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There are at least two reasons this development is important.  First, technology and tax law have led the emergence of what international tax analyst Ed Kleinbard calls “stateless income,” a phenomenon that was on full display at the Apple hearing yesterday, where the company’s spokesperson said in so many words, “you can’t tax this income because it only exists where tax liabilities do not exist.”

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For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

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“Thanks to the U.S., I don’t even know what the word ‘Dad’ means,” Muhammad told me when we met at his family’s house earlier this month in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. Clutching a portrait of his father, Abdul Khaliq al-Baidhani, in a white prison jumpsuit, he added: “I just want the U.S. to send my father home.”

If President Obama stands by his statements on Thursday, Muhammad may finally get his wish. During a wide-ranging speech on counterterrorism policy, Obama vowed to lift a freeze on repatriations of Yemenis from Guantánamo that he imposed in January 2010, days after a botched effort to attack a U.S. airliner that authorities linked to Yemen. Obama also renewed the pledge he made on his first day in office in 2009 to close Guantánamo altogether – though without offering a time frame.

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Hunt's lawyer Julia Graves explained the decision to go to court in a statement: "This is a situation of two teenagers who happen to be of the same sex involved in a relationship. If this case involved a boy and girl, there would be no media attention to this case... If this incident occurred 108 days earlier when she was 17, we wouldn’t even be here."

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The military judge presiding over the case can currently close a courtroom to the press and public for "security" reasons—citing sensitive classified information. The plaintiffs are calling on the judge to grant public and press access to the historic trial and its attendant documents. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) has already had some success in having pretrial transcripts published, but for the most part public access to the proceedings has been provided in the form of rush transcripts compiled by dedicated independent journalist, Alexa O'Brien. Common Dreams reported on this week's filing:

In a complaint filed in a federal district court Wednesday by the Center for Constitutional Rights—along with journalists Amy Goodman, Jeremy Scahill, Kevin Gosztola, Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange, and Chase Madar—the group of plaintiffs motioned for a preliminary injunction that would compel the judge to "grant the public and press access to the government’s filings, the court’s own orders, and transcripts of the proceedings." To date, none of these have been made available to the public.

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Despite the announcement from Moscow, one of Assad's staunchest allies, Damascus has not issued a definitive statement of its own on the proposed talks.

Russia and the U.S. joined efforts earlier this month to convene an international conference to bring representatives of Assad's regime and the opposition to the negotiating table. The aim of the talks would be to establish the outlines of a transitional government as a way out of the crisis.

More than 70,000 people have been killed and several million displaced since the uprising against Assad erupted in March 2011 and escalated into a civil war.

The main opposition Syrian National Coalition has not yet said whether it will attend the conference in Geneva, expected within two weeks, and is currently discussing its position at a gathering in the Turkish city of Istanbul. But members have said they want guarantees that Assad's departure is foremost on the agenda.

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An archdiocese spokeswoman said Friday that Madrid only has one exorcist priest and that it is considering a plan to train more. She spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with archdiocese policy.

"The devil exists. That's a fact," she told The Associated Press.

Only a priest authorized by a bishop can perform an exorcism and the brief rite involves blessings with holy water, prayers and an interrogation of the devil by the exorcist during which the demon is asked to leave the victim.

ReligionenLibertad, a Catholic website, blames the growing secularization of Spanish society for what it calls an increase in people asking for help with their demons.

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Reports of deprivation are closely related to national wealth. For example, in Australia, Canada and Germany -- three of the richest countries surveyed in terms of 2012 GDP per capita -- roughly one-in-ten or fewer have struggled in the past year to afford food. Meanwhile, in Uganda, Kenya and Senegal -- among the poorest countries surveyed -- half or more say food for their family has been hard to come by.

The United States is a clear outlier from this pattern. Despite being the richest country in the survey, nearly a quarter of Americans (24%) say they had trouble putting food on the table in the past 12 months. This reported level of deprivation is closer to that in Indonesia or Greece rather than Britain or Canada.

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John Stortstrom, a mechanical engineer who works for the Army at its Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (ECBC), was among 150 white nationalists, many of them young, who attended the American Renaissance conference held in early April in Tennessee. American Renaissance is a journal dedicated to race and intelligence, with a heavy focus on the “psychopathology” of black people. Its editor has written that black people are incapable of sustaining any kind of civilization.

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But with the easing of scandal fever on the Potomac, Republicans are back to fighting one another, and the week-long Senate clash between freshman Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. John McCain over the budget is exposing the yawning gulf within the party once again.

Now that the GOP-dominated House and Democratic-led Senate have passed very different budgets, McCain has tried to argue for the formation of a conference committee that would try to reconcile the two. That might be a thankless, impossible task nowadays, but it’s nonetheless the way Congress has always worked. Democrats agree with McCain, and so do most Republicans.

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"Qworty" -- the Wikipedia editor unmasked as the writer Robert Clark Young in Salon one week ago -- played a leading role in instigating Brown's deletion. As Qworty, Young denounced Brown as a "self-appointed spiritual savior" who had styled himself "a modern-day messiah who combined all of the powers of Jesus and Freud and Einstein and Marx and, oh why the heck not, Timothy Leary, lol." Young also resorted to his go-to critique for Wikipedia pages he found wanting: He accused Brown of repeatedly editing his own page in violation of Wikipedia's conflict-of-interest policies.

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The amendment was clearly created as a wedge issue, a perennial Republican effort to get Democratic senators to vote for something that can get used against them later in attack ads. Tom Coburn is a master of this; during the healthcare bill he offered an amendment banning sex offenders from receiving health insurance benefits for Viagra.

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“You know what happens at 12:01 tonight,” he said to a flurry of pre-emptive cheers.

They did: The lineup for the 14th Austin City Limits Music Festival, would be released in the wee hours of the morning. No doubt many members of the crowd fought sleep in anticipation of poring over a lineup of heavyweights fit for the festival's debut as a two-weekend affair. The Cure, Depeche Mode and Lionel Richie ultimately crowned the six-day bill, topping a collection of burgeoning acts and festival veterans.

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Vivica A. Fox, the actress known for "Kill Bill: Vol. 1" and "Juwanna Mann," appeared in a PSA (first noticed by Talking Points Memo's Hunter Walker) for "Cool Cat Finds a Gun," a children's film about how to react if one encounters a firearm. The message is sound, but the medium is astounding: In full makeup, low-cut gown, and giant sparkling earrings, Fox descends a staircase like Norma Desmond.

Her opening line: "Hey kids! It's your girl Vivica Fox. I'm a Hollywood actress. Now we make movies in Hollywood, and sometimes, they're not real. But when it comes to gun safety -- that's a real issue."

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Zink knows the harm such restrictions can inflict on women faced with this choice because she was one of them. At 21 weeks, her doctors informed her that her fetus had no brain function and would very likely not survive the pregnancy; it was an abnormality that could not have been detected earlier in her pregnancy, as she told the committee:

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A British security official said the situation involving the Pakistan International Airlines flight, which carried more than 300 people, did not appear to be terror-related, but that police were still investigating. He requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the investigation.

A fighter jet was launched to divert Flight P709 — which was supposed to travel from Lahore to Manchester — to Britain's Stansted Airport, where it was kept on an isolated runway. Essex Police said two suspects, ages 30 and 41, were taken to a police station for questioning.

Passenger Nauman Rizvi told Pakistan's GEO TV that two men who had tried to move toward the cockpit during the flight were handcuffed and arrested once the plane landed. Rizvi said that after the men were taken away, the flight crew told passengers there had been a terrorist threat and that the pilot had raised an alarm.

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Dozens of U.S. energy providers face "daily, constant or frequent" attempted cyber attacks, according to a new Congressional review of power grid safety. In an extreme case, one utility provider said it was the target of more than 10,000 attacks a month.

These numbers are intended to highlight the growing threat of cyber attacks to the nation's infrastructure, but some utility companies are calling the report alarmist and an effort to bolster congressional arguments for enhanced federal cybersecurity authority.

Earlier this week Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Ca.) and Rep. Edward Markey (D-Ma.) released a 35-page report entitled Electric Grid Vulnerability. Waxman and Markey gauged the threat to utility providers by sending a 15-question survey to 115 energy companies around the country. 112 of those companies responded and their answers revealed that the U.S. power grid is a prime target for cyber attackers using a variety of tactics and operating under a range of motives.

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It happened about 7 p.m. Thursday on the north part of the four-lane Interstate 5 bridge near Mount Vernon, about 60 miles north of Seattle and 40 miles south of the Canada border, and disrupted travel in both directions.

Initially, it wasn't clear if the bridge just gave way on its own. But at an overnight news conference, Washington State Patrol Chief John Batiste blamed it on a tractor-trailer carrying an oversize load that hit an upper part of the span. The vertical clearance from the roadway to the beam is 14.6 feet.

"For reasons unknown at this point in time, the semi struck the overhead of the bridge causing the collapse," Batiste said.

The truck made it off the bridge and the driver remained at the scene and cooperated with investigators. Authorities have not yet said what the truck was carrying.

Two other vehicles went into the water about 25 feet below as the structure crumbled. Three people were rescued and were recovering Friday.

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According to the New York Times, a bill that’s already moved through the House Financial Services Committee, allowing more of the very kind of derivatives trading (bets on bets) that got the Street into trouble, was drafted by Citigroup — whose recommended language was copied nearly word for word in 70 lines of the 85-line bill.

Where were House Democrats? Right behind it. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, Democrat of New York, a major recipient of the Street’s political largesse, co-sponsored it. Most of the Democrats on the Committee, also receiving generous donations from the big banks, voted for it. Rep. Jim Himes, another proponent of the bill and a former banker at Goldman Sachs, now leads the Democrat’s fund-raising effort in the House.

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In a Central Park concert this morning on "Good Morning America," Mariah Carey popped out of her dress. "This is the diva drama. I wake up at this hour -- I don't mean I wake up, I mean I go to sleep," she announced shortly before narrowly avoiding getting ABC News a big FCC fine.

"My dress popped. I love you Donatella, but it popped, darling. I just wanted to change the ensemb'. Both of them are out now. These are out. What should we call this, the Central Park Saga?" "G.M.A." anchor Lara Spencer threw to commercial as Carey was sewn back into her dress. "This seems like a YouTube moment, possibly Spotify even," Carey, who memorably melted down live on MTV in 2001, quipped.

It was a tough morning for "Good Morning America"'s summer concert series. Carey had to hold her microphone pack while singing "Always Be My Baby" as she hadn't had time to put it on; she audibly cursed while climbing a staircase; and she struggled to hit high notes while performing her new single "#Beautiful."

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That's a good start. Now how about lifting the ban on gay adult leaders?

The Scouts have long fended off the acceptance of "open or avowed homosexuals" in court and have explicitly banned them for 20 years, stating that homosexuality is "inconsistent" with the moral values of scouting. But on Thursday, chief executive Wayne Brock said, "This is not about what’s legal, "but what’s compassionate, caring and kind." And 21 -ear-old Zach Wahls, the Eagle Scout raised by two moms and founder of Scouts for Equality, called it "a historic moment."

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