Media and civil liberties groups have expressed alarm after the managers of an Olympic venue pledged to intercept and question anyone seen photographing or filming the site, even from public land, and defended security guards who wrongly tried to invoke terrorist laws to prevent footage being shot of the arena.
John Toner from the National Union of Journalists said he would seek an urgent meeting with managers of the O2, saying their tactics had no basis in law. "I’m stunned, and what they say is utterly outrageous," he said.
Americans want to believe their president when he poses as a humanitarian world leader. But Africa knows different. Literally millions have died and been displaced as a direct result of U.S. imperial strategies. “American policy in Africa is to create chaos, and then to present itself as the cure.”
The first systematic look at the New York police department's response to Occupy Wall Street protests paints a damning picture of an out-of-control and aggressive organization that routinely acted beyond its powers.
Willard Romney has been on the road again. There's a picture of him in a working warehouse, standing behind a modest podium sporting this sign: "Putting Jobs First."
In one of the most shocking articles that the New York Times has ever put out, a New York Times reporter has openly admitted that virtually every major mainstream news organization allows government bureaucrats and campaign officials to censor their stories. For example, almost every major news organization in the country has agreed to submit virtually all quotes from anyone involved in the Obama campaign or the Romney campaign to gatekeepers for "quote approval" before they will be published. If the gatekeeper in the Obama campaign does not want a certain quote to get out, the American people will not see it, and the same thing applies to the Romney campaign. The goal is to keep the campaigns as "on message" as possible and to avoid gaffes at all cost. But this kind of thing is not just happening with political campaigns. According to the New York Times, "quote approval" has become "commonplace throughout Washington". In other words, if you see a quote in the newspaper from someone in the federal government then it is safe to say that a gatekeeper has almost certainly reviewed that quote and has approved it. This is another sign that "the free and independent media" in this country is a joke. What we get from the mainstream media is a very highly filtered form of propaganda, and that is one reason why Americans are turning away from the mainstream media in droves. People want the truth, and more Americans than ever realize that they are not getting it from the mainstream media.
This is a country whose people self-righteously criticize China for its human rights abuses. This is a country where the public has been aghast at Singaporean laws against chewing gum, and its “harsh” penalties for violations of the law. This is a country whose people have propagated rabid fear-mongering against Muslims, on the grounds Islam supports poor treatment of women and arbitrary and severe punishments (and I have argued in the past that American statism is not so unlike radical Islam).
It's an audiotape the New York Police Department hoped you would never hear.
The French government is “totally opposed” to hydraulic fracturing, a drilling process to produce natural gas and oil from shale, French Environment and Energy Minister Delphine Batho said.
There has been increasing concern about the potential role of fracking in earthquakes. The worries prompted the the US Geological Survey to look into it, and scientists found that the increase in earthquakes is likely man-made, but probably caused more by wastewater disposal than fracking itself. Now, a fabulous new piece from EnergyWire looks a little more deeply at the wastewater connection.
