The family of a girl who was declared brain dead at Children's Hospital Oakland last week has stepped up their fight to keep her on life support.

Relatives of 13-year-old Jahi Mcmath took their case to a lawyer who served the hospital a cease and desist letter that says the hospital does not have the family's consent to remove life support without permission.

McMath underwent surgery to remove her tonsils at the Oakland hospital on Monday, December 9th. It was said to have been a routine procedure that was intended to cure a sleep apnea problem. After the surgery, she coughed up blood and went into cardiac arrest.

She was declared brain dead last Thursday, but her mother Nailah Winkfield is not giving up.

A provision cutting the pensions of military retirees in the bipartisan budget deal that the Senate will vote on this week does not exempt disabled veterans, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

Disabled retirees were previously thought to be exempt from the changes to military retiree pay, which could cost servicemembers up to $124,000 over a 20-year period.

The Free Beacon previously reported that military retirees under the age of 62 would receive 1 percentage point less in their annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) in the plan crafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray (D., Wash.).

The section of the U.S. code that has been altered also applies to disabled servicemembers, many of whom have been wounded in combat.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, called the change "unthinkable."

"It has been asserted that the controversial change to military retirees' pensions affects those who are 'working-age' and 'still in their working years,' with the clear suggestion being that these individuals are able to work," Sessions said in a statement. "That's why I was deeply troubled when my staff and I discovered that even individuals who have been wounded and suffered a service-related disability could see their pensions reduced under this plan."

Joe White was this close to making it.

A 50-year-old California man described by relatives as a "loving father and a doting grandfather," White had been living on the streets of Hayward for years. He wanted to work and was able to find odd jobs here and there, but it was never much or consistent enough to afford a place to live. Hayward has no emergency shelter with beds for single men, so White slept outside.

But things were looking up. Last Saturday, White was second on a long list to get permanent supportive housing in Hayward. He had been waiting in line for months and it seemed as though he might finally catch a break.

White died on Sunday.

Temperatures in the Bay Area plummeted to near-freezing on December 10, an uncommon occurrence in a region generally known for its lack of inclement weather. White's body was found in the old Hayward City Hall courtyard. He'd been beaten up and robbed by multiple men, who took the new winter coat White's sister had given him on Friday. He was wearing just a hoodie and shorts. His cause of death is still being determined, but police speculated that his death was weather-related.

It has been nearly 15 years since music journalist Jim DeRogatis caught the story that has since defined his career, one that he wishes didn't exist: R. Kelly's sexual predation on teenage girls. DeRogatis, at that time the pop-music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times, was anonymously delivered the first of two videos he would receive depicting the pop star engaging in sexual acts with underage girls. Now the host of the syndicated public radio show Sound Opinions and a professor at Columbia College, DeRogatis, along with his former Sun-Times colleague Abdon Pallasch, didn't just break the story, they did the only significant reporting on the accusations against Kelly, interviewing hundreds of people over the years, including dozens of young women whose lives DeRogatis says were ruined by the singer.

This past summer, leading up to Kelly's headlining performance at the Pitchfork Music Festival, DeRogatis posted a series of discussions about Kelly's career, the charges made against him, and sexual assault. He published a live review of the singer's festival set that was an indictment of Pitchfork and its audience for essentially endorsing a man he calls "a monster." In the two weeks since Kelly released his latest studio album, Black Panties, the conversation about him and why he has gotten a pass from music publications (not to mention feminist sites such as Jezebel) has been rekindled, in part because of the explicit nature of the album and also because of online arguments around the Pitchfork performance.

I was one of those people who challenged DeRogatis and was even flip about his judgment -- something I quickly came to regret. DeRogatis and I have tangled -- even feuded on air -- over the years; yet, amid the Twitter barbs, he approached me offline and told me about how one of Kelly's victims called him in the middle of the night after his Pitchfork review came out, to thank him for caring when no one else did. He told me of mothers crying on his shoulder, seeing the scars of a suicide attempt on a girl's wrists, the fear in their eyes. He detailed an aftermath that the public has never had to bear witness to.

DeRogatis offered to give me access to every file and transcript he has collected in reporting this story -- as he has to other reporters and journalists, none of whom has ever looked into the matter, thus relegating it to one man's personal crusade.

I thought that last fact merited a public conversation about why.

Guess who's investing in America's future?

Nobody, that's who.

Just check out this excerpt from an article by Rex Nutting at Marketwatch and you'll see what I mean. The article is titled "No one is investing in tomorrow's economy":

The U.S. economy simply isn't investing enough to ensure that there will be enough good paying jobs for our children and our children's children. Net investment - the amount of capital added to our stock - remains at the lowest levels since the Great Depression. ...

Net investment...measures the additional stock of buildings, factories, houses, equipment, software, and research and development - above and beyond the replacement of worn-out capital. In 2012, net fixed investment totaled $485 billion, only about half of the $1.1 trillion invested in 2006...

If businesses, consumers and governments were investing for the future at usual rate, the economy would be at least 3% larger, employing millions more people. That's a huge hole in the economy that can't be filled by heavily indebted consumers, especially at a time when government is handcuffed by forces of austerity. ("No one is investing in tomorrow's economy", Rex Nutting, Marketwatch)

The arrest of a low-level diplomat from India over maid pay in New York has spun into an international incident that is threatening relations between the United States and a longtime ally.

Secretary of State John Kerry called a cabinet official in New Delhi on Wednesday to express regret over the arrest of India deputy general counsel Devyani Khobragade, who was stripped- and cavity-searched during her arrest on charges that she didn't pay her housekeeper enough money.

The India government reacted with outrage, going so far as to remove security barriers outside the U.S. embassy in New Delhi and canceling duty-free liquor deliveries to the embassy.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described the diplomat's treatment as "deplorable" and protests have broken out in India.

"We don't want this to negatively impact our bilateral relationship (with India), and we'll keep talking about it with them on the ground and here," said Marie Harf, deputy spokeswoman at the State Department.

Tomorrow, December 19th, George Mason University is presenting renown billionaire Apartheid profiteer Shari Arison, member of the Arison settlement-building family and Israel's richest woman, an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters at the university's winter graduation ceremony. Arison will also be a speaker at the event.

George Mason University Students Against Israeli Apartheid (GMU SAIA) as well as Craig Willse, Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies, have authored an open letter (below) stating GMU's name is being used to "whitewash the activities of the Arison Group" diminishing "the academic autonomy and reputation of George Mason" and undermining the possibility "for teaching, learning, and practicing social justice on our campus."

Haaretz:

Students Against Israeli Apartheid wrote a letter accusing the Arison Group of involvement "in the illegal occupation and colonization of Palestine ... and turns the repression, discrimination and displacement of the Palestinian people into profit." The letter charges the company's various holdings with offering mortgages in the settlements, mining for minerals in an occupied portion of the Dead Sea, financing the Jerusalem's light rail, construction at checkpoints and the separation barrier, and involvement in the Bedouin resettlement plan by financing a new military compound in the Negev. The letter also says Israeli Arabs are discriminated against at branches of Arison's Bank Hapoalim.

In their opinion, the connection with Arison runs counter to GMU's declared values and hurts its reputation. "Honoring Arison," they state in an open letter, "makes Mason appear to be a PR machine for robber baron billionaires, rather than an autonomous public research university."

The judge ordered on Wednesday, November 13, at the request of the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism ( Licra ), the prohibition of a book and partial censorship of four others for anti-semitism. Those books were edited by essayist Alain Soral. Anthology of words against Jews, Judaism and Zionism by Paul-Éric Blanrue published in 2013 and sold on the Kontre Kulture editions website, must be removed from sale "within a month", according to the decision.

Some parts of the four other works from the nineteenth and twentieth century, republished by the publishing company will be removed: Jewish France by Edouard Drumont, Salvation through the Jews by Leon Bloy, The International Jew by Henry Ford and The Controversy of Zion by Douglas Reed.

This sentence is a first in France about the exceptionality of its extent and the violation of a number of principles yet established on freedom of opinion and expression, the retroactivity of laws or the necessary transmission of historical knowledge.

Obamacare may have its problems, including more bugs than you can find in the cornfields of Nebraska, but its legal worries were meant to end after the Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate, the heart of the Affordable Care Act.

Now, as the technologists charged with making healthcare.gov work report progress, lawyers are re-entering the fray. A little-heard of challenge currently making its way through the court system may represent opponents' last best hope of, as they are fond of saying, driving a stake through the heart of the law.

It all started in 2011, when Jonathan H. Adler, a conservative law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, shot an email to his friend Michael Cannon, a health policy expert at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. Adler thought he had spotted an error in Obamacare that could unravel a significant portion of the law.

At issue are the federal subsidies for individuals buying insurance in their state's health care exchanges. The law stipulates that those subsidies should be allotted for plans purchased "through an Exchange established by the State under Section 1311" (italics added), a reference to the section of the law that establishes state-run exchanges.

The U.S. Army War College, which molds future field generals, has begun discussing whether it should remove its portraits of Confederate generals - including those of Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.

Nestled in rural Pennsylvania on the 500-acre Carlisle Barracks, the war college is conducting an inventory of all its paintings and photographs with an eye for rehanging them in historical themes to tell a particular Army story.

During the inventory, an unidentified official - not the commandant, Maj. Gen. Anthony A. Cucolo III - asked the administration why the college honors two generals who fought against the United States, college spokeswoman Carol Kerr said.

"I do know at least one person has questioned why we would honor individuals who were enemies of the United States Army," Ms. Kerr said. "There will be a dialogue when we develop the idea of what do we want the hallway to represent."

She said one faculty member took down the portraits of Lee and Jackson and put them on the floor as part of the inventory process. That gave rise to rumors that the paintings had been removed.