The United States Supreme Court this week effectively ended all efforts to overturn a controversial 2012 law that grants the government the power to indefinitely detain American citizens without due process.

On Monday, the high court said it won't weigh in on challenge filed by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges and a bevy of co-plaintiffs against US President Barack Obama, ending for now a two-and-a-half-year debate concerning part of an annual Pentagon spending bill that since 2012 has granted the White House the ability to indefinitely detain people "who are part of or substantially support Al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces engaged in hostilities against the United States."

The Obama administration has long maintained that the provision - Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 - merely reaffirmed verbiage contained within the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, signed by then-President George W. Bush in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

In a new policy directive from the Obama administrative, national security and other government officials will no longer be allowed to publicly discuss or even reference news reporting that is based on "unauthorized leaks."

President Obama once promised the American people that his administration would be the most transparent in history. But after years of fights with civil libertarians trying to obtain legal memos used to justify the president's overseas assassination program, an unprecedented pattern of prosecuting government whistleblowers, the targeting of journalists and all the secrecy and obfuscation related to the NSA's mass surveillance programs made public by Edward Snowden, that claim is now met with near universal laughter, if not scorn, by critics.

According to the New York Times: A new pre-publication review policy for the Office of Director of National Intelligence says the agency's current and former employees and contractors may not cite news reports based on leaks in their speeches, opinion articles, books, term papers or other unofficial writings.

"They must really think we're stupid." That is what people all over the world are saying about the American government and media's portrayal of world events.

Several weeks ago, an interviewer said to Russian President Putin: "NATO claims the missile shield was not built against you but against Iran." Putin broke out laughing. When the laughter finally subsided, Putin said: "You really make me laugh. God bless you because it's almost time to finish the day... indeed it's already time to go to sleep. At least I get home in good humor."

No sane person could seriously assert that NATO's missile shield circling Russia is intended to protect the West from Iran. Yet, that is exactly what NATO - the imperial American occupation army in Europe - tells the world. How stupid do they think we are?

Governments lie. Imperial governments construct vast empires of lies. But in the past, most official lies carried at least a thin veneer of plausibility. Today, the US government and its media echo chamber do not seem to care whether their lies are even slightly credible.

More Americans than ever believe the economy is rigged in favor of Wall Street and big business and their enablers in Washington. We're five years into a so-called recovery that's been a bonanza for the rich but a bust for the middle class. "The game is rigged and the American people know that. They get it right down to their toes," says Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Which is fueling a new populism on both the left and the right. While still far apart, neo-populists on both sides are bending toward one another and against the establishment.

Who made the following comments? (Hint: Not Warren, and not Bernie Sanders.)

A. We "cannot be the party of fat cats, rich people, and Wall Street."

B. "The rich and powerful, those who walk the corridors of power, are getting fat and happy..."

C. "If you come to Washington and serve in Congress, there should be a lifetime ban on lobbying."

D. "Washington promoted moral hazard by protecting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which privatized profits and socialized losses."

F. "The people who wake up at night thinking of which new country they want to bomb, which new country they want to be involved in, they don't like restraint. They don't like reluctance to go to war."

(Answers: A. Rand Paul, B. Ted Cruz, C. Ted Cruz, D. House Republican Joe Hensarling, E. House Republican Justin Amash, F. Rand Paul )

The leaders of the "Donetsk People's Republic" claimed that self-defense forces in Mariupol came under a chemical attack when the City Council building was being stormed by Kiev-controlled armed units.

"Kiev bears the entire responsibility not only for their state agencies' actions, but also for the actions by citizens who illegally apply means of chemical warfare," the statement says.

"Armed groups controlled by Kiev used unidentified chemical weapons on May 6 while storming the City Council headquarters," the foreign ministry of the "Donetsk People's Republic" said in a statement, posted in the Donetsk "people's governor" Pavel Gubarev's Facebook account.

"The defenders of the City Council have left the contaminated area. Many of them had their breathing systems damaged, which is likely to have consequences and probably be a danger to their lives," the statement says.

The statement urges the world community to condemn the use of a toxic choking gas in Mariupol and to take comprehensive measures to subject the Kiev authorities to international isolation."

The US is sending missiles to Syrian rebels as part of a "pilot program" to strengthen the opposition, American media reveals. Addressing criticism the US is arming extremist militants, Washington claims its weapons will not "fall into the wrong hands."

Washington's new initiative aims to find out whether it can supply opposition forces in Syria with weapons without them falling into the hands of Islamist extremists, American officials told USA Today on condition of anonymity.

"They will try this first and see how it goes" before expanding it, said a former official. According to reports, rebel groups have already received anti-tank missiles, known as TOWs, which are specially designed to destroy tanks and pierce reinforced bunkers.

This latest move by the US comes as the head of the Syrian National Coalition for Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, Ahmad Al-Jarba, visits Washington to lobby for more support. Al-Jarba will push for Washington to supply rebel forces with anti-aircraft missiles, the New York Times reports.

In a meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry, Al-Jarba emphasized that his coalition was "moderate and inclusive."

Pope Francis called on "legitimate redistribution" of wealth by the world's governments to undo the "economy of exclusion" underlying capitalist society.

The pontiff appealed Friday to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the heads of major U.N. agencies in Rome, warning that wealth inequality promoted a "culture of death" at odds with Catholic teachings.

"An awareness of the dignity of each of our brothers and sisters whose life is sacred and inviolable from conception to natural death must lead us to share with complete freedom the goods which God's providence has placed in our hands," Pope Francis said.

These may be "material goods but also intellectual and spiritual ones," Francis said, and he urged the world's people "to give back generously and lavishly whatever we may have earlier unjustly refused to others."

On Sunday morning, prominent Irish politician Gerry Adams woke alone in a cell in Antrim police station. By the following evening, the Sinn Fein president was stepping onto a podium at an election rally at the Devenish Centre, West Belfast as an 800-strong crowd chanted his name.

Adams, who smiled widely, did not look like a man who had spent four nights in police custody. He told cheering supporters that his arrest in connection with the 1972 killing of West Belfast mother of ten Jean McConville was "a sham", but that Sinn Fein would not be diverted from "the job of building the peace".

The Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998, ended the 30-year "Troubles" that cost over 3,000 lives. Since 2007, Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), has shared power with the Democratic Unionist Party in a devolved parliament in Belfast.

Concerns, however, are being raised about the fragility of the peace in Northern Ireland. The murals and flags that line many streets across this country of just 1.8 million attest to on-going tensions between unionists, who favour a political union between Northern Ireland and the Great Britain, and republicans, who want a united Ireland.

Foreign-backed militants in Syria's northern city of Aleppo have cut water supplies into the city, leaving residents without water for a week.

The al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front has reportedly cut water supplies into eastern part of the city, which is under the control of militants, and government-controlled west of the city.

The cut had forced people to queue in front of wells for collecting water, with reports saying that some people were drinking unclean water.

Militants also cut the electricity supply to government-held areas of the city and the nearby neighborhoods last month.

At least one million people have left Aleppo, Syria's second city, following the ongoing conflict in the Arab country.

Cutting off water supplies came as Syrian military forces have conducted a number of major operations around Aleppo in a bid to entirely drive the foreign-backed militants out of the area.

Monica Lewinsky's Vanity Fair article reluctantly plunges us straight back into the frothing world of '90s gossip. It may be painful but it answers so many questions about today's media.

The Monica Lewinsky confessional in Vanity Fair brings back a torrent of unfond memories of the appalling cast of tabloid gargoyles who drove the scandal. Remember them? Treacherous thatched-roof-haired drag-queen Linda Tripp, with those dress-for-success shoulder pads? Cackling, fact-lacking hack Lucianne Goldberg, mealy-mouthed Pharisee Kenneth Starr - the whole buzzing swarm of legal, congressional and gossip industry flesh flies, feasting on the entrails. And, of course, hitting "send" on each new revelation that no one else would publish, the solitary, perfectly named Matt Drudge, operating in pallid obsession out of his sock-like apartment in Miami.

A once-in-a-lifetime cast! Or so we all thought. But what we didn't know at the time is that they were not some passing cultural excrescence. They were the face of the future. The things that shocked us then - the illicitly taped conversations, the wholesale violations of elementary privacy, the globally broadcast sexual embarrassments, all the low-life disseminated malice - is now the communications industry as it operates every minute of every day.

Monica is right when she writes that "only a few years later, with the advent of social media, the humiliation would have been even more devastating." Or maybe not: When the feds pressured her to talk that fateful night in the Ritz Carlton bar in Pentagon City, she'd have pulled out her iPhone and called her mom, who'd have told her to say nothing without a lawyer present. She just might have walked away from the hell that followed.


Monica is actually right about a lot of things in this piece, even as her vision is fogged by habituation to a culture she helped midwife. She is right that, for some, the stain of humiliation can indeed be irrevocable. Not everyone has the survival skills of William Jefferson Clinton. Scandal on the web leaves the shame a click away, forever. True, when you've been burned by the press it's strange to keep applying for (as she writes) "jobs that fell under the umbrella of 'creative communications' and 'branding.'"