The war on whistleblowers in the US continues. The Obama administration is going after yet another whistleblower. John Kiriakou, a former official for the CIA, was indicted on Thursday for leaking information out to the press. Kiriakou is no stranger to whistleblowing and was responsible for leaking the torture technique of waterboarding by the CIA on terror suspects. Jesselyn Radack from the Government Accountability Project joins us for more on the latest indictment and gives us her take on how the war on whistleblowers is turning into the war on journalists.
The fascists who run Israel have taken a new action that threatens worldwide consequences. The Guardian reports
Israel has forced low-cost airline Jet2.com to cancel the tickets of three women from Manchester intending to travel to Bethlehem via Tel Aviv this weekend for a gathering of pro-Palestinian activists.
Jet2.com informed the women by email that the airline would refuse to carry them and no refund would be paid. The move follows pressure on airlines from Israel to ban known activists.
The article reports that Israel is taking this policy with other airlines as well.
The situation deteriorated further Saturday when the Defense Department announced that five military personnel, who are staying at the same hotel, violated curfew Wednesday night and have been confined to their rooms. The department will conduct its own investigation upon their return to the United States, said Air Force Gen. Douglas Fraser of the U.S. Southern Command, where the military personnel were from.
Computer vision works much better than it once did, and that could enable a diverse range of machines to see and understand their environments. Such machines could be useful in everything from military scouting to self-driving cars.
A recent report by ABC has confirmed what many have claimed for years; infrastructure jobs are going directly to foreign countries, particularly China.
Regardless of the fact that US law usually requires American companies to be picked first for infrastructure jobs, multiple Chinease companies are currently working on U.S. bridges and roads throughout the country.
Yiamouyiannis documents research showing that fluoride increases the tumor growth rate by 25% at only 1 ppm, produces melanotic tumors, transforms normal cells into cancer cells and increases the carcinogenesis of other chemicals. For the original references to these studies, refer to Yiamouyiannis’ pamphlet, Lifesavers Guide to Fluoridation.
Did you know that roughly 10% of the American population suffers from depression? It isn’t exactly a coincidence, with the FDA approving a wide variety of damaging foods and drugs that many millions of Americans consume each day. The FDA isn’t helping the population with their approval of the dozens of antidepressant medications on the market – it in fact is doing the exact opposite...
The lawyers argued that, thus shackled, Nashiri was unable to participate in preparing his defense because it revived the trauma of being similarly shackled during the years of torture to which he was subjected while in CIA custody.
The motive for preventing the airing of these issues is clear. A heavily redacted 2004 CIA inspector general’s report provides an indication of the criminal methods to which Nashiri was subjected. The report acknowledges that Nashiri was waterboarded 83 times, a form of induced drowning which was prosecuted as a war crime after the Second World War.
The Arab World has had plenty of attention in the past year, but the plight of some has slipped through the net. Palestinian farmers, whose families have worked the land for centuries, are having to fend off Israeli soldiers and settlers, as Paula Slier reports.
In an attempt to re-create the backlash that killed anti-piracy legislation earlier this year, activists are planning a “week of action” beginning on Monday to protest the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA).
Mike Rivero Comment: In 1933 the world's bankers declared a global boycott against Germany because Germany was refusing to go along with the private central banking model imposed on the rest of the world, indeed had abandoned the private central bank imposed on them after WWI in favor of a government issued value-based currency which had triggered the "German Miracle" economic recovery. It was the anger and resentment from this attempt at a global boycott that provided the kindling for WW2.
Can we please not be so stupid that we make the same mistake twice? Or does that ink used on money destroy brain cells when you fondle the notes?
Republicans have spent the last week attacking President Barack Obama after a Democratic CNN contributor said that Ann Romney, who is the mother of five, had “never worked,” but it turns out that presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney has also said mothers on welfare “need to go to work.”
“I wanted to increase the work requirement,” Romney told an audience in New Hampshire in January. “I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work.”
“And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It’ll cost the state more providing that day care, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.’”
Monsanto, Philip Morris and other U.S. tobacco giants knowingly poisoned Argentinean tobacco farmers with pesticides, causing “devastating birth defects” in their children, dozens of workers claim in court.
The farmers grow tobacco on small family-owned farms in Misiones Province and sell it to U.S. tobacco distributors. Most of Argentina’s tobacco is grown in Misiones, a rural northeastern province.
The farmers claim the tobacco companies asked them to use herbicides, pesticides and other toxic products made and distributed by Monsanto, and assured them the products were safe.
Was it a momentary lapse of concentration or an honest admission?
Last week, in an interview with Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor in Jerusalem, I heard something I have not heard before.
It's when I challenged him on the biggest talking point of all, Iran's supposed determination to "wipe Israel off the face of the map," that Meridor seemed to stumble outside the lines of the agreed narrative.
Meridor: [Iran's leaders] all come basically ideologically, religiously with the statement that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn't say 'we'll wipe it out', you are right, but [that] it will not survive, it is a cancerous tumor, it should be removed;
Mike Rivero Comment: And please remember: Iran is home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the Middle East, outside of Israel. These are people who are very proud of both their Iranian and their Jewish heritage, and they are not immigrating to Israel any time soon.
Which leads us to another interesting question; should Israel decide to attack Iran, will they not, then, be killing brother and sister Jews in such an attack?!?
Via Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones: "In 2009, IRS commissioner Doug Shulman said in a speech that the IRS had formed a new group of auditors who were going to be directing their attention at a special group of taxpayers: the super rich. Dubbing them "global high wealth individuals," Shulman promised that his agency would be taking a hard look at people who had tens of millions of dollars worth of assets and income tied up in complicated financial dealings that often involved overseas banking and aggressive tax avoidance strategies...Two-and-a-half years later, though, the effort to target the super rich has proven underwhelming. According to a new study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, the IRS has completed a mere 36 audits from the over-$10 million set since launching the global high wealth group...".* The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down.
Facebook has bought Instagram, a company with a single product – a photosharing app – for $1bn in cash and (FB) shares. Just to put that in context, Instagram has been in existence for 18 months, employs 13 people, has 30 million users and has had a grand total of $7m in investment funding. Oh, and it has precisely zero dollars in revenue.
The Afghan capital has come under co-ordinated attack, with explosions and gunfire rocking the diplomatic enclave - home to government buildings, Western embassies and NATO bases - as gunmen tried to enter parliament.
By way of belated acknowledgement that the main purpose of NATO’s war in Afghanistan was to build an international, integrated expeditionary military force – there are 50 nations contributing soldiers, equipment, artillery and aircraft for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force – for future wars, Clinton said that the Chicago summit will enhance the allies’ “commitment to joint exercises and training programs that deepen the habits of cooperation we have developed through our work together in Afghanistan.”
Via Think Progress: "As ThinkProgress has detailed, the House Republican budget, authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), pays for massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans by cutting spending from programs that primarily benefit lower-income Americans. While giving an average of $187,000 to each millionaire, the budget finds 62 percent of its cuts from programs that benefit the lower- and middle-classes, kicking millions off of food stamps, gutting Pell Grants, and slashing Medicare and Medicaid. As if that weren't enough, according to a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the budget also raises taxes for low-income Americans...". The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur explains.
In a rare show of unity, the government and opposition joined on Thursday to present the United States with a list of stringent demands, including an immediate end to C.I.A. drone strikes, that were cast in uncompromising words but could pave the way for a reopening of NATO supply lines through the country. Related in Opinion .
After the housing bubble and the Internet bubble before that, you'd think we'd learn our lesson. But maybe not.
According to Citigroup economist Steven Wieting health care is the next big bubble looming in the distance.
And to make matters all the more worrisome, his analysis suggests it’s like nothing we’ve seen before.
“It’s not a single asset price that’s about to pop (like housing) and it doesn’t have a cyclical component,” he explains during a live interview on Fast Money.
Today’s European crisis was brought about by widespread popular revolt against the straitjacket of an unrealistic European monetary union. Barroso’s solution is apparently an even tighter straitjacket, and no nonsense about popular elections or national referendums. He wants Europe ruled by Aristotle’s aristocrats, by people like him.
Despite the fact that investigative journalists Seymour Hersh, Gareth Porter and others have meticulously documented the fact that Iran, in fact, poses no nuclear threat at all, the Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress have laid down multiple rounds of harsh sanctions as a means to "deter" Iran from reaching its "nuclear capacity."
While rhetorical attention remains focused on Iran’s "threat", there is an "elephant in the room": Kazakhstan’s booming uranium mining and expanding nuclear industry -- a massive effort involving U.S. multinational corporations and an authoritarian regime increasingly tied to Washington.
Via Science Daily: " Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies demonstrates...". Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur discuss on The Young Turks.
The U.S. special envoy for Sudan told reporters in January he was "very concerned" about the situation in Sudan. South Sudan and Sudan split last year under the terms of a comprehensive peace agreement that ended one of the bloodiest conflicts since World War II. The envoy, Princeton Lyman, admitted some of the outstanding issues from the CPA were "set aside" but where now "coming to the surface." This week, with South Sudanese authorities seizing oil territory in Sudan, the situation has now boiled over into war.
The White House hailed the “positive attitude” from Iran and world powers at the negotiating table on Saturday, calling the nuclear talks a “positive first step.”
Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes reiterated the White House’s call for Tehran to take “concrete steps” to demonstrate that it will not militarize its nuclear program, which the Iranian regime insists serves peaceful, civilian energy purposes.
He made the comments to reporters after Iran and the P5+1 bloc that groups Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States agreed to more in-depth talks in Baghdad on May 23.
Speaking in Cartagena, on the sidelines of a Summit of the Americas in Colombia, Rhodes welcomed the follow-on meeting as an “additional positive sign.”
Mike Rivero Comment: I have to wonder just precisely what President Obama, and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, are going to demand at this next meeting in late May to throw the mother of all monkey wrenches into the mix and cause the next round of meetings to fail.
This was, apparently, all smoke and mirrors, engineered to appear that the EU and the US were sincerely after a peaceful solution here.
With amount of components we can cram on a chip slowly reaching its physical limit, quantum has become the next big thing that could revolutionize the computing world. IBM is even on the cusp of building actual quantum computer protoypes. But what good is any of that if we don’t have a quantum Internet? Fortunately, we do. A team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics have just established the first working quantum network.
You already know that Fukushima’s fuel pool number 4 may be the single greatest threat, but that pool number 3 is very dangerous as well.
You’ve heard that unit 3′s fuel pool contains less radioactive material than unit 4 … but still a tremendous amount of radiation. Scientific American reported last year:
The Sickness of Hazing :: Body Armor :: Police Chief Killed in War on Drugs :: Hazing Escalation :: Defending Hazing? :: Frat Father Opposes Hazing :: The Good Side of Greek Organizations? :: Secret Societies :: Cycle of Abuse :: Pledging :: Hazing-Free Frat? :: Cleaning up their Image :: Juvenile College Behaviour :: Bonding :: Pin Hazing :: The 99%
On January 10, 2008, the Federal District Court in Chicago issued a permanent injunction against Bill Benson on the grounds that by offering information demonstrating that the 16th Amendment was not legally ratified, he was promoting an abusive tax shelter. The Court then refused to look at the government-certified documentary evidence, deciding instead that the facts necessary to prove his statements true were "irrelevant."
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