A farmer in Washington state has cooked up a cannabis concoction for his pigs. Part flavor experiment, part green recycling, these "pot"-bellied pigs are being sold at market.
Charles Thomas O'Reilly supported capital punishment when he oversaw his first Texas execution. And he still supported it after his 100th.
In six years as warden of the Huntsville Unit, the prison that houses Texas' death chamber, O'Reilly supervised about 140 executions — more than any other warden in state history.
Now retired, he reflected on his career this week as the nation's busiest death penalty state as the state executed its 500th inmate since resuming capital punishment in 1982.
The 62-year-old said he has no regrets about a process he considered to be a relatively unemotional and small part of his job.
By Aug. 1, same-sex marriage will be legal in California, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Washington — all states where it was not legal one year earlier.
There are about 59 million people living in these seven states, which means that the availability of same-sex marriage in the United States as a percentage of population will have more than doubled within the year. As of early last year, same-sex marriage was legal only in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont and the District of Columbia, which have 35 million people among them.
- Federal judge unimpressed with government's reasoning on no-fly list. The Department of Homeland Security and FBI have a secret list of more than 20,000 people who are too dangerous to allow to board a commercial plane or ship but not so dangerous they need to be arrested. It amounts, the ACLU has argued in a lawsuit representing 13 Americans, including four veterans, to a kind of detention. The civil rights group states:
We're asking the court to finally put a check on the government's use of a blacklist that denies Americans the ability to fly without giving them the explanation or fair hearing that the Constitution requires. It's a question of basic fairness," said ACLU Staff Attorney Nusrat Choudhury, one of the ACLU attorneys who will argue the case Friday in Portland [Oregon]. "It does not make our country safer to ban people from flying without giving them an after-the-fact redress process that allows them to correct the errors that led to their mistaken inclusion on the list."
The National Institutes of Health [Wednesday] announced that 310 captive chimpanzees will be retired from medical research. Genetic and behavioral studies may continue in sanctuary settings, but no longer will those chimpanzees be forced to undergo procedures that would be unconscionable if performed in humans.
Up to 50 chimpanzees will be kept in reserve for possible use in future medical experiments, a likelihood that disturbs animal welfare advocates. That decision will, however, be revisited every five years. It’s possible that government-supported medical experiments on chimpanzees will come to an end altogether.
On today's
Kagro in the Morning show, heading into a week-plus break, Greg Dworkin and Armando help round up our discussion of the NSA/Snowden story, the IRS story, the SCOTUS decisions, the Texas filibuster fight, and the revival of CNN's much-maligned Crossfire, and more. The other big topic of today's show: the apparent evolution of Edward Snowden's views on national security leaking. And did Glenn Greenwald undergo an evolution of his own on his views on executive reaction to the Supreme Court's apparent insistence on reigning in of claimes of interent national security powers?