Shawn Atleo: Tories Must Choose 'Collaboration Or Collision' With First Nations

OTTAWA - The Harper government must choose between "collaboration or collision" with Canada's Aboriginal Peoples when it comes to proposed energy projects, the head of the Assembly of First Nations warned Thursday.

First Nations must be a part of any energy projects that affect them or their lands, and will not back down if they feel their rights are not being respected, Shawn Atleo said in an interview.

"We will stand firm in our rights. We will have a say," he said.

Shawn Atleo: Tories Must Choose 'Collaboration Or Collision' With First Nations

OTTAWA - The Harper government must choose between "collaboration or collision" with Canada's Aboriginal Peoples when it comes to proposed energy projects, the head of the Assembly of First Nations warned Thursday.

First Nations must be a part of any energy projects that affect them or their lands, and will not back down if they feel their rights are not being respected, Shawn Atleo said in an interview.

"We will stand firm in our rights. We will have a say," he said.

David Anderson, Tory MP, Lobbies CRTC On Sun News Case In Possible Ethics Violation

OTTAWA - A Conservative parliamentary secretary has intervened in the federal broadcast regulator's deliberations on carriage of all-news services — just months after three colleagues landed in trouble for sending letters to the same court-like body.

In his Sept. 4 letter to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Saskatchewan MP David Anderson urges the regulator to take a "much more market driven approach" to both news and entertainment channels.

This Vulture-Fund Billionaire Is the GOP's Go-To Guy on Wall Street

When Republicans make their pilgrimages to Wall Street for money to help take back the Senate next year, there may be no hotter ticket than a party at Paul Singer's. The 69-year-old hedge fund billionaire's co-op apartment at the Beresford, a hulking Italian Renaissance building on Central Park West whose celebrity residents have included Jerry Seinfeld, Glenn Close, and Helen Gurley Brown, can draw scads of high-finance players. The haul for a dinner event has been known to run to $1.4 million, and Singer himself has no trouble writing a $1 million check to a super-PAC. He's been described as a "fundraising terrorist" for his persistence in twisting arms, a skill that has helped drive a major strategic shift among Big Finance donors, who favored Obama in 2008 but now overwhelmingly back the GOP.

Robert Reich on his Turn as Film Star in ‘Inequality for All’

Throughout his forty-six-year career, Robert Reich has been an academic, an author, a candidate for governor, an adviser to presidents, the secretary of labor and a merry-eyed agitator. With the September 27 release of his documentary Inequality for All, he adds “film star” to his résumé. On a recent morning, we sat down to talk about the movie and the subject that seems to have become something of a mission for him. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.     —Lizzy Ratner

Glenn Greenwald Faces Off With 'Newsnight' Interviewer In Hostile Clash

Glenn Greenwald faced off against BBC journalist Kirsty Wark in a deeply hostile interview on Thursday night's edition of "Newsnight."

Wark unabashedly made the case for the prosecution, interrogating Greenwald about his reporting and Edward Snowden. Some of her questions:

"Why should you be the arbiter about what is in the public interest and what is vital to national security?"

"It is very possible that you actually, by your actions, make it easier for terrorists to understand how to evade all the checks that are made on them online."

"There is vast amounts of material I gather that you have that still has not been reviewed at the moment. Do you have this? Is it in your bedroom in Rio?"

AmeriCorps VISTA Members: At Work With No Pay During the Shutdown

During their years of national service, AmeriCorps members deal with long hours and little pay—and that’s when the federal government is working. Due to the government shutdown, members of the AmeriCorps VISTA program are receiving no pay—and are still required to show up at work.
 
While several government agencies have furloughed workers, AmeriCorps VISTA members, around 8,000 Americans working to fight poverty, are among the federal workers who must continue working for no compensation. Even worse, VISTA members are prohibited from taking a second job to supplement their income, leaving some members short on rent payments and food.

Obama Pins Shutdown Blame On John Boehner

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama laid the blame for the government's partial shutdown at the feet of House Speaker John Boehner, escalating a government-shutdown confrontation that was leading headlong into a potentially more damaging clash over the nation's borrowing authority.

Speaking at a construction company in Washington's Maryland suburbs Thursday, Obama cast Boehner as a captive of a small band of conservative Republicans who want to extract concessions in exchange for passing a short term spending bill that would restart the partially shuttered government.

Darkness in Washington

Ryan Lizza’s excellent Daily Comment last week explained the lay of the American political landscape in the clearest possible terms, backed up by numbers: a faction of congressional Republicans, many, if not most, in the South, representing ideologically extreme, heavily white districts that were drawn by Republican-controlled state legislatures after the 2010 elections so as to keep those seats Republican in perpetuum, have their party in a chokehold—and with it, at the moment, the federal government. Eighty House members, Lizza wrote, barely a third of the Republican caucus, most of them new to Congress, forced Speaker John Boehner to reverse his public position and refuse to fund the government after September 30th unless Democrats agreed to gut the Affordable Care Act.

Supreme Court rejects citizens' request to change nationality from 'Jewish' to 'Israeli'

The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a request by a group of Israelis to declare that they were members of the Israeli people and to allow them to change the ethnic registration on their identity cards from “Jewish” to “Israeli.”

The court ruled that the issue was not one for the court to decide and that there was no proof of the existence of a uniquely “Israeli” people. The court’s ruling echoed that in a similar case 40 years ago.