Wall Street’s audacity to corrupt knows no bounds and the cooptation of government by the 1 per cent knows no limits. How else to explain $150 million of taxpayer money going to equip a government facility in lower Manhattan where Wall Street firms, serially charged with corruption, get to sit alongside the New York Police Department and spy on law abiding citizens.
According to newly unearthed documents, the planning for this high tech facility on lower Broadway dates back six years. In correspondence from 2005 that rests quietly in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s archives,
Wall Street Firms Spy on Protesters In Tax-Funded Center
Massive study concludes: 'Global warming is real'
A massively thorough study – funded in part by a pair of US oil billionaires who are opponents of climate-disruption remediation – has come to the conclusion that the earth is, indeed, warming.
In fact, it's warming just as much as more-limited studies conducted by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, and the UK's Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change said it was: about 1°C since 1950.
Turning wood into oil in to simple steps
Efficiency and simplicity have long eluded renewable-fuel researchers, but a Maine scientist has developed a two-step process he says can make oil from the cellulose in wood fiber.
This process, far less complex than competing methods, creates an oil that can be refined into gasoline, jet fuel or diesel and removes nearly all oxygen -- the enemy of fuel efficiency.
Air Force UFO Rules Vanish After Huffington Post Inquiry
The military deleted a passage about unidentified flying objects from a 2008 Air Force personnel manual just days after The Huffington Post asked Pentagon officials about the purpose of the UFO section.
Before the recent revisions, the document -- Air Force Instruction 10-206 -- advised pilots, radar operators and other Air Force personnel on what to do when they encountered any unknown airborne objects. Now in the 2011 version, the reference to UFOs -- which simply means "unidentified flying objects," not necessarily spaceships with little green men -- has been eliminated.
Soldiers May Be Leaving Iraq, But Contractors Will Remain
American troops may be leaving Iraq before the end of the year, but U.S. contractors aren’t going anywhere soon.
ABC News reports that the State Department “is expected to have about 5,000 security contractors in Iraq as of January 2012 (they already have about 3,000 in country).” There will also be 4,500 “general life support” contractors to provide food and medical services.
ACLU: FBI Guilty of Massive Racial Profiling Operations
The FBI has engaged in vast surveillance operations that involves unconstitutional racial profiling and "mapping" of American communities across the country, the American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday.
"The FBI has targeted communities for investigation not based on suspicion of a crime, but on crude stereotypes," said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's National Security Project. Shamsi said documents released by the FBI in response to a Freedom of Information Act request "confirm our worst fears" about the FBI targeting communities on the basis of identity and association rather than evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
Bush confronted with Guantanamo torture complaint at Canadian economics summit
International human rights lawyers in western Canada greeted George W. Bush's arrival at an economics summit Thursday by asking a Canadian court to consider a torture complaint by four Guantanamo captives, three of them free and one still held at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.
The move is part of a global Guantanamo protest effort to ground the man who set up the prison camps in 2002. In February, the former president canceled a plan to speak at a United Israel Appeal gala fundraiser in Geneva ahead of a similar torture complaint.
99% helps occupy West Village pipeline hearing
A contingent of some 200 people marched from the Occupy Wall Street protest in “Liberty Square,” following a speech by actor Mark Ruffalo, to the climactic last hearing of the proposed “Spectra Pipeline” or NJ-NY Expansion Project, which was held in the Greenwich Village School auditorium.
The “99 Percenters” helped fill the auditorium after marching past City Hall, through Tribecca, SOHO and the West Village chanting “No fracking way.” They helped fill the room, adding to a hundred initial people who were either from lower west Manhattan or the general antifracking movement of New York City. There were only about forty people at the previous hearing in the West Village over the pipeline last year.
What are officials hiding about Fukushima?
After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, Soviet officials were vilified for hiding the impacts from the public.
But when Japan’s Fukushima nuclear accident took place last March, public officials in Japan and Canada alike jumped straight into Chernobyl-style damage-control mode, dismissing any worries about impacts.
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