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    Matt Sledge

    Matt Sledge

    Contributor

  • FBI Arrests 3 Brooklyn Men Suspected Of Planning To Join ISIS

    Three Brooklyn men who allegedly planned to join the Islamic State were arrested Wednesday by the FBI. The Department of Justice said in a press release that two of the suspects planned to return to New York and carry out a terror attack if they failed to join up with the Islamic militant group, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Authorities identified the men, all residents of Brooklyn, as Abdurasul Hasanovich Juraboev, 24, Akhror Saidakhmetov, 19, and Abror Habibov, 30.

  • 'It Could Have Been Any One Of Us': Thousands Across Country Honor Slain Muslim Students

    Thousands of people gathered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Wednesday to pay tribute to the three young Muslims who were killed by a neighbor a day earlier. The gathering was held at a central meeting space on UNC's campus. In a show of solidarity, some of those who attended were students from nearby arch-rival Duke University.

  • Tens Of Thousands March On NYPD Headquarters To Protest Police Killings

    A large labor union contingent was present, including members of the Communications Workers of America wearing red shirts and AFL-CIO supporters waving blue signs. The NYPD told The Huffington Post that, as of the official end of the march, no arrests had been made. Protesters held up 8 panels depicting Eric Garner's eyes, created by an artist known as JR.

  • Long-Simmering Anger Over Police Violence Erupts At St. Louis Forum

    This article was made possible in part by HuffPost readers through their support of the Ferguson Fellowship. ST. LOUIS, Mo. -- It was roughly two hours into the forum on Tuesday night, hosted in a college auditorium by local hip-hop station HOT 104.1, when Cary Ball Sr. decided he had heard enough. Ball, a large man wearing a plain white T-shirt, gray fitted baseball cap and cargo shorts, was here to attend a discussion about the issues raised in the wake of the death of an unarmed, black 18-year-old in the nearby suburb of Ferguson earlier this month.

  • Michael Brown Funeral Filled With Cries For Justice

    A massive crowd gathered at the Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church on this brilliantly sunny day to grieve an 18-year-old they called "Mike Mike," whose death at the hands of a police officer has sparked huge protests in the small city of Ferguson over the past two weeks. Michael Brown, who was black and unarmed, was shot by Police Officer Darren Wilson, 28, on Aug. 9. Brown's death and the protests that followed have put a spotlight on police violence, militarization of local law enforcement and racial profiling.

  • Relax. DOJ Lawyer Says NSA Data Sweeps Are Just Like Stop-And-Frisk

    A top Justice Department lawyer said on Tuesday that the "relatively low" standard the NSA uses to decide whether it can search its massive phone records database is good enough -- because it's the same one cops apply before they stop and frisk a suspect. Deputy Attorney General James Cole's argument before the House Intelligence Committee was supposed to be reassuring. When the NSA is searching phone records, Cole argued, a "reasonable, articulable suspicion" that someone is connected to terrorism is sufficient.

  • NYPD Officer Speaks Out Against Stop And Frisk

    A New York City police officer is speaking out against the department's stop-and-frisk policy in a new video. Adhyl Polanco, an officer since 2005, has become an outspoken critic of the NYPD's policy, which critics say disproportionately targets blacks and Latinos for police stops. "This is not what I became a cop for," Polanco says of stop and frisk in the video, which was produced by the reform advocacy group Communities United for Police Reform and released on YouTube on Monday.

  • John Boehner Says U.S. On 'Path' To Default

    House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said on Sunday that the country was on a path toward default if President Barack Obama continues to refuse to negotiate over raising the debt limit. Appearing on ABC's "This Week," host George Stephanopoulos asked Boehner, "If [Obama] continues to refuse to negotiate, the country is going to default"? "That's the path we're on," Boehner replied.

  • Ted Cruz: Shutdown Battle Has 'Not Remotely' Hurt GOP's Image

    Speaking on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) rejected the suggestion that members of his own party are unhappy with him for pursuing a fight over Obamacare into a government shutdown. Asked by host Candy Crowley whether his actions have "hurt the Republican Party brand," Ted Cruz said no. "Not remotely, but I also think far too many people are worried about politics" in the shutdown fight, Cruz said.

  • Treasury Secretary: GOP Debt Ceiling Strategy Is 'Reckless'

    Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said Republicans in Congress are "playing with fire" and that there is "no option" available for the president if they refuse to raise the debt ceiling. Some Republicans have suggested that once the debt ceiling is breached, President Barack Obama could take action on his own to prevent the country from entering into default, triggering cascading world financial problems. But with the debt ceiling deadline set for later this month, Lew said Sunday morning on CNN's "State of the Union" that "there is no option preventing us from being in default if we don't have the cash to pay our bills."

  • Govt. Tries To Wall Off NSA Surveillance From Challenge

    The government is arguing in the terrorism case that serves as the National Security Agency's primary public justification for its bulk collection of telephone records that criminal defendants have no constitutional right to challenge the agency's sweeping surveillance program. In a filing made Sept. 30, U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy of the Southern District of California contends that only the telephone companies have a Fourth Amendment interest in their call records -- and therefore that Basaaly Moalin cannot challenge his conviction for providing material support to the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab. Moalin is a Somali immigrant and San Diego cab driver convicted in February with three other defendants of sending $8,500 to al-Shabaab.

  • Ted Cruz Says Obama Is 'Playing Politics' With Shutdown's Impact On NSA

    Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Wednesday that intelligence community leaders' testimony about the impact of the government shutdown was "deeply disturbing," accusing Obama of "playing politics" with national security. "The person who should be most out front correcting this is our commander in chief, and I don't believe President Obama should be playing politics with this," Cruz said at a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on the National Security Agency's intelligence collection.

  • Senator on NSA: 'We Get More In The Newspapers Than In Classified Briefings'

    The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee complained Wednesday at an oversight hearing that he learns more about the NSA's programs in the newspapers than in classified briefings. Asking whether a New York Times article last week about the agency's use of social network analysis of metadata was accurate, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) complained that he had never heard of the program. "We sometimes find we get far more in the newspapers -- we get crossword puzzles as well -- we get more in the newspapers than in classified briefings," Leahy said.

  • Prison Phone Call Company To File Lawsuit Against FCC

    The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday released its rules for a recently approved reduction in prison phone call rates. Advocates had been holding their breath awaiting the official FCC order since the agency voted on Aug. 9 to create rate caps on the eye-popping fees third-party phone companies charge inmates to call families and friends. The rules will now head to the White House Office of Management and Budget and will go into effect 90 days after OMB publishes them in the Federal Register -- but only if the prison phone companies are unable to stop them first.

  • Did Senators Grill NSA Chief? Mostly No

    Gen. Keith Alexander defended the National Security Agency and derided the press in the Senate Intelligence Committee's first public hearing since Edward Snowden's revelations began. The NSA chief said that "sensational headlines" have fooled the public into believing the agency invades Americans' privacy, and he suggested that the Snowden leaks have already pushed the agency to change the way it operates. Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper were speaking before a mostly friendly meeting of the Intelligence Committee chaired by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

  • Senator Suggests That The NSA Has Tracked Cell Phone Location Data

    Wyden was facing off with NSA Director Keith Alexander in a rare public meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Wyden asked whether the agency has ever collected, or made plans to collect, records of the cell sites mobile phones connect with. Alexander first referred Wyden to a classified, written answer that accompanied a public letter from July, which said the NSA was "not currently" receiving cell site location data.

  • Surveillance Court Asked To Open Up

    A civil liberties group is asking the secretive court that oversees the National Security Agency's surveillance programs to open up its deliberations to the public. In a Wednesday letter, Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to force the government to provide a public briefing to the entire court the next time it seeks to reauthorize its bulk collection of telephone records. "This is a serious and different kind of issue than the FISA court usually looks at, because it goes to the broader interpretation of the statute that hasn't been interpreted on this issue by other courts," Martin said of the phone records collecting.

  • Four Senators Push 'Real, Not Cosmetic' NSA Reform

    A bipartisan group of senators announced a comprehensive surveillance reform bill on Wednesday, but their effort may encounter resistance from the powerful Intelligence Committee chairwoman, who steadfastly supports the National Security Agency. The legislation "expresses our bipartisan view of what Congress must do to enact real, not cosmetic, intelligence reform," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Intelligence Committee. Wyden was joined by fellow committee member Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and by Sens.

  • Former Inmate Takes On Prison System For Trying To Quash Speech

    Former Earth Liberation Front member Daniel McGowan took the first step toward a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Prisons on Tuesday, filing a $200,000 claim over an April incident in which he was jailed for writing a Huffington Post column. On April 4, 2013, McGowan was taken from a halfway house, where he was serving out the final months of a seven-year sentence, and sent to a Brooklyn jail for roughly a day and a half. Three days before, he had published a HuffPost blog post about the years he spent in two secretive federal prison units designed to severely restrict inmates' contact with the outside world.

  • New FBI Director Must End 'Unchecked Abuse Of Authority,' Rights Group Says

    FBI Director James Comey should reverse sweeping government surveillance practices begun since the Sept. 11 attacks that encroach on civilians' constitutional rights, the American Civil Liberties Union asserted in a report. "FBI abuse of power must be met with efforts of reform, just as much now as in the days of J. Edgar Hoover," the report, to be issued on Tuesday, said. It recommended that the president, the attorney general and Congress tighten surveillance guidelines and exercise vigorous oversight.