Emergency state 'not hard to justify' says Snyder when faced with recent damning report claiming Detroit close to collapse

The governor of Michigan declared the city of Detroit to be in a state of "financial emergency" Friday and said he would appoint an independent overseer in an attempt to save it from financial ruin.

A state report last week concluded the city was close to financial collapse and experts fear it could become the biggest municipal bankruptcy in US history.

"I believe it's appropriate to declare the city of Detroit in financial emergency based on the review team report," governor Rick Snyder said during a town hall meeting at Detroit's Wayne State University. "It's not hard to justify that conclusion."

Under Michigan law, an outside manager could eventually lead the financially troubled city into bankruptcy, a proceeding that would make Detroit the most populous American city ever to do so. The emergency manager, once named, would have about 18 months to turn the city around before facing re-appointment.

A Connecticut lawmaker apologized on Thursday for telling a 17-year-old girl that he had "a snake sitting under my desk" during her testimony at a committee hearing.

"I want to personally apologize to the young lady for the comments that I made," State Rep. Ernest Hewett (D) told The New London Day newspaper after he was stripped of his position as deputy speaker over the remark. Hewett will lose $6,446 in extra pay as a result of losing his position, lowering his salary to that of other state representatives, $28,000.

The unnamed teenager testified on Feb. 20 about the Connecticut Science Center, saying her internship there had helped her overcome her fear of snakes. "I am usually a very shy person, and now I am more outgoing," she told the committee. "I was able to teach those children about certain things like snakes that we have and the turtles that we have," she said. "I want to do something toward that, working with children when I get older."

At a Senate hearing on gun violence Wednesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was humiliated by a police chief who abruptly interrupted his talking points to insist that he's "wrong" on how enhanced background checks for gun buyers would work.

Echoing the National Rifle Association, Graham argued before the Senate Judiciary Committee that enhanced background checks are not needed because the laws currently on the books are not enforced well enough.

"When almost 80,000 people fail a background check and 44 people are prosecuted, what kind of deterrent is that?" he asked. "I mean, the law obviously is not seeing that as important, if it's such an important issue, why aren't we prosecuting people who fail a background check?"

If you can get past how horrifying it is, the looming "sequestration cuts" crisis is fascinating. It's like watching a bunch of gambling addicts play craps by throwing dice into a four-dimensional wormhole. There are so many variables that neither side can possibly know the true outcome of a failure to make a deal - which means the only certainty is that what we're watching is irresponsibility on an epic scale, wherein both of our major political parties seem to prefer government by random outcome over one managed by sensible compromise.

Obviously, most of the problem was originally driven by the intractability of a Republican Party energized politically by its Tea Party base, which preferred the nuclear option of a default or a government shutdown to increased debt and/or new taxes. These fine folks taped sticks of dynamite to their chests and threatened to blow the government, its credit rating and our entire budget mechanism to the moon if we didn't make massive spending cuts - a wild ploy that may not have made a ton of patriotic sense given the catastrophic possibilities of, say, a default, but certainly helped the party solidify its relationship with its base.

Watching the original Republican debt-ceiling warriors furiously shake their fists over this business reminded me of that great line by Claude Rains in Casablanca, when his Captain Renault character tells Humphrey Bogart why he had to be so rough in tossing Rick's nightclub in search of the missing letters of transit. "I told my men to be especially destructive," Rains said. "You know how that impresses Germans."

The 25-year-old Army Private, this generation's Daniel Ellsberg, pleads guilty today to some charges and explains his actions

In December, 2011, I wrote an Op-Ed in the Guardian arguing that if Bradley Manning did what he is accused of doing, then he is a consummate hero, and deserves a medal and our collective gratitude, not decades in prison. At his court-martial proceeding this afternoon in Fort Meade, Manning, as the Guardian's Ed Pilkington reports, pleaded guilty to having been the source of the most significant leaks to WikiLeaks. He also pleaded not guilty to 12 of the 22 counts, including the most serious - the capital offense of "aiding and abetting the enemy", which could send him to prison for life - on the ground that nothing he did was intended to nor did it result in harm to US national security. The US government will now almost certainly proceed with its attempt to prosecute him on those remaining counts.

Manning's heroism has long been established in my view, for the reasons I set forth in that Op-Ed. But this was bolstered today as he spoke for an hour in court about what he did and why, reading from a prepared 35-page statement. Wired's Spencer Ackerman was there and reported:

"Wearing his Army dress uniform, a composed, intense and articulate Pfc. Bradley Manning took 'full responsibility' Thursday for providing the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks with a trove of classified and sensitive military, diplomatic and intelligence cables, videos and documents. . . .

"Manning's motivations in leaking, he said, was to 'spark a domestic debate of the role of the military and foreign policy in general', he said, and 'cause society to reevaluate the need and even desire to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore their effect on people who live in that environment every day.'

"Manning explain[ed] his actions that drove him to disclose what he said he 'believed, and still believe . . . are some of the most significant documents of our time' . . . .

"He came to view much of what the Army told him - and the public - to be false, such as the suggestion the military had destroyed a graphic video of an aerial assault in Iraq that killed civilians, or that WikiLeaks was a nefarious entity. . . .

"Manning said he often found himself frustrated by attempts to get his chain of command to investigate apparent abuses detailed in the documents Manning accessed. . . ."

The myth of altruism and generosity surrounding Mother Teresa is dispelled in a paper by Serge Larivée and Genevieve Chenard of University of Montreal's Department of Psychoeducation and Carole Sénéchal of the University of Ottawa's Faculty of Education.

The paper will be published in the March issue of the journal Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses and is an analysis of the published writings about Mother Teresa. Like the journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, who is amply quoted in their analysis, the researchers conclude that her hallowed image - which does not stand up to analysis of the facts - was constructed, and that her beatification was orchestrated by an effective media relations campaign.

"While looking for documentation on the phenomenon of altruism for a seminar on ethics, one of us stumbled upon the life and work of one of Catholic Church's most celebrated woman and now part of our collective imagination - Mother Teresa - whose real name was Agnes Gonxha," says Professor Larivée, who led the research. "The description was so ecstatic that it piqued our curiosity and pushed us to research further."

As a result, the three researchers collected 502 documents on the life and work of Mother Teresa. After eliminating 195 duplicates, they consulted 287 documents to conduct their analysis, representing 96% of the literature on the founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity (OMC). Facts debunk the myth of Mother Teresa

In their article, Serge Larivée and his colleagues also cite a number of problems not take into account by the Vatican in Mother Teresa's beatification process, such as "her rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce."

Multiple public information requests for the results of an extensive inquiry into the treatment of soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have been denied according to NBC News, but the Army says the results will be made public sooner or later.

The probe centers on Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Washington, where some soldiers claim their PTSD diagnoses have been wrongly changed to save the government money. The review was launched after an Army psychiatrist at Madigan gave a lecture citing a memo that claims veterans suffering from PTSD could get up to $1.5 million in health benefits over their lifetimes.

"The U.S. Army private accused of providing secret documents to the WikiLeaks website pleaded guilty on Thursday to misusing classified material he felt "should become public," but denied the top charge of aiding the enemy."*

Bradley Manning is facing prosecution for giving military information to Wikileaks. He's plead guilty to some charges. He maintains that he did release the information and that he did it because he wanted to help the country. What will happen with the other treasonous charges against him that could net a life sentence? Cenk Uygur breaks it down.

Did you pay sales tax on the last item you bought on the Internet? Unless it was from Amazon, you probably did not. You may soon though if a gaggle of U.S. lawmakers working hand-in-hand with big business get their way.

And if you're an online retailer, you may have to collect and remit sales taxes for all fifty states no matter where your online business resides. But don't worry, lawmakers want to force all states to adopt the same standard for sales taxes, thus making it easier for you to comply.

Earlier this month, a large collection of lawmakers introduced the Marketplace Fairness Act in both the Senate (S. 336) and the House (H.R. 684). Lawmakers who oppose the measure have renamed it more appropriately, the "National Internet Tax Mandate" because that's what it is.

Bradley Manning, the US Army intelligence officer accused of passing sensitive military documents to whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, has pleaded guilty to ten separate charges. The army, however, will pursue the grave charge of aiding the enemy.

Although the army judge has accepted Manning's guilty pleas on ten counts, the remaining 12 charges are still to be reviewed. The army accuses Manning, 25, of aiding the enemy. If convicted, he could face a life sentence.

Private First Manning told a military court that he was responsible for uploading a trove of material to the website and pleaded guilty to 10 counts, RT's Andrew Blake reported from the courtroom.

After his plea was read to the court, Pfc Manning for the first time formally admitted guilt in the court, more than 1,000 days after being arrested. Reading a 35-page statement from his seat before Col. Denise Lind, Manning explained why exactly he risked his life to publish state-secrets