Most Americans probably take the right to travel for granted until this right is lost or curtailed. Passports are, of course, required for most international travel. When our group (Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake, Ray McGovern and Coleen Rowley) recently traveled to Moscow to meet with Edward Snowden and present him with the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence, we depended upon our fundamental right to travel.

The intelligence whistleblower whose integrity we honored, however, has been deprived of that right. Vindictive U.S. officials revoked the passport of Snowden, whose disclosures have informed and educated the people of the United States and the world about secret surveillance and massive data-gathering that the NSA and other government agencies are engaged in within the U.S. and around the world.

If you’ve already signed the RootsAction petition urging that Snowden’s passport be restored, please forward this email to people you know and urge them to do the same. If you haven’t yet signed the petition, you can add your name by clicking here.

The U.N. and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International recently released a flurry of deeply flawed reports on drone murders. According to the U.N.'s special rapporteur, whose day job is as law partner of Tony Blair's wife, and according to two major human rights groups deeply embedded in U.S. exceptionalism, murdering people with drones is sometimes legal and sometimes not legal, but almost always it's too hard to tell which is which, unless the White House rewrites the law in enough detail and makes its new legal regime public.

When I read these reports I was ignorant of the existence of a human rights organization called Alkarama, and of the fact that it had just released a report titled License to Kill: Why the American Drone War on Yemen Violates International Law. While Human Rights Watch looked at six drone murders in Yemen and found two of them illegal and four of them indeterminate, Alkarama looked in more detail and with better context at the whole campaign of drone war on Yemen, detailing 10 cases. As you may have guessed from the report's title, this group finds the entire practice of murdering people with flying robots to be illegal.

We are in desperate need of documentary filmmakers at Fukushima.

The Japanese government is about to pass a national censorship law clearly meant to make it impossible to know what’s going on there.

Massive quantities of radioactive water have been flowing through the site since the 3/11/11 earthquake/tsunami.

At thousand flimsy tanks hold still more thousands of tons of radioactive water which would pour into the Pacific should they collapse.

An earthquake and two typhoons have have just hit there, flushing still more radioactive water into the sea.

The shutdown is has ended. But is the corporate takeover of our political system no longer an issue? During the past couple of years, hundreds of schools have been closed around the country and programs such as Food Stamps are under attack as the budgets of cities, states and the federal government are squeezed while as much as hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue, maybe more, are lost to tax havens, high-end tax evasion, and tax cuts for the uber-rich and companies that have replaced American workers with low-wage workers in other countries, some of whom are essentially slaves.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The Dalai Lama said he supports the use of medical marijuana, but if a person smokes the plant to get "a crazy mind, that's not good."

Tenzin Gyatso, the self-exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader, made the remarks in Mexico in response to a question during an event hosted by former Mexican president Vicente Fox.

When asked if he favors legalization of marijuana, the Dalai Lama replied that "the exception" would be for medical purposes, according to Agence France-Presse.

"But otherwise, if it's just an issue of somebody [using the drug to have] a crazy mind, that's not good," he said on Tuesday (Oct. 15) at the outdoor event in Guanajuato state.

Fox "laughed when the question was asked to the Dalai Lama," AFP reported.

The former president is a vocal supporter of marijuana's legalization to cut "a major revenue stream for ultra-violent drug cartels," according to AFP.

The Dalai Lama, 78, is not known to use marijuana for any illness.

In 2008, he underwent laparoscopic surgery to have a gallstone removed, his spokesman Chhime R. Chhoekyapa said at the time.