❖ Syria won’t allow a chemical weapons investigation team into the country.

❖ Rogoff and Reinhart (Kenneth and Carmen, respectively) have responded to the criticism from Univ of Massachusetts researchers. This is a key controversy, since Rogoff and Reinhart’s work is used to justify Austerity USA. Yves Smith: “The experts have been shown to be wildly wrong, and any decision to follow their faulty analysis now rests squarely on Obama and his fellow travelers.”

❖ “How Congress undercuts the Postal Service”, with help from ALEC, the Koch Brothers, and FedEx.

❖ While North Korea was celebrating the 101st birthday of founder Kim Il-sung, people in South Korea were protesting against North Korea. Consequently, North Korea “has issued new threats against South Korea, vowing ‘sledgehammer blows’ of retaliation if South Korea does not apologise”.

❖ We the people aren’t allowed to see the “6,000-page Senate report on the CIA’s use of extraordinary rendition and” torture. But we now have the 577-page Constitution Project’s report, which concludes: “[T]here never before had been ‘the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, proprietary and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.’” New details presented.

❖ That eleventy-seven dimensional chess game is working out just great: “Republicans embrace Obama’s offer to trim Social Security benefits”.

❖ “UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned the crisis on the Korean peninsula may become ‘uncontrollable’.”

❖ Lawyers for Guantanamo Bay prisoners are now being notified if one of their clients is “being force-fed to prevent them from starving to death”.

❖ KPMG, “accountancy giant” is “rocked by damaging allegations that one of its senior US partners had leaked confidential information.”

❖ Gen. James Mattis, US Central Command: “Afghan national security forces will be equipped with drone capabilities”.

❖ The F-35A ready for training? “Is. Isn’t. That about sums up the latest kerfluffle between the Pentagon’s top operational tester . . . the Air Force and its Joint Program Office.”

❖ “Whistleblower: Wells Fargo Fabricated and Altered Mortgage Documents on a Mass Basis”–despite claiming it “had a ‘rigorous system’ to ensure that mortgage documents were accurate and complete.” Why do whistleblowers have to do all the heavy lifting and run the risks?

❖ New York City may “Move Back to Lever Voting Machines For September Elections”.

❖ Bill Black on “Why the World Economic Forum and Goldman Sachs Are Capitalism’s Worst Enemies”

❖ “A brand new conservative group calling itself Americans for a Strong Defense and financed by anonymous donors is running advertisements urging Democratic senators . . . to vote against Chuck Hagel . . . [as] secretary of defense”. There’s another new, anonymously funded, anti-LGTB group called Use Your Mandate

❖ “Bad pharma: Drug research riddled with half truths, omissions, lies: Industry-funded trials are too common, can’t be trusted–and bring pills to market that likely don’t work.” 85% of 500+ trials that were industry-funded had positive outcomes, compared to 50% of government-funded ones–even though negative results from trials are frequently suppressed. Such issues are very relevant to today’s gun control debate.

❖ “Senate Democratic leaders described House Republicans as in “‘full-on retreat’ on fiscal policy” since Republicans agreed to raise the debt limit and didn’t try to match the debt ceiling increase with spending cuts.

❖ House Representative John Lewis (D-GA) is among several Democrats in the House who are reintroducing a voting rights bill. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) is doing so in the Senate.

❖ Pentagon head Leon Panetta is lifting the military ban on women in combat.

❖ Mussolini bought Vatican recognition of his regime–a sum that’s since grown to its present £500m+ and has been used to purchase UK, Paris and Swiss properties. But the Vatican doesn’t do such purchases openly, relying instead on shadowy entities–and offshore tax havens. JP Morgan is also involved.

❖ “Former Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) [is now] chief executive officer of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners”, responsible for implementing the Affordable Care Act. He’ll also be “advising” a K-street outfit, Agenda–which is exempt from the requirement that two years must elapse before former senators can be hired by lobbying firms.

❖ That recent West Point right-wing domestic terrorism report has hit a nerve. E.g., according to David Sirota, the report “exposes the depths of conservatives’ denial”, such as accepting reports of Muslim security threats without concern “for the whole ‘innocent until proven guilty’ stuff” but reacting to being identified as a security threat themselves by “insisting that the Big Bad Government is wrongly demonizing them.”

❖ The “Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued two orders to JP Morgan Chase” related to two failures–the big whale one and anti-money laundering compliance. That’s bad enough, but Emptywheel follows through on the markedly different treatment accorded Jamie Dimon and regular people like Karen Gasparian, “the manager of the G&A Check Cashing company” who got a 5-year sentence “for doing precisely what Jamie Dimon did”. Don’t miss.

❖ What happened the last time the US didn’t raise the debt ceiling (1979, “and we shouldn’t do it again.”)

❖ Germany is rounding up and bringing home some of its gold, including some 1,500 tons of it at the Federal Reserve in NY.

❖ Wal-Mart’s promise to hire veterans, in context: Wal-Mart pays sales associates $8.81/hour ($10.30 at Sam’s Club); has a 37% employee turnover rate; and the tax credit for hiring veterans was extended into 2013.

❖ “5 Creepy New Ways for Police to Intrude on Your Rights: Handcuffs that give shocks? Mobile iris scan readers? Thanks to Homeland Security cash, police departments are stocking up on all kinds of creepy new technologies.”

❖ Proof that capitalism works for those special few: Meg Whitman will be paid more than $15m for her first year on the job as Hewlett-Packard’s CEO. Also on Meg’s first year on the job, “HP lost nearly $13 billion for the fiscal year, revenue slipped, and the shares lost nearly half of their value”.

❖ Guess who’s a lead sponsor of the biggest gun trade show on the planet.

❖ Teachers at Seattle’s Garfield High School are protesting giving the Measure of Academic Progress test to their students. Already there is interest growing at Ballard High, online petitions and so forth. More on Garfield High.