96% Stories We Tell

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Stories We Tell is not just very moving; it is an exploration of truth and fiction that will stay with you long after repeated viewings.

Part of the movie's pleasure is how comfortable the "storytellers" are with their director; you get a sense of a complicated but tight-knit family, going along with Sarah's project because they love her.

Never sentimental, never cold and never completely sure of anything, Polley comes across as a woman caught in wonder.

After you see it, you'll be practically exploding with questions - and with awe.

Stories We Tell is just the latest reminder of nonfiction film's current, endlessly innovative state. That's a story worth savoring.

The films greatest achievement is in how deeply mesmerising one woman's story can be, regardless of whether she's famous or not.

Honestly, it's one of the best things you'll see this year.

Polley's fearless personal journey is a huge achievement, a genuine revelation - but the less detail you know beforehand, the better. Go in cold, come out warmed.

Sarah Polley is often referred to in Canada as a 'national treasure'. She's far more than that. She's a treasure to the world - period. And so, finally, is her film.

An absorbing exercise not only in documentary excavation but in narrative construction.

Sarah Polley's exploration of her tangled family history is a complex and thoroughly fascinating inquiry into the nature of truth and memory -- and, inevitably, into Polley herself.

This is simply a gorgeously realised and warmly compiled family album, which lingers with us not because its subjects are so unusual and alien, but because they feel so close to home. What a success.

Sarah Polley's personal "documentary" suffers from one additional emotional beat too many. Otherwise, it's mesmerizing.

Polley interviews her family and acquaintances with remarkable candor and intimacy, perhaps as a method of catharsis, but it never feels like a vanity project or a simple airing of dirty laundry.

The great conceit of Polley's theories of perspective and truth is that she, as director, ultimately controlled everyone's memories because she arranged them on film.

As with her other films, when Sarah Polley takes it upon herself to tell us a story, you can bet it's a tale well-told and one that you'll want to hear.

What Stories We Tell does so brilliantly is both tell the story and tell about how we tell our stories. The truth may not be out there.

This is a warm, brave and thought-provoking piece of autobiography.

Stories We Tell shows us that the truth and the way its told are two very different things. Polley's wonderful documentary honors both by preferring neither.

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/stories_we_tell/

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White House: Russia has 'legal basis' to expel Snowden

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The White House says Russia has a "clear legal basis" to expel National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden and is asking them to do so without delay.

National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden says even without an extradition treaty, Russia should expel him to face espionage charges in the United States.

Hayden's statement Tuesday came after Russian President Vladimir Putin bluntly rejected the request for extradition and said Snowden is free to travel wherever he wants.

Hayden said the White House agrees with Putin that they don't want the issue to negatively impact their bilateral relations. But she said they are asking for Snowden's extradition to build upon their law enforcement cooperation, particularly since the Boston Marathon bombing.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/white-house-asks-russia-expel-snowden-181644256.html

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High court to hear Obama recess appointments case

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Supreme Court on Monday waded into a major constitutional clash between President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans that could fundamentally limit a president's use of recess appointments to fill high-level administration posts.

The justices will review a federal appeals court ruling that found Obama overstepped his authority when he bypassed the Senate last year to fill three vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board.

The case ? to be decided next term ? highlights the growing partisanship that has led GOP lawmakers to stall or filibuster several of Obama's choices to head federal agencies that Republicans distrust. That includes nominees to the labor board, which has issued several union-friendly decisions, and the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The Constitution gives the president the power to make temporary appointments to fill positions that otherwise require confirmation by the Senate, but only when the Senate is in recess.

At issue for the Supreme Court: What constitutes a congressional recess and does it matter when a vacancy occurs?

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., held earlier this year that recess appointments can be made only during the once-a-year break between sessions of Congress. Two judges on the panel also ruled ? for the first time ? that a vacancy must occur while the Senate is away in order to be filled during the same break.

If the Supreme Court agrees, it would make it nearly impossible for a president to use the recess power, giving the opposition party in Congress the ability to block administration nominees indefinitely.

"Should they uphold the D.C. Circuit, it would be a major blow to presidential power," said Sanford Levinson, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas. "The rationale for recess appointments in the modern world is much more the ability of the president to staff his administration in the face of Senate hostility."

Obama has made relatively few recess appointments, 32 in his four-plus years in office, according to the Congressional Research Service. Bush made 171 such appointments and President Bill Clinton filled 139 posts that way in their eight years in office, the research service said.

The Obama administration argues the ruling is a radical departure from precedent that would invalidate hundreds of recess appointments made by presidents of both parties over more than 100 years. Those appointments include "three Cabinet secretaries, five court of appeals judges, 10 district court judges, a director of Central Intelligence, a chairman of the Federal Reserve, numerous members of multi-member boards, and holders of a variety of other critical government posts," Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said in his petition to the Supreme Court.

But all 45 Republicans in the Senate ? led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky? have filed a friend of the court brief asserting that Obama "made an unprecedented power grab" by making the recess picks.

The nature of the president's actions, during brief Senate breaks that Congress explicitly said were not formal recesses, is driving the current legal controversy.

The case stems from Obama's decision to fill the three NLRB vacancies on Jan. 4, 2012, with Congress on an extended holiday break. At the same time, however, the Senate held brief, pro forma sessions every few days as part of the Republicans' explicit strategy of keeping Obama from filling vacancies through recess appointments. The president also used a recess appointment to install Richard Cordray as head of the financial protection agency, a nomination the GOP had blocked for a year and a half.

In taking up the case, the court said it would also consider the narrower question of whether recess appointments can be made during pro forma sessions ? where one senator gavels in and out for a few minutes every three days. The appeals court did not address the issue of how short a break can count as a recess.

The case challenging the appointments was brought by Noel Canning, a Washington state bottling company, which claimed an NLRB decision against it was not valid because the board members were not properly appointed and that the board did not have enough members to do business without the improperly appointed officials.

Since the Canning decision, a second federal appeals court in Philadelphia issued a similar opinion finding that recess appointments can be made only between sessions of the Senate. But on three earlier occasions, federal appeals courts have upheld recess appointments.

If the latest rulings stand, they could invalidate more than 1,600 NLRB decisions, and call into question the legitimacy of enforcement actions by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, many of which affect the mortgage industry.

The NLRB would effectively be shut down as a ruling against the administration would leave the board with only one member, and it needs three to conduct business.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau likewise would have to cease all investigations against mortgage lenders and other financial entities.

"It's going to be sheer chaos," said Alan Kaplinsky, a consumer financial services attorney based in Philadelphia. "If the court determines it was not valid, then literally almost every act taken by the CFPB since January 2012 will be under a huge cloud of uncertainty."

Obama used the recess appointment to install Deputy Labor Secretary Sharon Block, union lawyer Richard Griffin and NLRB counsel Terence Flynn to fill vacancies on the labor board, giving it a full contingent for the first time in more than a year. Block and Griffin are Democrats, while Flynn is a Republican. Flynn stepped down from the board last year.

The parties' roles were reversed when a Republican President George W. Bush was in the White House and Democrats controlled the Senate in the final two years of Bush's presidency. Then, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid employed the same tactic of convening the Senate every few days to keep Bush from filling vacancies through recess appointments. Unlike Obama, Bush did not press the issue.

___

Associated Press writer Mark Sherman contributed to this report.

___

Follow Sam Hananel on Twitter: http://twitter.com/SamHananelAP

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-06-24-Supreme%20Court-Recess%20Appointments/id-e54db3991a7d42119912fd81352668d2

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Veterans' uphill road back, struggle with suicide

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Five years ago, Joe Miller, then an Army Ranger captain with three Iraq tours under his belt, sat inside his home near Fort Bragg holding a cocked Beretta 40mm, and prepared to kill himself.

He didn't pull the trigger. So Miller's name wasn't added to the list of active-duty U.S. military men and women who have committed suicide. That tally reached 350 last year, a record pace of nearly one a day. That's more than the 295 American troops who were killed in Afghanistan in the same year.

"I didn't see any hope for me at the time. Everything kind of fell apart," Miller said. "Helplessness, worthlessness. I had been having really serious panic attacks. I had been hospitalized for a while." He said he pulled back at the last minute when he recalled how he had battled the enemy in Iraq, and decided he would fight his own depression and post-traumatic stress.

The U.S. military and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) acknowledge the grave difficulties facing active-duty and former members of the armed services who have been caught up in the more-than decade-long American involvement in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The system struggles to prevent suicides among troops and veterans because potential victims often don't seek counseling given the stigma still associated by many with mental illnesses or the deeply personal nature ? a failed romantic relationship, for example ? of a problem that often precedes suicide. Experts also cite illicit drug use, alcohol and financial woes.

The number of suicides is nearly double that of a decade ago when the United States was just a year into the Afghan war and hadn't yet invaded Iraq. While the pace is down slightly this year, it remains worryingly high.

The military says about 22 veterans kill themselves every day and a beefed up and more responsive VA could help. But how to tackle the spiking suicide number among active-duty troops, which is tracking a similar growth in suicide numbers in the general population, remains in question. The big increase in suicides among the baby boomer population especially ? linked by many to the recent recession ? actually began a decade before the 2008 financial meltdown.

Compounding the problem, the VA ? which administers health and other government benefits for veterans ? has a huge backlog of disability, medical and other claims resulting from service in the military. Eric Shinseki, head of the VA and a former Army general, promises to have the backlog erased ? but not before 2015. The Pentagon and Veteran Affairs are working to install compatible computer systems to speed up the process. And the VA just reported it had cut the backlog of claims pending more than 125 days by 15 percent in recent weeks.

John Hansman, of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, says the problem among military men and women stems from a support system that falls far short of the needs of a military and its veterans.

"One of the big problems now is that we are trying to play catch-up on 10-plus years of war. People have gone back and forth seven, eight, nine times. And now you have a force that is stretched to its limit," Hansman said.

"It's not just people who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan who are killing themselves. About 50 percent are people who've never deployed before. So there's this broader issue going on in the military. Are there even the health services in the military to take care of the troops who have deployed, who have no first-hand knowledge of war and trauma."

Miller had plenty of first-hand experience.

"I was really good at combat. I was really good at that job. It was when I was in the States that I had a problem," he said from his home in Old Town, Maine, where he and his second wife are working toward doctorates in history at the University of Maine.

He said symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome began building as did the effects of a number of concussions that caused mild traumatic brain injury. He had gone through elite Ranger training twice and became a jump-master in the 82nd Airborne. He ignored his symptoms because he didn't want to leave combat and his job as a platoon leader. When he finally sought help from the military during his last rotation in the United States, he found what he said was a "19th century" attitude.

"I remember a psychologist telling me 'officers don't get PTSD.' It was a real affront."

A few days after he nearly killed himself on July 3, 2008, Miller mustered out of the service and resumed treatment for PTSD at a VA facility in Richmond, Virginia.

The treatment was helpful but his feelings about the VA are "really mixed. My take is they are a bunch of really well-meaning people. I don't know that it's resourced for the tasks." Also huge numbers of veterans ? a tiny portion of the larger population ? live in small towns, far from the cities where veteran services are available.

The American public, largely untouched by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because an all-volunteer military did the fighting, is gradually becoming aware of the problems faced by active-duty troops and military veterans. Now, some in Congress and President Barack Obama are trying to improve on the country's ability to take care of those who have signed up to fight.

None of that, however, undoes the anguish of such people as Ashley Whisler, whose brother Kyle killed himself Oct. 24, 2010. He had been driving convoys of supplies to U.S. troops from Kuwait shortly after the American invasion in 2003. He hanged himself in his home in Brandon, Florida, seven years after leaving the military. He had returned to his family in Michigan then moved to Florida, married and had a daughter. He and his wife separated before reconciling. He worked in a tattoo parlor, tended bar and began showing increasing signs of PTSD. He hanged himself while his wife and daughter slept.

Ashley Whisler said her brother spoke of fears of being ambushed when he was driving to work in Florida. After Kyle killed himself, her brother's friends told her how Kyle repeatedly called to talk about the horrors he had witnessed in Iraq and of how he couldn't sleep if there was a thunderstorm.

While she and her parents don't directly blame the military or the VA for Kyle's death, she does not let the department off the hook.

"These guys are coming back from the war and just being thrown back into society without any kind of transition or any kind of support. It's very difficult," she said.

Joe Miller says his military training, in the end, kept him alive.

"I had a gun in my hand. The second I cocked the weapon, I was back in Ranger mode and Ranger mode is not to kill yourself."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-06-25-Military%20Suicides/id-da80c027002c411084e623f537bb00c1

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Google Gave U.S. Government Emails From Wikileaks Volunteers Smari McCarthy, Herbert Snorrason

The extent of the U.S. government's probe into Wikileaks may have become just a little clearer on Friday, when a pair of former Wikileaks volunteers revealed prosecutors' successful attempts to subpoena their Gmail account information.

The broader investigation into Wikileaks was confirmed as "ongoing" by independent journalist Alexa O'Brien in March, but few specifics have been revealed. However, the unsealing of subpoenas executed against Smari McCarthy and Herbert Snorrason may hint at a broad governmental probe into the whistleblower site's leaking of classified government documents.

McCarthy and Snorrason, two Icelandic men previously associated with Wikileaks, posted a statement on June 21 that linked to the recently unsealed court orders issued to Google by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia back in 2011. The documents were also obtained and posted online by The Nation.

The files state that Google was ordered to hand over "records and other information" from McCarthy's Gmail account, going back as far as November of 2009. The documents also ask Google to provide similar data from Snorrason's account, such as "preserved copies of emails ? draft emails, deleted emails, emails" and "the source and destination addresses associated with each email, the date and time at which each email was sent and the size and length of each email."

Google recently contacted both men to notify them of the company's compliance with the government's requests.

Though the documents do not specifically mention McCarthy or Snorrason's ties to Wikileaks, Snorrason surmises on his blog that their past association with the organization motivated the orders:

I assume it?s because I had a conversation or a few with a white-haired [A]ustralian guy, but there?s nothing in the documents to confirm this. Let?s reiterate this, because that?s the point I find the most remarkable in all of this: Because I talked to Julian Assange, all information held by Google relating to my [Google] user account ... can be handed over to U.S. prosecutors.

The pair also posted on McCarthy's website a similarly worded joint statement, writing that they believe the orders "were almost certainly related to the Grand Jury investigation of the unauthorized public disclosure of information showing considerable misconduct, including a number of probable cases of war crimes, by U.S. military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan."

A spokesperson for Google told The Huffington Post in an email that "we don't comment on individual cases, but you can find general information about our practices around government requests for user data on our Transparent [sic] Report FAQ."

A Google spokesperson told The Nation that, generally speaking, "for [Google] to comply, the request must be made in writing, signed by an authorized official of the requesting agency and issued under an appropriate law.?

Mashable noted that the announcement of the subpoenas seemed to be worrying Wikileaks associate and hacker Jacob Appelbaum.

As Google's most recent Transparency Report shows, the number of subpoena requests sent by U.S. law enforcement have been rising steadily in the past few years. Recent requests were up 34 percent from 2011 to 2012. Between July and December 2012, Google received 8,438 total requests for information pertaining to 14,791 users or accounts in the United States.

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/24/google-wikileaks-smari-mccarthy-herbert-snorrason_n_3492076.html

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Watch Sony's E3 2013 press conference right here beginning at 9PM ET

Last but not least, Sony will be closing out our first day of E3 2013 press conferences at 9PM ET, and you can tune in several different ways. Of course our liveblog is the place to be, but you can also stream the video on this page (embedded after the break) or directly through your PS3. After the PlayStation 4 console stayed hidden backstage at its own preview event we're expecting to hear (and see) a lot more this time around, so get ready -- it's almost time to go.

June 10, 2013 9:00:00 PM EDT

Filed under: Gaming, HD, Sony

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Source: PlayStation.Blog

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Global Warming Alarmism In Twilight (Powerlineblog)

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Good Reads: From Google?s secret lab, to Japan?s economy, to the end of alimony

This week's round-up of Good Reads includes Google's lab, a reporter's tale of kidnapping, Japan's plan for revitalization, an undercover meat inspector, and a challenge to alimony.

By David T. Cook,?Staff writer / June 4, 2013

Google cofounder Sergey Brin gestures after riding in a driverless car.

Eric Risberg/AP/File

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Google's secret lab

Google X, the search firm?s secretive research lab, is like Willy Wonka?s chocolate factory ? a workshop that needs to be protected from critical eyes ? or the technology equivalent of ?taking moonshots.? So says Astro Teller, the lab?s director, in the May 22 cover story for Bloomberg Businessweek.

Skip to next paragraph David T. Cook

Senior Editor and Washington Bureau Chief

Cook is senior editor and Washington bureau chief of The Christian Science Monitor and host of the Monitor's newsmaker breakfasts.

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?The world is not limited by IQ. We are all limited by bravery and creativity,? Mr. Teller says. Getting around those limits is made a bit easier by the fact that Google had an R&D budget of $6.8 billion in 2012.

So far Google X has produced a driverless Lexus, capable of cruising unaided on Silicon Valley?s crowded 101 freeway. Another product: Internet-connected eyeglasses dubbed Google Glass. Future projects, Businessweek says, include an airborne turbine that sends electrical power down to a base station and a project to bring Internet access to undeveloped parts of the world. ?We are serious ... about making the world a better place,? Teller says.?

On being kidnapped in Syria

NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel recounts the harrowing story of being kidnapped with five colleagues while covering the conflict in Syria between rebels and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in April?s?Vanity Fair.

Shortly after Mr. Engel and his crew crossed into Syria from Turkey, they were captured by 15 heavily armed men who loaded them into a container truck where they were bound, gagged, and blindfolded. Engel says his captors were from ?the most ruthless and lethal of Assad?s militias, the shabiha.?

For the next five days, the NBC team was moved constantly, threatened with death, and subjected to psychological torture. On the fifth night, the vehicle in which they were being moved ran into a checkpoint set up by rebels from a Sunni religious group that had been searching for them. In the ensuing gun battle, the journalists escaped.

This riveting tale is a reminder of the risks foreign correspondents take. ?Kidnapping is always a threat in this life,? Engel says.?

Revitalizing Japan?s economy

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe flies, Superman-like, above Tokyo?s skyline on the cover of the May 18-24 issue of The Economist as the magazine probes the action-packed first months of Mr. Abe?s return to an office he left in 2007.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/DkqbvDtWKcU/Good-Reads-From-Google-s-secret-lab-to-Japan-s-economy-to-the-end-of-alimony

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