When Pope John Paul II visited Damascus in May 2001, Bashar used his welcoming speech to denounce the Jews, saying, “They tried to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ and the same way they tried to betray and kill the Prophet Muhammad.”   read more

Hours before New Yorkers handed Democratic president hopeful Hillary Clinton and her likely Republican challenger Donald Trump highly coveted wins in their quest for the White House on Tuesday, a voting scandal erupted in the state's largest city. New York City's comptroller announced his office will audit the Board of Elections after it confirmed more than 125,000 Brooklyn voters were removed from the rolls, miscategorized by party and shut out of the Democratic process.   read more

This largely liberal region is struggling with the devastating impact of opiate abuse, which is disrupting families and taking lives. Many lawmakers balk at the idea of legalizing a banned substance, citing potential social costs. “[People] ask themselves, ‘Are we sending the right message...?'” said Vermont House speaker Shap Smith. The opiate crisis, which has killed more than 1,000 people in New England last year, is a substantial stumbling block and figuring into anti-legalization alliances.   read more

Fueled by Trump fascination, the Republican race in general has gotten more coverage. Fox no doubt believes that its audience, dominated by Republicans, is more interested in the GOP campaign. For example, Sean Hannity's show had no Democratic candidates or surrogates on during the month-long period. A 2012 Pew Research Center study found that 78% of Hannity's audience identified themselves as conservative, and 5% as liberal.   read more

Hogan’s ruling is notable because some lawmakers want to require government agencies to get a warrant before searching the raw repository of emails for an American’s name or email address. Bipartisan majorities in the House have twice passed such a proposal in the last two years. The ruling was also the first time that the intelligence court has reviewed the surveillance program with contributions from an outside “friend of the court,” rather than hearing arguments from the government alone.   read more

District security director Richard Payne said he decided to spend more than $12,000 on the Bushmaster brand rifles for the district's eight armed officers. Payne said he made the decision to buy assault rifles himself and the school board has not discussed it. The superintendent approved the purchase after lengthy discussion. The move raised new questions about how far school officials should go in arming employees.   read more

“The increase in death in this segment of the population was great enough to affect life expectancy at birth for the whole group,” said Elizabeth Arias, the statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics who analyzed the data, referring to whites from their mid-20s to their mid-50s. “That is very unusual." Arias said drug overdoses, liver disease and suicide were the main drivers of the trends among whites in recent years, a pattern also found by other researchers.   read more

Thousands of New Yorkers discovered they couldn’t vote in the primaries Tuesday. The reason: Under a New York law dating to the late 1800s, independent voters would have had to register last October in order to cast a vote in the primary. Some Bernie Sanders supporters suggested such rules were a way for party leaders to hamstring insurgents like the Vermont senator. But in fact the rules were originally intended as a strike against the manipulations of party bosses and political machines.   read more

The FBI's Amy Hess defended the agency's hiring of a third party to break into a gunman's iPhone, telling some skeptical lawmakers Tuesday that it needed to join with partners in the rarefied world of for-profit hackers as technology companies increasingly resist their demands for consumer information. There is a growing discomfort by some in Congress and in the tech industry with the use of “gray hat” hackers, who may push the boundaries of the law.   read more

The biggest European economies announced a plan to share information about owners of shell companies. But there is one major player that is coming up short, and that is the U.S., which in 2015 ranked third in a financial secrecy index. U.S. failure to respond to the worldwide clamor for financial accountability looks hypocritical from afar, considering the U.S.’s aggressive extraterritorial pursuit of foreign companies that breaks its laws and its demands that foreign banks provide information   read more

Nothing in the records supports the Pentagon's casting of top military brass as hard-nosed crime fighters who insisted on taking the cases to trial after civilian law enforcement said no. No evidence showed any case was prosecuted at a commander's insistence. "Someone at the Pentagon should be held accountable," said retired USAF prosecutor Col. Don Christensen. "...Every senator — especially those who repeated the claim or based their vote on the claim — should be outraged."   read more

With New York bracing for a primary Tuesday, both Democratic candidates came out in favor of Schumer's bill, though Bernie Sanders hit the issue harder and sooner than Hillary Clinton. While both backed the legislation, the Vermont senator went farther in calling for more sunlight to shine on the Saudi section of the 9/11 commission's report. "The families of those lost on that terrible day have the right to review any evidence that connects the hijackers to foreign supporters..." he said.   read more

This police tactic raises troubling questions about the fairness and effectiveness of how the NYPD uses undercover officers. They neither arrested nor pursued the dealers who sold the drugs to the addicts. Instead, they waited for the addict to return with the drugs before swooping in. Jurors have questioned why police and prosecutors so aggressively pursue troubled addicts. The tactic would seem at odds with public positions of some of the city’s top politicians and law enforcement figures.   read more

While use of the drug did not increase significantly among children, it did jump among adults. Relying on data from the national drug use survey, Colorado reported that nearly a third of Coloradans 18 to 25 in 2014 had used pot in the last 30 days, a rise of about 5 percent from the year before recreational pot was legalized. The survey showed a similar spike in adults over 26. Past 30-day marijuana use went from 7.6 percent in 2012 to 12.4 percent in 2014.   read more

Regulators have given five of the biggest U.S. banks failing grades for the strategies they would deploy if they tumbled into bankruptcy. The big banks have been working on their plans for four years. The regulators already put them on notice in mid-2014 that they had to correct serious deficiencies. But for now, the regulators' thumbs-down represents merely a ripple for the banking industry, which faces no government sanctions as a result.   read more

So many low-income people gained coverage that it halted the decades-long expansion of the gap between the haves and the have-nots in the American health insurance system. Hispanics accounted for nearly a third of the increase--the single largest share of any racial or ethnic group. Low-wage workers, who did not have enough clout in the labor market to demand insurance, saw sharp increases. Coverage rates jumped for cooks, dishwashers, waiters, hairdressers and cashiers.   read more

Lockheed has dragged out the F-35 program from eight or 10 years to. . . .forever. Nevertheless, it has full US backing to sell pre-production prototypes to US allies who can be pressured to buy. The US Partners who trusted the US should be especially upset considering they have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to F-35 development only to now see the best deals going to buyers who arrived 15 years after they thought they had an agreement.   read more