With the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on torture, it becomes clear that in the aftermath of the loathsome terrorist attack of 9/11, the United States entered into a new and barbarous stage in its history, one in which acts of violence and moral depravity were not only embraced but celebrated. Certainly, this is not to suggest that the United States had not engaged in criminal and lawless acts historically or committed acts of brutality that would rightly be labeled acts of torture. That much about our history is clear and includes not only the support and participation in acts of indiscriminate violence and torture practiced through and with the right-wing Latin American dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil in the 1970s but also through the wilful murder and torture of civilians in Vietnam, Iraq, and later at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and Afghanistan. The United States is no stranger to torture nor is it a free of complicity in aiding other countries notorious for their abuses of human rights. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman reminded us by taking us as far back as 1979 that of the "35 countries using torture on an administrative basis in the late 1970s, 26 were clients of the United States."[1]

In fact, the United States has a long record of inflicting torture on others, both at home and abroad, although it has never admitted to such acts. Instead, the official response has been to deny this history or do everything to hide such monstrous acts from public view through government censorship, appealing to the state secrecy principle, or deploying a language that buried narratives of extraordinary cruelty in harmless sounding euphemisms. For example, the benign sounding CIA "Phoenix Program" in South Vietnam resulted in the deaths of over 21,000 Vietnamese. As Carl Boggs argues, the acts of U.S. barbarism in Vietnam appeared both unrestrained and never ending, with routinized brutality such as throwing people out of planes labeled as "flying lessons" or "half a helicopter ride,"[2] while tying a field telephone wire around a man's testicles and ringing it up was a practice called "the Bell Telephone Hour."[3] Officially sanctioned torture was never discussed as a legitimate concern; but, as indicated by a few well-documented accounts, it seems to be as American as apple pie.[4]

In Victoria, Texas a police officer was just recorded beating and tasering a 76-year-old man who called the cop a "Goddamned Nazi Stormtrooper." These sound like pretty harsh words until you find out that the officer was harassing the man for an expired inspection sticker, even though the vehicle had dealer tags which makes it completely exempt from such stickers.

The 23-year-old cop was placed on administrative leave on Friday after beating and tasering Pete Vasquez.

Vasquez was driving a work-owned dealer vehicle on Thursday when Officer Nathanial Robinson started harassing him. When Vasquez explained the exemption to the cop, Robinson became enraged.

The dashcam video shows it all. Robinson slams Vasquez onto the hood of the patrol car before forcing him to the ground, then shocking him twice while on the ground.

"He just acted like a pit bull, and that was it," Vasquez said. "For a while, I thought he was going to pull his gun and shoot me."

Chief J.J. Craig said that he took this matter very seriously and offered a personal apology to Vasquez, but he stopped short of disciplining the rogue officer.

"Public trust is extremely important to us," Craig said, hoping that his apology will keep his department from getting sued.

"Sometimes that means you have to take a real hard look at some of the actions that occur within the department," he continued.

"You want to make sure you give the right kind of person a badge and a gun," he finally added.

Larry Urich, a co-worker of Vasqueze at the car lot, told local Victoria Advocate reporters that the officer should be fired and prosecuted for assault.

"I told the officer, 'What in the hell are you doing?' This gentleman is 76 years old," Urich explained. "The cop told me to stand back, but I didn't shut up. I told him he was a goddamned Nazi Stormtrooper."

Contrary to the perception in the media, poverty - not gentrification - is booming in US neighborhoods. When such conditions double or triple, areas quickly fall into disrepair, services are cut, and crime escalates, according to a new report.

Media attention tends to focus on poor neighborhoods that are rapidly undergoing gentrification by way of investments and an influx of wealthier new residents, but a paper by cityobservatory.org shows a troubling trend that is more prevalent. The number of poor people living in high-poverty urban neighborhoods has more than doubled, the report found, from two million to four million over the past 40 years. Additionally, the number of high-poverty neighborhoods has nearly tripled from 1,100 to 3,100.

"The direct negative economic consequences of concentrated poverty are well established...fewer local job prospects...poor physical connections to growing job centers...[worse] health...poor quality public services that worsen the experience of poverty for neighborhood residents, and make it harder to attract new residents and businesses, adding to a cycle of decline," said the report's authors Joe Cortright and Dillon Mahmoudi.

The study, titled 'Lost in Place,' looks into why the persistence and spread of concentrated poverty - not gentrification - is the biggest urban challenge in the US. It analyzed changes in high-poverty neighborhoods in 51 of the largest metropolitan areas between 1970 and 2010. In these areas, 30 percent or more of the population lives below the poverty line.

Stopping to film Baltimore police officers kicking a handcuffed man, a local woman says she found herself being tasered and arrested while police hurled expletives. She is now suing the department.

Kianga Mwamba, 36, claims she was tasered and arrested by Baltimore Police Department officers in March while filming the arrest of another man on her mobile phone. After she was released, she noticed someone had tampered with her mobile phone - erasing the arrest video. Charges against her were eventually dropped in September, but Mwamba recently served the police department with a lawsuit seeking $7 million.

"I'm in shock for real, like are they really doing this to me," Mwamba, the daughter of a veteran of the Maryland Capitol Police, said as she recalled the arrest in an interview this fall with the Baltimore Sun.

The lawsuit filed with the Circuit Court for Baltimore City last Thursday said the police "attacked" her, "dragged" her from her vehicle, and "threw her onto the street, handcuffed her, tasered her, called her a 'dumb bitch,' and kept her restrained."

The suit alleges the officers arrested Mwamba to "prevent the disclosure of the video taken of them beating a handcuffed man."

Video of the March 30 melee surfaced online this week. Police erased the 135-second recording from Mwamba's phone, but it was recovered from her cloud account, according to the lawsuit.

Like many people, I grew up watching numerous television shows and mainstream movies depicting a world in which the common police officer stood as a sentinel of civilized society against a seething underbelly of violence and chaos just beneath the surface of the world around us. Through public schooling, we were indoctrinated to fear the drug culture as a breeding ground of gangland destruction and to worship law enforcement officials as the only barrier between us and a cocaine-frosted wasteland. We were led to believe that every day police were holding back a tide of crime and terrorism. The so-called "thin blue line" was an indispensable part of a safe and prosperous nation.

To criticize or present opposition to the institution of state and federally funded law enforcement is often considered tantamount to treason - or, at the very least, it is considered unpatriotic. After all, we have all been told every moment of our lives that a world without police would immediately turn into a frothing, frenzied orgy of mass insanity and that average human beings cannot be trusted to take responsibility for the day-to-day security of their neighborhoods and towns. Official doctrine today demands a designated warrior class, separate from the rest of us, to handle the protection and care of weakling citizens.

With her right hand, my 8-year-old daughter, Kalian, presses the red-hot soldering iron against the circuit board. With her left hand, she guides a thin, tin wire until it's pressing against both the circuit board and the tip of the iron.

The tin begins to melt. There is a wisp of smoke, and a metallic smell drifts back to where I am standing behind her, a bit nervously, sweat running down my forehead onto my safety goggles (which I have always detested). I am ready to pounce if that soldering iron slips and touches her skin.

Instead, she pulls the iron and wire away. The solder cools, holding in place a metal pin from a computer chip. It's one of 20 solders she must make to attach the chip to the circuit board, and the moment seems to last forever.

Attaching the chip is just one of the tiny steps she and her brother, Liam, 10, will take over the next 10 months to create their own miniature computer, called a Hackerling Circuit.

We were building these computers as part of a program called Curiosity Hacked, started by some friends here. The goal is to teach kids a wide range of digital and analog skills: computer programming, 3-D printing, and sewing and drawing.

As the biggest storm in five years took aim at California this week cities across the state distributed sandbags, cancelled school and warned residents to prepare for power outages. And though the storm didn't really live up to the media hype, some people did take the warnings to heart and made last minute trips to the grocery store to stock up on foodstuffs and other supplies just so they wouldn't have to go out in the rain.

But not everyone was prepared. One San Francisco resident in particular highlights just how susceptible America is to disasters and what to expect in the event of a widespread emergency.

"I thought we were going to watch tv all day, but now the power's out," Beth Ludwig said. Her mom added that the kids had never experienced a power outage before.

Georgia Virgili was one of the hundreds of thousands in the Bay Area who lost most of the conveniences of modern life.

"I didn't have power," Virgili said. "I couldn't get my car out of the garage, I have no food, I have no cash, so I'm trying to forage for something." (CBS)

Russia has donated a 25m tree Christmas tree to the Notre Dame cathedral in France, following an appeal for help.

The cathedral had struggled to raise the money for its annual tree and appealed to foreign embassies in Paris for assistance.

"It was a surprise but it won't create problems. It was a gift. No money changed hands. And if it helps to build bridges, so much the better.", said one of the Parisian clergy.

The surprise donation comes at a time of strained relations between the two countries, over Russia's involvement in the conflict in Ukraine.

The whole country, and the world, stood up to police brutality and institutionalized racism today.

This short time lapse video puts the protests into perspective. While the mainstream media may report hundreds or maybe a thousand, you need to know the truth. You are not alone, many many other young people around the country have also awaken to the injustices we face.

Here's the proof:

There is a pattern emerging in my Facebook feed this week. One group of friends has been posting stories of police brutality and protests accompanied by personal statements of outrage. Another group has been remarking on the disgusting revelations from the Senate Intelligence Committee's CIA torture report and the need for accountability. There is little overlap between the two groups, and yet the common threads between the U.S.' foreign and domestic policies are disturbingly uncanny.

Whether on the streets of Baghdad or Ferguson, soldiers and militarized police forces have historically enforced control, not law. Behind the prison walls of Guantanamo and Texas, some authorities have tortured and brutalized rather than interrogated. They have not protected nor served; they have attacked and killed. They have not gathered intelligence; they have violated people's humanity.

I am an immigrant to the United States. The names of those killed and tortured in Iraq and Afghanistan invoke in my imagination people who look like me, people I could have known, who could be my family. In the faces of those killed and tortured in Ferguson and Los Angeles, I see my neighbors and friends, people I know and love and think of as family. These are not separate and distinct. The pain I feel while reading the CIA report is as strong as the grief that comes from perusing the images of unarmed people of color who have been killed by U.S. police. The U.S. tortures and imprisons people of color both at home and abroad.