New Orleans residents Mohammed and Talat Husain claim they were refused service at Rep. John Fleming’s (R-LA) Subway franchise in Shreveport, Louisiana. According to Husain, an employee of the chain told them to leave because they are Muslim and threw them out after an altercation. Though Husain called the police, a report was never filed. He recounted the experience to TPM:

“She asked me point blank ‘Are you Muslim?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I’m Muslim,’ She said ‘We can’t serve you’ and locked the door from inside when my wife was still inside the store,” Husain said.

The situation quickly escalated and Husain ended up calling 911. So did a Subway employee. At some point before police arrived, however Husain said the employee unlocked the door and let his wife leave but also made it clear they should take their business elsewhere.

An officer with the Shreveport Police Department arrived after that. Both Husain and a department spokesman said the officer initially patted Husain down to check for weapons. But spokesman Cpl. Marcus Hines said the officer eventually determined the situation was much ado about nothing. Department records show the officer didn’t even file a report.

Fleming’s employees deny Husain’s version of events, and claim that security tapes prove that there was no discrimination against the couple. Still, the Shreveport police are ignoring a request for an investigation by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Fleming, a devout Christian, warned in August that the election was a choice between “competing world views” of “a godless society” or “a Christian nation.”

While much of the coverage leading up to the International Telecommunications Union’s (ITU) World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai focused on the red herring threat of a U.N. plot to steal the internet, last week ITU Telecommunications Standardization Sector (ITU-T) quietly approved new standards that — if mandated — could pose an actual threat to user privacy.

The new standards outline requirements for Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology in future systems — a technique for snooping into the web content with legitimate uses all too often used by repressive regimes to identify and punish dissenters or preemptively censor online communication through fear of reprisal. However, while setting technical standards, ITU made practically no mention of the user implications of the technology, nor did it outline guidelines for appropriate use. The Center for Democracy and Technology outlines the issues:

The ITU-T DPI standard holds very little in reserve when it comes to privacy invasion. For example, the document optionally requires DPI systems to support inspection of encrypted traffic “in case of a local availability of the used encryption key(s).” It’s not entirely clear under what circumstances ISPs might have access to such keys, but in any event the very notion of decrypting the users’ traffic (quite possibly against their will) is antithetical to most norms, policies, and laws concerning privacy of communications.

By adopting these standards, ITU is essentially supporting a future where all networks have an infrastructure in place for internet service providers and governments to go in and snoop on any web traffic, but not giving clear guidance on when that invasion of privacy is acceptable and what safeguards the average user should expect for their personal communications. This is especially troubling because of DPI’s potential for and history of use as a tool of oppression.

ITU-T standards are not binding, and although some states have proposed changing that, it is unlikely to happen — especially without U.S. support. But while the media rails against the bogeyman of a U.N. internet take over, ITU-T has given tacit approval to technological standards that could have a very real, detrimental effect on long-term internet privacy without so much as giving lip service to the freedom of information online ITU claims to champion.

The U.S. Senate today killed the ratification of a United Nations treaty designed to improve the prospects of those with disabilities around the world by a vote of 61-38, ending the best chance of any significant treaty making its way through the lame duck session. All “no” votes came from Republicans and the measure fell just five votes short of achieving the two-thirds of the Senate approval required for passage.

In voting down the Convention on the Rights of People with Disability, Senate Republicans have rejected a treaty based principally around the United States’ own Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which passed 91-6 in 1990. The major provisions of the treaty were modeled after ADA’s requirements of providing equal access to all citizens regardless of disability; it’s passage also would have given the United States a seat on a committee charged with aiding in implementation.

An impassioned Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) took to the floor just prior to the vote, challenging arguments that the treaty would encroach on American sovereignty and require significant changes in current law. Instead, Kerry charged, the treaty could be boiled down to four words, “Be more like us.” Kerry, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was joined in pressing for the approval of convention by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in a rare moment of bipartisanship.

Kerry also wrote a op-ed in the Huffington Post earlier today, laying out the provisions of the treaty and shooting down arguments against it:

So let’s be clear: the Disabilities Convention is a non-discrimination treaty. It won’t create any new rights that do not otherwise exist in our domestic law. What are the U.S. obligations under this Treaty? Simple: prevent discrimination on the basis of disability only with respect to rights that are already recognized and implemented under U.S. law. In other words — keep doing what we already have done for the 22 years since we proudly passed the Americans with Disabilities Act.

As for the notion that this treaty supports an expansive “social” rather than a “medical” definition of the term “disability,” shifting the focus from physical to attitudinal barriers for persons with disabilities, don’t let the critics fool you.

It’s true that some countries were advocating for an unacceptable definition of “disability” during treaty negotiations. But those efforts failed. The counterarguments of the United States–and Dick Thornburgh–were successful and the flawed definition was not included in the treaty. Bottom line: the Treaty leaves it up to each country to apply the term “disability” consistent with its domestic laws.

Opposition to new treaties has become endemic among Republicans. GOP obstruction also lead to the blocking of the Convention on the Law of the Sea during this session, despite the united support of business and military leaders behind it. The near failure also implies that the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, both opposed by the 2012 GOP Platform, won’t be moving forward anytime soon.

Former Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS), also a previous Senate Majority Leader and 1996 candidate for President, was on the floor to lobby for Republican votes to help pass the treaty, but not even his presence, just days after being released from a brief stay in the hospital, was enough to save the vote.

Instead, Republicans chose to stand with former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) in his castigation of the treaty’s provisions. In doing so, they’ve managed to prevent millions of parents around the world from being afforded the safe protection of their children with disabilities that Santorum enjoys and denied the United States the ability to prompt other states to live up to its standards.

A new report in the Wall Street Journal makes clear that it was the CIA, not the White House, who ultimately removed references to al Qaeda from a controversial set of talking points on the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Congressional Republicans and conservative commentators alike have spent weeks wondering just who edited the now infamous talking points, accusing officials across the Obama administration of lying to cover-up the truth about Benghazi. Instead, what they have labeled a political decision to play down the role of al Qaeda by the Obama administration was actually a much more complicated process:

The officials said the first draft of the talking points had a reference to al Qaeda but it was removed by the Central Intelligence Agency, to protect sources and protect investigations, before the talking points were shared with the White House. No evidence has so far emerged that the White House interfered to tone down the public intelligence assessment, despite the attention the charge has received.

Edits and revisions of estimates continued on even as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice was preparing to make her appearances on several Sunday morning news shows to discuss them on Sept. 16:

On Sept. 15, Michael Morell, then CIA deputy director and now acting director, spoke with the CIA station chief in Tripoli, who expressed concern that the agency’s reporting was off the mark. The station chief said there was no protest ongoing at the time of the attack, and he didn’t think the attack was spontaneous. Mr. Morell asked the chief to summarize his views in an email so the analysts at Langley could evaluate his take along with more than a dozen other internal intelligence reports, Mr. Morell later told lawmakers.

Officials placed the talking points that day in a binder that was hand-delivered to Ms. Rice at around 8 p.m. at her home in Washington, where she was making last-minute preparations before making the rounds of the news shows the following morning.

In addition, despite repeated right-wing insistence that the Obama administration mislead the public about the role an anti-Islam video played in the launch of the attack, the new story makes clear that members of the intelligence community “still believe the attack was inspired in part by the earlier protest in Cairo over the video.”

This new reporting solidifies previous stories that tanked Republican theories of official cover-up. By firmly pointing to the CIA, the reports also clarify the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s statement on Nov. 19 that the “intelligence community” edited the talking points, not the White House and that the CIA had approved of the changes.

After Palestine was upgraded to a non-member observer state at the United Nations, members of both houses of Congress proposed legislation responding to the Palestinians’ U.N. statehood bid by cutting off American aid. However, cutting off aid would harm the prospects for peace and immiserate thousands of Palestinians.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) (who has done this before) was the first to call for defunding, followed shortly by two measures in the Senate. The proposals are essentially non-starters as they would also take away massive amounts of money from the U.N., a move Senate Democrats would most likely not allow to move forward.

A fourth proposal, amendment 3203 to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), would only remove United States aid to the Palestinians in case any Palestinian authority brings a case at the International Criminal Court (a potential consequence of the U.N. upgrade). Regardless of whether or not one thinks the United States should seek to deter the Palestinians from going to the ICC, the blanket, automatic aid cutoff proposed in SA 3203 could have potentially devastating consequences. As CAP’s Matt Duss explains, diplomatic and financial support for the Palestinian Authority is a critical tool for bolstering the moderate Palestinian leadership vis-a-vis their hardline Hamas rivals:

U.S. policymakers and legislators should consider the words of several former Israeli officials who have come out in support of the Palestinian bid, including former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who said in a recent interview that “the Palestinian request from the United Nations is congruent with the basic concept of the two-state solution. Therefore, I see no reason to oppose it.” Writing in Foreign Policy this week, former deputy Israeli defense minister Ephraim Sneh warned that efforts to punish Abbas and the Palestinian Authority over the U.N. bid — which would likely redound to the benefit of Abbas’ more hardline rivals in Hamas— “would be a shot not in the foot but in the liver — Israel’s.”

Threatening aid in retaliation for the widely popular U.N. bid would undermine the moderate leadership’s argument that diplomacy with Israel, and not force, is the best way to advance the Palestinian national cause. Passing SA 3203 would undermine America’s main goal in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — furthering a peace process towards a two-state solution.

It could also shatter the fragile Palestinian economy. Though Palestinian growth has averaged a massive 7.7 percent in recent years, that growth has been fueled by foreign economic assistance. Without foreign aid, the Palestinian Authority would be unable to pay for services and development projects, which is why the World Bank believes “it is imperative” that “donors maintain their support to the PA’s budget.” This situation is unfortunately likely to continue for the forseeable future, as the continued occupation makes sustainable, non-aid fueled growth difficult. Since the U.S. provides an enormous amount of non-military aid to the PA, and aid is already slowing down, further cuts could do serious harm to Palestinian economy, endangering both vulnerable Palestinians and the legitimacy of the moderate, economically-focused Fatah leadership.

Perhaps for these reasons, the White House is not supporting any sort of “punishment” for the Palestinian bid at the United Nations.