Almost 6 million Americans will not be able to vote in November's presidential election under tough state rules that have pushed the number of disenfranchised former convicted criminals to a historic high.A new study by the Sentencing Project estimates that a record 5.85 million people - some 2.5% of the US voting age population equivalent to one out of every 40 adult Americans - will be ineligible to vote in November by dint of having been convicted of a felony. That includes almost 3 million people who have served their sentence in full, including all probation, and yet are still stripped of their right to vote under harsh state laws.

The US is the among the strictest nations in the world in terms of denying the vote to those who have felony convictions on their record. The Sentencing Project report shows how the laws have been sharply toughened up in recent years across many states, dramatically increasing the numbers caught in the felony trap - from just 1.2 million people in 1976 to 5.9 million in 2010.

African Americans and other minority ethnic groups are particularly vulnerable to being disenfranchised. Almost 8% of adult African Americans are ineligible to vote because of convictions, compared to 1.8% of the rest of the adult population.

Washington - A former CIA agent convicted by an Italian court of participating in the covert 2003 abduction in Milan of an Egyptian cleric suspected of terror-related offenses had gone public to defend herself.

In an interview published in the Washington Post, Sabrina de Sousa, 56, denied playing any role in the kidnapping of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, a member of Egypt's radical Islamist opposition also known as Abu Omar.

Abu Omar was seized on the streets of Milan on February 17, 2003 in a joint operation between the CIA and Italian intelligence services. He was then transferred to Egypt, where his lawyers say he was tortured.

It was part of a CIA practice known as "rendition" - when a terror suspect is forced against his will to fly to a third country known for allowing torture during interrogations.

In 2009, an Italian court sentenced De Sousa and 22 other CIA agents to seven to nine years in prison over the incident.

If running a successful campaign is largely keeping your opponent on the defensive, then Mitt Romney is in the political dog house - and it's his own fault, because he lied.

Let's step back up a second. The Obama campaign ran ads a short time ago and accused Romney of investing in firms that resulted in outsourcing jobs and increasing unemployment in the US. Romney claimed he was not responsible for his Bain vulture capital firm when this activity was taking place because he had left the company.

However, the Boston Globe revealed today (based on earlier stories in Talking Points Memo and Mother Jones):

Government documents filed by Mitt Romney and Bain Capital say Romney remained chief executive and chairman of the firm three years beyond the date he said he ceded control, even creating five new investment partnerships during that time.

Romney has said he left Bain in 1999 to lead the winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, ending his role in the company. But public Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents filed later by Bain Capital state he remained the firm's "sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president."

The United States should consider scaling down ambitious plans for a $1 billion laboratory in Kansas to study potentially deadly animal diseases, the National Research Council said on Friday in a key report to help the government decide how to proceed.

Construction of the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Manhattan, Kansas has been stalled by concerns that deadly animal diseases could escape and devastate agriculture, and criticism of it as a costly boondoggle.

The Department of Homeland Security asked the research council - which is part of the National Academy of Sciences - to study three options for the facility. They were to proceed with the Kansas plant, scale it back, or retain the aging Plum Island Animal Disease Center off Long Island, New York.

China's economy grew at its weakest pace in three years, the government reported Friday.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, Gross Domestic Product grew at a 7.6 percent rate in the second quarter of 2012, down from a 8.1 percent pace in the first quarter and marking the sixth consecutive quarter of slowing growth on the mainland dating back to 2009.

The data were in line with official government projections for the quarter although they serve as another reminder that China's economy is slowing faster than the government had hoped.

China is under enormous pressure from abroad and at home to maintain steady economic growth. Amid worrying economic numbers out of the European Union and the United States, China is increasingly viewed as one of the few motors strong enough to power the global economy through this financial turmoil.

Meanwhile, here on the mainland, the ruling Communist Party has seemingly staked its legitimacy to an unspoken pact with its citizens: give up some social freedoms for continued economic prosperity.

"For the past 30 years, the Communist party derived a lot of its legitimacy from delivering the goods: better economy, better living standards," says Patrick Chovanec, a professor of economics at Tsinghua University in Beijing, "If the perception is that's changed, then it introduces a real element of uncertainty."

Westbound I-8 in Southern California (an East-West highway that NEVER intersects the international border).

Did you know that sterilization will not cost women a penny under Obamacare? A new regulation that goes into effect on August 1st requires that health plans cover sterilization for all women with "reproductive capacity". That includes teenage girls. According to the new regulation, women must have access to sterilization "without having to pay a co-payment, co-insurance or a deductible." So women will not have to pay a single penny out of pocket if they want to get sterilized.

Of course this sterilization mandate will make health insurance more expensive for all of us, but the social engineers in Washington D.C. feel that increasing access to sterilization is a very important public policy goal. So why are they doing this? They are doing this because they love death. They truly believe that they are saving the planet by reducing human numbers. That is why "family planning" is always at the very heart of the "green agenda". They want to sterilize women because that will help keep the population down. And if there are less people running around, there will be less of us to ruin "their planet" with all of our pollution.

The new Obamacare regulation requires health insurance policies to offer 100% coverage for all "approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity."

But to fully understand what is going on, you have to look at this in context with what is being implemented all over the globe.

Have you heard of Agenda 21? It is an international effort coordinated by the United Nations to make the world a more "sustainable" place in the 21st century.

To the social engineers at the forefront of this effort, the number one threat to "sustainable development" is overpopulation. That is why population control is one of the central pillars of Agenda 21.

So all over the globe, family planning programs are being pushed and funded by the United Nations. In many UN-funded family planning facilities all over the planet sterilizations are being offered for free.

The United Nations seems absolutely obsessed with population issues. In particular, they seem quite determined to get women in poorer countries to have less children. For example, the March 2009 U.N. Population Division policy brief began with the following statement....

What would it take to accelerate fertility decline in the least developed countries?

A statement like that should be setting off all kinds of alarm bells in your head.

Questions like that are only a few steps away from all-out genocide.

But the social engineers at the United Nations are so obsessed with "saving the earth" that the fact that human lives are being destroyed in the process does not seem to bother them.

Many in the environmental movement believe that the number one problem facing the earth is climate change, and many of them also believe that carbon emissions being produced by human activity are the number one cause of climate change.

So that makes all of us the number one enemy of the planet.

This disturbing philosophy was clearly reflected in a 2009 report released by the United Nations Population Fund entitled "Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate". The following are three quotes that were pulled directly out of that report....

It has been nearly two weeks since the parliament of Paraguay orchestrated an institutional coup that removed President Fernando Lugo from power and installed vice president Fernando Franco in his place, a mere 9 months before the next presidential elections.

Reading articles coming out of South America, I have been trying to wrap my head around not just what happened in Paraguay but what it could mean for the region. And I'm afraid it's not good. When one connects the dots - many of which require further investigation - it suddenly feels as though the gains that countries in the region have made toward multi-lateral cooperation in order to guarantee economic and political sovereignty and are dangerously vulnerable.

I have always been skeptical of claims by Hugo Chavez or even anti-militarist voices here in the region that believe that the U.S. has not let go of its plans for the region in its fulfillment of "Full Spectrum Dominance" - controlling natural resources indirectly through elite puppet governments and directly through the threat of military force. Between the U.S' refocus on the Middle East and the rise of left-leaning governments in Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, and Uruguay, the idea of the region falling victim to the kinds of imperial/neoliberal bullying of the 70s, 80s, and 90s seemed both politically overblown and strategically unfeasible.

I am no longer so sure.

Imagine a stun gun that doesn't just drop you to the floor, but renders you unconscious for several minutes. This tech is called a "nano-second electrical pulse," and the Pentagon believes it could be used in a gun that would hit targets with high voltages of electricity for an amazingly short amount of time - we're talking billionths of seconds here. That would make the enemy an easy capture. But today's stun guns are already linked to dozens, if not hundreds, of abusive incidents. What happens if they become even more powerful?

The stun gun is only one of several projects that the Department of Defense showcased at the Non-Lethal Weapons Industry Day in Quantico, Va. on June 22, an opportunity for the Pentagon to give a glimpse of the present and future of its weapons that are designed to injure, rather than kill.

The Joint Non Lethal Weapons Directorate, the Pentagon's agency responsible for these projects, has been working on these system for years, proposing all kinds of exotic and futuristic less-than-lethal alternatives to its deadly arsenal, including sticky foam guns, sonic cannons, and devices that could potentially create voices in the target's heads, mimicking the effects of schizophrenia.

The U.K. intends to take severe action against the illegal manipulation of market interest rates, German daily Handelsblatt reports Tuesday, citing an interview with Mark Hoban, the financial secretary to the Treasury. He said anyone who falsifies market indexes should land in jail, the newspaper reported.