 27 percent in August, according to the Associated Press. That’s compared to August 2013, state regulators announced on Thursday, Oct. 1. The reduction was slightly less than the 31 percent decline in July, but stable with the 27 percent conservation effort made in June.

The reasons for Clinton’s steady lead aren’t hard to find. While the chatter about outlier inflammatory curiosities such as Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and the politically radical Sanders, awes, fascinates, and titillates the media and a wide body of the public, they are far from electable. Polls do show that the overwhelming majority of Americans are sick of and disgusted with the dysfunctionality, deal-making, and big money manipulation of American politics. Yet there is no evidence that this has now, or in the past, ever translated into a repudiation of traditional party politicians at the polls.

Just about the only time that an execution will raise more than eyebrow is when a woman is scheduled to be put to death. This was certainly the case with condemned Georgia murderer Kelly Gissendaner. Pope Francis chimed in and pleaded for Georgia to spare her life. Tens of thousands signed a petition pleading for mercy. Gissendaner's daughters, who also happened to be the daughters of the man whom she was complicit in his murder in 1997, also pleaded for her life. 

City, state and federal agencies have been stepping up efforts to stamp out fraudulent mortgage practices that target communities of color, pricing discrimination and redlining among them. Redlining, the practice of denying credit to qualified applicants who seek loans for homes in specific neighborhoods, is illegal under the 1968 Fair Housing Act. However, a Buffalo-area bank on September 10 agreed to pay nearly $1 million to settle a lawsuit that alleges it redlined a large, predominantly black community in that city.

Corruption, fraud, theft, waste. These four dull horsemen of the auditor’s apocalypse are as common as violent death in Afghanistan and as the man responsible for overseeing the United States’ $109.7 billion reconstruction effort in the country, John Sopko is as well acquainted with their depressing ubiquity. The former prosecutor was appointed Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction by President Obama in 2012 and his caustic quarterly reports to Congress open a window onto a world in which these four horsemen have never been reined in, while cowboys run riot in Kabul.