Insanity: Seventh-Grader Suspended Three Days for Gun Keychain the Size of a Quarter

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Photo Credit: YouTube screenshot

Photo Credit: YouTube screenshot

Yet another student has landed in trouble for having something that represents a gun, but isn’t actually anything like a real gun.

This time, the student is 12-year-old Joseph Lyssikatos, a student in advanced math who had perfect attendance last year. The seventh-grader made the mistake of bringing a ridiculously small, silver keychain shaped like a gun to Alan Shawn Feinstein Middle School in Coventry, R.I, reports local NBC affiliate WJAR.

The two-inch keychain fell out of Lyssikatos’s backpack while he was at school.

After another kid picked it up and displayed it to other students, a teacher intervened and impounded the keychain.

Apparently fearing that the roughly quarter-sized hunk of cheap metal was somehow a danger to life and limb, school officials sprang into action. They suspended Lyssikatos for three days. He has also been banned from an upcoming class field trip.

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House Votes to Fund Govt, Delay Obamacare for Year – Reid Defiant

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Photo Credit: AFP

Photo Credit: AFP

The House of Representatives approved a controversial Republican measure early Sunday that avoids a looming US government shutdown but delays President Barack Obama’s health care law for one year.

The bill assures a stalemate with the Senate, whose Majority Leader Harry Reid said he would not pass legislation that defunded or delayed so-called “Obamacare,” and brings the federal government dramatically closer to its first shutdown in 17 years.

The White House also insisted the president would veto the bill if it reaches his desk.

A divided House held hours of raucous debate during a rare Saturday session, when lawmakers often pointed blame at one another for a likely shutdown.

The measure, which now heads back to the Senate, is comprised of two amendments: a one-year delay of Obamacare’s implementation, notably the “individual mandate” requiring US residents to have health insurance by January 1 or pay a fine; and repeal of a medical device tax.

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The NSA Has Been Creating Maps of American Citizens’ Social Networks Similar to How the FBI Links Organized Crime Families Together

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Photo Credit: Daily Mail

Photo Credit: Daily Mail

The NSA has been graphing American’s social networks and plotting them as they do organized crime since at least 2010, according to the latest published Edward Snowden leak.

The highly secretive intelligence agency has been mapping out American citizens’ social connections – identifying associates, determining locations, and logging who they talk to – by taking advantage of loosened rules previously meant to restrict surveillance actions.

As far back as November, 2010, the agency authorized spies to conduct ‘large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness,’ the New York Times revealed Saturday.

The agency augmented that information with bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls, property records and tax data, the Times further divulged.

There does not appear to be any restriction on the types of data culled, or who it is gather on, the Times noted.

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Nancy Pelosi Absent for CR Vote

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Days ahead of a government shutdown, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary outside Washington, D.C.

“Speaker Boehner has told me he has the votes for his proposals on his side of the aisle and that he will not need our help,” Pelosi (D-Calif.) wrote in a letter to colleagues. “I have been in contact with our leadership team and Members, and we appreciate the united front from Members as we proceed.”

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Bill Maher: Ted Cruz Reminds Me of Miley Cyrus

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Sen. Ted Cruz’s 21-hour Senate floor speech reminded liberal comic Bill Maher of someone else: Miley Cyrus.

“I was thinking the other night, he reminds me of Miley Cyrus, Ted Cruz. Because he is not afraid to incur the wrath of even some of his fans for the greater good of drawing attention to himself,” Maher said Friday on his HBO program “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

In addition to drawing comparisons between controversial performances, Maher said that the filibuster is “the political version of twerking,” but like Cyrus, the Texas Republican will bounce back.

“I really think that a filibuster is the political version of twerking. And for those people who say, ‘Ted Cruz, he hung himself.’ No. Just like Miley Cyrus, she came out the winner in that. Everybody said, ‘oh, she’s ruined her career.’ She’s on the cover of Rolling Stone, her records are outselling anybody else’s. I think Ted Cruz is going to be the winner too,” Maher said.

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Lawsuit Targets Atheist’s Influence with Pentagon

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

An anti-Christian activist who has such a close relationship with the Pentagon he had a piece of artwork removed from an Air Force base within 56 minutes of calling is now under scrutiny by a team of legal experts.

The non-profit government-accountability group Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act suit in federal court in Washington seeking all records in the Department of Defense regarding conversations with Military Religious Freedom Foundation founder Mikey Weinstein.

Weinstein is well known for comparing evangelical Christians to al-Qaida and demanding the courts martial of Christian chaplains.

Further, he recently convinced the Air Force to remove a copy of a famous essay from a chaplain’s section of the website for Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. It was a copy of the famed World War II essay “No atheists in foxholes: Chaplains gave all in World War II.”

He did, however, taste defeat shortly later when the military re-posted the essay, determining it was within a chaplain’s rights to express his faith.

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NSA Employee Spied on Nine Women Without Detection, Internal File Shows

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Photo Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Photo Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images

A National Security Agency employee was able to secretly intercept the phone calls of nine foreign women for six years without ever being detected by his managers, the agency’s internal watchdog has revealed.

The unauthorised abuse of the NSA’s surveillance tools only came to light after one of the women, who happened to be a US government employee, told a colleague that she suspected the man – with whom she was having a sexual relationship – was listening to her calls.

The case is among 12 documented in a letter from the NSA’s inspector general to a leading member of Congress, who asked for a breakdown of cases in which the agency’s powerful surveillance apparatus was deliberately abused by staff. One relates to a member of the US military who, on the first day he gained access to the surveillance system, used it to spy on six email addresses belonging to former girlfriends.

The letter, from Dr George Ellard, only lists cases that were investigated and later “substantiated” by his office. But it raises the possibility that there are many more cases that go undetected. In a quarter of the cases, the NSA only found out about the misconduct after the employee confessed.

It also reveals limited disciplinary action taken against NSA staff found to have abused the system. In seven cases, individuals guilty of abusing their powers resigned or retired before disciplinary action could be taken. Two civilian employees kept their jobs – and, it appears, their security clearance – and escaped with only a written warning after they were found to have conducted unauthorised interceptions.

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US Nuclear Commander Suspended Over Gambling, Officials Say

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The No 2 officer at the military command in charge of all US nuclear war-fighting forces has been suspended and is under investigation by the naval criminal investigation command for issues related to gambling, officials said on Saturday.

The highly unusual action against a high-ranking officer at US strategic command was made more than three weeks ago but not publicly announced.

Air force general Robert Kehler, who heads Strategic Command, suspended the deputy commander, navy vice admiral Tim Giardina, from his duties on September 3, according to the command’s top spokeswoman, navy captain Pamela Kunze. Giardina is still assigned to the command but is prohibited from performing duties related to nuclear weapons and other issues requiring a security clearance, she said.

Kehler has recommended to defense secretary Chuck Hagel that Giardina be reassigned, Kunze said. Giardina has been the deputy commander of strategic command since December 2011. He is a career submarine officer and prior to starting his assignment there was the deputy commander and chief of staff at US pacific fleet.

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Exxon to Offer Benefits to Married Same-Sex Couples

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Photo Credit: David Duprey/AP

Photo Credit: David Duprey/AP

Exxon Mobil Corp. said on Friday that it will begin offering benefits to legally married same-sex couples in the United States starting next week.

The company says it will recognise “all legal marriages” when it determines eligibility for health care plans for the company’s 77,000 employees and retirees in America.

That means if a gay employee has been married in a state or country where gay marriage is legal, his or her spouse will be eligible for benefits with Exxon in the United States as of 1 October.

Exxon, which is facing a same-sex discrimination complaint in Illinois, said it was following the lead of the US government. In June, the US supreme court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, which had allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages granted in other states. In recent months, federal agencies have begun to offer benefits to legally married same-sex couples.

“We haven’t changed our eligibility criteria. It has always been to follow the federal definition and it will continue to follow the federal definition,” said an Exxon spokesman, Alan Jeffers, in an interview.

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A Small President on the World Stage

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Photo Credit: Chad Crowe

Photo Credit: Chad Crowe

The world misses the old America, the one before the crash—the crashes—of the past dozen years.

That is the takeaway from conversations the past week in New York, where world leaders gathered for the annual U.N. General Assembly session. Our friends, and we have many, speak almost poignantly of the dynamism, excellence, exuberance and leadership of the nation they had, for so many years, judged themselves against, been inspired by, attempted to emulate, resented.

As for those who are not America’s friends, some seem still confused, even concussed, by the new power shift. What is their exact place in it? Will it last? Will America come roaring back? Can she? Does she have the political will, the human capital, the old capability?

It is a world in a new kind of flux, one that doesn’t know what to make of America anymore. In part because of our president.

“We want American leadership,” said a member of a diplomatic delegation of a major U.S. ally. He said it softly, as if confiding he missed an old friend.

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