Bystanders Who Record Police Brutality Must Be Protected and Valued

Eric Garner’s recent death at the hands of cops would not have come to our attention had it not been for a camera phone recording; Satanists are “trolling” Hobby Lobby to test the boundaries of the Supreme Court ruling; meanwhile, some commentators are saying that the “IDF either targets civilians or has terrible aim.” These discoveries and more below.

Protect Bystanders Who Record Police Let no one forget: If not for the fact that a bystander with a camera phone captured Eric Garner’s confrontation with cops — and that the video then found its way to the Daily News — Garner’s death might have ended up like most all of the other approximately 1,000 complaints of chokeholds filed at the Civilian Complaint Review Board over the last five years: unsubstantiated allegations of police abuse.

Who Wins in the Name Game? From dating to job prospects, a name has remarkable power over the path of its owner’s life.

Satanists Troll Hobby Lobby How far do religious-liberty claims actually extend following the Supreme Court’s ruling?

Yes, It Could Happen Again Instability in Ukraine, chaos in Syria, conflict in the East China Sea—the trigger points for World War III are in place.

Chomsky: How America’s Great University System Is Being Destroyed The following is an edited transcript of remarks given by Noam Chomsky via Skype on 4 February 2014 to a gathering of members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, PA.

OkCupid Reveals It’s Been Lying to Some of Its Users. Just to See What’ll Happen It turns out that OkCupid has been performing some of the same psychological experiments on its users that landed Facebook in hot water recently.

Why One New Jersey School District Killed Its Student Laptop Program “There is no more determined hacker…than a 12-year-old who has a computer.”

The Worrying Vacuity Of Hillary Clinton I’ve tried to avoid the Clinton book tour bullshit this past month or so. Not good for my blood pressure.

Glenn Greenwald: Terrorism in the Israeli Attack on Gaza As I’ve written many times before, “terrorism” is, and from the start was designed to be, almost entirely devoid of discernible meaning.

Behind the News from Gaza When the issues become too sharp and the contradictions too blatant, the news media are severely challenged to contain them within normal bounds.

Israel Is finding It Harder to Deny Targeting Gaza Infrastructure With blackouts, food shortages and sewage in the streets, observers say the IDF either targets civilians or has terrible aim.

Collective Punishment in Gaza Three days after the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the current war in Gaza, he held a press conference in Tel Aviv during which he said, in Hebrew, according to the Times of Israel, “I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”

Israel Takes Away 44% of Gaza Land … Herds Gazans Into Remaining Area This narrow strip of land that used to be called “the Gaza Strip,” already one of the more densely populated places on earth, is growing dramatically smaller.