Although presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton wants the current controversies surrounding her emails, her charity's suspicious donors, the Benghazi consulate slaughter and other questionable activities to be in the rearview mirror of her race for the White House, a Florida judge on Friday set a trial date for a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Criminal Organization) lawsuit brought against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by a Washington, D.C., watchdog group that specializes in government corruption and criminal enterprise cases.

The US Department of Defense has spent $176.8 billion over the past eight years buying foreign imports through more than 307,000 waivers to the Buy American Act, US Senator Chris Murphy aid in a press release published on Thursday.

It might be a little unfair to criticize Tomorrowland for sticking to themes that, admittedly, are fine and comforting presences in a childrens’ movie. However, Bird’s commitment to abstract banalities and spineless pep talks accomplish neither. Kids should be encouraged to hope and dream and invent fun things. Hell, everybody should. That’s still no excuse for a mess of a story that contradicts itself tonally, politically, and philosophically. Tomorrowland isn’t going to inspire the world’s next generation of scientists. It takes a lot more than a movie to do that.

A senior Iranian nuclear negotiator has reaffirmed that inspections of Iran’s military sites and interviews with Iranian nuclear scientists will not be on the agenda of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear talks with the P5+1 states.

Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert was paying hush money to protect his reputation. The question, however, is what reputation?

Not-so-frequently Asked Questions About the Hastert Indictment

It’s clear that the indictment of Dennis Hastert has raised more questions than it’s provided answers. But I suspect a lot of people are asking the wrong ones. Hastert’s “misconduct” may turn out to be of sexually predatory nature, in which case talk of how much his reputation is worth is picayune compared the nature of crime. But there are questions about what he did that are applicable to the entire industry he represents.

Following a Memorial Day Weekend during which 12 people shot and killed and 43 more were wounded, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said a large part of the solution to the problem is more gun control.

That’s right — gun control is failing miserably and the solution is more gun control.

A Youtube user going by the name F.T.G. released a video yesterday showing Jacksonville police refusing to issue citations to unmarked patrol cars parked in violation of city parking signs. The description of the video reads, “I conducted an audit at the Jacksonville Florida Jail where cops are constantly parking in violation of there[sic] own signage. Not one cop was willing to enforce their own restrictions simply because it is a fellow cop.”

A Hawaii man was killed Friday after he was apparently impaled by the bill of a fish, officials said.

Witnesses at Honokohau Harbor in Kailua-Kona reported that a man in his 40s jumped from the pier in an apparent attempt to catch a billfish, said West Hawaii Acting Battalion Chief John Whitman of Hawaii County’s fire department.

The Irish American former governor and mayor will start out as a long shot but it is a place he has come from before.

When initially running for City Council, mayor and governor, O’Malley was an outsider who confounded the odds.

Were he to do the same against Hillary Clinton it would be the biggest upset since --- well, since a relatively unknown senator Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton.

Hezbollah is ready to liberate the outskirts of the Lebanese border town of Arsal, the deputy head of the party's executive council said Saturday, accusing the March 14 coalition of supporting terrorism and inciting sectarian strife.

“The positions of the March 14 [coalition], which serve as a source of hope for takfiri gangs don’t concern us, neither does sectarian incitement which is worse than the terrorist occupation of the outskirts of Arsal,” Sheikh Nabil Qaouk said during a Hezbollah ceremony in south Lebanon.

Nobody has come out of the FIFA bribery scandal looking good, but one group that has been overlooked could soon find itself in the spotlight: banks.

The US Department of Justice's 164-page indictment names a string of the world's biggest lenders that reportedly held accounts that were used to pay and transfer bribes around the world.

Possible US presidential candidate Scott Walker has accused the administration of President Barack Obama of not supporting Israel enough and making “bad deals” with Iran.

Another day, another round of embarrassing authoritarian nonsense from would-be Republican presidential candidates. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the honey-throated apocalyptic who Ed Krayewski writes about below, made the following “joke” on Saturday:

If I’m president of the United States and you’re thinking about joining al-Qaeda or ISIL — anybody thinking about that? — I’m not going to call a judge, I’m going to call a drone and we will kill you.

The United States tried but failed to sabotage North Korea's nuclear weapons program with a computer virus in 2010, Reuters reported Friday.

The cyber attack came at the same time the Stuxnet virus was disrupting Iran's uranium-enrichment efforts, according to sources familiar with the stealth effort. Stuxnet was reportedly created by the United States and Israel.

The North Korea attack involved a Stuxnet variant that was designed to activate "when it encountered Korean-language settings on an infected machine," Reuters writes. But U.S. agents were never able to install the malware on the computers controlling Pyongyang's nuclear program.

Last night, the student senate of the University of California at Davis passed a resolution to divest from companies which profit from Israel’s occupation and abuses of Palestinian rights. Ten senators voted yes, none voted against and two abstained.

Palestinians are expressing disappointment at the abandonment and sabotage of efforts to have Israel suspended from world football’s governing body over its systematic abuses of Palestinian players.

But campaigners are vowing to continue to work to isolate Israel.

Washington: Bank of America has been fined $30 million by US regulators, who accused the bank of violating consumer protections for members of the military in collecting debts.

It's your money, in your account, but that doesn't mean you can take it out any way you please.

Failure to report large cash transactions can often trigger federal investigations, leading to fines or even lengthy prison sentences.

It all stems from U.S. law that requires forms to be submitted—both by financial institutions, as well as bank customers—each time a cash transaction in excess of $10,000 occurs. Customers hoping to avoid having to disclose such transactions often seek ways around around the law in a process known as "structuring," which can lead to serious money laundering charges.

Former top NSA officials have repeatedly said that the NSA is collecting TOO MUCH information on Americans to be able to stop terror attacks.

The Intercept reports that current mid-level NSA officials confirm that the NSA is gathering TOO MUCH information… and it’s making it impossible to focus:

It's scheduled to start at 6:15 p.m., about the time evening prayers are taking place inside the center. The rally also features its own cartoon contest, similar to the one targeted in Texas.

"I think the whole thing, the cartoon contest especially, I think it's stupid and ridiculous," Ritzheimer said, "but it's what needs to take place in order to expose the true colors of Islam."

When 14-year-old Christopher Duran left his Bronx home on Friday to go to school, he didn't know that a red-bandana-wearing gunman was waiting to pump him full of lead.

In a brutal ambush caught on surveillance video, Duran was shot four times and died while screaming for his mother. Though Duran already had five previous arrests on his record, no one could possibly blame such a young victim for his own tragic murder.

No one, except for three former New York Police Department officers who took to Facebook to call the 14-year-old a "piece of shit thug," a "piece of trash" and a "menace to the neighborhood."

A Syrian Christian fighter has beheaded an Islamic State group (IS) militant to avenge people "executed" by the jihadists in northeastern Syria, a monitor said on Friday.

The Defense Security Cooperation Agency delivered the required certification notifying Congress of the possible sale of arms to Israel on May 18, 2015.

The details were sent for congressional review on Tuesday.

A statement from the Defense Security Cooperation Agency said, “The United States is committed to the security of Israel, and it is vital to U.S. national interests to assist Israel to develop and maintain a strong and ready self-defense capability. This proposed sale is consistent with those objectives and will not change the power balance in the region.”

It notes that Israel “already has these munitions in its inventory” and “will have no difficulty absorbing the additional munitions into its armed forces.” The proposed sale of these munitions will not alter the basic military balance in the region,” it says.

The full list of weapon includes 750 bunker buster bombs and 3,000 Hellfire missiles

everal of the most extremist provisions of the 2001 Patriot Act are going to expire on June 1 unless Congress reauthorizes them in some form. Obama officials such as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and new Attorney General Loretta Lynch have been engaged in rank fear-mongering to coerce renewal, warning that we’ll all be “less safe” if these provisions are allowed to “sunset” as originally intended, while invoking classic Cheneyite rhetoric by saying Patriot Act opponents will bear the blame for the next attack. In an interview yesterday with the Intercept, ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer explained why those scare tactics are outright frivolous.

There have been several attempts to discredit the Nobel Peace Prize since its establishment. Founder of Italian fascism, bloody dictator Benito Mussolini was nominated for the Prize in 1935. In

1939 member of the Swedish Parliament E.G.C. Brandt nominated Adolf Hitler, who unleashed the Second World War. Tens of millions of people died at the hands of his soldiers. American President Barak Obama received the Prize in 2009, though he did not stop the war in Afghanistan, failed to close the torture prison in Guantanamo. While American drones constantly kill civilians in the Middle East at his order. The Prize pushed Obama to even bloodier airstrikes in Libya and Syria. This year US Ambassador to Norway Julie Furuta-Toy is at great pains to get Ukrainian President Poroshenko nominated for the Prize. As you can see from the letter of the Chairman of Ukrainian Parliament Volodymyr Groysman, US Ambassador managed to get the support of two Nobel committee members.

Libya is on the verge of economic collapse as rival factions haggle over a political settlement, the United Nations special envoy said on Thursday.

Bernardino Leon, who has been trying for months to broker an agreement on a national unity government for Libya, said the United Nations was preparing a new draft of a possible political agreement which it hoped to give to the feuding parties in the first week of June.

Two governments, one in the east, the other in Tripoli, are fighting for control of the North African state four years after leader Muammar Gaddafi was ousted.

Leon said that in the last round of talks in Morocco, the rival groups had agreed on 80 percent of an accord and negotiators were working on the remaining 20 percent, which was the most difficult part.

It’s been just more than two months since a Saudi Arabia-led coalition began its airstrike campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen, and the country has since become a “humanitarian catastrophe,” experts said Thursday.

“I am shocked about what I have seen,” said Medecins Sans Frontieres’ Middle East Operations Manager Pablo Marco, who spent 50 days inside the country recently. “The biggest problem is the fact both parties in the conflict are not respecting the civilians and, specifically, they are not respecting medical facilities and medical staff.”

Marco was one in a panel of three experts in Washington who took a hard line against attacks by the Houthis as well as the 10-country coalition engaged in a bombing campaign against them for the past 10 weeks. The U.S. provides intelligence and material support to that Arab-led coalition.

In an effort that simultaneously seeks to eschew responsibility for the situation on the ground and to define certain limits on the scope of the US war, the White House today declared itself to be unwilling to be “responsible” for the security situation in Iraq.

Though press secretary Josh Earnest emphasized the growing problem of foreign fighters flowing into Iraq, he insisted the war itself, at least on the ground, was up to the Iraqi government to fight and win.

This comes irrespective of Pentagon efforts to dictate exactly where and when Iraqi forces launch offensives, and to try to push them into cooperative relationships with pro-US tribal factions.

The Spanish government approved an accord Friday permanently granting the U.S. military a presence at a southwestern base as a center for a rapid reaction force to deal with crises in Africa and elsewhere.

The deal approved by Spain's Cabinet allows for the U.S. to station up to 3,000 troops at the Moron air base, up from a current 850. The number of aircraft deployed can be increased from 14 to 40.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is to visit Madrid on Sunday and Monday to sign the agreement. Kerry will meet with King Felipe, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia Margallo during his stay.

Under a 1988 bilateral agreement, accords permitting U.S. presence at the base have been renewed annually. The new agreement needs to be approved by Spain's Parliament.

Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria said the rapid reaction force was aimed at contributing to stability in Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

The United States is preparing for a possible war against China and Russia aimed at preventing the collapse of the Western banking system, an American political commentator and activist says.

Michael Billington, Asia editor for the Executive Intelligence Review and author of Reflections of an American Political Prisoner: the Repression and Promise of the LaRouche Movement, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Thursday.

“The point that has to be made is that the Chinese, like the Russians, are very, very clear that the United States and their NATO allies are in a war mobilization, preparing for war on Russia, preparing for war on China,” Billington stated.

“There’s a general recognition growing that the driving force for this war is the utter collapse of the entire Western banking system,” he added.

So the fast track plan to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership has run into a new wrinkle after an amendment passed in the Senate debate: slavery. Yes, really, slavery: the Senate voted for an amendment that would make it more difficult for countries that engage in slavery to be in the TPP, and the Obama administration objected. This is bizarre stuff, folks, but welcome to the world of international trade deals. From Ryan Grim's article the day Fast Track was passed, about the amendment in question:

That measure would bar governments considered to be complicit in human trafficking from receiving the economic benefits of a fast-tracked trade deal. Menendez, the author of the provision, has described it as a human rights protection that will prevent U.S. workers from competing with modern-day slave labor.

Ordering limits attached to 2015 American Silver Eagle bullion coins end on Monday, June 1, the United States Mint announced in a memo sent to its network of bullion distributors called “Authorized Purchasers.”

Just hours after being force to admit that they were hacked (by Russians apparently) [8], an inspector general's report shows that The IRS [9]has rather remarkably continued to pay refunds on hundreds of thousands of fraudulent tax returns in recent years, and sent dozens of checks to the same addresses, including in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. While some progress has been made, $2.3 billion of real US taxpayer's money was wrongfully refunded to fake US taxpayers... but with this new cyber-attack, we suspect that number will soar.

Parents of children as young as nine have reacted angrily after schools in an east London borough asked pupils to complete surveys designed to provide clues to possible radicalisation. Waltham Forest council has been piloting the scheme in five primary schools with large Muslim intakes. The questionnaire, circulated among year 6 pupils, asks how much they trust the police and people from another race or religion.

They are also asked whether they agree that it is acceptable to marry someone from outside their race or religion and whether women are just as good as men at work. Another question asks if the pupils believe their religion is the only correct one. About 22% of the population in Waltham Forest, one of the most deprived local authorities in England, are Muslim.

Russia is ready to consider the creation of a currency union with other members of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Thursday.

Now, Russia is taking de-dollarization a step further by suggesting that a BRICS alternative to SWIFT may be in the cards.

This comes as Russia (which, incidentally, is the second heaviest SWIFT user) is set to convene a BRICS summit in Ulfa on July 8-9 where the $100 billion BRICS bank will officially be launched along with a $100 billion currency reserve

"In this [EEU] format it would be possible to consider the possibility and conditions of eventually creating a monetary union,” Medvedev said.

The prime minister is currently in Kazakhstan for a session of the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council.

That common arc is more of an indictment of U.S. political culture than Hastert himself, but he’s certainly been happily and hungrily feeding at the trough. A political system that essentially ensures that every powerful political official becomes extremely rich is one that is inherently corrupt – as we’ve been taught for decades about those Bad Other Countries – and that is the most interesting and most important part of this story.

But Hastert was not indicted for any of that. Nor was he indicted for the alleged, unspecified “past misconduct” against an unnamed person to whom he agreed to pay $3.5 million to keep concealed.

Instead, Hastert was indicted for two alleged felonies: 1) withdrawing cash from his bank accounts in amounts and patterns designed to hide the payments; and 2) lying to the FBI about the purpose of those withdraws once they detected them and then inquired with him. That’s it. For those venial acts, he faces five years in a federal prison on each count.

Today, I am releasing a report submitted by Jeff Barber and his wife, from El Paso, Texas. The Barbers decided to investigate 47 a mile stretch of “open border” between Mexico and the United States. Barber obviously examined the claims that I made, via a Judicial Watch report, which stated that ISIS had a base camp only 8 miles from El Paso.

Things were going fairly well for the first three weeks of May. There were a few cold evenings, but in general we were on the right track for the spring growth of leaves and blossoms.

Then came May 20. In the early morning hours the temperatures dropped far below freezing, as low as 22 degrees in some places. By the end of the day extensive injury to plants was obvious throughout the Grand Traverse region.

The snow was dumped there throughout the city's snowiest winter on record.

The trash-filled pile is three stories high and includes bikes, traffic cones and even half a $5 bill, all encrusted in solid ice, according to the Associated Press.

I had looked into the weather conditions on the mountain about a week before the trip and was floored by what I saw: the National Weather Service had issued a blizzard warning for the area. Six inches of snow and gusts of wind up to 80 miles per hour were expected. Yes, in Hawaii.

A federal judge on Thursday rejected a short-term stay of a decision that blocked the District from enforcing a key provision of its restrictive concealed-carry laws — prompting the city to move to issue carry permits to the gun owners who had sued after being denied permits.

However, U.S. District Judge Frederick J. Scullin Jr. left open the possibility the District could obtain a stay pending appeal of his previous ruling, which called the city’s requirement that gun owners demonstrate a “good reason” to obtain a permit unconstitutional. He set a hearing on the matter for July 7.

In the meantime, the ruling means the Metropolitan Police Department may end up issuing concealed-carry permits to applicants who previously were denied because they could not demonstrate they faced a specific threat of injury or harm.

Gun owners will have to carry liability insurance if a bill introduced Friday by New York House Democrat Rep. Carolyn Maloney successfully makes its way through Congress.

Rep. Maloney’s The Firearm Risk Protection Act would subject gun owners to a $10,000 fine if they ignored a mandate for liability insurance before obtaining a weapon, The Hill reported Friday.