If you've ever felt stupider after watching Congress bicker about some issue for a couple of hours, you're not wrong. The nation's lawmakers are, in fact, dumbing themselves down, according to a new report by the Sunlight Foundation.

An analysis weighing congressional speeches against the Flesch-Kincaid scale - best known as that numerical score that tells you how smart you are when you run the word count diagnostic in your word processing software - reveals that legislators speak at a 10.6 grade level.

That's down from 11.5 just seven years ago. In the span of less than a decade, Congress' rhetorical skills have receded nearly a full grade, the Sunlight Foundation discovered. The report readily admits the unreliability of the Flesch-Kincaid test, which grades language on complexity, not clarity. But it is still a decent metric for judging the quality of one's words.

That quality is declining on Capitol Hill, and it's a bipartisan effort. Democrats in the 112th Congress speak at a 10.8 grade level, with Republicans declaiming at a 10.5 mark. But the GOP could take some solace in the knowledge that a reading of Democratic scores showed that the further left a member of Congress is ideologically, the more his or her grade tends to decline.

NATO arrives everywhere violently. Chicago was no exception. During summit activities, city cops are enforcers. They specialize in serving wealth, power, and imperial interests.

Their guerrilla warfare history is notorious. They're reliable state terror partners.

Their tactics include no-holds barred surveillance, vigilantism, and brutality. They're infamous for physical confrontation, flagrant abuse, and criminal assaults.

From 2002 - 2004 alone, over 10,000 complaints were lodged. Many involve violence, brutality, even torture and murder. Only 18 disciplinary actions followed.

University of Chicago Law Professor Craig Futterman heads its Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project (PAP). It's one of America's leading civil rights initiatives.

It focuses on criminal justice issues. Its aim is improving police accountability and the nation's criminal justice system. It faces long odds as America grows more repressive. Police behavior during Chicago's NATO summit is Exhibit A. More on that below.

If you woke on a beautiful spring Sunday in May on a pond in Maine, what would you do? A canoe ride on water as smooth as glass, and breakfast on the deck, perhaps -- followed by disrupting international war criminal Tony Blair at Colby College graduation in Waterville!

Who knew our protest would lead news coverage of the ceremony? (Washington Post, WGME, Houston Chronicle, and Daily Mail, to name a few.)

Two adjacent items in last Monday's Daily Telegraph highlighted what has become one of the more prominent features of British life. In one, Cristina Odone described how she was asked to speak in favour of marriage at a conference arranged by the World Congress of Families, at the Law Society. At the last minute, the Society cancelled the debate on the grounds that it was "contrary to our diversity policy" - "espousing as it does an ethos which is opposed to same-sex marriage". (Though the society happily hosted a meeting recently to promote assisted suicide which, unlike marriage, is still against the law.)

Adjoining this was a fine rant by Boris Johnson against the BBC: "statist, corporatist, anti-business, Europhile and, above all, overwhelmingly biased to the Left". He called for its next director-general to be a Tory.

The wider point these two pieces illustrated was the success achieved by the upholders of politically correct orthodoxies in taking over the institutions that represent the commanding heights of our society, and using them ruthlessly to ensure that no dissenting voices are heard. Any view contrary to their dogmas becomes what Orwell called, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a "thoughtcrime".

We saw this for years in the way that those daring to question the euro, or the onward march of the EU to political integration, were dismissed with contempt - by politicians, the BBC and every variety of the great and the good - as "fruitcakes", "xenophobes" and "Little Englanders". We saw it in spades as the promoters of "consensus" on global warming took over the commanding heights of the scientific world - such as the Royal Society, Nature, the universities (on a sea of climate-change related funding). Supported again by politicians and the BBC, they were determined to show the maximum intolerance to those who challenged their orthodoxy, however rationally: these were "deniers", "flat-earthers", "anti-science nutters", who must be "in the pay of Big Oil".

The US corporate superstructure conglomerate - including financial interests, the defense industry, oil companies and the media - brazenly manipulate American society, shares Peter Dale Scott, former diplomat, poet and prominent anti-war advocate.

Man charged with disorderly conduct after Blair's speech interrupted by small group of demonstrators at Colby College

Former British prime minister Tony Blair was heckled by protesters as he tried to issue a plea for world unity during a college commencement speech.

Blair was interrupted by a small group of demonstrators as he attempted to deliver a speech in front of 400 graduates at Colby College in Maine.

Police say the activists shouted "warmonger" and "war criminal" during the address. One person was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

Waterville police said the trouble began after Blair took to the podium.

"As Mr Blair was introduced for his address, three protesters began screaming and were removed and escorted from campus.

"A short time later, another protester began screaming and was escorted away from the crowd," a police statement read.

A former agent of the CIA has revealed that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has died of natural causes five years before the US announced his death.

In an interview with Russia's Channel One, Berkan Yashar, who is also a Turkish politician, said the US has not killed the al-Qaeda leader.

"In September of 1992, I was in Chechnya, that's when I first met the man whose name was Bin Laden. This meeting took place in a two-story house in the city of Grozny; on the top floor was a family of Gamsakhurdia, the Georgian president, who then was kicked out of his country. We met on the bottom floor; Osama lived in the same building," Yashar said.

According to the former CIA agent, he personally knew Bin Laden's three Chechen bodyguards, who had protected him until his death and witnessed his death on June 26, 2006.

"Even if the entire world believed, I could not possibly believe it," Yashar said. "I personally know the Chechens who protected him, they are Sami, Mahmood, and Ayub, and they were with him until the very end."

French prosecutors on Monday opened a preliminary investigation into allegations that former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn took part in a gang rape in Washington in 2010. He has already been charged in northern France for "pimping".

French prosecutors on Monday opened a preliminary investigation into accusations that disgraced ex-IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn took part in a gang rape in the United States.

Prosecutors in Lille, where Strauss-Kahn and three others have been charged in a pimping case, said the probe centred on an incident "that could be described as gang rape" that took place in Washington, DC in December 2010.

The US financial system and, probably, the financial system of Europe, like the police, no longer serves a useful social purpose.

In the US the police have proven themselves to be a greater threat to public safety than private sector criminals. I just googled "police brutality" and up came 183,000,000 results. (Here are two recent brutal assaults, one deadly, by police on hapless individuals.)

The cost to society of the private financial system is even higher. Writing in CounterPunch (May 18), Rob Urie reports that two years ago Andrew Haldane, executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England (the UK's version of the Federal Reserve) said that the financial crisis, now four years old, will in the end cost the world economy between $60 trillion and $200 trillion in lost GDP. If Urie's report is correct, this is an astonishing admission from a member of the ruling elite.

Try to get your mind around these figures. The US GDP, the largest in the world, is about 15 trillion. What Haldane is telling us is that the financial crisis will end up costing the world lost real income between 4 and 13 times the size of the current Gross Domestic Product of the United States. This could turn out to be an optimistic forecast.

In the end, the financial crisis could destroy Western civilization.

Ottawa - Canadian spies closely eyed existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, tracking his planned trip to Quebec in support of people arrested during a crackdown on separatist threats, newly released documents show.

The declassified Royal Canadian Mounted Police dossier on Sartre also reveals that Mountie intelligence officers pored over translations of the French writer's pronouncements, monitored his links to the peace movement and noted the academic rebel's brushes with the law.

The two-volume file, spanning 234 pages, was obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act from Library and Archives Canada.

Personal files compiled by the RCMP security branch, a forerunner of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, can be made public 20 years after a person's death. Portions of Sartre's file remain secret.

The prolific essayist and playwright is perhaps best known for his thoughts on existentialism, the notion that man has no predetermined nature but defines his essence through belief and actions.

In 1964 he was awarded - but refused to accept - the Nobel Prize for literature.

Sartre transcended the rarefied world of political philosophy, becoming a touchstone of popular culture embodied by the chain-smoking hipster ennui of the 1960s.