Dozens of men who underwent agonizing treatment in secret CIA prisons or at Guantanamo were left with psychological problems that persisted for years, despite U.S. lawyers’ assurances there would be no lasting harm. The shadow of interrogation and mutual suspicion tainted the mission of those treating prisoners. That limited their effectiveness for years to come. Meanwhile, Trump said he will bring back banned interrogation tactics and authorize others that are “much worse.”   read more

Trump's talk of a "law and order" approach to crime fighting and his praise for stop-and-frisk police tactics are out of step with a Justice Dept that has advocated community policing and decried strategies it considers unconstitutional or discriminatory. Trump said "we need more stop and frisk, that the Black Lives Matter movement has placed police officers at risk, in ways that are really concerning," said former Justice Dept civil rights official Jonathon Smith.   read more

Civility in politics has been declining for years. But Donald Trump's presidential run took name-calling and mockery — things that voters long said they detested in their candidates — and normalized them into a winning political strategy. Many question whether it is possible to reverse the campaign's damage to political discourse and its ripples out to the way Americans speak to and about each other. "What worries me the most is we're becoming almost numb," Mullen said.   read more

"This decision could leave Americans blind about his whereabouts and well-being in the event of a national crisis," said Jeff Mason, White House correspondent for Reuters and the group's president. "Not allowing a pool of journalists to travel with and cover the next president of the United States is unacceptable." Every president and president-elect in recent memory has traveled with a pool of journalists when leaving the White House grounds.   read more

Facebook has long denied that it's a media company, or that it acts remotely like one. Its cheery slogan — to make the world more "open and connected" — seemingly invites a broad range of viewpoints and the free flow of information, rather than censorship. But it could also make clamping down on fake news difficult. At a time when everyone seems entitled, not just to their own opinions, but to their own facts, one person's misleading headline might be another person's heartfelt truth.   read more

Prosecutors argued they had no obligation to inform those convicted of their possible innocence. It then took four years to even attempt to notify the thousands of defendants that their convictions might have been won unfairly. Formal notices lacked essential information and 6,000 of them were returned as undeliverable. One prosecutor suggested that many of the defendants might be too poor or caught up with mental illness and addiction to care about contesting convictions on their records.   read more

Advocates say the president-elect is "unpredictable," and they are unsure where he stands on marijuana issues, though Trump has said in the past that he supports state laws legalizing medical marijuana. Still, analysts and advocates alike say, the industry may be too big and valuable for a Trump administration to stop, especially after California voters legalized its recreational use. Seven states have now legalized pot, and a recent poll showed close to 60% of Americans support the idea.   read more

Correctly interpreted, less than 6 percent of Americans ages 1 to 70 are deficient and only 13 percent are in danger of not getting enough. That's concerning, "but these levels of deficiency do not constitute a pandemic," the authors write. Yet people may think there is one. Doctors say there's too much needless testing and too many people taking too many pills for a problem that few people truly have.   read more

Facebook users filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook, asserting that its ad-targeting technology violates the law. “There is no mechanism to prevent ad buyers from purchasing ads...and then excluding based on these illegal characteristics,” said the complaint. “[N]o user can tell whether they are subject to illegal discrimination, because the discrimination occurs with the ads they do not see. ...The problem will not be remedied unless Facebook is forced to take additional action.”   read more

“I have to go an extra hour earlier than anybody else, because it’s not random checking,” Syed said. An American and a Muslim, Syed wears a hijab, or head covering. More often than not, she said, she is pulled aside at security check-in for secondary screenings and pat-downs, the examiner feeling her head through the hijab. Syed and many of her American Muslim friends and Islamic-rights advocates are all too familiar with what many refer to as the stigma of traveling while Muslim.   read more

In campaigning to reduce the world’s carbon emissions, environmentalists have increasingly focused on the financiers behind the fossil fuel industry — highlighting their role in financing coal, oil and gas projects. The groups have blasted the Dakota Access pipeline as outdated infrastructure with no place in a world racing to stave off the worst effects of climate change. The pipeline is expected to carry half a million barrels of crude oil daily out of the Bakken fields of North Dakota.   read more

This technology raises issues of civil liberties, as digital information provided by social media is combined with criminal data by companies that sell it to law enforcement. The ACLU, citing reports that the Chicago Police used a computer analysis to create a “heat list” that unfairly associated innocent people with criminal behavior, has warned about the dangers of the police using big data. Even companies that make money doing this sort of work warn that it comes with civil rights risks.   read more

The U.S. Supreme Court on Saturday reinstated an Arizona law that makes it a felony to collect early ballots, stepping into a contentious political issue days before the presidential election and hurting Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts. The ruling called into question what happens to ballots that were legally collected from voters in the 20 hours that the law was blocked. The GOP chairman said the the ballots should be returned. Democrats say the law hurts minorities' ability to vote.   read more

There’s no way to quantify exactly how many times the field tests were wrong or how many innocent people pleaded guilty based on the inaccurate results, or to assess the damage to their lives. What is clear is that even as they continue to employ field tests to secure arrests and gain convictions, neither the Las Vegas Police nor the DA’s office has informed local judges of the long-standing knowledge of their unreliability. And neither has taken any additional steps to prevent mistakes.   read more

Anderson says a particularly toxic strain of pesticides known as neonicotinoids has killed hundreds of thousands of bees in recent years. He says the EPA has failed to regulate neonicotinoids, even though it is required by law to do so. Alsup suggested that the government could be withholding relevant documents, based on his prior experience as a Justice Dept attorney, when he routinely witnessed government lawyers try to exclude pertinent files from disclosure in lawsuits.   read more

The number is an extreme data point in an accumulating body of evidence that young adolescents are suffering from a range of health problems associated with the country’s rapidly changing culture. The pervasiveness of social networking means that entire schools can witness someone’s shame, instead of a gaggle of girls on a school bus. And with continual access to such networks, those pressures do not end when a child comes home in the afternoon.   read more