Noah Rayman

Deprived of sleep, drugged, and forced to watch pornographic footage or videos of other prisoners being abused

A man detained in Guantanamo Bay for nearly 13 years has said he was subjected to “dirty and sadistic” abuse at the prison, days after a Senate report revealed the extent of the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation tactics.

In a first-person account for the human rights organization Reprieve and published on CNN, Samir Naji from Yemen says he was deprived of sleep, drugged, and forced to watch pornographic footage or videos of other prisoners being abused.

Naji, a Yemeni who was accused of being a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, was cleared for release in 2009 but remains in detention along with 135 other inmates.

“The dirty and sadistic methods I endured — which were then taken directly to Abu Ghraib — achieved nothing, except to shame that American flag hanging in the prison corridor,” he says in the account. “America cannot keep hiding from its past, and its present, like this. Our stories, and our continued detention, cannot be made to disappear.”

Read more at CNN

Rolling Stone story under growing scrutiny

Friends of the University of Virginia student whose account of a brutal campus gang rape drew national attention before coming under increasing scrutiny challenged key aspects of her story in new interviews.

The Washington Post, citing interviews with friends who were depicted in the widely-read Rolling Stone story as being primarily concerned with how the incident would reflect on their social status if the accuser known as “Jackie” reported it, reports that Jackie’s friends dispute several aspects of the Rolling Stone account.

“It didn’t happen that way at all,” one said. “I mean, obviously, we were very concerned for her. We tried to be as supportive as we could be.”

The Rolling Stone article roiled the UVA community when it was published last month, but discrepancies in Jackie’s account led the magazine to issue an apology last week and to say it no longer trusts her as a source.

Read more at the Washington Post

Hundreds of protesters have gathered nightly since Saturday.

The Oakland Police Department remained down on Thursday following an apparent cyberattack as protests continued over the treatment of minorities by police.

About 50 protesters blocked the entrances of the city’s courthouse on Wednesday night in a relatively quiet demonstration. A night earlier, authorities fired rubber bullets and arrested at least 19 people as crowds swarmed city streets for the fourth straight night.

Websites for the city, the Fire Department and the Police Department were all disabled beginning on Tuesday, according to the LA Times, though by Thursday only the police site remained down. The hacker collective Anonymous appeared to take responsibility for the cyberattacks in a tweet.

Hundreds of protesters have gathered at Berkeley nightly this week to protest in the wake of grand jury decisions in New York and Missouri not to indict white police officers over the deaths of unarmed black men.

[LA Times]

The centrist Hatnuah party's alliance with the Labor Party could be a serious rival to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party in next year's elections

Israel’s former justice minister is expected to join her centrist party with the country’s center-left opposition, in a move that could significantly raise the stakes in the upcoming March election.

Tzipi Livni, who heads the centrist Hatnuah party, was expected to announce a unity deal with the Labor Party in a press conference Wednesday, Reuters reports.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired Livni from his cabinet last week amid growing rifts in his coalition and called for early general elections in a bid to renew his mandate in office. Polls have found his center-right Likud party likely to come away with the most votes in the general election set for March 17.

But an alliance between Livni’s Hatnuah party and the larger Labor Party, headed by opposition leader Isaac Herzog, could reshape the electoral outlook. Recent polls suggest that the centrist alliance could take more parliamentary seats than Likud.

Still, Netanyahu could remain prime minister by forming a coalition with right-leaning parties in parliament. His party was expected to decide Wednesday whether to approve Netanyahu’s proposal to move primary elections to Dec. 31 from Jan.6, a move that has drawn criticism from some party members who say it puts other candidates for party leadership — such as former minister Gideon Sa’ar—at a disadvantage.

[Reuters]

The Slow Food Manifesto was signed 25 years ago, on Dec. 10, 1989

When Italy’s first McDonald’s franchise opened at the heart of Rome in 1986, the opposition came from all angles. Officials said it didn’t have the right construction permits; celebrities called it the “Americanization of Italy”; politicians said it ruined a historic center; neighbors said it was noisy and its odor unbearable; thousands of people rallied outside the location in the Piazza di Spagna.

One of the opponents, an Italian journalist named Carlo Petrini, took a novel approach by handing out plates of penne to the protesters.

“I was alarmed by the culturally homogenizing nature of fast food,” Petrini told TIME years later, in the magazine May 17, 1999, issue.

The McDonald’s franchise, said at the time to be the world’s largest, remained — but Petrini’s grievances would extend far beyond the Piazza di Spagna. He established the Slow Food association that year, aiming to protect traditional foods and advocating for agricultural biodiversity,

On Dec. 10, 1989, three years after the franchise opened in Rome and 25 years ago today, he joined representatives of 15 countries in Paris for the signing of the Slow Food Manifesto, and the international Slow Food movement was born.

Today, the movement boasts more than 150,000 members across 150 countries. TIME described Petrini in 2004 as a revolutionary who “changed the way we think about eating.”

And it was all thanks to McDonald’s.

Read TIME’s 2008 story about the movement: Can Slow Food Feed the World?

More than 600 former Guantanamo Bay detainees have ended up in over 53 countries

Over the dozen years since the Guantanamo Bay detention camp opened, more than 630 people have been allowed to leave the controversial U.S. prison in Cuba.

Over the weekend, six more inmates joined their ranks when they were moved to Uruguay as President Barack Obama continued to attempt to fulfill his long-held promise of shuttering the prison. The latest transfers reduced the number of inmates to 136, the lowest since the prison’s earliest days.

But where did all those inmates go? Those who have been transferred or released have been sent to at least 53 different countries, according to a list compiled by the New York Times and NPR. The majority have been repatriated to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, but hundreds of others have been repatriated or transferred to countries around the world.

(See more: Inside Guantanamo)

The majority have stayed away from terrorist activity and attempted to resume their lives, often in unexpected places. But 107 former detainees have since engaged in terrorist activity and another 77 are suspected of engaging in it as of July, the Office of Director of National Intelligence said in its semiannual report.

Here’s a snapshot of some of the countries that harbor former Gitmo detainees:

The United Kingdom

Moazzam Begg, one of 14 detainees transferred to Britain, is a British citizen of Pakistani descent who was detained in Pakistan in 2002 as a suspected al-Qaeda member and sent to Guantanamo for three years. He was released and dispatched to Britain in 2005, where he became a public speaker and activist; he was arrested again last February and charged with funding terrorism in Syria. Those charges were dropped in October.

Kuwait

Fawzi al-Odah was repatriated to Kuwait in November after nearly 13 years without a trial, marking the first of a recent wave of transfers from Guantanamo. As part of the agreement with Kuwait, which has taken in 11 former detainees, al-Odah will remain in custody for a yearlong rehabilitation program.

France

Lakhdar Boumediene, an Algerian who was detained while living in Bosnia in 2001, spent seven years in Guantanamo. Boumediene, who had been working for the Muslim branch of the Red Cross, went on a two-year hunger strike opposing his detention, and his case was brought to the Supreme Court, which issued a seminal decision in 2008 that Boumediene and other Guantanamo prisoners had a right to use the writ of habeas corpus under the U.S. Constitution. In the wake of that decision, he was ordered released — and in 2009 became one of nine former detainees who have been transferred to France, where he settled with his wife and three children.

Spain

Lahcen Ikassrien was handed over to Spanish custody in 2005 after the alleged Taliban fighter spent four years in Guantanamo; Spain soon released him for lack of evidence. In June, he was among nine people detained in a police sting on a network of jihadist recruiters.

Georgia

Six Guantanamo inmates have been transferred to Georgia since 2010, including three Yemenis who were resettled there last month (two others were sent to Slovakia).

Qatar

Six inmates have been transferred to Qatar, including one Qatari citizen in 2008 and five Afghan citizens who were released in exchange for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl earlier this year in a Qatar-brokered deal with the Taliban. As part of the agreement, Qatar said it would impose a one-year travel ban on the five men.

Bermuda

In 2009, four Chinese Muslim men who had spent seven years in the U.S. prison were sent to Bermuda. The men, members of the restive Uighur community from Western China, were among the 22 Uighurs who had been detained in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan but were later determined not have been enemy combatants. China called for their repatriation–which would have likely led to continued imprisonment–but then Bermuda Prime Minister Ewart Brown negotiated their release. Yet five years after they arrived in Bermuda, activists said that the men still lacked passports and were effectively stranded on the island.

Uruguay

The six men now in Uruguay, including four Syrians, a Tunisian, and a Palestinian, are expected to learn Spanish and adapt to new lives in Uruguay after more than 12 years in Guantanamo. They had been approved for release in 2009 but the U.S. could not find a destination for them until Uruguayan President Jose Mujica agreed to accept them on humanitarian grounds. “It is difficult for me to express how grateful I am for the immense trust that you, the Uruguayan people, placed in me and the other prisoners when you opened the doors of your country to us,” Abedlhadi Omar Faraj, one of the Syrian former inmates, said in a statement released by his attorney.

The pet of Nina Pham

Dallas rang up a $27,000 bill while caring for the dog of a nurse who contracted Ebola in October and was quarantined for three weeks, according to a list of expenses publicized Wednesday.

Most of the cost to care for Nina Pham’s dog, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Bentley that was isolated as a precautionary measure, was covered by private donations and grants, NBC News reports. The city’s total bill for its Ebola crisis added up to more than $155,000.

Nina Pham was one of two nurses who were treated for Ebola after caring for Thomas Eric Duncan, the first patient diagnosed with the virus in the U.S., and who later died. Pham was successfully treated and completed a 21-day quarantine period to ensure she was not a threat to the public upon her release.

[NBC News]

Some 22,000 officers will complete a three-day training course on tactics like deescalation

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio called for the retraining of the city’s police force on Thursday, one day after the announcement that a grand jury declined to indict a white officer in the death of an unarmed black man.

“The relationship between police and community has to change. The way we go about policing has to change,” de Blasio said in an afternoon news conference, standing next to Police Commissioner William Bratton and other city leaders as he called for reforms. “People need to know that black lives and brown lives matter as much as white lives.”

MORE: See Protestors Take to the Streets After the Eric Garner Grand Jury Decision

Some 22,000 officers will complete a three-day training course that will aim to brush them up on tactics like deescalating situations and interacting with people who are mentally ill, Bratton said. De Blasio noted that $35 million will go into the training to allow for overtime pay.

The mayor’s announcement followed a night of largely peaceful demonstrations around the city and preempted a rally planned Thursday evening at Lower Manhattan’s Foley Square. A series of police-involved deaths this year has put politicians under scrutiny over a lack of trust between police departments and the local communities they serve.

Read next: Why a Medical Examiner Called Eric Garner’s Death a ‘Homicide’