The Supreme Court ruled on the Affordable Care Act Thursday, determining the individual mandate was a tax.
Watch live analysis on MSNBC, broadcast June 28.
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Watch lawmakers react live on MSNBC, broadcast June 28.
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The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the most anticipated case this season: Whether the Affordable Care Act, or specifically the individual mandate, is constitutional. WPWC 1480AM DC’s Main Street Talk Radio is broadcasting live from the steps of the Supreme Court.
The British government wants to expand its powers to monitor email exchanges and website visits, The Sunday Times newspaper reported.
Internet companies would be instructed to install hardware to allow the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) -- Britain's electronic "listening" agency" -- to go through "on demand" every text message and email sent, websites accessed and phone calls made "in real time, the broadsheet said.
The plans are expected to be unveiled next month.
The Home Office said ministers were preparing to legislate "as soon as parliamentary time allows" but said the data to be monitored would not include content.
"It is vital that police and security services are able to obtaincommunications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public," a spokesman said.
"We need to take action to maintain the continued availability of communications data as technology changes.
"Communications data includes time, duration and dialling numbers of a phone call, or an email address.
"It does not include the content of any phone call or email and it is not the intention of government to make changes to the existing legal basis for the interception of communications."
An attempt to bring in similar measures was abandoned by the former Labour government in 2006 amid strong opposition.
However, ministers in the current Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government believe it is essential that the police and security services have access to such communications data in order to tackle terrorism and protect the public.
The plans would not allow GCHQ to access the content of communications without a warrant.
However, they would enable the agency to trace whom a group or individual had contacted, how often and for how long, the report said.
A restaurant called "The Heart Attack Grilled" finally earned its name on Saturday when a customer eating one of their Triple Bypass Burgers had a cardiac arrest.
"At the time of the incident I was performing bypass procedures on other patients," restaurant owner Jon Basso told Raw Story. "My 'head' nurse informed me that one of our patients was having an actual heart attack."
Basso comes to work dressed as a "doctor" and his waitresses wear sexy nurse costumes, but on this night they had to call in trained medical professionals.
"The paramedics were immediately contacted and to our grateful surprise were on the scene within minutes. With great professionalism they quickly ushered the man to a nearby Las Vegas hospital."
Amateur video obtained by KVVU showed EMTs wheeling the man out of the restaurant.
The Heart Attack Grill prides itself on food that many would consider unhealthy. The Triple Bypass Burger has 1.5 pounds of beef and up to 15 slices of bacon. The Quadruple Bypass Burger has two pounds of beef and up to 20 slices of bacon. According to the menu, their French fries are cooked in "pure lard" and non-filtered cigarettes are available for purchase.
Meals can easily reach over 8,000 calories and customers over 350 pounds eat free.
"This restaurant is bad for your health," reads a large sign on the door, but that hasn't deterred the diners.
"It says right on the door, it's hazardous to your health," CJ Beeman pointed out to KVVU on Tuesday as he ate his burger.
Watch this video from KVVU, broadcast Feb. 14, 2012.
Photo: heartattackgrill.com
(H/T: Gawker)
Britons may soon drink more beer at home than in the nation's cherished pubs, The Daily Telegraph newspaper reported Monday, with one industry body blaming the supermarkets for undercutting them.
Drinkers are close to consuming more beer from supermarkets, it said, citing figures from the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) trade body.
In the 1970s, more than 90 percent of beer was bought from pubs, clubs and bars, the broadsheet said.
The ratio fell to 50.9 percent at the end of last year, with 49.1 percent being bought in shops.
"It should cross over in the near future," a BBPA spokesman told the Telegraph.
The BBPA blames the fall on the supermarkets, which sell beer at a loss that can be made up on other products. Pubs do not have that option.
Meanwhile the GMB trade union said Monday that a pint of lager was 80 pence ($1.27, 93 euro cents) higher and ale 65 pence more expensive than could be justified by rises in inflation and tax changes since 1987.
It blamed the "sky high" rents charged by pub-owning companies.
The Campaign for Real Ale says that around 25 pubs were closing every week as supermarkets undercut them, with the price difference sometimes as high as seven to one.
An animal rights group urged the Philippines to free what is thought to be the world's largest crocodile in captivity, even though it allegedly killed two people.
The monster 21-foot (6.4-metre) male saltwater crocodile was placed in a penned pond after it was caught in a remote southern creek on September 3, with officials planning to use it as a tourist attraction once it adapts to its cage.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals senior Asia-Pacific campaigner Ashley Fruno on Saturday said that despite suspicion it is a man-eater, the reptile was better off being returned to the wild, away from human settlements.
"(The government) should do the compassionate thing and order this crocodile to be returned to his natural habitat, as taking him away to be locked up in an animal prison is just plain wrong," she wrote to AFP.
Penned animals are prone to psychotic behaviour and its immense size and power could prove dangerous to visitors and those caring for it, she warned.
"While even those zoos with the best intentions can never replicate the natural environment of animals, how do they expect to come remotely close with a crocodile roughly two or three times the size of a regular adult?"
The 1,075-kilogramme (2,370-pound) beast is suspected of eating a local man who went missing in July in the southern town of Bunawan, and of killing a 12-year-old girl whose head was bitten off in 2009.
Rollie Sumiller, who led the team that trapped the animal, earlier told AFP removing from the wild a huge reptile suspected of attacking humans was the correct thing to do.
He could not be reached for comment Saturday.
The Philippine specimen is bigger than the previous largest captive saltwater crocodile, which the Guinness World Records website lists as a 5.48-metre (18-foot) male that lives at an Australian nature park.
Press reports say the former had not eaten anything for a week.
In the wild the species is known to survive without food for months after a meal.
Some 500 bodies still remain to be uncovered from hidden graves in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, a non-governmental group told reporters on Tuesday.
Isabel Miranda de Wallace said her NGO, which fights Mexico's rampant kidnapping, had gathered data from a recent visit to San Fernando, a small town near the US border, including interviews with gang suspects.
The region is largely dominated by the notorious Zetas gang -- which controls drug trafficking routes into Mexico's northern neighbor -- and has been the site of numerous massacres over the past year.
A total of 193 bodies have already been uncovered from clandestine graves around San Fernando in recent months, in the same area that saw the massacre of 72 migrants last year.
More than 41,000 people have died in violence linked to Mexico's organized crime gangs since President Felipe Calderon launched a military crackdown on them in December 2006, according to media counts and official figures.
Author: If Americans want a truly free network, 'we've got to build it from scratch'
Secrets outlet WikiLeaks' continuing struggle to remain online in the face of corporate and government censorship is a striking example of something few truly realize: that the Internet is not and never has been democratically controlled, a media studies professor commented to Raw Story.
"[T]he stuff that goes on on the Internet does not go on because the authorties can't stop it," Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age and Life, Inc.: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How to Take it Back", said. "It goes on because the authorities are choosing what to stop and what not to stop."
Rushkoff told Raw Story that the authorities have the ability to quash cyber dissent due to the Internet's original design, as a top-down, authoritarian device with a centralized indexing system.
Essentially, all one needs to halt a rogue site is to delete its address from the domain name system registry.
"This is not rocket science," said Rushkoff, who also teaches media studies at The New School University in Manhattan.
For example, the Dutch teenager arrested Thursday for helping to organize a denial of service attack on an 'Operation Payback' online chatroom: "They just took him off. He had his own server, and they just go, 'Oh, nip this one!'" Rushkoff said.
This is why, he noted in a recent CNN editorial, the actual threat to PayPal, Visa, MasterCard and Amazon last week were "vastly overstated" in most media.
"The forces of bottom-up anarchy have reached a similar impasse, and the authorities of the Internet have once again demonstrated their ability to fend off any genuine peer-to-peer activity," he explained. "This is a tightly controlled network, and you know, that's why I think the Chinese do have it right in that they understand, 'Oh, we can control this thing. We just censor the fuck out of it."
"[The general public] didn't realize that the only difference is now we can see that we've been censored."
Rushkoff said that until the recent WikiLeaks attacks, no one has talked about plans to create truly democratic, peer-to-peer alternatives to the Internet's centralized domain index since political activist Paul Garrin's work in the mid-to-late 1990s.
Garrin's anti-trust lawsuit NAME.SPACE v. Network Solutions, Inc. paved the way to lower domain registration costs by breaking up the monopoly-based domain name registration system into a wholesale-retail market.
"What [Garrin] showed was that if you don't want to use the domain name servers that are officially in charge of the net, you can create your own network of domain name servers," Rushkoff explained.
"You can set up your computer to look them up instead of the official ones where we can create our own names database, so I could be 'Douglas.Rushkoff,'" he said. "You know, we could have any name we want. It's arbitrary and artificial that they've limited domain at top-level registers to what they have. I mean, they have their reasons for it, of course, but it's artificial."
Most people, he said, would rather "just stream Steve Jobs' authorized movies" than connect to an open public space that would almost certainly become demonized as a haven for terrorism and lawlessness.
"If we want to have a true peer-to-peer network, we now understand what it might look like," Rushkoff said. "If you want to have something real, we've got to build it from scratch."
With editing by Stephen C. Webster.
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