In recent weeks GOP congressmen have resorted to all sorts of underhanded schemes to avoid interacting with their angry constituents back home over August recess. Now two Republican freshmen, Reps. Daniel Webster (R-FL) and Tim Griffin (R-AR), are taking this trend one step further, using disturbing intimidation tactics and "watch lists" to discourage constituents from asking them questions:

Video seen by Catrina Stewart reveals the brutal interrogation of young Palestinians

The boy, small and frail, is struggling to stay awake. His head lolls to the side, at one point slumping on to his chest. "Lift up your head! Lift it up!" shouts one of his interrogators, slapping him. But the boy by now is past caring, for he has been awake for at least 12 hours since he was separated at gunpoint from his parents at two that morning. "I wish you'd let me go," the boy whimpers, "just so I can get some sleep."

During the nearly six-hour video, 14-year-old Palestinian Islam Tamimi, exhausted and scared, is steadily broken to the point where he starts to incriminate men from his village and weave fantastic tales that he believes his tormentors want to hear.

This rarely seen footage seen by The Independent offers a glimpse into an Israeli interrogation, almost a rite of passage that hundreds of Palestinian children accused of throwing stones undergo every year.

Israel has robustly defended its record, arguing that the treatment of minors has vastly improved with the creation of a military juvenile court two years ago. But the children who have faced the rough justice of the occupation tell a very different story.

"The problems start long before the child is brought to court, it starts with their arrest," says Naomi Lalo, an activist with No Legal Frontiers, an Israeli group that monitors the military courts. It is during their interrogation where their "fate is doomed", she says.

The American people should be allowed to know the legal reasoning offered to justify warrantless surveillance during the Bush Administration

What was Bush Administration lawyer John Yoo thinking when he wrote various legal memos declaring that the president has the power to spy on American citizens without getting a warrant or telling anyone about it?

The Obama Administration isn't telling:

The Obama administration has refused to declassify a secret memo from the George W. Bush presidency that justified the warrantless spying conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).

Matthew Aid, a writer who's covered the NSA and surveillance policy, requested a copy of a 2001 Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion by John Yoo that discussed the legal grounds for electronic spying without permission from a special federal court. The Department of Justice mostly denied Aid's Freedom of Information Act request, saying the redacted information in the OLC opinion was "classified, covered by non-disclosure provisions contained in other federal statutes, and is protected by the deliberative process privilege."

Atlanta, Georga: The first-ever audit of the U.S. Federal Reserve has revealed 16 trillion dollars in secret bank bailouts and has raised more questions about the quasi-private agency's opaque operations.

"This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you're-on-your-own individualism for everyone else," U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, said in a statement.

The majority of loans were issues by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY).

"From late 2007 through mid-2010, Reserve Banks provided more than a trillion dollars... in emergency loans to the financial sector to address strains in credit markets and to avert failures of individual institutions believed to be a threat to the stability of the financial system," the audit report states.

Truth is the pillar of civilization. The word 'truth' occurs 224 times in the King James Version of the Holy Bible; witnesses testifying in American courts and before the United States Congress must swear to tell the truth; and, laws and civil codes require truth in advertising and in business practices, to list just a few examples.

The purpose of science is to discover the true nature of Earth and Universe and to convey that knowledge truthfully to people everywhere. Science gives birth to technology that makes our lives easier and better. Science improves our health and enables us to see our world in ways never before envisioned. It uplifts spirits and engenders optimism. And, science provides a truth-standard, securely anchored in the properties of matter, a means to expose and debunk the charlatans and science-barbarians who would lie, cheat, steal, and tyrannize under the guise of science.

Science is not always a neutral, disinterested search for knowledge, although it may often seem that way to the outsider. Sometimes the story can be very different.

Smoking and health have been the subject of argument since tobacco was introduced to Europe in the sixteenth century. King James I was a pioneer antismoker. In 1604 he declared that smoking was "a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse." But like many a politician since, he decided that taxing tobacco was a more sensible option than banning it.

By the end of the century general opinion had changed. The Royal College of Physicians of London promoted smoking for its benefits to health and advised which brands were best. Smoking was compulsory in schools. An Eton schoolboy later recalled that "he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoking". As recently as 1942 Price's textbook of medicine recommended smoking to relieve asthma.

These strong opinions for and against smoking were not supported by much evidence either way until 1950 when Richard Doll and Bradford Hill showed that smokers seemed more likely to develop lung cancer. A campaign was begun to limit smoking. But Sir Ronald Fisher, arguably the greatest statistician of the 20th century, had noticed a bizarre anomaly in their results. Doll and Hill had asked their subjects if they inhaled. Fisher showed that men who inhaled were significantly less likely to develop lung cancer than non-inhalers. As Fisher said, "even equality would be a fair knock-out for the theory that smoke in the lung causes cancer."

The Pentagon has wasted more than $30 billion on contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan due to shoddy management and a lack of competition, an independent inquiry said Monday.

In its final report to Congress due to be released Wednesday, the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting warns that waste and fraud have undermined American diplomacy, fomented corruption in host countries and tarnished the US image abroad.

"Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted through poor planning, vague and shifting requirements, inadequate competition, substandard contract management and oversight, lax accountability, weak interagency coordination, and subpar performance or outright misconduct by some contractors and federal employees," the co-chairs of the panel, Christopher Shays and Michael Thibault, wrote in a commentary in the Washington Post.

"Both government and contractors need to do better," said the op-ed piece published on Monday.

Sexy Photo Shoots Amount to Marketing Mission Impossible

The thousands of scantily clothed bikers, skateboarders, walkers, hawkers, gawkers and performers were simply taking advantage of another breezy, crystal clear Southern California day. They had fought their way valiantly through relentless freeway traffic to participate in the year-round weekend ritual of parading down Los Angeles' bohemian thoroughfare, the Venice Beach boardwalk.

This was not a place you would think would inspire deep thoughts about Israel's increasingly desperate efforts to brand itself - and the wastefulness of all the dollars contributed by American Jewish organizations to mount a defense in the media of the Jewish state. But that's exactly where my mind went when I came upon a food truck dispensing thousands of little containers of hummus.

Along a stretch of Venice Beach, tables were set up, covered with colorful tablecloths and bowls of fresh limes, lemons, red peppers and other fruits and vegetables. Hundreds of young people were seated, giggling and diving into their free samples.

Signs were posted that this event was sponsored by Sabra Foods, the makers of "Mediterranean Dips."

"Ponerology was born in the crucible of attempts to understand, scientifically, a macro-social phenomenon of what can only be called extreme and excessive evil: Fascism and Soviet Communism." - Andrew M. Lobaczewski, a Polish psychiatrist and author of the book, Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes.

Definition of Pathocracy (from the website The Pathocracy Blog):

pathocracy (n). A system of government created by a small pathological minority that takes control over a society of normal people (from Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, by Andrew Lobaczewski).

From Greek pathos, "feeling, pain, suffering"; and kratos, "rule".

A totalitarian form of government in which absolute political power is held by a psychopathic elite, and their effect on the people is such that the entire society is ruled and motivated by purely pathological values.

A pathocracy can take many forms and can insinuate itself covertly into any seemingly just system or ideology. As such it can masquerade under the guise of a democracy or theocracy as well as more openly oppressive regimes.

"That is the nature of professional politics. Many are called, but few survive the nut-cutting hour--which appears to be coming down on our goofy Child President these days. . . . Ah, but it was ever thus, eh? Vicious thieves have always ruled the world. It is our wa. We are like pigs in the wilderness." - Hunter S. Thompson, from Kingdom of Fear.

Medtronic device susceptible to wireless tampering

The maker of an insulin pump that's susceptible to wireless hacking was identified for the first time on Thursday by a diabetic researcher who said the company repeatedly ignored his warnings.

A commercially available pump made by Medtronic, the world's biggest medical device manufacturer, is vulnerable to attacks that allow strangers to increase, decrease, or stop the flow of insulin being administered, the Associated Press reported. The article went on to say that hacker Jay Radcliffe outted the Minneapolis-based company after "he was ignored in repeated attempts to alert the company to the defects."

He has recently started relying on a new pump model made by Johnson & Johnson to treat his diabetic condition, according to The Minneapolis Star Tribune.