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Obama has renounced torture. He has issued a new executive order defining acceptable interrogation techniques. He has reasserted the illegality of many of the techniques used in American prisons around the world during the first few years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

But he has also repeatedly expressed his desire to "look forward instead of looking backward." As a result, there has yet to be any accountability for the actions of the Bush/Cheney administration. And none appears forthcoming.

And without accountability -- without either criminal prosecutions or some sort of official national reckoning of what took place -- there's no reason to think that the next time a perceived emergency comes up, some other president or vice president will not decide to torture again.

Governor Rick Perry’s The Response prayer rally already has support from self-proclaimed prophets and apostles like Cindy Jacobs, Mike Bickle, Che Ahn, Doug Stringer, John Benefiel, and Jay Swallow, and now we can add one of the most prominent leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation to the list of endorses: C. Peter Wagner.

Not only is Wagner one the founders of the International Council of Apostles, but he is also a chief advocate of Seven Mountains Dominionism, which holds that fundamentalist Christians should have control over all aspects of society, and a foremost proponent of ‘Spiritual Warfare.’ Wagner’s wife, Doris, is also an endorser of The Response. She is author of How To Minister Freedom, a collection of works that includes chapters on “Freedom From Homosexual Confusion,” “Freedom from Abortion’s Aftermath,” and “The Believers Authority over Demonic Spirits.”

Following the deadly earthquake in Japan earlier this year, Peter Wagner argued that the disaster was punishment from God because Japan “invited national demonization” and the pagan Sun Goddess had “sexual intercourse with the Emperor” of Japan. He similarly blamed Japan’s economic problems on the Emperor’s supernatural sex life: “Since the night that the present emperor slept with the sun Goddess, the stock market in Japan has gone down - never come up since.”

It's one of those contests for which there is a seemingly endless supply of candidates, but in the race for stupidest of all Republicans we may have a winner.

Two Democratic senators are defending a top U.S. regulator's power to shield the nation's largest banks from certain state consumer financial laws.

Following a series of abuse cases in Europe and North America, revelations have emerged of sexual abuse by priests in a number of African countries. The case of Father Renato Kizito, who is accused of raping young men in Kenya, shows how local power structures work in favor of the clerics.

Bringing fresh insight into long-standing debates about how powerful geological forces shape the planet, from earthquake ruptures to mountain formations, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have identified a new mechanism driving Earth's massive tectonic plates.

Scientists who study tectonic motions have known for decades that the ongoing "pull" and "push" movements of the plates are responsible for sculpting continental features around the planet. Volcanoes, for example, are generally located at areas where plates are moving apart or coming together. Scripps scientists Steve Cande and Dave Stegman have now discovered a new force that drives plate tectonics: Plumes of hot magma pushing up from Earth's deep interior.

Rate Of U.S. Troops Killed In Iraq Is At ’03 And ’04 Levels

Hundreds of protesters pelted the security headquarters in the Egyptian city of Suez with rocks on Wednesday, angered by a court's decision to uphold the release of seven policemen facing trials for allegedly killing protesters during the country's uprising.

Riots and protests have been escalating recently over what many see as the reluctance of the military rulers to prosecute police and former regime officials for the killing of nearly 900 protesters.

A painting by Leonardo da Vinci that was lost for centuries has been authenticated by distinguished scholars in the United States and Europe and will be exhibited at London's National Gallery as part of a Leonardo show that opens November 9, ARTnews has learned.

How cool?

"It's up there with any artistic discovery of the last 100 years," said one scholar.