Amnesty International USA urged the inspector general for the Justice Department to investigate why the department has failed to examine human rights violations documented in the Senate report on CIA torture. In a letter dated September 21, AIUSA alleges the Justice Department failed to review evidence regarding the department’s role in human rights violations, which were committed by the CIA.

Last week, the New York City Council sent eight bills to Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s desk aimed at bringing greater transparency to the city’s jails. The wave of legislation was introduced this past spring and its passage marks the latest efforts by the city to reign in the brutal culture of violence and impunity that has reigned inside its jails for years.

“Lebanon is brutally capitalist in its structures … all public infrastructures are run privately,” one analyst tells MintPress. “And so what you see today as a ‘revolution’ against the establishment is really a denunciation of Western capitalism.”

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A Moroccan released from Guantanamo Bay prison was blindfolded and shackled during his flight to Morocco, where he remains in detention, according to his attorney. Younis Abdurrahman Chekkouri, who was detained for 13 years, was repatriated to Morocco last week. Moroccan authorities did not immediately release him.

The law firm that employs John W. White, husband of Mary Jo White, Chairperson of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), has changed its marketing material after being scrutinized for the way the firm advertised its connections to regulators. The firm, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, was trumpeting John White’s work for an advisory group to the influential Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) just as Mary Jo White, in her capacity as SEC chair, is considering candidates to lead the PCAOB.

Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), has introduced legislation to abolish aspects of the prison industrial-complex. However, despite being touted as a private prison abolition bill, it would still leave some areas of corrections open to contractors. On September 17, Sanders joined Representatives Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), Keith Ellison (D-Minn.)

Despite ample evidence pointing to the therapeutic, non-addictive qualities of marijuana, the new head of the Drug Enforcement Agency wants to keep it legally classified alongside heroin and other highly addictive substances. “If we come up with a medical use for it, that would be wonderful. But we haven’t,” declared Chuck Rosenberg, the acting head of the Drug Enforcement Agency, in an interview with Fox News.