The bill still needs to pass the Senate and get Obama’s signature before becoming law
By Grant Gross, IDG News Service
April 18, 2013 02:30 PM ET
inShare0
IDG News Service – The U.S. House of Representatives has voted to approve a controversial cyberthreat information-sharing bill, despite opposition from the White House and several privacy and digital rights groups.
The House on Thursday voted 288-127 to approve the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a bill that would allow U.S. intelligence agencies to share cyberthreat information with private companies. It would also shield private companies that voluntarily share cyberthreat information with each other and with government agencies from privacy lawsuits brought by customers.
The bill would still need to be passed by the U.S. Senate before heading to President Barack Obama for his signature. The Senate declined to act on another version of CISPA during the last session of Congress, and earlier this week, Obama’s advisors threatened a veto, although that was before the House approved a handful of amendments intended to address privacy concerns.
CISPA would allow private companies to share a broad range of customer data with each other and with government agencies, privacy groups have complained.
Supporters, however, argued the legislation is needed to encourage better information sharing about active cyberattacks, resulting in better defense of U.S. networks. Federal law now prohibits intelligence agencies from sharing classified cyberthreat information with private companies.
The bill will help protect the U.S. against cyberattacks from China, Iran and other countries, supporters said. Cyberespionage has cost the U.S. tens of thousands of jobs, as foreign companies steal the blueprints of U.S. products, said Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican and primary sponsor of CISPA.
“If you want to take a shot across China’s bow, this is the answer,” he said to applause on the House floor.
The bill correctly balances privacy concerns with the need for security, added Representative Dan Maffei, a New York Democrat. Rogue nations and “even independent groups like WikiLeaks” are taking aggressive measures to attack the U.S. power grid, air-traffic control systems and customer financial data, he said.
“Every day, international agents, terrorists and criminal organizations attack the public and private networks of the United States,” he said. “While I do always have some concern that the U.S. government may access our private information in the cyber sphere, I am more concerned that the Chinese government will access our private information.”
The House on Thursday voted for a handful of amendments to the bill intended to improve privacy protections in the bill. Lawmakers approved an amendment designating the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Department of Justice as the primary repositories of cybertheat information shared by private companies, addressing a concern by several privacy groups that CISPA would give the U.S. National Security Agency unfettered access to customer data.
By Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 10:05am
We’ve written extensively about CISPA over the last year, but since the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is set to mark the bill up next week, and the full House to vote on it the week after that, we’re posting in more depth about its shortcomings. Information sharing isn’t offensive per se; it’s really a question of what can be shared, with whom, and what corporations and government agencies can do with it. First up:
What information does CISPA allow companies to share?
The short answer: any information that “pertains” to cybersecurity, broadly defined to include vulnerabilities, threat information, efforts to degrade systems, attempts at unauthorized access, and more. You can see the full list on page 20 of the bill. You’ll see that it’s not tied to the criminal definition of hacking but instead forges new ground.
The bill sponsors will tell you that CISPA is only about the “ones and zeroes,” but it certainly isn’t drafted that way. There’s nothing limiting CISPA in that manner and personally identifiable information (PII) could be shared right along with some inconsequential code that doesn’t impact privacy at all. So, if your communications or records are somehow caught up in a cybersecurity data dump, they might possibly include information that identifies the real-world you, even if that information is not necessary to combat a cyber threat. Under CISPA, you’ll just have to trust that the corporations holding your very personal information do what’s best. Good luck with that.
On Thursday, US lawmakers discussed whether or not the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act should be renewed. FISA gives government the power to monitor phone calls, emails and other forms of electronic communication. Critics believe that FISA can now be used to target citizens all in the name of homeland security. Andrew Blake, RT’s web producer, joins us with more on the controversial legislation and discusses other legislation such as CISPA, SOPA and PIPA.
Massive surveillance of your communications happened during the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping experiment and then we know that Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act in 2008. Except we also know that there were abuses and domestic communications were collected as well, so this clearly brings up a range of privacy and civil liberties issues. If Congress goes the way the Obama administration is pushing for, that just means reauthorizing the law that’s set to expire at the end of this year. Today there was a hearing on Capitol Hill where lawmakers at least discussed some of the concerns and heard testimony from the ACLU. EFF’s Trevor Timm discusses.
Hatchery fish, as the name implies, are hatched from eggs fertilized in a controlled environment and raised in captivity until they are big enough to release into the natural environment. They lack the genetic diversity of wild fish that provides insurance against fisheries collapses.
A newly published collection of more than 20 studies by leading university scientists and government fishery researchers in Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, Russia and Japan provides mounting evidence that salmon raised in man-made hatcheries can harm wild salmon through competition for food and habitat.
“The genetic effects of mixing hatchery fish with wild populations have been well-documented,” says journal editor David Noakes from Oregon State University. “But until now the ecological effects were largely hypothetical. Now we know the problems are real and warrant more attention from fisheries managers.”
The research volume, published in the May issue of Environmental Biology of Fishes, brings together 23 peer-reviewed, independent studies carried out across the entire range of Pacific salmon, including some of the first studies describing the impact of hatcheries on wild salmon populations in Japan and Russia.
The studies provide new evidence that fast-growing hatchery fish compete with wild fish for food and habitat in the ocean as well as in the rivers where they return to spawn. The research also raises questions about whether the ocean can supply enough food to support future increases in hatchery fish while still sustaining the productivity of wild salmon.
“This isn’t just an isolated issue,” says Pete Rand, a biologist at the Wild Salmon Center and a guest editor of the publication. “What we’re seeing here in example after example is growing scientific evidence that hatchery fish can actually edge out wild populations.”
Losing wild fish would mean losing the genetic diversity that has allowed salmon to survive for centuries. Unlike hatchery fish, wild salmon populations have a range of highly specialized adaptations to the natural environment. These adaptations not only help them return to their home streams to spawn, but also increase their ability to withstand environmental changes like increases in ocean temperature and extreme variations in stream flows.
Hatchery fish, as the name implies, are hatched from eggs fertilized in a controlled environment and raised in captivity until they are big enough to release into the natural environment. They lack the genetic diversity of wild fish that provides insurance against fisheries collapses.
Hatcheries have been used for many years in an attempt to increase catch in the over $3 billion Pacific salmon commercial fishing industry and to offset losses of wild salmon that have suffered serious declines due to dams and habitat degradation.
“These studies suggest that even more caution is needed to make sure hatchery programs keep wild salmon safe, and don’t inadvertently hurt the long term potential of salmon runs,” says Rand.
Since the mid-1970s, large increases in hatchery programs in the U.S., Canada, Russia and Japan have released billions of fish into the water. And the increasing global demand for salmon has resulted in calls to further expand hatchery production, especially in Russia and Alaska.
In a 2010 open letter to Alaska hatcheries, seafood processors proposed increasing pink salmon hatchery returns by 25%-115% over the next five years. Similarly, Russian hatchery managers stated in 2010 that Russia is planning to build 23 new hatcheries that would increase the country’s hatchery production by 66% or 680 million fish.
“The scale and magnitude of our current hatchery production system is enormous,” says Rand. “Five billion juvenile salmon are released each year worldwide, and the prospect of additional increases in hatchery production is worrisome for the long-term survival of wild salmon.”
Not Just a Local Problem Scientists are also uncovering surprising interactions on an international scale. One of the new studies indicates that chum salmon (a type of Pacific salmon) released from hatcheries in Asia, mostly from Japan, have played a significant role in causing declines in a wild chum salmon population in remote western Alaska, 2500 miles away.
“Genetic data show that these fish share the same feeding grounds in the open waters of the Bering Sea and North Pacific Ocean,” says author Greg Ruggerone of Natural Resources Consultants. “With billions of hatchery chum released each year, the abundance of adult chum salmon from hatcheries is now much greater than wild chum salmon, so it is not all that surprising that we are seeing evidence of competition in the North Pacific.”
This competition is likely to get tougher with predicted changes in ocean conditions. Recent climate patterns have made ocean conditions temporarily favorable enough to support large populations of salmon, but as these patterns shift, the amount of food in the ocean available for salmon could drop significantly, making it even harder for wild populations to survive.
These results have caused many scientists to point to the need for a new international agreement or treaty to address the expansion of hatchery salmon in the open waters of the North Pacific.
Many industry leaders, academic scientists and government agencies also highlight the importance of more research to understand the full impact of hatchery fish on wild salmon. “Wild salmon represent the backbone of the Alaska salmon fishery,” says Stew Grant of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, a contributing author to the special issue. “We need more information about the impacts of hatchery salmon entering our wild salmon rivers.”
“There is no substitute for wild salmon. They must be our first priority,” says Guido Rahr, President of the Wild Salmon Center. “Wild salmon are an important part of local culture and a cornerstone of economic health for fishing communities.
“And once you lose the resilience that wild salmon contribute to our salmon fisheries, it’s almost impossible to bring it back. Given these new findings, we urge fishery managers across the North Pacific to examine the science and err on the side of caution when considering hatchery practices and expansions.”
Robert Allen is an assistant professor of Earth sciences at UC Riverside. Credit: UCR Strategic Communications
Black carbon aerosols and tropospheric ozone, both manmade pollutants emitted predominantly in the Northern Hemisphere’s low- to mid-latitudes, are most likely pushing the boundary of the tropics further poleward in that hemisphere, new research by a team of scientists shows.
While stratospheric ozone depletion has already been shown to be the primary driver of the expansion of the tropics in the Southern Hemisphere, the researchers are the first to report that black carbon and tropospheric ozone are the most likely primary drivers of the tropical expansion observed in the Northern Hemisphere.
Led by climatologist Robert J. Allen, an assistant professor of Earth sciences at the University of California, Riverside, the research team notes that an unabated tropical belt expansion would impact large-scale atmospheric circulation, especially in the subtropics and mid-latitudes.
“If the tropics are moving poleward, then the subtropics will become even drier,” Allen said. “If a poleward displacement of the mid-latitude storm tracks also occurs, this will shift mid-latitude precipitation poleward, impacting regional agriculture, economy, and society.” Study results appear in Nature.
Observations show that the tropics have widened by 0.7 degrees latitude per decade, with warming from greenhouse gases also contributing to the expansion in both hemispheres. To study this expansion, the researchers first compared observational data with simulated data from climate models for 1979-1999. The simulated data were generated by a collection of 20 climate models called the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project version 3 or “CMIP3.”
The researchers found that CMIP3 underestimates the observed 0.35 degrees latitude per decade expansion of the Northern Hemisphere tropics by about a third. But when they included either black carbon or tropospheric ozone or both in CMIP3, the simulations mimicked observations better, suggesting that the pollutants were playing a role in the Northern Hemisphere tropical expansion.
Next, to ensure that their results were not influenced by intrinsic differences between CMIP3’s 20 models, the researchers expanded the time period studied to 1970-2009, comparing available observed data with simulated data from NCAR’s Community Atmosphere Model (CMIP3 data did not extend to 1970-2009). They then repeated the exercise with the GFDL Atmospheric Model. Using these models allowed the researchers to directly isolate the effects of black carbon and tropospheric ozone on the location of the tropical boundaries.
As before, they found that the models underestimate the observed Northern Hemisphere expansion of the tropics by about a third. When black carbon and tropospheric ozone were incorporated in these models, however, the simulations showed better agreement with observations, underscoring the pollutants’ role in widening the tropical belt in the Northern Hemisphere.
“Both black carbon and tropospheric ozone warm the tropics by absorbing solar radiation,” Allen explained. “Because they are short-lived pollutants, with lifetimes of one-two weeks, their concentrations remain highest near the sources: the Northern Hemisphere low- to mid-latitudes. It’s the heating of the mid-latitudes that pushes the boundaries of the tropics poleward.”
Allen further explained that with an expansion of the tropics, wind patterns also move poleward, dragging other aspects of atmospheric circulation with them, such as precipitation.
“For example, the southern portions of the United States may get drier if the storm systems move further north than they were 30 years ago,” he said. “Indeed, some climate models have been showing a steady drying of the subtropics, accompanied by an increase in precipitation in higher mid-latitudes. The expansion of the tropical belt that we attribute to black carbon and tropospheric ozone in our work is consistent with the poleward displacement of precipitation seen in these models.”
Black carbon aerosols are tiny particles of carbon produced from biomass burning and incomplete combustion of fossil fuels. Most of the world’s black carbon production occurs in the Northern Hemisphere, with Southeast Asia being a major producer. The same is true of tropospheric ozone, a secondary pollutant that results when volatile organic compounds react with sunlight.
“Greenhouse gases do contribute to the tropical expansion in the Northern Hemisphere,” Allen said. “But our work shows that black carbon and tropospheric ozone are the main drivers here. We need to implement more stringent policies to curtail their emissions, which would not only help mitigate global warming and improve human health, but could also lessen the regional impacts of changes in large-scale atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere.”
Thomas Reichler, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, noted that the new work by the Allen-led team represents a major advance in climate dynamics research.
“For a long time it has been unclear to the research community why climate models were unable to replicate the observed changes in the atmospheric wind structure,” said Reichler, who was not involved in the study. “This work demonstrates now in very convincing ways that changes in the amount and distribution of tiny absorbing particles in the atmosphere are responsible for the observed changes. Since previous model simulations did not account properly for the effects of these particles on the atmosphere, this work provides a surprisingly simple but effective answer to the original question.”
“The question to ask is how far must the tropics expand before we start to implement policies to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases, tropospheric ozone and black carbon that are driving the tropical expansion?” said Allen, who joined UCR in 2011.
Allen, who conceived the research project and designed the study, was joined in the research by Steven C. Sherwood at the University of New South Wales, Australia; Joel Norris at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, San Diego; and Charles S. Zender at UC Irvine. Next, the research team will study the implications of the tropical expansion from a predominantly hydrological perspective.
A hacker who claims to hate both Anonymous and notorious BitTorrent website The Pirate Bay (TPB) has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack that TPB has been suffering under for the last 24 hours.
The user, who goes by the Twitter handle @AnonNyre, has been riling up members of the hacktivist group and supporters of TPB with a series of angry posts on Twitter, to the extent that Anonymous supporters are now demanding to get in contact with him over the social network.
AnonNyre also later posted on Pastebin, claiming that he works for the FBI and wants to take TPB website down because it is “a press-release website for Anonymous“.
Although PirateBay.se was still accessible from the UK during the DDoS attack, TPB claimed that it was under attack on its official Facebook page and TorrentFreak confirmed that users around the world were having difficulty accessing the website.
Today The Pirate Bay informed its fans through Facebook that it was back online.
In a message posted at about 9:45 GMT, The Pirate Bay wrote: “We’re back in full effect! Show your support by adding this badge to your profile picture!”
This is not the first DDoS attack to be linked with The Pirate Bay. UK ISP Virgin Media suffered a DDoS attack on 9 May, a week after complying with a high court order to block users’ access to the file-sharing website.
The Pirate Bay condemned the action att he time, stating: “We do NOT encourage these actions. We believe in the open and free internets, where anyone can express their views. Even if we strongly disagree with them and even if they hate us.
“So don’t fight them using ugly methods. DDoS and blocks are both forms of censorship.”
Will the Kindle Fire‘s home screen soon double as a color billboard for advertisers? Ad Age reports that Amazon is pitching the idea to ad agency executives, although it’s unclear if the online retailer plans to bring ads to the current generation of Kindle Fires, or wait until the 2nd-gen models that are expected to arrive later this year.
Amazon currently sells versions of its E-Ink eReaders that display ads on the Kindle screensaver and at the bottom of the home screen. In exchange for viewing the ads, customers get a price break. The entry-level Kindle, for instance, is $79 with “Special Offers” (meaning advertisements) or $109 without ads. The Kindle Touch with ads is $99; the ad-free model is $139.
Amazon reportedly is seeking $600,000 to $1 million or more for ad campaigns that would run two months on the Fire, Ad Age says. If true, Kindle Fire ads may be more sophisticated–and possibly more intrusive–than the subtle ads on the E-Ink Kindles.
Would Kindle Fire owners be annoyed by the ads? Possibly, particularly if the ads hog too much space on the home screen, and if they’re obnoxious, flashy, and noisy. Then again, a reduced price tag–similar to Amazon’s cut-rate offer for its ad-supported eReaders–might help soothe users’ ire. Kindle Fire users, after all, are a pretty pragmatic bunch. They know the $199 Fire may not be the most advanced color tablet available, but the price is right and the Fire is good enough for their needs.
It seems to me that a $169 Kindle Fire with Special Offers would be a holiday hit.
An Italian court has upheld a €900,000 (US$1.2 million) fine imposed on Apple by Italy’s competition authority for allegedly violating consumer protection laws, Italian media reported late Friday.
The Regional Administrative Tribunal (TAR) of Lazio rejected Apple’s appeal against the fine imposed by the Antitrust Authority last December for “unfair commercial practices that damage the consumer.”
The court found that Apple Italy was not fully applying a two-year guarantee that is obligatory under European law and was providing unclear information on its own additional commercial warranties, the online edition of the Corriere della Sera newspaper reported.
An Apple Italy spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.
The Antitrust fine applies to Apple Sales International, Apple Italia, and Apple Retail Italia and concerns their alleged failure to inform customers of their right to a 24-month warranty from the vendor under European Union regulations and insufficiently clear information on the company’s own AppleCare Protection Plan and its partial duplication of the existing legal warranties.
A campaign to force Apple to modify its behavior in Italy was spearheaded by the Milan-based consumer association Altroconsumo.
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) might be cast into doubt in the wake of a Department of Defense announcement last week that as many as 1,000 defense contractors — and possibly thousands more — may voluntarily join an expanded program of sharing classified information on cyber threats with the federal government.
The program, known as the Defense Industrial Base Cyber Security/Information Assurance, or DIB CS/IA, has been in a pilot phase for the past four years with only 37 contractors. The expansion, recently approved by the Obama administration, means about 8,000 contractors cleared to work with DoD intellectual property are being invited to participate.
Bloomberg BusinessWeekreports that if this expansion “proves successful in safeguarding defense contractors from cyber attacks, the administration may enlarge the program to companies in 15 other critical infrastructure categories through the Department of Homeland Security,” Eric Rosenbach, deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy, said.
This, if it works as expected, could prompt those arguing over CISPA, recently passed by the U.S. House, along with other similar pending legislation in Congress, to wonder how necessary it all is. Why mandate information sharing with the government if it can happen voluntarily?
Jason Healey, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative of the Washington, D.C. think tank Atlantic Council, says while “there absolutely are similarities” between DIB and the various legislative efforts, that there are “lots of other bits” in those bills — such as mandatory security standards. “Some legislation is necessary,” he says.
Dan Philpott, an expert in federal cybersecurity and editor of FISMApedia, says DIB CS/IA is “a much lighter version” of CISPA. He says another reason the program could not replace cybersecurity law is because it is unlikely that anything close to 8,000 contractors will volunteer to enter it. He believes the DoD is being optimistic even with an estimate of 1,000. “I think they’d be happy with 500,” he says.
Beyond that, there is debate over how worthwhile and effective DIB CS/IA has been and will be. There is broad agreement that the threat of cyberattacks is increasing at “a rapid and accelerating rate,” in the words of Rear Admiral Samuel Cox, director of intelligence for the military’s Cyber Command, at a forum last month.
And the goal of the DIB expansion is for more sharing of data between private defense contractors and the DoD’s intelligence-gathering arm, the National Security Agency. Richard A. Hale, deputy chief information officer for cybersecurity, told the American Forces Press Service, “We started the program in an attempt to share cyber-threat data with these companies in a way that allowed the companies to act on that information immediately,” and called it, “an important step forward in our ability to catch up with widespread cyber threats.”
But Healey, speaking to Reuters last week, expressed some skepticism about whether the benefits of DIB CS/IA would be worth the cost to contractors. “The DIB pilot probably increases the defenders’ work factor much more than it increases the attackers,” he said. “This is a lot of work and a lot of taxpayer dollars for something that has apparently not proven it can increase security more than on the margins.”
Healey says he is “very pleased to see DoD saying they could scale this to 8,000 companies.” But he still thinks the department could be much more efficient in its dealings with private industry.
In an article in The Atlantic, Healey argues that the NSA should simply declassify much of its database of malware “signatures.”
While he acknowledges that critics will argue that such action would, “compromise our sensitive collection sources and methods. [But] in truth, the extreme classification surrounding most of these signatures protect little but bureaucratic inertia. General Michael Hayden, a past NSA director, made this case best, saying, ‘Let me be clear: This stuff is overprotected.'”
“More importantly, the Internet is an open network and any adversary that uses novel malicious software knows it will eventually be discovered,” he said.
Philpott adds that in the information security community, “signature-based security is becoming kind of looked down on. It’s inherently weak because only identifies things that have already happened.”
Healey writes in The Atlantic that NSA’s signature database, while “considered among the crown jewels of the U.S. government’s defense capabilities … may not be as awe-inspiring as advertised.” He adds: “And independent review found only marginal benefit” to contractors like Northrop Grumman or Lockheed Martin.
“Only 1% of the attacks were detected using NSA threat data that the companies did not already have themselves,” Healey says.
He argues that a more effective system would be an “independent clearinghouse for signatures. NSA might anonymously add its signatures … and further wash their source by mixing them with signatures from security companies and even with other nations’ intelligence agencies.”
“This option would create the world’s best-ever signature database … and any organization that contributes their signature collection would then able to use the full database,” Healey says.
FBI wants a wire-tap-friendly ‘back door’ to all internet providers
By J. D. Heyes,
(NaturalNews) In this Information Age, the government threats to privacy just continue to cascade, as now the FBI wants Internet companies to install “back doors” into their services to allow electronic eavesdropping of users. Specifically, the FBI wants the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, amended to require Internet platforms such as Facebook, as well as Web-based email programs like Gmail and Yahoo! to build back doors into their systems, so the FBI can access…
This week, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced the establishment of a Whistleblower Protection Advisory Committee. This body will make recommendations to the Secretary of Labor on ways to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and transparency of OSHA’s administration of whistleblower protections.
Dr. David Michaels, assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health said in the news release, “Workers who expose securities and financial fraud, adulterated foods, air and water pollution, or workplace safety hazards have a legal right to speak out without fear of retaliation, and the laws that protect these whistleblowers also protect the health, safety, and well-being of a
From the Majority Report, live M-F 12 noon EST and via daily podcast at http://Majority.FM:
A photographer who was arrested at an Occupy Wall Street event has won his case in what is the first Occupy Wall Street trial, after video evidence proved the NYPD were lying…
Iceland’s peaceful revolution is a stunning example of how little our media tells us about the rest of the world. Read details about Iceland’s wonderful social evolution at DailyKos, here. Another great article is on Bloomberg.com. The following summation has been posted by countless people on Facebook; I’ve reposted it in its entirety: ICELAND (GP) – No news from Iceland? Why? Last we heard, people were rising up and overthrowing the bankers. Then, no news on the television or newspapers for two years. What happened? Why won’t the papers and TV tell us how the bankers successfully crushed or minimized another rebellion? Because… THEY DIDN’T! This time, the people won.
The people of Iceland have overwhelmingly risen up and forced their government puppets of the banks to resign. Primary banks have been nationalized. The debt scam imposed by Great Britain and Holland money printers was declared null and void. A public assembly has been created to rewrite Iceland’s constitution.
The best part is, all of this happened without violence or bloodshed. A whole country’s revolution succeeded against powers that created the current global crisis without a shot being fired. A very good reason exists for the apparent failure of television and newspapers to provide any publicity on this unprecedented event: what would happen if the rest of the EU and the United States took this as an example?
The following is a summary of the facts:
2008 – The main bank of Iceland is nationalized.
The Krona, the currency of Iceland devaluates and the stock market halts. The country is in bankruptcy
2008 – Citizens rise up at Parliament and succeed in forcing the resignation of both the prime minister and the effective government. New elections are held.
Yet, the country remains in a bad economic situation. A Parliament act is passed to pay back 3,500 million Euros to Great Britain and Holland by the people of Iceland monthly during the next 15 years, with 5.5% interest.
2010 – The people of Iceland again take to the streets to demand a referendum. In January of 2010, the President of Iceland denies approval, instead announcing a popular vote on the matter by the people.
In March, a referendum and denial of payment is approved by popular vote of 93%. Meanwhile, government officials initiate an investigation to bring to justice those responsible for the crisis. Many high level executives and bankers are arrested. Interpol dictates an order to force all implicated parties to leave Iceland.
An assembly is elected to write a new constitution (based on the Denmark’s) to avoid entrapments of debt based currency foreign loans. 25 citizens are chosen – with no political affiliation – out of the 522 candidates. The only qualifications for candidacy are adulthood and the support of 30 people. The constitutional assembly started in February of 2011. It continues to present ‘carta magna’ from recommendations provided by various assemblies throughout the country. Ultimately, it must be approved by both the current Parliament and the one created through the next legislative election.
In summary of the Icelandic revolution, we saw: -resignation of the entire corrupt government of the country -nationalization of the bank -referendum enabling the people to determine their own economic system -incarceration of responsible parties, and -a rewriting of the Iceland Constitution by its people
This is significant stuff.
Have we been informed about this through the main stream media?
Has any political program on radio or TV commented on this?
Not that I’ve seen. The Icelandic people have demonstrated a way to beat the international money printers and controllers of information. The last thing entrenched usurers would want is for you to think you could also free yourself from their chains.
Chicago cops start preemptive arrests before NATO Summit?
Over the weekend, thousands of NATO protesters are expected to hit the streets of Chicago. In preparation for the event, the Chicago PD has spent over $1 million on riot gear and sound cannons to blow the protesters away. Reports have surfaced of police raiding the homes of protest organizers, but will their arrests damage the massive protest? Kevin Gosztola, blogger for Dissenter.FireDogLake.com, joins us with a preview of what to expect this weekend.
Police arrest 400 ‘Blockupy’ activists in Frankfurt
The protest mood is brewing in Europe. Protests target capitalism and austerity policies. In Germany, thousands are expected to rally in the country’s financial capilal, Frankfurt, marking the climax of a four-day campaign called ‘Blockupy’. RT’s Peter Oliver is in the city.
Brazilian authorities have admitted that the Amazon’s Awa, “Earth’s most threatened tribe,” are outnumbered 10 to one in just one of their reserves, Survival International said Thursday.
Survival International, a leading advocate for tribal peoples’ rights worldwide, said officials admitted “the scale of the emergency” after receiving over 20,000 messages of protest following the launch of its drive to save the Awa from “imminent extinction” late last month.
It pointed to a Brazilian government survey estimating there could be “up to 4,500 invaders, ranchers, loggers and settlers” occupying just one of the four territories inhabited by the Awa, whose total population stands at no more than 450.
Last month, the rights group launched a major campaign spearheaded by Britain’s Oscar-winning actor Colin Firth to focus world attention on the plight of the Awa, saying they were threatened with “genocide” and “extinction.”
The campaign also aimed to persuade Brazilian Justice Minister Jose Eduardo Cardozo to send in federal police to clear out the loggers, ranchers and settlers invading Awa lands, and keep them out.
Survival said the new head of Brazil’s National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), Marta Azevedo, confirmed that the threat to the Awa was now her agency’s top priority.
“The Awa tribe’s land is being destroyed faster than any other Amazon tribe. As the rainy season ends, one of their main hunting areas is now being targeted by loggers. An Awa man named Armadillo said today, How will we live without the forest?,” the group said in a statement.
“Brazil is one of the world’s most important countries with one of its most dynamic economies, and it certainly has the resources to protect Awa land. Can it deliver?” said Survival Director Stephen Corry. “If not, and the Aw� are destroyed, then is this new economic miracle’ just for the rich and powerful?”
According to Survival, there are roughly 360 Awa who have been contacted by outsiders, many of them survivors of brutal massacres, along with another 100 believed to be hiding in the rapidly-shrinking forest.
FUNAI estimates that there are 77 isolated indigenous tribes scattered across the Amazon. Only 30 such groups have been located.
Indigenous peoples represent less than one percent of Brazil’s 192 million people and occupy 12 percent of the national territory, mainly in the Amazon.
************************************************************************************************************ [In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes ‘FAIR USE’ of any such copyrighted material.]
House lawmakers will return to a familiar debate over the deficit when they come back to Washington on Monday following a weeklong recess.
Republican leaders are planning to bring up a $260 billion measure to slash the budget gap and replace across-the-board spending cuts set to take effect in 2013.
The bill, known as a “reconciliation” proposal, is the product of six House committees and will be combined into one piece of legislation by the House Budget Committee. Democrats have already panned it as an extension of the House GOP proposal that “reflects the wrong priorities” by protecting tax cuts for the wealthy and cutting programs for the poor.
Principally, the GOP measure would replace $78 billion in sequestered cuts resulting from the failure of the congressional “supercommittee” to strike a bipartisan deficit deal last fall. Both Republican leaders and the Pentagon have warned against what they say are arbitrary cuts to defense spending.
“Intended as a mechanism to force action, there is bipartisan agreement that the sequester going into place would undercut key responsibilities of the federal government,” Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other GOP leaders wrote to their members last week in an updated memo describing the reconciliation process.
Senate Dems modifying cybersecurity bill to pick up GOP votes
By Brendan Sasso
Senate Democrats are quietly revamping cybersecurity legislation in an attempt to pick up Republican votes.
The move is an acknowledgement that they currently lack the 60 votes needed to bring their preferred bill to the floor.
“Undoubtedly we’ll make some changes,” a Senate Democratic aide told The Hill. But he said getting the legislation through the Senate “is not as hard of a lift as some people have made it out to be.”
The aide predicted that the entire Senate Democratic caucus will vote for the bill.
The House passed its own measure, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), last month despite a veto threat from the White House.
The goal of CISPA is to help companies beef up their defenses against hackers who steal business secrets, rob customers’ financial information and wreak havoc on computer systems. The bill would remove legal barriers that discourage companies from sharing information about cyber threats.
But the White House and Senate Democrats argue that CISPA lacks adequate privacy protections and would fail to protect critical infrastructure, such as electrical grids, banks or water supplies.
They have endorsed an alternative bill from Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) that includes tougher privacy protections and would authorize the Homeland Security Department to set mandatory security standards for critical infrastructure.
Supporters of the Senate bill argue that mandatory standards are necessary to ensure that critical systems are safe from a catastrophic cyber attack.
But a group of Republicans, led by Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), has slammed the Lieberman-Collins Cybersecurity Act as an example of big government overreach.
At a hearing in February, McCain said if the Lieberman-Collins bill were enacted, “unelected bureaucrats at the DHS could promulgate prescriptive regulations on American businesses” and that the new rules would “stymie job creation, blur the definition of private property rights and divert resources from actual cybersecurity to compliance with government mandates.”
GOP House leaders have also indicated they will not allow a vote on any bill that creates new cybersecurity mandates.
A Senate Democratic leadership aide said the Senate is “on track” to vote on the Lieberman-Collins bill sometime this month.
“The Cybersecurity Act of 2012 has been a priority for [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid [D-Nev.] for three years, and we’re going to do everything we can to pass a bill that confronts the urgent national security threats we face,” the leadership aide said.
Obama looks to move ‘forward’ with comparisons to Bush’s policies
By Amie Parnes and Carlo Munoz
RICHMOND, Va. – In order to move “forward,” the Obama campaign reached backward on Saturday, trying to rekindle the magic of the 2008 campaign.
For the second time on Saturday, during his second official campaign rally, President Obama sought to push a new campaign slogan “Forward,” telling those gathered at Virginia Commonwealth University that the country can’t afford to elect Mitt Romney and move backward to the Bush administration’s “failed” policies.
“Virginia, we’ve gotta move forward to the future you imagined in 2008,” Obama said, standing near a large banner that read “Forward,” before a crowd of 8,000 people, who held signs saying “Not Back” in a packed gymnasium. “Virginia, I’m here to say, we were there, we remember and we’re not going back.”
The reelection campaign aimed to remind voters about the winning campaign in 2008.
Like he did at the Columbus, Ohio, rally earlier in the day, Obama reminded voters that he still believes in “hope and change.”
Obama told the crowd that when people ask what this campaign is about, “You tell them it’s still about hope. You tell them it’s still about change.”
During the rally, the campaign also tried to bring back their old rallying cry: “Fired Up, Ready to Go.” And songs like Stevie Wonder’s Sign Sealed Delivered, a staple from Obama’s first campaign, wailed over the loudspeakers.
FB PAC, Facebook’s new political action committee, spent its first-ever quarter of activity hewing to a more or less bipartisan donation strategy with emphasis on the House and Senate Judiciary committees, the PAC’s first quarter disclosure form shows.
Facebook’s PAC was formed at the end of 2011, but the company’s strong revenues and high valuation in the run up to its initial public offering allowed executives it raises funds from plenty of resources to donate. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg, and several board members including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen contributed the maximum allowable $5,000 to the committee.
Some of Facebook’s Washington-based employees contributed comparatively small amounts, including public policy manager Adam Conner. Conner, who was an aide to Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) before becoming Facebook’s first D.C. hire, kicked in $300 to help get the PAC off the ground.
But the Washington office’s real contribution to the PAC – strategy – becomes clear after a read of its first quarter disclosure for 2012.
Of the $128,900 the PAC took in, it quickly gave away $119,000, distributing the donations on a mostly bipartisan basis. Uncharacteristic for most tech companies, the final tally of contributions favored Republicans $65,500 to $53,500.
Typical leadership cash magnets like House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority and Minority leaders Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) were FB PAC recipients.
But despite the almost bipartisan final breakdown, many of the PAC’s donations seemed to ignore party labels altogether, going instead either to tech favorites like Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and Fred Upton (R-Mich.) or Judiciary committee veterans like Reps. Darrel Issa (R-Calif.), Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
Green group marshals top K Street lobbyists to do battle on farm bill
By Kevin Bogardus
An ardent critic of federal agriculture subsidies has enlisted one of K Street’s premier firms to do battle on this year’s farm bill.
The Environmental Working Group Action Fund — the 501(c)4 affiliate of the Environmental Working Group (EWG) — has signed up Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti to lobby on the legislation.
The hire is a departure for the green group, which hadn’t hired an outside lobby firm in more than eight years, according to lobbying disclosure records.
The support of an established K Street shop could lend heft to what has traditionally been an uphill slog to reform federal farm spending. Scott Faber, EWG’s vice president of government affairs, said Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti is “a terrific firm.”
“We have retained them to advocate for programs that support stewardship, support healthy diets and reform subsidy programs,” Faber said. “They are a terrific firm and they are doing a fabulous job in sharing our views with lawmakers.”
Faber said EGW hired the firm because this year’s farm bill could have a lasting impact on the country.
“This is a pivotal year because we stand to lose many of the gains made in 25 plus years,” Faber said. “Part of the ‘why’ is this is one of the farm bills that will shape America’s farmland, diet and environment for generations to come.”
A new lawsuit, which is bordering on the unbelievable, implicates the Obama administration and some of the world’s largest banks in the largest international money laundering case in history.
This global money laundering network was allegedly formed during the Obama administration and helped banks rob U.S. home owners through offshore affiliates in infamous tax havens and money laundering hubs like the Cayman Island, Isle of Man, Luxembourg and Malaysia.
A press release published by Marketwatch (a website owned by the Wall Street Journal) via Marketwire on April 23, 2012, by America’s Spire Law Group, revealed that a mass tort action on behalf of home owners across the United States has been filed in the Supreme Court of New York, County of Kings.
The release states that the suit implicates every major bank servicer and their subsidiaries, as well as the Obama administration which allegedly was privately ratifying the formation of shell corporations in violation of not only the USA PATRIOT Act, but also State and Federal law as well.
This is all while the administration was very publicly encouraging home owners to modify their loans.
The suit, which has been assigned Index No. 500827 and was filed by the Spire Law Group and their affiliates and partners throughout the United States, also alleges that Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo Bank, Citibank, Citigroup, One West Bank, among other federally chartered banks stole hundreds of millions of dollars from U.S. home owners through little-known offshore companies.
The money was then laundered through offshore corporations, and surprisingly the suit is quite explicit in identifying specific companies as well as the countries they are located in which were used to help defraud huge sums of money from Americans.
These activities are violations of the guidelines of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), New York state law, not to mention other states as well as federal law.
After Heated Debate, Connecticut Senate Passes Medical Cannabis Bill
After a raucous debate last night that lasted longer than anticipated, the Connecticut senate passed a medical cannabis bill approved by the House earlier in the session that will now head to Governor Dannel Malloy’s willing pen for signature.
With Connecticut passing a medical cannabis bill, approximately one third of the US population now resides in a state that has decided to act in favor of it’s citizens’ will, as compared to the remarkably recalcitrant federal government, which, moronically, still insists cannabis is a dangerous ‘narcotic’ and has no accepted medical value what so ever.
“Today is a day of hope, compassion and dignity and I thank all of the legislators who worked hard on this legislation and who voted to pass this bill,” said Erik Williams, Executive Director of Connecticut NORML. “I am so happy for all the patients who will have another medicinal option to discuss with their doctor and for all of those currently suffering with debilitating conditions who will no longer suffer the indignity of being sick and a criminal.”
Scott Walker Gets $1.3 Million From Koch Summit Attendees to Fight Recall
Wisconsin’s embattled Republican governor is supported by a who’s who of wealthy right-wing donors.
Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker has received at least $1.3 million in recall campaign contributions from donors who attended secretive right-wing fundraisers organized by Charles and David Koch, a Center for Media and Democracy analysis shows.
Twice a year for the past nine years, the Koch brothers have held exclusive meetings of businessmen and right-wing activists to, “combat what is now the greatest assault on American freedom and prosperity in our lifetimes,” according to Charles Koch, and raise millions for political causes and candidates.
While the meetings are intentionally kept secret (attendees are warned against speaking with the press), a program from the 2010 summit in Aspen, Colorado was leaked to The New York Times and Think Progress and included a list of attendees. At least twenty of those in attendance have given thousands — and in a few cases, hundreds of thousands — to Scott Walker in recent months as the embattled governor faces a recall election. Overall, these donors have given Walker at least $1.3 million. A full list of Walker contributors known to have attended the Koch donor seminars is below.
Mother Jones obtained audio from the June 2011 meeting, including a segment where Charles Koch personally thanks donors who pledged more than $1 million to the Kochs’ favored causes (a program from the meeting with a full list of attendees was not leaked). Many of those named also gave to Walker and attended the 2010 meeting, including Art Pope (who gave Walker $25,000), John “J.W.” Childs ($100,000), Joseph Craft ($25,000), Richard DeVos ($250,000), Foster Friess ($100,000), and Diane Hendricks ($500,000). John “Jack” Templeton was also given a shout-out at the 2011 meeting, and he and his wife Josephine gave Walker $10,000 each in April.
Wisconsinite and Walker donor Fred Young spoke at the June 2011 meeting and told the crowd, “I attended my first Koch seminar in January of 2004, which I offer as an endorsement of what I think is the effectiveness of this group over the years of doing this.” Like other individuals who attended the Kochs’ donor summits, such as M&I Bank executive Dennis Kuester, Young maxed-out his contributions to Scott Walker in the 2010 election.
Young continued: “Especially now in these times that we’re facing, this is an effective outfit and I hope you’ll stay with us … it’s a well-oiled machine.”
Francois Hollande has ousted Nicolas Sarkozy from the French presidency – to become the country’s first Socialist president in 17 years. It was a close call – winning 51 per cent of votes to his rival’s 49. Our correspondent Tesa Arcilla has been witnessing the wild celebrations at Socialist Party headquarters in Paris.
An awkward moment occurred at Mitt Romney’s town hall event in Cleveland, Ohio on Monday when an audience member, in the process of asking him a question, asserted that President Barack Obama should be tried for treason.
Romney remained silent during the question-and-answer session, only to say that he “of course” did not agree with the sentiment while greeting voters after the event.
The incident nevertheless illustrated what seems likely to be a tricky proposition for Romney as the general election season progresses: balancing the anti-Obama sentiments of the party’s base with the need to maintain a civil level of discourse.
“We have a president right now that is operating outside the structure of our Constitution,” the audience member said to applause. “And I want to know — yeah, I do agree he should be tried for treason — but I want to know what you would be able to do to restore balance between the three branches of government and what you are going to be able to do to restore our Constitution in this country.”
Romney didn’t correct the woman, choosing instead to address the question she posed. Huffington Post
HIGHLIGHTS
The woman did not specify why she believed Obama should be “tried for treason”-a comment that received a huge applause from the audience. And when it was his turn to respond, Romney ignored her suggestion about “treason” and instead spoke about how he would “respect the different branches of government.” abcnews.go.com
Afterwards, as he shook hands along the rope line, the New York Times’ Ashley Parker asked Romney if he agreed with the woman’s comment regarding a “treason” sentence for Obama. “No, of course not,” the candidate said. abcnews.go.com
Later, Romney told CNN: “I don’t correct all of the questions that get asked of me. Obviously I don’t agree that he should be tried.” Washington Post
The Obama campaign characterized the woman’s remark as an out-of-bounds attack and said Romney, though he is Obama’s political adversary, should have stood up for the president. Boston Globe
“Time after time in this campaign, Mitt Romney has had the opportunity to show that he has the fortitude to stand up to hateful and over-the-line rhetoric and time after time, he has failed to do so,” campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith said in a statement. “If this is the ‘leadership’ he has shown on the campaign trail, what can the American people expect of him as commander-in-chief?” Boston Globe
With one and a half million (1.5 million) American children now homeless, reporter Hilary Andersson meets the school pupils who go hungry in the richest country on Earth. From those living in the storm drains under Las Vegas to the tent cities now springing up around the United States, P a n o r a m a finds out how the poor are surviving in America and asks whatever happened to the supposed ‘government’ and the Real People in charge – those who you ‘don’t see’ pulling on the strings; and their vision and welfare for the country.
Could this be a form of ‘Social cleansing’ without the need of war or disease inflicted by the orchestrators – simply a controlled bout of poverty? Or is this the forced education that only condition children to know only a certain amount of knowledge that can only ever see them progress in working environments such as confined offices within the ‘Human Zoo’ qualities within the desperately overcrowded cities.
Why are our children not educated properly – to be able to survive communally with real craft and building skills? Is the social mobility (as in other ‘rich countries’ such as the UK) only fairing the rich; the wealthy and the ‘clever elite’; the white collar criminal, as per usual?
Take your Money out of the Bank NOW!
The Credit Crunch is not some natural phenomenon but an all out assault by the Money Power. What is worse: even without the crunch we are paying trillions per year in interest for absolutely nothing.
The solution is simple: quit their banks.
By Anthony Migchels for Henry Makow and Real Currencies
The Money Power’s goals are obvious. It is not just the massive multi trillion wealth transfer that is under way. It is about bringing the West down a few notches. The US seems strong with a nominal $30.000 per capita GDP, but when the dollar devalues against the Brazilian Real and the Chinese Yuan things will quickly look different. It will also end cheap raw materials.
The reason this crisis exists is because the banks, politicians, the media and economists are colluding in fooling the many into believing we need banks for our money supply. Most of them probably even believe this is true themselves.
They say we need the banks, because otherwise the real economy would have no money to trade with.
All this is complete and utter rubbish, of course. If banks can create credit, then anybody can. That’s just common sense.
Just imagine: we are led to believe that we need to cough up trillions just to have a means of exchange. One that is completely paper/computer based. I.e., almost free of cost.
Banking is part of the Babylon Mystery and bankers believe we are still enthralled with their ‘fractional reserve banking’ sleight of hand. And they are right. Although people are waking up, they still don’t get it.
A good example of this is the ‘take your money out of Bank of America’ of last October. Bank of America decides to rake in an extra 60 dollars per year with a silly fee. This upsets people.
While they are paying $300k interest over 30 years on their $200k mortgage. Which the bank created the moment they borrowed it.
In other words: Penny wise, pound foolish.
People still don’t understand how badly they are being raped. They still don’t understand how they are fleeced through interest on fictional debt.
Dozens of Police Evict Georgia Family at Gunpoint at 3am
The eviction might have been another anonymous descent into poverty were it not for Occupy Atlanta activists who tried to help the family stay.
Four generations of a Georgia family were evicted at gunpoint by dozens of sheriffs and deputies at 3am last week in an Atlanta suburb. The eyebrow-raising eviction, a foreclosure action, might have been another anonymous descent into poverty were it not for Occupy Atlanta activists who tried to help the family stay in Christine Frazer’s home of 18 years.
The eviction came as Frazer, 63, who lost her husband and then job in 2009, had been challenging the foreclosure in county and federal courts by seeking to restructure the terms of a delinquent mortgage. However, the latest holder of her loan, Investors One Corporation—the fourth company that bought her mortgage in an eight-month period—allowed the eviction to proceed even thought it was “negotiating” new loan terms with her attorney one day before the police raid.
DeKalb County Sheriff Thomas Brown told an Atlanta talk radio show a day after the raid that a dozen squad cars and dozens of deputies were needed for the dead-of-night raid because Occupy Atlanta had set up tents on Frazer’s property, and his perception of the Occupy activists in other cities led him to believe they could be armed. He also said he timed the eviction to avoid media coverage.
“I made the decision that we were going to do this at 3am for a couple of reasons,” he told WAOK’s Derrick Boazman. “Number one, I have seen the various Occupy groups in various cities operate before. It was an ugly scene in Oakland. I have seen them firsthand in Washington. I’ve seen them on Wall Street. I’ve seen them in Atlanta.”
“I will not participate in a mass demonstration arrest with television cameras when I am not sure I can trust the people who say they will offer passive resistance,” Brown said. “Our intelligence told us that there were at least 10 Occupy Atlanta folks there on the property; that turned out not to be the case. Our intelligence told us that the family had vacated the house; that turned out not to be the case… We made the decision to have enough resources there to make sure it would not get out of hand.”
But out-of-hand does not even approach how Christine Frazer described the raid, saying in the days since the eviction she and her family, including her 85-year-old mother, daughter and 3-year-old grandson, have been split up and forced to rely on charity. Frazer also described how she had been exploring every legal avenue to refinance her debt, but the lenders had no intention of doing anything but evict her, presumably to sell the home.
“It has been really unsettling,” Frazer said. “When something like this happens, it breaks up the family. Me and my mom are staying one place. My grandson is someplace. My daughter is staying someplace else. It just feels really strange. I have lived in that home for 18 years. That is where I am used to waking up every morning. It’s just… I am grateful that I am not under a bridge, but I miss home.”
Frazer said that she did not expect the sudden eviction, because she had been challenging the foreclosure in federal court and her attorney had been negotiating with the lenders.
“No, I didn’t, because I currently have a case in federal court for a wrongful foreclosure,” she said. “And also the opposing or foreclosing attorney was in a negotiation process with my attorney. As a matter of fact, that Monday, I talked with them and they had talked about possibly reinstating the loan. But, of course, I was concerned about the principle [amount]. And they previously said they were looking for the eviction. It happened the next morning at 3am.”
Frazer’s descent in home loan hell had been going on for months, she said, but nothing in that arduous effort prepared her for being awakened and evicted at gunpoint.
Is Obama Negotiating A Treaty That Would Essentially Ban All “Buy American” Laws?
69 members of the U.S. House of Representatives have sent Barack Obama a letter expressing their concern that a new international treaty currently being negotiated would essentially ban all “Buy American” laws. This new treaty is known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and it is going to be one of the biggest “free trade” agreements in history. Critics are referring to it as the “NAFTA of the Pacific“, and it would likely cost the U.S. economy even more jobs than NAFTA did. At the moment, the Trans-Pacific Partnership includes Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore. Barack Obama is pushing hard to get the United States into the TPP, and Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, Canada, Japan and South Korea are also reportedly interested in joining. But quite a few members of Congress have heard that “Buy American” laws will essentially be banned under this agreement, and this has many of them very concerned. You can read the entire letter that was sent to Obama right here. Unfortunately, the leaders of both major political parties are overwhelmingly in favor of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, so the objections of these 69 members of Congress are likely to fall on deaf ears. The Trans-Pacific Partnership will accelerate the flow of American jobs out of this country, and meanwhile our politicians will continue to insist that they are doing everything that they can to “create jobs”.
There is not much protecting American jobs these days. The “Buy American” laws are one of the last remaining barriers that helps protect against much, much cheaper foreign labor, but now “Buy American” laws are in danger of being banned permanently as a recent article in the Huffington Post explained….
Since the 1930s, the American government has offered preferential treatment to American producers in the awarding of federal contracts. If a domestic producer offers the government a more expensive bid than a foreign producer, it can still be awarded the contract under certain circumstances, but more recent free trade agreements have granted other nations the same negotiating status as domestic firms. The Obama administration is currently pushing to grant the several nations involved in the Trans-Pacific deal the same privileged status, according to the Thursday letter.
‘Your victory is not far:’ Turkish PM Erdogan tells Syrian refugees
By Al Arabiya With Agencie
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Syrian refugees near the border town of Kilis that their “victory is not far,” as the regime in Damascus geared for a parliamentary election described by the opposition as a cynical attempt by President Bashar al-Assad to hold on to power.
“You are getting stronger each passing day,” Erdogan told the hundreds of refugees who had fled a bloody crackdown on dissent in Syria.
“Your victory is not far,” added the prime minister who was visiting the Kilis refugee camp.
Turkey, once a strong ally of Syria, is home to some 23,000 refugees who fled the Damascus regime’s deadly crackdown on dissent. It is also playing host to a large Syrian opposition community including rebels defecting from the army.
“Bashar is losing blood each passing day,” said Erdogan, referring to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
“We are on the side of Syrian people but we are never on the side of the Bashar administration,” said Erdogan.
The Kilis refugee camp bordering Syria is one of the largest camps hosting some 9,600 refugees.
The camp was target of controversy when ricocheting bullets from crossfire between Syrian troops and rebel forces wounded four Syrians and two Turks in early April. Two of the wounded Syrians later died, witnesses had told AFP.
The Multinational Force and Observers is an independent international organization with peacekeeping responsibilities in the Sinai. (File photo)
By Al Arabiya with Agencies
Bedouin tribesmen in the Sinai peninsula on Monday briefly detained 10 Fijians from the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), which is charged with monitoring peace between Egypt and Israel.
One of the tribesmen told AFP they had seized the men because they were seeking the release of Bedouin prisoners held by Egypt.
“They were patrolling and we seized them by firing in the air,” he told AFP by telephone on condition of anonymity. “They are with us now, and we want the liberation of all Bedouin prisoners.”
He later said the captives were released following assurances their demand would be met.
An Egyptian security source confirmed the 10 had been detained and then released around an hour later.
The MFO is an independent international organization with peacekeeping responsibilities in the Sinai. Its origins lie in the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty.
It was unclear precisely how long the peacekeepers had been held, however, and why the tribesmen had released them.
The MFO could not be immediately reached for comment, while state TV and the state news agency MENA denied that the incident had taken place.
MENA cited its own security source as saying that the troops had in fact got lost but had later found their way home without any problems.
In March, armed Bedouin surrounded a camp belonging to the MFO mission for eight days before lifting the siege. That incident was also a bid to pressure Egyptian authorities into releasing tribesmen from jail.
In March, Bedouins briefly abducted two Brazilian women tourists in the Sinai before releasing them hours later, in the third kidnapping of foreign tourists in two months as they pressed their demands.
A hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners against Israel’s jail policies has swollen in weeks from a protest by a handful to a national movement with at least 1,500 participants. (Reuters)
By AL ARABIYA WITH AFP
Israel’s Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal by two Palestinian prisoners who have been on hunger strike for 69 days in protest at being held without charge, their lawyer told AFP.
“The Supreme Court refused both appeals,” Jamil Khatib said of the move by Bilal Diab, 27, and Thaer Halahla, 34, who had appealed to Israel’s highest court on Thursday to end the administrative detention orders under which they are being held.
“They will continue their strike till the end,” Khatib added.
“Israeli courts do not handle administrative detention in a positive way. It shows that the intelligence services have the final word.”
Halahla was arrested on June 28, 2010 and has been held in administrative detention ever since, while Diab has been held since August 17, 2011.
Both began refusing food on Feb. 29.
Administrative detention is an antiquated procedure that allows suspects to be held without charge for periods of up to six months, which are renewable indefinitely.
Nine bodies have been found hanging from a bridge in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico on May 4, 2012.
Sun May 6, 2012 5:20PM GMT
Share31
The bodies of 23 people have been found hanging from a bridge or decapitated and dumped in northeastern Mexico, where drug gangs are fighting a brutal turf war along the US border.
Police discovered 14 decapitated bodies in a vehicle in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, hours after nine bodies with signs of torture were found hanging from a bridge.
Police said that the heads belonging to the decapitated bodies were found in ice boxes dumped outside the mayor’s office.
Just across the border from the Texas city of Laredo, Nuevo Laredo is the scene of a bloody war between two of Mexico’s biggest drug gangs, the Zetas cartel and the powerful Sinaloa cartel, which has joined forces with the Gulf cartel, over the control of smuggling routes into the US.
A message left with the bodies indicated that the attacks may have been carried out by the Zetas cartel against the rival Gulf cartel.
More than 50,000 people have died in drug-related violence in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon launched a crackdown on criminal gangs in late 2006.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai speaks during a press conference at the presidential palace in Kabul on May 3, 2012.
Mon May 7, 2012 10:21PM GMT
Share5
Afghan President Hamid Karzai says the strategic pact signed by Kabul and Washington will be at risk if US-led forces continue to kill Afghan civilians.
On Monday, Karzai summoned the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, General John Allen, and US Ambassador Ryan Crocker to warn them that civilian casualties in military operations threatened the pact, AFP reported.
On May 1, 2012, Washington and Kabul signed an agreement to extend the US military presence in Afghanistan to 2024.
Shortly after arriving in the war-torn country in an unannounced trip late at night on May 1, US President Barack Obama met Karzai, and both signed the deal that authorizes the presence of US troops for a period of 10 years after 2014, which was the original date agreed upon for the departure of all foreign combat troops from Afghanistan.
A statement from Karzai’s office said that since Saturday, dozens of Afghan civilians, including women and children, had been killed in NATO airstrikes in four provinces — Logar and Helmand in the south, Kapisa in the east, and Badghis in the northwest.
The statement said that President Karzai signed the pact with the US to protect the lives of Afghans and if civilian deaths are not prevented, the pact will lose its validity.
“If the lives of Afghans are not protected, the strategic partnership will lose its meaning,” the statement quoted Karzai as saying.
US-led troops have been fighting in Afghanistan since 2001. Their initial offensive removed the Taliban from power, but insecurity continues to rise across the country despite the presence of about 130,000 foreign forces.
Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh calls on Israel to release Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike to protest their detention, Press TV reports.
Describing the mass hunger strike by Palestinians in Israeli jails as a humanitarian struggle, Haniyeh on Monday called on Islamic and Arab countries to be more engaged in the issues of Palestinian prisoners.
His remarks came after Israel’s Supreme Court turned down an appeal requesting the release of two Palestinian prisoners, Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahla who have been on hunger strike for more than two months.
Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahla began refusing food on February 29 in protest to their administrative detention, a controversial practice used by Tel Aviv, which allows Israeli authorities to hold people, mostly Palestinians, without charge or trial indefinitely.
Meanwhile, political adviser to Haniyeh Yousef Rizqa warned that Israel was trying to use party affiliations to sow discord among the prisoners on hunger strike.
An estimated 1,600 to 2,000 Palestinian prisoners began an open-ended hunger strike on April 17 to protest against Israel’s administrative detention rules, the use of solitary confinement, maltreatment of sick detainees, and difficulty in securing family visits and strip searches that are imposed on visitors.
According to an April 1, 2012 report published by the non-governmental Palestinian prisoner support and human rights association, Addameer, at least 4,610 “political” Palestinian prisoners are held in Israeli jails.
Addameer figures show 322 of the Palestinian prisoners are administrative detainees.
Independent sources, however, put the number of Palestinian inmates in Israeli jails at 11,000.
Controversial ‘naked’ body scanners could be introduced at all UK airports after top scientists declared them safe.
Manchester Airport has been trialling the device – known as back scatter scanner – since 2009, but the European Commission halted new trials last year amid concerns there was a risk to passengers’ health from high levels of radiation.
But an EU study has decided that the risk from the scanners, which use X-rays to scan through clothing to produce images of passengers, is ‘close to zero’ and no greater than other factors.
Scroll down to see the scanners in action
Safe: A security officer poses for photographers in the body scanner at Manchester Airport, Manchester
A report said the radiation from a single passenger scan is ‘equivalent’ to the natural background radiation received within an hour on the ground or during ten minutes on a flight.
It added that the doses per scan were ‘well below the public dose limit’, although the long-terms effects, such as cancer risks, could not be dismissed entirely.
The European Commission is now expected to approve the technology and the scanners could be rolled out to other UK and European airports.
Holding a sign saying “We Love ObamaCare” supporters of health care reform rally in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, Tuesday, March 27, 2012, as the court continued hearing arguments on the health care law signed by President Barack Obama. Go ahead, call it Obamacare. Obama’s re-election campaign has lifted an unofficial ban on using the opposition’s derisive term for his health care law. Democratic activists have been chanting, “We love Obamacare,” in front of the Supreme Court. And the campaign is selling T-shirts and bumper stickers that proclaim: “I like Obamacare.” (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
(CNSNews.com) – A report from the House Ways and Means Committee finds that 71 of the nation’s top 100 companies would find it far more economical to drop their health care plans and simply pay the penalty for not complying with the Obamacare employer insurance mandate.
The report, published May 1, surveyed 71 of the 100 companies in the Fortune 100 list of large corporations and finds that all of them would save considerable amounts of money by dropping their health care coverage instead of complying with the Obamacare insurance mandate.
“According to data provided by the 71 Fortune 100 companies that responded to the inquiry, they could save a total of $28.6 billion in 2014 alone if they stopped offering health insurance to their U.S. employees and instead paid the employer mandate penalty for not doing so,” the report said.
“In the highly competitive global market in which these Fortune 100 companies operate, it is unrealistic for them not to consider the more economical choice of dumping health coverage and telling their employees to purchase health insurance through the Exchanges.”
During the health care reform debate, Obama famously promised that people would be able to keep the coverage that they currently have – a promise that looks to be in increasing danger.
The sale of a bankrupt dairy farm group to a Chinese firm has sparked fears of a foreign land grab in New Zealand, as well as revealing what critics label a “dark side” of the national psyche.
After a review process lasting more than 12 months, the government last month approved the sale of the 16-property Crafar Farms group to China’s Shanghai Pengxin in a deal reportedly worth NZ$210 million ($170 million).
On the face of it, the sale was a minor component of the burgeoning NZ$10 billion a year trade relationship between China and New Zealand, which in 2008 became the first developed nation to sign a free trade agreement with Beijing.
But the approval sparked intense controversy in the farm-reliant country, the world biggest exporter of dairy products, with Prime Minister John Key’s conservative government accused of selling out to foreign interests.
The main opposition Labour Party labelled the decision “a massive kick in the guts” for New Zealand farmers, while Winston Peters of the populist New Zealand First Party branded it “economic betrayal”.
“The whole sales process has been a shonky, jack-up job between Prime Minister John Key, his ministers, and the communist government of China,” Peters said.
Opinion polls have showed overwhelming public opposition to the deal, which the Greens say is part of a land grab by foreign investors intent on snapping up productive farmland to shore up security of their own food supplies.
“Food producing farmland with access to water is an increasingly valuable resource in a finite world with growing population and declining water resources,” Greens co-leader Russel Norman said.
“Realising this, the Chinese government has embarked upon a strategy encouraging Chinese companies to purchase farmland throughout the world,” he added, saying it would see profits generated in New Zealand going offshore.
Key, who has previously expressed concern about New Zealanders becoming “tenants in their own land”, has supported the sale, saying New Zealand cannot turn down investors simply because they are Chinese.
He said that all foreign investors, regardless of where they came from, had to be treated equally under the law.
“So if this deal is a yes for an Australian buyer or a yes for an American buyer then it should be a yes for a Chinese buyer,” he said.
“In the end I think it is a pretty good deal for all parties.”
Key said there was no evidence the Crafar sale would open the way for a flood of rural sales to foreign groups, arguing less than two percent of New Zealand farmland was owned by foreigners, mostly from Europe or America.
“I don’t think that’s actually happening at this point, it’s more a perception than a reality,” he said.
With the government hoping to double two-way trade with China to NZ$20 billion by 2015, the foreign affairs ministry warned during the Crafar consultation process that rejecting the deal could have serious implications.
Land Information Minister Maurice Williamson has described opposition to the sale as “bordering on racism”, while the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research attributes the backlash to xenophobia and party politics.
It’s an assessment University of Otago politics lecturer Bryce Edwards reluctantly agreed with, saying the ethnicity of the group buying the farms was “the elephant in the room” in the debate.
“Obviously there’s a lot of genuine non-racist criticism but… I think it’s slightly alarming,” he said. “New Zealand’s dark side is coming out, our discomfort with foreigners and Asian investors in particular.
“It’s not something I’ve seen in my lifetime. Normally it’s been about how much goods and services we’re buying from Asia, now it’s moved on to a different level.”
A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Wellington, Cheng Lei, was reluctant to address the Crafar issue directly but said New Zealanders should be pleased to welcome foreign investment.
“I think Kiwis should understand that it is a positive signal,” he told reporters after the sale was announced.
“It showcases foreign countries confidence in your country, in your system, in your people and you should be happy about that.”
In a meeting meant to calm residents fear about hosting missiles on their rooftops during the Olympic games, Lieutenant Colonel Brian Fahy told Londoners it’s possible that drones laden with biological weapons may be used in an attack during the upcoming games.
Yahoo News India reports Fahy is the officer in charge of community relations during the Olympics and he spoke to a group at Leystonstone, East London, close to where one of six surface-to-air missile batteries will be set up during the Olympics.
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes ‘FAIR USE’ of any such copyrighted material.]
Dr Guy Kiddle from Lumora, who led the research, explained that LAMP-BART was able to detect as little as 0.1% GM contamination of maize, and, compared to PCR, was more tolerant of contaminating polysaccharides, meaning that the DNA clean-up process did not need to be as thorough.
It is important to be able to monitor genetically modified (GM) crops, not only in the field but also during the food processing chain.
New research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal BMC Biotechnology shows that products from genetically modified crops can be identified at low concentration, using bioluminescent real time reporter (BART) technology and loop mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP).
The combination of these techniques was able to recognize 0.1% GM contamination of maize, far below the current EU limit of 0.9%.
In agriculture GM crops have been bred to improve crop yield or viability. For example some are resistant to herbicides or viruses.
They are also used in the pharmaceutical industry to produce proteins such as collagen. However there is a constant debate about the safety of these crops and whether the man-made transgenes might enter the wild population by cross-fertilization.and produce herbicide resistant weeds.
Careful handling and sampling techniques are required to assess the GM content of a crop. The most common technique is polymerase chain reaction (PCR), however, this involves complex extraction procedures and rapid thermocycling, both of which require specific equipment.
To overcome these problems researchers from Lumora Ltd. assessed whether they could use LAMP to amplify DNA at a constant temperature and use BART to identify GM-specific DNA in real time.
Dr Guy Kiddle from Lumora, who led the research, explained that LAMP-BART was able to detect as little as 0.1% GM contamination of maize, and, compared to PCR, was more tolerant of contaminating polysaccharides, meaning that the DNA clean-up process did not need to be as thorough.
He commented, “This method requires only basic equipment for DNA extraction, and a constant temperature for DNA amplification and detection. Consequently LAMP-BART provides a ‘field-ready’ solution for monitoring GM crops and their interaction with wild plants or non-GM crops.”
GMO detection using a bio-luminescent real time reporter (BART) of loop mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) suitable for field use Guy Kiddle, Patrick Hardinge, Neil Buttigieg, Olga Gandelman, Clint Pereira, Cathal J McElgunn, Manuela Rizzoli, Rebecca Jackson, Nigel Appleton, Cathy Moore, Laurence C. Tisi and James A.H. Murray BMC Biotechnology (in press)
WASHINGTON — Predicting the weather is tricky enough. Now a new government-sponsored report warns that America’s ability to track tornadoes, forecast hurricanes and study climate change is about to diminish.
The number and capability of weather satellites circling the planet “is beginning a rapid decline” and tight budgets have significantly delayed or eliminated missions to replace them, according to a National Research Council analysis released Wednesday.
The number of in-orbit and planned Earth observation missions by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is projected to drop “precipitously” from 23 this year to only six by 2020 based on information provided by both agencies, the report found. As a result, the number of satellites and other instruments monitoring Earth’s activity is expected to decline from a peak of about 110 in 2011 to fewer than 30 by the end of the decade.
“Right now, when society is asking us the hardest questions and the most meaningful questions, we’re going to be even more challenged to answer them,” said Stacey W. Boland, a senior systems engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and a member of the committee that wrote the report. “We’ll slowly become data-starved here.”
The report, Earth Science and Applications from Space: A Midterm Assessment of NASA’s Implementation of the Decadal Survey, credits NASA with finding creative ways to prolong the life of existing satellites and working with international partners to fill in forecasting gaps.
But, the authors said, glue and scissors only go so far.
When a similar analysis was issued five years ago, eight satellites were expected to be in space by 2012 tracking a variety of conditions, such as global precipitation, ocean topography and carbon emissions. Only three are now in orbit. Of the remaining five, two failed, one was canceled and two others are not expected to launch until at least next year.
The pipeline looks emptier over the next decade.
Of the 18 missions recommended in the 2007 report through 2020, only two are close enough to completion to register launch dates.
Dennis Hartmann, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle, and chair of the committee, warned that the loss of capacity will have “profound consequences on science and society, from weather forecasting to responding to natural hazards.”
NASA and NOAA are facing what all other government agencies are confronting: a record federal debt that has most in Congress talking about ways to cut programs, not expand them. The debt is approaching $15.7 trillion, or more than $50,000 per U.S. citizen, and even military leaders say the government’s spiralling sea of red ink poses a huge threat to the nation’s economic stability.
Lawmakers and the Obama administration have treated NASA better than most agencies. Its budget for the fiscal 2013 year is proposed to be relatively flat, a small victory given that many other agencies are facing deep cuts.
As a way to improve the efficiency of the nation’s civilian satellite program, a key Senate panel voted last month to shift the acquisition — but not operation — of weather satellites from the NOAA to NASA.
But even if Congress changed course today and decided to fund these missions, there would still be a lag because of the time it takes to build a satellite, Boland said.
“Once you’re even in implementation, it still takes several years to get from there to a launch pad,” she said.
Federal prosecutors said four Irish and British men charged in a crackdown on the international hacking group Anonymous also helped breach the security analysis company Stratfor last year.
In an indictment made public on Wednesday, Manhattan federal prosecutors said the four men, previously charged in March, were part of the “Antisec” faction of Anonymous that disclosed in December that it had hacked into Strategic Forecasting Inc, or Stratfor.
Stratfor is dubbed a “shadow CIA” because it gathers non-classified intelligence on international crises.
Until Wednesday, only 27-year old Chicago hacker Jeremy Hammond had been formally charged with the Stratfor breach. Hammond, who is in custody in New York, was formally indicted on Wednesday for the first time, and has yet to be arraigned. His lawyer declined comment.
Hammond’s arrest was announced on March 6 along with charges against the four suspected “AntiSec” members, Donncha O’Cearrbhail and Darren Martyn of Ireland, and Jake Davis and Ryan Ackroyd of Britain.
Kuwaitis hold a picture of 13-year-old boy Hamza al-Khatib, killed during anti-regime protests in Syria, as they take part in a demonstration in support of the Syrian uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Kuwait City on June 24, 2011.
Kuwait is about to take a firmer line on regulation of social media, uneasy about people who it says use Twitter and Facebook to stoke sectarian tensions and wary of spillover from turmoil in nearby Gulf states and Syria.
Although Kuwait has largely been spared the sectarian violence that flares in other countries in the region, the Sunni government is constantly aware of the potential for Sunni-Shi’ite tensions to boil over.
Authorities are particularly sensitive to developments in Bahrain, where the Sunni monarchy has cracked down on mainly Shi’ite Muslim protesters. Kuwait also borders Iraq and Saudi Arabia and sits across the Gulf from non-Arab Shi’ite power Iran.
Lately there are signs that frictions are heating up, and much of the activity is being stoked online.
“Twitter is becoming a platform that many people are using and many people are watching. You cannot look at this without neglecting what is happening in the region,” said Kuwaiti Twitter user and blogger Jassim al-Qamis.
Twitter has enjoyed runaway popularity in Kuwait, whose oil wealth and freer political system have helped to shield it from Arab Spring-style anti-government demonstrations.
One million accounts were registered in the country of 3.6 million inhabitants as of April, a two-fold rise in 12 months, according to Paris-based Semiocast, which compiles Twitter data.
“You have the extreme Islamists in Kuwait and you have a tension between Saudi and Iran. This is fuelling the discussion here,” said Qamis, who has written online about the unrest in Bahrain and has 2,000 followers tracking his Twitter messages.
“People are becoming proxies of powers in the region. Kuwait has become a battlefield for this.”
The rift between Sunnis and Shi’ites dates back some 1,400 years, originating in a debate over who would succeed the Prophet Mohammad as leader of the Muslim community. But it now can also encompass different political, social and historical outlooks and splits down ethnic lines.
Shi’ites make up about one third of Kuwait’s 1.1 million nationals and vocal members can be found in senior positions in parliament, media and business.
Sunni writer Mohammad al-Mulaifi was sentenced to seven years in jail and fined nearly $18,000 after a court ruled in April that he had posted falsehoods on Twitter about sectarian divisions in Kuwait and had insulted the Shi’ite faith.
Lawyers and rights activists said this appeared to be the strictest punishment so far for comments posted online.
Insulting religions or religious figures is illegal in Kuwait and the penalty is usually a fine or prison term. Lawmakers recently voted in favor of a legal amendment which could make such offenses punishable by death.
But it is the case of a Kuwaiti Shi’ite charged with insulting the Prophet Mohammad that has triggered the biggest public uproar.
Learning their lesson from SOPA, the House decided to invite civil liberties constituencies to the table so as to avoid having to witness another implosion of a major legislative goal. As a result, a number of amendments were introduced that began to address some of the most egregious parts of the bill, and, in response, some members of the civil liberties community decided to withhold further, vocal opposition. Then, on Thursday evening, it all fell apart. As Josh Smith at the National Journal described, the CISPA that was passed by the House on Thursday didn’t reflect this negotiation:
The Center for Democracy and Technology and the Constitution Project never really dropped objections to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, but after discussions with the bill’s sponsors, the groups said on April 24 they would not actively oppose the bill and focus on amendments instead. But on April 25, the House Rules Committee shot down 22 of 43 submitted amendments to the bill, known as CISPA. All but one Republican amendments were made in order, while four out of 19 Democratic amendments and four with 10 bipartisan support made the cut. Five amendments were withdrawn.
Unhappy with this outcome, the civil liberties groups are doubling down their efforts for the next stage of this battle — the Senate.
That’s the quick recap of what happened last week.
I’ll spend the rest of this post providing a summary of the amendments made and provide my thoughts on the problems they create and solve. I’ve ordered them, roughly, by importance.
1. Goodlatte Amendment:Provides more detail around what “cybersercurity” means under this bill:
This amendment places under the umbrella of cybersecurity:
(i) a vulnerability of a system or network of a government or private entity;
(ii) a threat to the integrity, confidentiality, or availability of a system or network of a government or private entity or any information stored on, processed on, or transiting such a system or network;
(iii) efforts to degrade, disrupt, or destroy a system or network of a government or private entity; or
(iv) efforts to gain unauthorized access to a system or network of a government
or private entity, including to gain such unauthorized access for the purpose of exfiltrating information stored on, processed on, or transiting a system or network of a government or private entity
Cyber threat information, under this amendment, now specifically covers information relating to a threat to the “integrity, confidentiality, or availability of a system or network of a government or private entity or any information stored on, processed on, or transiting such a system or network.”
Confidentiality is defined as “including the means for protecting proprietary information.” This sounds a lot like intellectual property. If that’s correct, than it means that cybersecurity threats now include intellectual property piracy. Accordingly, private companies can send warrantless surveillance information regarding threats of copyright piracy to the government, and the government is authorized to act on them. It’s not exactly the Son of SOPA, but it does elevate the crime of copyright piracy so that it is now on par with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and Stuxnet type viruses.
Meat, fish, poultry, dairy, and fresh bakery products are dated with a “sell by date” to indicate how long the food can be displayed for sale. Also, the “sell by date” allows a reasonable amount of time after the purchase in which the product can be used. Consumers should always purchase food before the “sell by date” expires. Cereals, snack foods, frozen entrees, and dry packaged foods may be marked with a “best if used by date.” The products are not at their best quality after this date, but can still be used safely for a short period of time thereafter. Safety
Other foods, such as unbaked breads, are marked with an “expiration” or “use by date,” which means the product should not be consumed after that date. Do not purchase any food not used by that date. The freshness date is located on the food package and serves as an indicator of product quality.
Making your own herbal concoctions for medicinal purposes is really not that difficult. And since the best herbal preparations are those made when the plants are fresh, the better off you are to grow your own herbs and make your own preparations.
But even the best plants can be ruined if you use the wrong kind of process in preparing your remedies. Your choice depends on the parts of the plant to be used, the form in which the remedy will be taken, and the desired result.
Remember that herbal remedies are not one-shot wonder cures. Their effectiveness is based largely on a gradual cure.
The following ways of preparing your fresh herbs are those most commonly used in herbal medicine. Always use an enamel or non-metallic pot.
Infusion – this is a beverage made like tea, combining boiled water with the plants and steeping it to extract the active ingredients. The normal amounts are about 1/2 to 1 ounce of the plant to one pint of boiled water. You should let the mixture steep for five to ten minutes, covered, and strain the infusion into a cup.
Cold Extract – preparing herbs with cold water preserves the most volatile ingredients, while extracting only minor amounts of mineral salts and bitter principles. Add about double the amount of plant material used for an infusion to cold water and let sit for about 8 to 12 hours, strain and drink.
Learn with Green Deane how to recognize and prepare wild mustard, Brassica ssp., springtime salad ingredient, pot herb and wild food from http://www.eattheweeds.com
“Tuition Fees are Class War!” CUNY Brooklyn College Students Roughed Up By Police for Demanding Fairer Treatment
Calling for an end to policies that make college less accessible to lower-income students, CUNY activists held a peaceful sit-in that was violently broken up by police.
Every gate at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College had doubled security—no one was getting in without a student ID.
That and the rain might have dampened turnout for a mass studentday of action calling for increased access to higher education and supported by the likes of Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky, but it didn’t dampen the spirits of the student activists who rallied on the quad and then marched into Boylan Hall, chanting, “1, 2, 3, 4, tuition fees are class war! 5, 6, 7, 8, students will retaliate!”
It took police, batons and riot cuffs to do that.
I was able to get onto campus with the name of a professor given to me by one of the student organizers–the last time I visited the campus, I had no problem walking by the guards, but this time a student was left in tears because her ID wasn’t properly validated and she couldn’t get to class. Some CUNY graduate students from other campuses were able to join the Brooklyn College students for their rally, which included a banner drop from the top of Boylan Hall (also reading “tuition fees are class war”). “They didn’t give access to a rally about access,” commented Biola Jeje, one of the students involved in the action, later to AlterNet.
Arriving on the quad just after 1pm, I was just in time to follow the march into Boylan Hall and up the stairs. The students, a mix of men and women, many of whom wore red squares on their shirts or backpacks in solidarity with the Quebec student movement, took the stairs and lined up arm-in-arm in front of the office of the college president, Karen Gould.
Campus police followed the students up the stairs and lined up behind them as they sat down, still with their arms linked together, still singing. They mic-checked their demands, the crowd surrounding them repeating their calls for the college president to meet with them to discuss tuition hikes, the surveillance and racial profiling of Muslim and other students, and funding student services, as well as the over-arching presence of security on campus. And they stressed that they would not move.
The university president, they pointed out, might not have the power to change the tuition hikes they were fighting, but she did have the choice to come and meet with them and she chose instead to send campus police. “We had a petition going around that had over 1000 signatures for free printing, extension of library hours, free course packets. Those are ways besides rescinding the tuition hikes, to help students who were dealing with the tuition hikes,” Jeje said of the students’ demands to the president.
A clarinetist accompanied them as they turned once again to songs, declaring “The Italians fought fascists with this song” and keeping the mood, for the moment, cheerful, yet militant.
“In 1969 we shut this school down, in 1989 we shut this school down. In 1995 guess what we did? We shut this school down!” the crowd echoed as the police moved closer.
Those of us standing were herded backward and the police began yanking students to their feet, pulling them apart and pushing them down the hallway. “They yanked us up and just threw us away,” Jeje said later.
In front of me, an older man dressed in a suit tried to move forward and was roughly pushed back by an officer. He declined to give me his name, but he told the police, “I’m a college professor!” He was threatened with arrest for disorderly conduct by a large plainclothes security officer when he pressed his case for staying close. Others loudly proclaimed their right to be in the hallway as the police continued to shove students down the hall—and more of them streamed up the stairs, batons out, plastic riot cuffs dangling from their belts.
The 99% Movement Has Something for Everyone — But Is it Occupy?
How will the 99% Spring impact the Occupy Movement?
May 3, 2012 |
Photo Credit: sashakimel on Flickr
A version of this article was originally published by Salon.com.
By all measures the Occupy movement is a powerful brand. It has thousands of spin-offs such as Occupy our Homes, Occupy Money, Occupy the Hood, Occupy Gender Equality and Occupy the Food System. It has powerful name recognition, snagging “word of the year” honors in 2011. And now ardent supporters are manning the ramparts to defend its integrity.
Adbusters, the culture-jamming magazine that helped spark Occupy Wall Street, is accusing unions and liberal groups clustered under the banner of the 99% Spring of tarnishing Occupy’s sterling name. Launched in February by groups like Greenpeace, the Service Employees International Union, MoveOn and Rebuild the Dream, the 99% Spring announced it would train 100,000 people in April for “sustained nonviolent direct action” against targets like Verizon, Bank of America and Walmart.
These groups, Adbusters belllowed in an online missive titled “Battle for the Soul of Occupy,” are “the same cabal of old world thinkers who have blunted the possibility of revolution for decades.” Adbusters fingered MoveOn as one of the primary saboteurs of Occupy, and linked to an article in Counterpunch that claims the 99% Spring “is primarily about co-option and division, about sucking a large cross-section of Occupy into Obama’s reelection campaign, watering down its radical politics, and using these mass trainings as a groundwork to put forward 100,000 ‘good protesters’ to overshadow the ‘bad protesters.’”
It’s a fiery broadside, but there’s little evidence to back it up. I queried occupiers from San Francisco, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Little Rock and New York who joined 99% Spring trainings and not one witnessed election-year politicking. Others stressed the coalition includes organizations that would bolt if it was promoting the Democrats. One core organizer of the 99% Spring who preferred to remain anonymous blew his stack when I asked if there weren’t legitimate reasons for occupiers to be suspicious of the effort. “Why don’t people look at the fact that MoveOn, this huge organization that has set much of the tone for the progressive movement for the last 10 years, is now trying to engage in a radical culture shift by moving its members from clicktivism to getting them to put their bodies on the line in nonviolent street protests and militant eviction defenses in their neighborhoods. Maybe Occupy is worried about its own viability.”
Some observers go further, claiming that Occupy is the one co-opting MoveOn. Josh Harkinson writes in Mother Jones: “It seems that America’s best-known progressive fundraising organization is now taking its cues from Occupy Wall Street.” Nathan Schneider, writing in Waging Nonviolence, takes a more nuanced approach by concluding that while the 99% Spring is indeed co-optation, there is also an opening. Because the thousands who participated in the 99% Spring are a juicy target, he argues that Occupy should be asking how to “turn these people’s attention to structures of oppression, rather than to stump speeches and delegates?” Schneider gives voice to the many Occupy activists who want to engage with broader forces. As one activist observes, “The worst thing we could do right now is make Occupy Wall Street into a small ‘radicals only’ space.”
But the real story is how the main groups behind the 99% Spring – such as MoveOn and Rebuild the Dream – have created a meta-brand known as the 99% Movement that encompasses a product line including 99% Power, 99% Candidates, 99% Uniting, a 99% Voter Pledge, and events like All in for the 99% and 99% Spring Bank Protests. (Rebuild the Dream, MoveOn and SEIU are sponsors of nearly every formation.) Broadening the coalition to include radical left organizations that reject electoral politics is a sophisticated way to enhance the overall brand. Such groups can feel confident they are maintaining their independence from elections by participating in the 99% Spring, but they are still building the 99% brand, which will then be used in forms like the 99% voter pledge and 99% candidates to boost the Democratic Party’s fortunes come fall.
May Day Multimedia Wrapup! See All Our Pics In One Place, Plus AlterNet Staff Talk General Strike on TV
Last night, AlterNet reporters Sarah Seltzer and Joshua Holland talked about the actions in NYC and the Bay Area, respectively, on The Big Picture With Thom Hartman:
Workers of the world are uniting in a global day of action to commemorate International Workers Day. In hundreds of cities across America and around the world – in London, Barcelona, Toronto, Kuala Lampur, and Sydney – there were calls for a general strike with no working, no shopping and no banking. One thing you might have noticed in today’s rallies and marches, is that a majority of those taking part in the action are young people. That’s because they’ve figured out that Reaganomic austerity policies they’re pushing back against are harming them the most. According to a new study by the International Labour Organization, trickle-down austerity measures like the ones passed in Europe and by Republicans here in the United States disproportionately hit young workers the hardest. In austerity-wracked Ireland – a third of young workers are unemployed. And in austerity-hit Spain – more than half of all workers under age 25 are unemployed. And here in the United States – where Republicans have forced the President’s hand on budget cuts – including cuts to Pell grant programs – half of our nation’s recent college graduates are out of work or underemployed. If young people can’t find work out of college – then a whole generation of entrepreneurs, teachers, and engineers could be lost. For a round-up of today’s action from New York City – I’m joined by Occupy participants Sarah Seltzer, Associate Editor-Alternet, and Mark Bray, Press Liaison-OWS.
US drug-busting authorities apologized to a student who said he was driven to drinking his own urine and trying to kill himself after being abandoned in a cell for five days.
Daniel Chong, 23, was mistakenly left in a cell in San Diego after being arrested with eight other people on April 21 in raid in which Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents seized guns, ammunition and drugs.
The University of California (UC) student has filed a claim seeking $20 million in compensation after the “life-altering” incident, in which he says he was left in a tiny 5 ft. by 10 ft. cell, broadcaster NBC reported.
Lacking food or drink, he decided to drink his own urine. He also ingested a powdery substance found inside the cell, which was later revealed to be a methamphetamine.
“I had to do what I had to do to survive. I hallucinated by the third day,” he told NBC, adding that he lost 15 pounds (7 kg) during the ordeal. “I was completely insane.”
Chong tried to take his own life by breaking the glass from his glasses and attempting to carve “Sorry mom,” on his arm. Nurses later found pieces of glass in his throat, leading him to believe he swallowed the shards.
The DEA confirmed details of the incident, in a statement emailed to AFP.
“The individual in question was at the house, by his own admission, to get high with his friends. All defendants were brought back to the DEA office to be fingerprinted, photographed, and interviewed.
“While being processed, the suspects were moved around the five cells at the DEA facility. Each suspect was interviewed in separate interview rooms, and frequently moved around between rooms and cells.
It added: “Seven suspects were brought to county detention after processing, one was released and the individual in question was accidentally left in one of the cells.”
DEA San Diego Acting Special Agent in Charge William R. Sherman added: “I am deeply troubled by the incident that occurred here last week.
“I extend my deepest apologies to the young man and want to express that this event is not indicative of the high standards that I hold my employees to. I have personally ordered an extensive review of our policies and procedures.”
Chong told NBC he was mystified at how they could have simply forgotten him. “They never came back, ignored all my cries and I still don’t know what happened,” he said.
“I’m not sure how they could forget me.”
Sourced from Agence France-Presse
************************************************************************************************************ [In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes ‘FAIR USE’ of any such copyrighted material.]
Pieces of plastic debris found in the oceans are smaller than many people think. Most are measured in millimeters. Credit: Sea Education Association.
While working on a research sailboat gliding over glassy seas in the Pacific Ocean, oceanographer Giora Proskurowski noticed something new: The water was littered with confetti-size pieces of plastic debris, until the moment the wind picked up and most of the particles disappeared.
After taking samples of water at a depth of 16 feet (5 meters), Proskurowski, a researcher at the University of Washington, discovered that wind was pushing the lightweight plastic particles below the surface. That meant that decades of research into how much plastic litters the ocean, conducted by skimming only the surface, may in some cases vastly underestimate the true amount of plastic debris in the oceans, Proskurowski said.
Reporting in the journal of Geophysical Research Letters this month, Proskurowski and co-lead author Tobias Kukulka, University of Delaware, said that data collected from just the surface of the water commonly underestimates the total amount of plastic in the water by an average factor of 2.5. In high winds the volume of plastic could be underestimated by a factor of 27.
“That really puts a lot of error into the compilation of the data set,” Proskurowski said. The paper also detailed a new model that researchers and environmental groups can use to collect more accurate data in the future.
Plastic waste in the oceans is a concern because of the impact it might have on the environment. For instance, when fish ingest the plastics, it may degrade their liver functions. In addition, the particles make nice homes for bacteria and algae, which are then transported along with the particles into different regions of the ocean where they may be invasive and cause problems.
Proskurowski gathered data on a 2010 North Atlantic expedition where he and his team collected samples at the surface, plus an additional three or four depths down as far as 100 feet.
“Almost every tow we did contained plastic regardless of the depth,” he said.
By combining the data with wind measurements, Proskurowski and his co-authors developed a simplified mathematical model that could potentially be used to match historical weather data, collected by satellite, with previous surface sampling to more accurately estimate the amount of plastic in the oceans.
In addition, armed with the new model, organizations and researchers in the future might monitor wind data and combine it with surface collections in order to better estimate how much plastic waste is in our oceans.
“By factoring in the wind, which is fundamentally important to the physical behavior, you’re increasing the rigor of the science and doing something that has a major impact on the data,” Proskurowski said.
The team plans to publish a “recipe” that simplifies the model so that a wide range of groups investigating ocean plastics, including those that aren’t oceanographers, can easily use the model. Following the recipe, which is available now by request, might encourage some consistency among the studies, he said.
“On this topic, what science needs to be geared toward is building confidence that scientists have solid numbers and that policy makers aren’t making judgments based on CNN reports,” he said. Descriptions of the so-called great Pacific garbage patch in widespread news reports may have led many people to imagine a giant, dense island of garbage while in fact the patch is made up of widely dispersed, millimeter-size pieces of debris, he said.
In the future, Proskurowski hopes to examine additional factors, including the drag of the plastics in water, complex ocean turbulence and wave height, that might improve the accuracy of the model. He also may have the chance to examine the relationship between wind speed and depth of plastic particles. The 2010 expedition had near-uniform wind conditions so the researchers were unable to test that relationship.
“This is a first pass,” he said.
Other co-authors of the paper are Kara Lavendar Law and Skye Moret-Ferguson, Sea Education Association, and Dylan Meyer, an undergraduate student from Eckerd College. Support for the project came from NOAA and the University of Delaware. The researchers relied on data collected by students participating in the Sea Education Association’s Plastics at SEA program. Paper abstract.
Australia moved Monday to protect its most vulnerable koalas, listing the much-loved furry tree-dwellers as a threatened species in parts of the country.
Environment Minister Tony Burke said the most at-risk koalas needed to be on the national list of threatened species, and populations in New South Wales, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory would be listed as vulnerable.
“Koalas are an iconic Australian animal and they hold a special place in the community,” he said.
Burke said while some koala populations were under serious threat from habitat loss and urban expansion, as well as cars, dogs and disease, in other areas they were thriving to the point they needed to be controlled.
“In fact, in some areas in Victoria and South Australia, koalas are eating themselves out of suitable foraging habitat and their numbers need to be managed,” he said.
“But the Queensland, New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory koala populations are very clearly in trouble, so we must take action.”
An official report issued last year found the sleepy, furry marsupials were under increasing threat and should be considered a vulnerable species, with habitat loss seeing their numbers plunge.
Believed to number in the millions before British settlers arrived in 1788, the hunting and slaughter of the animals for their furs in the 1920s devastated the species in parts of the country.
Public outrage over the killing of the big-eyed “bears” put an end to the practice but numbers have never fully recovered, with estimates on the population varying from several hundred thousand to as few as 43,515.
Environmentalists have for years been pushing for greater protections for the koala, which sleeps about 20 hours a day and eats only the leaves of the eucalyptus tree.
University of Tasmania zoology professor Chris Johnson said the government’s move was sensible.
“The northern and southern populations are now basically separate,” Johnson said, saying they almost needed be considered as different species.
Related Links Darwin Today At TerraDaily.com
**********************************************************************************************************
Cyber Space
Google sued in France over ‘Jewish’ searches
By suggesting the term ‘Jewish’ with its autocomplete tool, the Internet giant is violating French laws against keeping ‘ethnic files,’ opponents claim
Google may have honored Israel’s 64th birthday on its homepage last week, but in France, the company is being sued for suggesting the term “Jewish” in searches involving celebrities.
SOS Racisme, a French organization that fights discrimination, is taking the Internet giant to court over a feature intended to speed up searches, but which often suggests the term “Jewish” when users type in the names of famous French people. (Google’s English sites use the same autocomplete tool, suggesting “Jewish” when you look up names including Rupert Murdoch and Jon Hamm. Neither is Jewish, but the suggestion, based on Google’s search algorithm, shows that many users are trying to find out if they are.)
Patrick Kulgman, a lawyer for SOS Racisme, told Agence France Presse that the feature amounts to “the creation of what is probably the biggest Jewish file in history.” That would be a non-issue in many countries, but France has outlawed the compilation of “ethnic files,” AFP reports.
SOS Racisme is joined in the lawsuit by France’s Union of Jewish Students and the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Among Peoples, among other organizations.
Mozilla has publicly decried the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a controversial cybersecurity bill recently approved by the House of Representatives that is now being considered in the Senate.
In a statement to Forbes, the head of Mozilla’s Privacy and Public Policy Department said:
“While we wholeheartedly support a more secure Internet, CISPA has a broad and alarming reach that goes far beyond Internet security. The bill infringes on our privacy, includes vague definitions of cybersecurity, and grants immunities to companies and government that are too broad around information misuse. We hope the Senate takes the time to fully and openly consider these issues with stakeholder input before moving forward with this legislation.”
The purpose of CISPA, which was introduced to the House in November 2011, is to allow the government and corporations to work together to protect the United States from foreign online attacks. The bill has been criticized because it includes a provision that would let companies share users’ private data with government agencies, in the event of cyberattacks.
The bill passed last Friday after the House added new amendments that extended that controversial provision beyond just cyberattacks; companies will now be able to share users’ private data in the event of “computer crime,” exploitation of minors, and to protect individuals from “the danger of death or serious bodily harm.”
Needless to say, such a broad definition of when data can be shared concerns many people. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is avidly against CISPA, and claims that the proponents of the bill are “inciting fears of security threats” that have existed for years.
CISPA “opens the floodgates” for companies to “intercept communications of everyday Internet users and pass unredacted personal information to the governments,” says Rainey Reitman, activism director for the Frontier Foundation.
A group of security experts, professors and academics and engineers wrote an open letter to Congress, stating their criticism of CISPA.
To the average passer-by, the Peter J. Crotty Casino in Cazenovia Park looks like a monument to teenage vagrancy.
Skateboarders wheel past walls of vulgar, sometimes racist graffiti. Sullen kids sneak cigarettes under the canopy on the way home from school. Pop bottles and junk-food wrappers litter the shrubbery.
But in Howard Marston’s mind, it’s a castle.
Marston sees beyond all the clutter. To him, the historic structure is a fortress, one he could retreat to when catastrophe strikes.
Solar flares might knock out power grids. A massive earthquake or meteor strike could cause widespread destruction. A pandemic might occur. A restricted oil supply or terrorist attack could trigger panic. A global financial collapse may cause riots on Main Street.
Marston has concerns. He’s always on guard and strives to be ready for life’s uncertainties. It’s how he’s wired.
He anticipates scenarios, foresees trouble — perhaps coming soon, real soon.
If a cataclysmic event drives him from his West Seneca home, Marston plans to flee with his wife and 5-year-old daughter to the Crotty Casino. The sturdy brick building has a fireplace and is near a water supply. The doors are steel. Upstairs windows face every direction, helping to defend against approaching marauders. Eight concrete steps provide high ground and can stop vehicles from ramming through the entryway.
“That’s almost too good to be true from a defensibility aspect,” Marston said.
Many would view Marston’s mindset as a form of radical paranoia, but he’s not alone — not nearly. He is what’s known as a “prepper,” someone who readies for the possibility of significant change, and there are millions across the country.
Preppers, also referred to as survivalists, have a dubious, often unfair reputation. They’re generally labeled right-wing kooks, although they come from all walks of life. Cable television series “Doomsday Preppers” on the National Geographic Channel and “Doomsday Bunkers” on the Discovery Channel have put them in the spotlight.
Such fictional characters as Robinson Crusoe and, less classically, MacGyver romanticized survivalism. But the ideal has been stigmatized by infamous real-life survivalists like Theodore Kaczynski (aka the Unabomber) and Timothy McVeigh, who were also terrorists.
Preppers frequently are ridiculed because of the oddball fringe that believes the Mayans might have been onto something with their 2012 Armageddon forecast or that a horde of zombies will overtake the planet.
But the prepper spectrum is expansive. The needle can point anywhere from incredibly practical to practically certifiable.
Some preppers merely cultivate a backyard garden to stock cellar shelves. They might be on alert for nothing more than an emergency weather situation, with a generator at the ready and enough provisions to last a week.
Others, such as members of the Mormon church, store food and supplies as faith-based policy.
There also is a group that takes the prepping lifestyle to an extreme, literal diehards who maintain underground bunkers or isolated backwoods retreats.
“Many people think the worst when they hear certain comments about survivalists,” said Bill Heffron, a retired National Guard colonel from the Town of Tonawanda. Heffron spent much of his career as a commander at the Connecticut Street Armory.
“It’s just comfort for some people. When you’re prepared ahead of time, then that’s just good planning. That’s never a problem.
“But when you start getting guns out, you start to wonder.”
Regardless of commitment levels or reasons for doing it, a critical component to a prepper’s lifestyle is anonymity.
Preppers want to stay off the grid to avoid social persecution and for one particularly important, sensible reason. When the SHTF (an abbreviation preppers commonly use for “stuff” hitting the fan) or TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it) is at hand, they don’t want panicky nonpreppers trying to crowd their space or raid their reserves.
“We’re not into exposing ourselves even to close friends and family,” said the 31-year-old Marston, who asked that his real name not be used in this story. “People might be shocked to learn a family member is a prepper, an uncle, a cousin.
“The fear of being rejected is there. Yeah, there’s a lot of crazies out here. But there are crazies into everything else. There are legitimate, upstanding people doing this. It bothers me that when you say ‘I’m a prepper,’ you get the eye roll.”
Marston’s wife does that quite a bit.
While he considers prepping a serious and vital pursuit, Jill Marston finds it amusing and borderline silly.
“Lay off the comics, people,” Jill Marston said, trying unsuccessfully to stifle a giggle. “You’ll be all right. Nothing’s going to happen.”
The Marstons met as online pen pals when Jill (also not her actual name) was working on an English project at Hamburg High. He was living near the Alaska-Canada border. After several visits over a few years, he moved here to marry her.
Still, she didn’t know he was a prepper until they began watching the TV shows together. He began to tip his hand.
“He’s always been a lumberjack,” Jill Marston said. “I was marrying him for who he was, but this whole prepping thing? I think he’s nuts. He sees this as a strategy of survival, and I see it as a hobby. But he enjoys it.”
Howard Marston doesn’t come off as the least bit unreasonable. He’s a burly man, soft-spoken and articulate. His salt-and-pepper hair makes him look weathered and wise when talking about constantly scouting out locales that are easy to defend.
He said he has thought this way since he was 13, when he had a vivid dream about a nuclear blast destroying the hydroelectric Bennett Dam on the Peace River in northern British Columbia. He furiously jotted ideas in his spiral notebook and mapped areas that would be safe or unsafe to travel under various emergency scenarios. He read whatever he could find about survivalist techniques.
Howard Marston never stopped pondering TEOTWAWKI circumstances. He once worked for a major big-box retailer (he didn’t want to reveal the name) and figured it was a darn-near-perfect refuge.
“Those [stores] are designed so that no one can get in anywhere but usually two places, some of them only one place,” he said. “There are very few windows, concrete walls, an outdoor garden center that has 30-, 40-foot chain-link fence up the side of it. Some of these places, it wouldn’t take much to seal them up. Then you also have supplies.”
Howard Marston would gather with his co-workers and, much like a football coach at a chalkboard, X-and-O the store map. They would discuss who would be included, where they would be stationed, what roles they would have when the SHTF.
“I wouldn’t be surprised that if something were to happen now,” Howard Marston said, “a lot of those guys still would go there and execute the plan.”
Jill Marston insisted she wouldn’t execute any disaster plan her husband devises for an impromptu stronghold, whether it’s an abandoned Walmart or Cazenovia Park.
“I’ve already told him ‘If anything ever happens, consider me dead.’ I won’t survive,” Jill Marston said, laughing again. “It would be too much a shock to me and my system.
“To me, that’s just the way it is. It’s not real until it happens.”
(Adds rainfall in third paragraph.)
May 1 (Bloomberg) — Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, whose anti-greed message spread worldwide during an eight-week encampment in Lower Manhattan last year, plan marches across the globe today calling attention to what they say are abuses of power and wealth.
Organizers say they hope the coordinated events will mark a spring resurgence of the movement after a quiet winter. Calls for a general strike with no work, no school, no banking and no shopping have sprung up on websites in Toronto, Barcelona, London, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney, among hundreds of cities in North America, Europe and Asia.
In New York, Occupy Wall Street will join scores of labor organizations observing May 1, traditionally recognized as International Workers’ Day. They plan marches from Union Square to Lower Manhattan and a “pop-up occupation” of Bryant Park on Sixth Avenue, across the street from Bank of America’s Corp.’s 55-story tower. Rain may limit the number of protesters.
“We call upon people to refrain from shopping, walk out of class, take the day off of work and other creative forms of resistance disrupting the status quo,” organizers said in an April 26 e-mail.
Occupy groups across the U.S. have protested economic disparity, decrying high foreclosure and unemployment rates that hurt average Americans while bankers and financial executives received bonuses and taxpayer-funded bailouts. In the past six months, similar groups, using social media and other tools, have sprung up in Europe, Asia and Latin America.
CLEVELAND (AP) — Five men described by federal authorities as anarchists angry with corporate America and the government were charged Tuesday with plotting to bomb an Ohio bridge linking two wealthy Cleveland suburbs.
The men were arrested Monday night after unknowingly working with an FBI informant for months, a strategy that federal investigators have used repeatedly in recent years to nab alleged terrorists.
“They talked about making a statement against corporate America and the government as some of the motivations for their actions,” U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach said in announcing the arrests with the head of the FBI in Cleveland, Stephen Anthony.
The alleged plotters researched explosives and obtained what they thought was C-4 explosives. The material, in fact, was harmless and the public was never at risk, because the men got it from the informant, officials said.
The men planted the fake explosives at the base of the bridge, armed them, went to a remote spot and “entered the codes that they thought would blow up the bridge with innocent people traveling over it,” Dettelbach said.
Court documents detail several conversations the FBI secretly recorded in which its informant discussed the bomb plans with some of the suspects.
Throughout the long history of political and economic enslavement there has been many times where the average people realized that they were being taken advantage of and fought back against the established orders of the time. Unfortunately, in so many of these revolutions the justified anger of the masses was misdirected onto meaningless issues or scapegoats who were merely slaves themselves. This is why we have remained enslaved over all of these generations, because each time we have had an opportunity to achieve freedom, we were intentionally divided and misdirected by the “powers that shouldn’t be”.
Once again, the world is on the brink of both collapse and revolution, so we can be sure that there is a lot to gain, and a whole lot to lose for those who have spent their entire lives in control. With that being said there is no doubt that they will attempt to thwart any resistance movement that may gain momentum. We saw this recently with both the Republican Party hijack of the tea party and how establishment fronts such as George Soros and moveon have consistently attempted to funnel occupy Wall Street into counterproductive political goals.
There is hope though, because this is the first time in history where we have had this much information about our society and this kind of ability to quickly communicate instantly with millions of people, all over the world. This puts a huge monkey wrench in the plans of the global elite, because it is now more difficult for them to completely co-opt revolutionary movements without getting noticed. This doesn’t mean that they still aren’t trying to do it, because they obviously are, this just means that we can actually notice it when it’s happening, call it out and then focus our attention in the right direction.
Every once and awhile I’ll be listening to a podcast with one or the other writers specializing on the subject of Peak Oil or collapse and the subject of timetables will come up. When will the collapse finally be here, the callers ask insistently, almost pleadingly, so that they can finally justify their investments in freeze-dried foods, water purification tablets and solid gold coins. Inevitably the guest will demur, and speak more in general terms. But I’m going to be the first pundit to go out on the limb and assign a timeline for the collapse. Spread it far and wide, and let’s see just how good my predictive powers are. Are you ready? Here it is:
Right now.
What do they think a collapse is supposed to look like? It seems people just cannot just cannot get past the “Zombie Apocalypse” theory of collapse. They imagine hordes of disease-ridden folks dressed in rags stumbling around and fighting over cans of petrol and stripping cans of food from shelves. That’s not what collapse looks like. It never has been. In fact, there’s very little evidence that a Zombie Apocalypse style collapse ever occurred in the historical record. Instead we see subtle patterns of abandonment and decay that unfold over long periods of time. Big projects stop. Population thins. Trade routes shrink and people revert to barter. Things get simpler and more local. Culture coarsens. High art stagnates. People disperse. Expectations are adjusted downward. Investments are no longer made in the future and previous investments are cannibalized just to maintain the status quo. Extend and pretend is hardly a recent invention.
No, what happens in a collapse is very much more subtle than a Zombie Apocalypse. Things tend to look pretty normal for the following reasons:
1.) People and Institutions are resistant to change.
2.) The system has a formidable array of resources to preserve the status quo.
3.) Sheer momentum.
4.) Creeping Normalcy
5.) Denial
This is how history says collapses go down, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Based on recent archaeology, it seems this is how the Roman collapse unfolded was well. Although images of pillaging barbarians looting burning cities sticks in people’s imaginations when they think of the fall of the Roman Empire, this was not the experience for most people according to recent scholarship. Big events tended to come down to us in the written record, but for ordinary people, it probably seemed much less dramatic. Yes, there were some famines and plagues, as there had always been. The population declined, but there were no apocalyptic battles or mass starvation. Many of the cities appear to have been continually inhabited. There were no mass graves, ruined cities or signs of malnutrition found in excavations. Most people who survived the plagues lived right through the transition from Classical Antiquity to Late Antiquity to the Medieval period with remarkable continuity, just a change of institutions and expectations. But something clearly was happening, because we know it from history. Buildings got plainer. Citizens got poorer. Trade routes shrank. Economies became local. Lawlessness increased. The old Roman Empire had been around since far before anyone could remember, and as it broke down more and more and failed to do things it had once done easily, it must have seen to some people like the world was collapsing in on them. It wasn’t, but something was happening. Much depended on who you were, where you were, what your expectations were, and how much you had invested in the status quo, both mentally and in terms of status and resources.
************************************************************************************************************ [In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes ‘FAIR USE’ of any such copyrighted material.]
Russia’s weather and emergency officials soothed fears of Moscow residents Thursday with statements that green-tinged clouds over the capital were not an alien invasion, but tree pollen.
“Today Muscovites felt like characters in a disaster film about an alien invasion: people living in the southwest of the city saw that the sky had been coloured green,” said Russia’s weather service on its website.
The clouds crept up on the Russian capital from the south in the morning, and reached the centre by the afternoon, causing office workers to gawk at the suspiciously colored sky.
“Green clouds are coming toward Moscow,” Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid headlined its story. “Could it be that the apocalypse is upon us?”
Green dust also covered streets and cars. Some people in Moscow and the region apparently called emergency numbers in a panic, leading officials to say the air was thick with tree pollen, not disaster fallout.
“Many residents forgot all about natural phenomena and decided that it’s the result of an accident at an industrial facility,” said the city administration of Moscow region town of Podolsk, an industrial town south of Moscow.
“But this dust is pollen from alder and birch trees, which began flowering recently after a slow spring,” it said on its website.
The emergency situation ministry said the sudden onset of spring and rapidly rising temperatures “caused blooming of several species of trees, and resulted in a yellow-green pollen coating over pavement, windows, and cars.”
“The pollen poses danger to people suffering from allergies and asthma, for others it’s only seasonal discomfort,” the ministry said.
India’s monsoon rains, crucial to the country’s farmers and growth in Asia’s third-largest economy, will be normal for a third straight year, the weather office has forecast.
The annual rains, which sweep across the subcontinent from June to September, are key to prosperity in rural areas where two-thirds of India’s 1.2 billion population live.
“It will be a normal monsoon this year,” Earth Sciences Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh told a televised news conference late Thursday in New Delhi, adding rainfall was expected to be 99 percent of the long-term average.
India gets 60 percent of its precipitation from the rains and a bad monsoon can spell financial disaster for its 235 million farmers, many of them smallholders eking out a living.
The country suffered a devastating drought in 2009.
The eagerly awaited forecast marked a rare piece of good news for the Congress-led government, reeling from a spate of corruption scandals, a stumbling economy and stubborn inflation.
The government is hoping that a good monsoon will help keep a lid on food prices, whose surge has hit hardest India’s hundreds of millions of poor, the Congress party’s biggest supporters, and also help economic growth pick up.
While agriculture’s share of India’s nearly $2-trillion economy has shrunk to around 14 percent from 30 percent in the early 1990s, the rains are still vital to its fortunes.
Rural spending accounts for over 50 percent of domestic consumption and a failed monsoon hits demand for everything from fridges to cars.
Outcry from Internet users, over the controversial cyber security act ‘CISPA’, is set to spill onto the streets. The hacker group Anonymous is hitting back in response to the bill by launching what it calls ‘Operation Defense Phase two’. CISPA, having passed the US House of Representatives on Friday, is now a step closer to becoming law. It’s now heading to the Senate, as the White House continues to threaten a veto of the bill. The act could allow Internet companies to legally share sensitive user information with the American government – a move critics say infringes on privacy and civil liberties. Journalist David Seaman explains how this bill puts everyone at risk. Luke Samuel, from Online Magazine “Spiked” thinks the CISPA bill is one of the latest attempts by the US government to limit the first amendment rights of its citizens.
Proposed Bill Would Protect Employees’ Facebook Passwords
The bill, called the Social Networking Online Protection Act, or SNOPA, was filed Friday by Rep. Eliot Engel (D – New York) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D – Illinois). The proposed law would not only prohibit employers from asking current and potential employees for the usernames and passwords to their social networking accounts, it would also prohibit colleges, universities, and K-12 schools from asking the same of their students. The bill would also bar employers and schools from demanding access to such accounts or online content, and from punishing employees and students who refuse to volunteer the information.
“Several states, including New York, have begun addressing this issue,” Rep. Engel said in a statement. “But we need a federal statute to protect all Americans across the country.”
A bill to protect employees’ passwords from snooping bosses is currently on the governor’s desk in Maryland, waiting to be signed into law. Nine similar measures have been introduced around the country, but they have yet to clear the committees they were referred to.
I’ve not met many canners who have canned pork, chicken and beef, however, this is the food I enjoy most to can. Having fresh canned meat to add to numerous dinner choices such as soup, stews, chicken salad, rice dishes, potato dishes, pasta etc. will make it much easier to please your family if you can add some protein to the mix.
The reason I’m writing is because some of what I’ve read on canning sites tend to make the meat sound quite unappealing in it’s texture and appearance and I can say from experience that couldn’t be further from the truth if you follow my method for canning meat. Lets start with the cut of meat. For the pork I use center cut boneless, thick cut approximately 1″ to 1 1/4″ thick. For chicken I buy skinless, boneless white meat breasts at the big warehouse stores buying the “store brand”. For the beef, which is a bit expensive right now, I buy Delmonico, New York strip or Rib-eye. It may be best to buy the beef when it is on sale. I buy all my pork when it is “buy one get one free” packages. The chicken has been a good deal at $1.97 per pound for at least the last 6 to 9 months.
The length of time I cook my meat is quite different from the canning books, but the end result is meat that will be fork tender and have an appealing appearance. First is the pork, trim all excess fat from around the edges and sprinkle liberally with Montreal Steak Seasoning on the front and back and place in large aluminum rectangular cake pan with lid. This should hold approximately 8 to 9 pieces of boneless pork loin, (they will look like small filets). You can cook them very close together. Add chicken broth or chicken stock to pan and cover loins at least 3/4 of the way, add lid.
Make these delicious whole wheat pancakes in just minutes! For more tip, tricks, and recipes for using food storage everyday in your own recipes, visit http://everydayfoodstorage.net
“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves and the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem. – Howard Zinn
“When We Grow…This Is What We Can Do” is an educational documentary concerning the facts about cannabis. In this feature length documentary we explore everything there is, from industrial hemp to medicinal cannabis use, from the origins of cannabis prohibition to the legality of growing equipment.
A film by Seth Finegold and presented by Luke Bailey.
Featuring Interviews with:
Professor David Nutt (Head of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs)
Mr Peter Reynolds (Head of CLEAR UK, formerly the Legalize Cannabis Alliance)
Ms Sarah Martin (Medicinal cannabis patient)
For more information contact:
Finegold2 (via YouTube messages)
If you have any issues with copyright protection please contact blogtopuscontent@gmail.com
************************************************************************************************************ [In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes ‘FAIR USE’ of any such copyrighted material.]
This image shows the aquaculture of salmon. Credit: Norsk Havbrukssenter.
Researchers from the University of Oviedo have for the first time analysed a DNA fragment from commercial feed for aquarium cichlids, aquaculture salmon and marine fish in aquariums. The results show that in order to manufacture this feed, eight species of high trophic level fish have been used, some of them coming directly from extractive fisheries.
Aquaculture initially came as an ecological initiative to reduce pressure from fishing and to cover human food needs. However, a problem has emerged: consumers prefer carnivore species, like salmon and cod that require tons of high quality protein for their quick, optimum development.
“If these proteins are obtained from extractive fisheries, aquaculture stops being an alternative to over-fishing and starts contributing to it, turning it into a risk for natural marine ecosystems” Alba Ardura, lead author of the study published in ‘Fisheries Research’ and researcher in the department of Functional Biology at the University of Oviedo told SINC.
The research team analysed a DNA fragment from commercial feed made for aquarium cichlids, aquaculture of salmon and marine fish in aquariums. After removing oil and fat from the feed, DNA sequences were obtained and compared with public databases to identify the species found.
From fish feed samples, supplied by manufacturers and bought in animal shops, researchers identified eight species of wild marine fish that were from high trophic levels in the food chain.
Industrial waste from processing and commercialisation for human consumption of Peruvian anchoveta (Engraulis ringens), European sprat (Sprattus sprattus), Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus), whiting (Merlangius merlangus), Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus), Pacific sandlance (Ammodytes personatus), jack mackerel (Trachurus symmetricus), and blue mackerel (Scomber australasicus), allow fish meal for aquaculture fish to be made.
Nonetheless, according to the researcher “some of the species found in this feed are commercialised fresh without being processed and they suspect that they came to the feed directly from extractive fisheries.” This is the case with herring and Pacific sandlance.
The research suggests that aquaculture is partly maintained by fisheries, and aquaculture fishes are fed by wild fish sold “whole” (without being processed) and fresh directly from fishing vessels.
Vegetable proteins, an alternative “If species from extractive fishing are used to feed farm fish, aquaculture does not help minimise over-fishing” warns the expert who suggests “urgently” revising the composition of aquaculture feed to replace them with other proteins. The aim is to reduce the exploitation of natural fish populations.
Ardura proposes increasing efforts to gain high quality proteins from other sources, such as vegetable proteins, which supplement farmed fish’s nutritional needs. This way they will be able to “minimise the impact of aquaculture on wild populations.”
Ardura, A.; Horreo, J. L.; Hernandez, E.; Jardon, A.; Pola, I. G.; Martinez, J. L.; Garcia-Vazquez, E. “Forensic DNA analysis reveals use of high trophic level marine fish in commercial aquaculture fish meals” Fisheries Research 115: 115-120 DOI: 10.1016/j.fishres.2011.08.011 March 2012.
Fridley set up an experimental garden on SU’s South Campus that includes groups of native plants and their non-native cousins, such as Japanese honeysuckle (invader) and Canada honeysuckle (native), burning bush (invader) and bursting heart (native), and European buckthorn (invader) and Carolina buckthorn (native).
Much like the fabled tortoise and the hare, the competition between native and invasive plants growing in deciduous forests in the Eastern United States is all about how the plants cross the finish line in autumn.
A new study by a Syracuse University biologist has found that the leaves of invasive plants continue to function in the fall, long after their native cousins have hunkered down for the winter. The findings are counter to conventional wisdom, which held that plants living under the forest leafy canopy obtain most of their food via photosynthesis in the spring and early summer before the canopy blocks the amount of sunlight getting to the shrubs.
The study, “Extended leaf phenology and the autumn niche in deciduous forest invasions,” will be published online in Nature. “It’s a classic case of scientific serendipity,” says study author Jason Fridley, assistant professor of biology in SU’s College of Arts and Sciences.
“We set up the experiment to quantify the amount of photosynthesis happening in the spring when both groups of plants were thought to be most active. But we found it was all about the finish. This was totally off of everybody’s radar.”
Many of the plants growing naturally under the forest canopy in the eastern United States, including New York, Pennsylvania and New England, are closely related to those that have been imported for more than 100 years, primarily from Europe, China and Japan, for cultivation in home gardens. The imported plants have invaded the surrounding forests and thrived. Scientific research is focused on uncovering strategies the invaders use that make them so successful.
Fridley set up an experimental garden on SU’s South Campus that includes groups of native plants and their non-native cousins, such as Japanese honeysuckle (invader) and Canada honeysuckle (native), burning bush (invader) and bursting heart (native), and European buckthorn (invader) and Carolina buckthorn (native). His research team monitored the plants for three years, recording when the leaves burst, turned brown and dropped.
They also used devices to measure leaf chlorophyll and photosynthesis throughout the leaf growing and dying seasons.
The research team found little differences between the spring emergence of leaves in native and their non-native cousins, the timing of which for both groups varied in response to spring temperatures. They also found little differences in spring food production between the groups.
Most significantly, the researchers found that the invaders retained their leaves and continued to photosynthesize almost four weeks longer into the fall than their native cousins, which begin shutting down between late August and mid-September.
“The extended leaf activity we found in the invaders is rarely seen in native species that inhabit deciduous forests,” Fridley says. “However, the data don’t tell us whether this is the primary strategy invasive plants use to compete with native species.”
The plants in the study have had separate evolutionary histories since at least the Pleistocene Age (11,400 to 2 million years ago). Climate conditions over the North American continent were colder with more ice coverage than Asia, Fridley says. Native species responded to the shorter growing seasons by pulling nitrogen from their leaves to store in the stems, causing the leaves to turn brown and fall off.
“Invaders don’t appear to store as much nitrogen,” Fridley says. “Their leaves fall off with a higher nitrogen content. It may be that the invasive species are better suited a warming climate.”
Which begs the question of how the invaders gain back in the spring the nitrogen that falls to the forest floor in the fall. “One hypothesis,” Fridley says, “is that invaders evolved by depending on earthworms to decompose the leaves, making nitrogen available in the spring for the plants.” Native plants did not evolve with earthworms because native earthworms did not survive glaciation.
“Eurasian earthworms invaded North America at some point in the past,” Fridley says. “It’s conceivable that having co-evolved with earthworms, the invaders would devise a nutrient-use strategy that was not dependent on re-absorbing the nutrients from the leaves.”
The larger question for scientists is, how does an increase in the amount of nutrient-rich leaf litter affect the overall forest-floor ecosystem? “It’s possible the extended growing season of non-native shrubs in deciduous forests may be a major driver of human-induced ecosystem change in eastern North America that may rival climate change in its impact on forest processes,” Fridley says.
Since January, dead dolphins have washed ashore in Peru, the death toll reaching a staggering 877. Scientists are still trying to explain the bizarre deaths, and their best prediction at the moment is that its due to a virus outbreak or acoustic trauma.
Environmental authorities are investigating the deaths of more than 800 dolphins that have washed up on the northern coast of Peru this year.
The dolphins may have died from an outbreak of Morbillivirus or Brucella bacteria, said Peruvian Deputy Environment Minister Gabriel Quijandria, according to Peru’s state-run Andina news agency. Speaking to CNN, he said he expects test results to be ready within the week.
“Right now, the most probable hypothesis is that it’s a virus outbreak,” he said.
Quijandria said Thursday that 877 dolphins have washed up in a 220-kilometer (137-mile) area from Punta Aguja to Lambayeque, in the north of the country.
More than 80% of those dolphins were found in an advanced state of decomposition, making it difficult to study their deaths, according to Andina.
Earlier last week, the Peruvian government put together a panel from different ministries to analyze a report by the Peruvian Sea Institute (IMARPE). Officials have been able to conclude that the dolphins’ deaths were not due to lack of food, interaction with fisheries, poisoning with pesticides, biotoxin poisoning or contamination by heavy metals.
“When you have something this large, my gut would tell me that there’s something traumatic that happened,” Sue Rocca, a marine biologist with the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, told CNN. She floated a number of number of possibilities as to what could have killed the animals, including acoustic trauma, but concluded that investigators just don’t know yet. “More investigation needs to be done,” she said.
More then 200 Dolphins have beached themselves on Manila Bay, Philippines
Ignoring a veto threat from the White House, the House passed legislation Thursday designed to protect communications networks from cyberattacks.
The vote was 248-168.
But even as the House bill moves forward, privacy concerns about granting government agencies access to personal information transmitted on the Internet could prove to be a major obstacle to any new cybersecurity law.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Michigan and a former FBI agent, said he spent the last year working on the bill because the national security risk to the United States posed by cyberattacks is one, “we are just not prepared to handle.”
“We needed to stop the Chinese government from stealing our stuff. We needed to stop the Russians from what they’re doing to our networks and people’s personal information data and resources,” Rogers said on the House floor on Thursday. “We needed to prepare for countries like
Iran and North Korea so that they don’t do something catastrophic to our networks here in America and cause us real harm to real people.”
The House bill, called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, was drafted by Rogers and the committee’s top Democrat, Maryland Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger. It sets up a voluntary system for private companies to share information about any threats or attacks on their networks with U.S. national security agencies. It also gives some liability protections to those companies in return for cooperating with the government.
While the Obama administration and many congressional Democrats agree the United States needs to respond to cyberthreats, they and many outside civil liberties advocates say the House bill fails to sufficiently guard personal information. They worry the new rules allowing Internet companies to share information with the National Security Agency could give unfettered access by the intelligence community to data about any individual surfing the Web or sending e-mail.
In its statement opposing the bill and promising a veto, the administration on Wednesday said, “Cybersecurity and privacy are not mutually exclusive.”
In a reference to the George Orwell book that described a society in which government was eavesdropping on its citizens, Rep Hank Johnson, D-Georgia, said during Thursday’s debate, “I know it’s 2012 but it still feels like 1984 in the House today.”
But House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, argued the administration’s insistence on specific standards and broader limitations on how much personal information can be shared goes too far.
“The White House believes the government ought to control the Internet; the government ought to set standards and the government ought to take care of everything that’s needed for cybersecurity. They’re in a camp all by themselves,” Boehner said
The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Cyber Information and Security Protection Act late Thursday despite concerns over user privacy, the specter of SOPA/PIPA, and a veto threat from the Obama administration. The idea behind CISPA is to empower the government and corporations to work together to better protect American infrastructure from foreign attacks. But many civil liberties groups say the bill is too broad and threatens user privacy.
The Center for Democracy and Technology said it is “disappointed that CISPA passed the House in such flawed form.” And the Electronic Frontier Foundation condemned the vote, saying it “would allow companies to bypass all existing privacy law to spy on communications and pass sensitive user data to the government.”
There’s little doubt that online security is a serious issue for large corporations. Recent reports of online security breaches have involved such high-profile targets as Google, security firm RSA, Verisign, and credit card processing company Global Payments. But whether CISPA is the right legislation to tackle those concerns is hotly debated.
So what is CISPA? Should you be concerned about this legislation? Here’s what you need to know.
What Does CISPA Do?
CISPA allows the government to share classified information about security threats with select American companies. These corporations can then use that information to better protect their infrastructure such as computer networks containing intellectual property and trade secrets. The bill also allows corporations to share information relating to cyber security with the authorities and protects those companies against privacy lawsuits. Critics say an Internet Service Provider would be free to share a customer’s private communications such as e-mail and instant messages without a court order if the information related to a cyber security concern.
CISPA allows this information to be used not only to protect against cyber attacks, but also to protect individuals from bodily harm, protect children from sexual exploitation, and for general American national security.
CISPA would shield companies from privacy-related lawsuits brought by customers. And corporations could share information relating to cyber security with each other without fear of the government bringing an antitrust suit against them.
The biggest privacy problem with Facebook isn’t Facebook itself, it’s Facebook’s apps. There are more than 500,000 games, puzzles, quizzes and other time wasters in the Facebook platform, many of which exist for the sole purpose of sucking data out of your account. Worse, these apps not only can access your information, they can also grab data from your friends’ profiles, depending on their privacy settings. Thank you, obnoxious Farmville fans.
Now you can take matters into your own hands and find out who the real data vampires are. PrivacyScore from PrivacyChoice is a Chrome plug in that rates how each app deals with your data on a scale from 0 to 100. It can also do the same for Web sites. You can view these scores on the Web, on Facebook or, if you’ve installed the Chrome extension, by clicking the PS icon in the browser bar when you install an app.
Nine months after Patty Silva-Hicks tore out her front lawn to plant fruit trees and produce, she shows us how her garden grows. She’s eating her yard (cherries, plums, avocado and chard), but it’s also surprisingly attractive with touches like lettuce and pepper hedgerows. Original story from 2009: http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/swapping-lawn-for-fruit-because-you-cant…
Chhut Vuthy, president of the Natural Resource Conservation Group.
A prominent Cambodian activist was fatally shot in a remote forest Thursday while documenting illegal logging in a clash that also killed a military police officer, authorities said.
Chhut Vuthy, president of the Natural Resource Conservation Group, was escorting two female reporters from a Cambodian newspaper when a dispute erupted, said Kheng Tito, spokesman for the national military police.
“There was a shooting incident when there was a clash between military police on duty to protect the forest and an environmental team, leading to the deaths of activist Chhut Vuthy and a military police official,” he told AFP.
Vuthy, 43, and one military police officer received gun shot wounds in the incident in a forest in southwestern Koh Kong province and died shortly afterwards in hospital.
Koh Kong provincial military police chief, Thong Narong, confirmed the deaths but details of the incident remain unclear and officials were unable to say how the dispute escalated and who had fired the shots.
Vuthy, who received military police training, was known to carry arms, activists told AFP.
Kheng Tito said the two reporters from the English-language Cambodia Daily, one Cambodian and one Ukrainian, would be questioned.
Kevin Doyle, the paper’s editor-in-chief, confirmed to AFP that both women were unharmed but said he was unable to give further details of the incident at this stage.
A military police source in the province said the row appeared to have erupted when the officer tried to confiscate a camera memory stick from the team.
“Vuthy was a long-time activist on forestry issues,” said Ou Virak, president of the Cambodian Centre for Human Rights. “He was a very brave man.”
Land disputes, including forced evictions and protests against illegal logging, have been on the rise in recent years in Cambodia and have become increasingly violent although they rarely result in deaths.
Over the last six months local human rights group Licadho documented five shooting incidents involving land activists, causing 19 injuries, though the last death was in April 2010.
Environmental groups and human rights campaigners have long accused the Cambodian government of selling off land to the highest bidder.
On May Day, Expect Scores of Rallies, Marches, Creative Actions
A strike, if it actually happens on May 1 or thereafter, may not look like one ever has before.
Photo Credit: occupymay1st.org
An Occupy Wall Street organizer I know — one of the original ones, from the planning meetings before the occupation began last September 17 — has a striking banner atop his Facebook Timeline. It’s from the History Channel series Life After People, an artist’s rendition of a cityscape after which all the humans in it somehow disappear. It’s quiet, and still, with trees growing out from the sides of crumbling towers.
To say that this image has anything to do with the movement’s plans for May 1, which the person who posted it is involved in making, might cause both paranoid-style right-wing radio hosts and the most anarcho- of primitivists to froth a bit at the mouth. And so they should. Ever since the idea of working toward May Day started catching on in Occupy Wall Street last January, it has been infused with the impulse of creating the vision of a radically different kind of city.
The visionary impulse, however, has also mixed with things more mundane. Over the course of the May Day planning process in New York, in at least two meetings each week, OWS organizers have been patiently patching together an historic joint rally and march with labor unions, immigrants’ rights groups and community organizations, many of which were invited to participate in the planning process since the beginning.
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes ‘FAIR USE’ of any such copyrighted material.]
Ignoring a veto threat from the White House, the House passed legislation Thursday designed to protect communications networks from cyberattacks.
The vote was 248-168.
But even as the House bill moves forward, privacy concerns about granting government agencies access to personal information transmitted on the Internet could prove to be a major obstacle to any new cybersecurity law.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Michigan and a former FBI agent, said he spent the last year working on the bill because the national security risk to the United States posed by cyberattacks is one, “we are just not prepared to handle.”
“We needed to stop the Chinese government from stealing our stuff. We needed to stop the Russians from what they’re doing to our networks and people’s personal information data and resources,” Rogers said on the House floor on Thursday. “We needed to prepare for countries like
Iran and North Korea so that they don’t do something catastrophic to our networks here in America and cause us real harm to real people.”
The House bill, called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, was drafted by Rogers and the committee’s top Democrat, Maryland Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger. It sets up a voluntary system for private companies to share information about any threats or attacks on their networks with U.S. national security agencies. It also gives some liability protections to those companies in return for cooperating with the government.
While the Obama administration and many congressional Democrats agree the United States needs to respond to cyberthreats, they and many outside civil liberties advocates say the House bill fails to sufficiently guard personal information. They worry the new rules allowing Internet companies to share information with the National Security Agency could give unfettered access by the intelligence community to data about any individual surfing the Web or sending e-mail.
In its statement opposing the bill and promising a veto, the administration on Wednesday said, “Cybersecurity and privacy are not mutually exclusive.”
In a reference to the George Orwell book that described a society in which government was eavesdropping on its citizens, Rep Hank Johnson, D-Georgia, said during Thursday’s debate, “I know it’s 2012 but it still feels like 1984 in the House today.”
But House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, argued the administration’s insistence on specific standards and broader limitations on how much personal information can be shared goes too far.
“The White House believes the government ought to control the Internet; the government ought to set standards and the government ought to take care of everything that’s needed for cybersecurity. They’re in a camp all by themselves,” Boehner said
Agenda 21: Arizona close to passing anti-UN-sustainability bill
By Jim Gold, msnbc.com
Arizona lawmakers appear close to sending to Gov. Jan Brewer a tea party-backed bill that proponents say would stop a United Nations takeover conspiracy but that critics claim could end state and cities’ pollution-fighting efforts and even dismantle the state unemployment office.
Senate Bill 1507 was passed by the state Senate last month and received an initial House affirmation Wednesday. It is sponsored by state Sen. Judy Burges, R-Sun City West, who also sponsored a state birther bill that Brewer vetoed last year.
“The bill is designed to protect the rights of Arizona citizens and prevent encroachment on those rights by international institutions,” Burges told msnbc.com in an email. “We have three branches of government and when one branch preempts the process through executive orders, the balance of power is lost in the process. It is that simple — no more, no less.”
Supreme Court Asks Hard Questions at Oral Arguments Over Arizona’s Extreme Immigration Law
The justices signalled that this may not be the end of the fight over SB 1070.
Almost two years to the day after Arizona enacted the notorious immigration law known as SB 1070, the Supreme Court heard arguments in what could be the first of many cases over the validity of the measure. Although most critics of the law have focused on its potential for civil rights violations, the only question before the Justices was whether federal immigration laws “preempt” four provisions of SB 1070 that were blocked by lower courts. While the ultimate fate of those provisions will not be known until a ruling is announced, a few preliminary observations can be made based on the questions posed by the Justices.
To begin with, the government’s arguments against Section 2(B)—which requires police to check the immigration status of all persons they stop or arrest if “reasonable suspicion” exists that they are in the country illegally—were met with great skepticism by the Court. The United States had argued that requiring such status checks would disrupt the federal government’s focus on noncitizens convicted of serious crimes because it shifts the allocation of resources to non-serious offenders. As Chief Justice Roberts stated, however, simply asking the government whether a particular person is in the country illegally doesn’t require the government to initiate removal proceedings against that person.
By Erik Wasson and Bernie Becker – 04/27/12 05:50 AM ET
Lawmakers are growing increasingly anxious about the overstuffed lame-duck session, when they will likely be confronted with a slew of major decisions on taxes and spending.
Democrats and Republicans are now raising the possibility that, with little expected to get done on Capitol Hill before the November election, some or most of those determinations will have to be punted until 2013.
It is impossible to predict what will happen in the lame duck, though more and more people around Washington believe there will be a lot of talk in November and December, and little action. A six-month bill that raises the debt ceiling and basically adheres to current policy has attracted a fair amount of chatter on K Street and in the halls of Congress.
That sort of delay could further undermine how the financial markets and credit-rating agencies view the U.S. government. But leading deal makers in Congress who want to lay the groundwork now for lame-duck deals on taxes and budget cuts are pessimistic they can even get that done.
House Republicans are hammering out the details on a spending plan that would open the door to financing weapons systems that could be used in a potential conflict with Iran.
GOP leaders on the House Armed Services Committee plan to incorporate a bill introduced by panel member Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas) into their final version of the defense-spending bill for fiscal 2013.
Conaway’s bill, brought to the House floor on Tuesday, would authorize and appropriate funding for fiscal 2012 and 2013 “to enhance readiness and U.S. military capabilities” in the Middle East.
“This bill demonstrates to a defiant Iran that the United States will take military action in order to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear capability, should economic sanctions and diplomacy fail,” according to Conaway’s legislation.
The legislation also calls for enhancing the “military capabilities of our Persian Gulf allies” and leveraging those allies into “regional strategic partnerships” to counter any military threats from Iran.
Finally, Conaway’s bill states that U.S. policy toward Iran should be geared toward taking “all necessary measures, including military action if required” to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
The Texas Republican told The Hill on Thursday that his staff was still working with committee leadership on which elements of his bill will be folded into the defense-spending legislation.
If it’s included in the fiscal ’13 defense bill, the Conaway language would pave the way for the committee to funnel DOD dollars into weapons and equipment that would be key in waging a military conflict against Iran.
House takes a swing at healthcare law and extends student loan rates
By Pete Kasperowicz – 04/27/12 12:47 PM ET
The House on Friday approved a controversial bill that extends low interest rates on subsidized student loans for another year but pays for that extension by killing a piece of the 2010 healthcare law, which prompted a veto threat from President Obama before the vote.
Members approved the Interest Rate Reduction Act in a 215-195 vote, with 30 Republicans voting against the bill and 13 Democrats supporting it. The end of the vote was confusing, with a few members appearing to switch their votes before the final tally.
The vote is one of the rare cases in which a bill was passed without getting a true majority of the House, which is 218 votes. In this vote, 10 Republicans and 12 Democrats did not vote on the bill.
The final tally was so narrow, due to the 30 Republicans who voted against it, that a decision by the 13 Democrats who favored it could have defeated the bill if they switched votes at the last minute.
Republicans came under some pressure ahead of the vote from conservative groups that said government should stay out of the student loan business. The Club for Growth said Friday morning it would score the legislation, meaning those voting for it would get a black mark from the organization.
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) made the surprise decision to schedule the vote on the bill earlier this week as Obama was in the midst of a tour of college campuses in which he cast Republicans as opposed to extending the reduced interest rates. Young voters were a critical constituency to Obama in 2008, and the president’s schedule and rhetoric this week were designed to entrench them firmly in his camp.
Without congressional action, interest rates on federally subsidized Stafford loans would double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent in July, and Friday’s vote to a degree was intended to shelter Republicans from White House fire.
It also took a shot at Obama’s healthcare law by paying for the extension with funds from a preventive care fund set up by the new law.
It was that language that prompted Obama’s veto threat, and Democrats railed against it during a floor debate in which they argued it amounted to an attack on the health of women and children.
Just before the final vote, Boehner accused Democrats of picking a fight on an issue that no one disagrees with.
“Why do people insist that we have to have a political fight on something where there is no fight?” he asked. “There is absolutely no fight. People want to politicize it because it’s an election year, but my God, do we have to fight about everything?
“And now, we’re going to have a fight over women’s health,” he added. “Give me a break. This is the latest plank in the so-called war on women, entirely created by my colleagues across the aisle for political gain.”
Like other Republicans, Boehner noted that Obama himself has proposed cutting the health fund in the past.
“So to accuse us of wanting to gut women’s health is absolutely not true,” he said. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is beneath us. This is beneath the dignity of this House, and the dignity of the public trust that we enjoy from our constituents.”
The Family Farm Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America
An entire way of life is rapidly dying right in front of our eyes. The family farm is being systematically wiped out of existence in America, and big agribusiness and the federal government both have blood all over their hands. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of farms in the United States has fallen from about 6.8 million in 1935 to only about 2 million today. That doesn’t mean that there is less farming going on. U.S. farms are producing more than ever. But what it does mean is that farming is increasingly becoming dominated by the big boys. The rules of the game have been tilted in favor of big agribusiness so dramatically that most small farmers find that they simply cannot compete anymore. Back in 1900, about 39 percent of the U.S. population worked on farms. At this point, only about 2 percent of all Americans now live on farms. Big agribusiness, the food processing conglomerates, and big seed companies such as Monsanto completely dominate the industry. Unless something dramatic is done, the family farm is going to continue to be wiped out of existence. Unfortunately, it does not look like things are going to turn around any time soon.
The way that the farming industry is structured today, it is simply not economically feasible to operate a small family farm. According to Farm Aid, every week approximately 330 farmers leave their land for good.
Many old timers are trying to hang on for as long as they can. A very large percentage of family farmers are in their fifties, sixties or seventies at this point. Today, only about 6 percent of all farmers are under the age of 35.
Most young people these days are not too eager to choose farming as a career. A lot of young adults that grew up on family farms have decided that investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a business that requires you to work 12 hours or more per day most of the year for very meager wages is simply not worth it.
In recent years, many family farmers have been forced to find second jobs in order to support their families. Many farm families are constantly on the verge of financial ruin. It is a really tough life for many of them.
Sadly, less than 25 percent of all farms in America bring in gross revenues in excess of $50,000. The following comes from the EPA website….
By Jeremy Herb and Brandon Conradis – 04/27/12 05:50 AM ET
Lobbying for the top defense contractors remained mostly flat in the first three months of 2012 compared to last year despite the threat of sequestration that could hit the Pentagon budget with an additional $500 billion in across-the-board spending cuts.
Spending on lobbying by 20 of the top defense and aerospace contractors in 2012 decreased a slight 2.4 percent compared to the companies’ first-quarter 2011 spending, an analysis of lobbying disclosure records found.
The flatline suggests that many in the defense industry are waiting until after the November election — or even until the next Congress — to make a lobbying push on sequestration, even as leaders in the industry, the Pentagon and Congress all say that the automatic cuts in sequestration should be addressed now.
Sequestration was set into motion in November when the congressional super-committee tasked with finding $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction failed.
Unless Congress acts, defense and non-defense discretionary spending will face a cut of $500 billion over the next 10 years. That cut, which would take effect starting in January 2013, would hit the defense industry especially hard because it’s coming on top of a $487 billion reduction that’s already been agreed upon.
Most people predict that the issue will not be addressed until a lame-duck session at the end of the year, as the two parties remain deadlocked on taxes and cannot agree on alternative deficit reduction.
“If companies thought that their lobbying efforts could lessen the threat sequestration poses to military spending, they would be lobbying the issue furiously,” said Loren Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute who consults with many top defense contractors. “But the political system seems too distracted by the upcoming election to listen to the pleadings of one sector on the subject.”
Even if the dollars for lobbying have not increased, the rhetoric has amplified.
The United States Has Plenty Of Oil: 10 Facts About America’s Energy Resources That Will Blow Your Mind
The United States is not running out of oil. In fact, nobody on the entire globe has more energy resources than the United States does. The truth is that we are absolutely swimming in oil and natural gas and we have so much coal that we have no idea what to do with it all. At current consumption rates, America has enough energy resources to completely satisfy all of its needs well into the 22nd century. If we would just access those resources, we would not have to import a single drop of foreign oil. But most Americans don’t realize that we have plenty of oil. In fact, our education system has brainwashed most Americans into believing that our energy resources are rapidly being depleted and that we will soon enter a great energy crisis. We are all constantly told that we must transition to “green energy” before it is too late. But the reality is that America is an energy rich nation and new discoveries of oil and natural gas deposits are being made all the time. Shouldn’t someone tell the American people the truth about these things?
Sadly, Barack Obama keeps running around the country declaring that there is no way that the United States can supply itself with enough oil. During one speech a while back, Obama made the following statement….
“With only 2% of the world’s oil reserves, we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices”
The funny thing is that what Obama said sounds very similar to something that Jimmy Carter said back in 1977….
“Unless profound changes are made to lower oil consumption, we now believe that early in the 1980s the world will be demanding more oil than it can produce”.
How did that prediction work out for Jimmy Carter?
Not too well.
The truth is that Obama is misleading the American people just like Jimmy Carter did. A recent Investor’s Business Daily article explained how Obama is twisting the truth….
But the figure Obama uses — proved oil reserves — vastly under-counts how much oil the U.S. actually contains. In fact, far from being oil-poor, the country is awash in vast quantities — enough to meet all the country’s oil needs for hundreds of years.
At current consumption rates, the United States has enough oil to last into the 23rd century without ever importing a single drop of oil from another country.
But only a very small fraction of the American people know this.
So when are we going to start hearing the truth?
The following are 10 facts about America’s energy resources that will blow your mind….
House Republicans have come up with a new method of getting revenge on East Coast elites: putting missile interceptors outside their loft apartments.
A key congressional panel is demanding that the Pentagon start work on a missile defense battery on America’s East Coast, all to make sure an Iranian missile doesn’t wipe out New York, Philly or D.C. in the next three years. But Tehran’s longest-range missile can’t come anywhere near American shores. And the Defense Department already has a plan in motion to launch missile interceptors from Europe, just in case Iran somehow makes a giant technological leap in the near future.
In its markup of next year’s Pentagon budget, the House Armed Services Committee’s Strategic Forces panel inserted a provision that “require[s] the Director, Missile Defense Agency to develop a plan for the deployment of an East Coast site to be operational not later than the end of 2015.” And to encourage the Missile Defense Agency to get started, the subcommittee authorized an extra $100 million — provided the MDA actually comes up with an East Coast plan.
House Republican aides say the extra interceptors are a must because Iran may be armed with an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, in just three short years. “By the administration’s own estimate, Iran could have an ICBM by 2015. And if they get it by 2015, we’ve got a defense ready to go,” one aide tells Danger Room.
TSA screeners allegedly let drug-filled luggage through LAX for cash
Four current and former Transportation Security Administration screeners have been arrested and face charges of taking bribes and looking the other way while suitcases filled with cocaine, methamphetamine or marijuana passed through X-ray machines at Los Angeles International Airport, federal authorities announced Wednesday.
The TSA screeners, who were arrested Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, allegedly received up to $2,400 in cash bribes in exchange for allowing large drug shipments to pass through checkpoints in what the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles called a “significant breakdown” of security.
In addition to the two current and two former screeners, prosecutors also indicted two alleged drug couriers and a third who allegedly tried to smuggle 11 pounds of cocaine but was nabbed when he went through the wrong security checkpoint.
The TSA employees “placed greed above the nation’s security needs,” Andre Birotte Jr., U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said in a statement.
Tracked, Detained at Gunpoint? 3 Americans Assaulted By Our Surveillance State
A career government intelligence official, a filmmaker and a hacker have all been targeted by the state, despite not having been charged with a crime.
April 26, 2012 |
Three targeted Americans: A career government intelligence official, a filmmaker and a hacker. None of these U.S. citizens was charged with a crime, but they have been tracked, surveilled, detained—sometimes at gunpoint—and interrogated, with no access to a lawyer. Each remains resolute in standing up to the increasing government crackdown on dissent.
The intelligence official: William Binney worked for almost 40 years at the secretive National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. spy agency that dwarfs the CIA. As technical director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, Binney told me, he was tasked to “see how we could solve collection, analysis and reporting on military and geopolitical issues all around the world, every country in the world.” Throughout the 1990s, the NSA developed a massive eavesdropping system code-named ThinThread, which, Binney says, maintained crucial protections on the privacy of U.S. citizens demanded by the U.S. Constitution. He recalled, “After 9/11, all the wraps came off for NSA,” as massive domestic spying became the norm. He resigned on Oct. 31, 2001.
Along with several other NSA officials, Binney reported his concerns to Congress and to the Department of Defense. Then, in 2007, as then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was being questioned on Capitol Hill about the very domestic spying to which Binney objected, a dozen FBI agents charged into his house, guns drawn. They forced aside his son and found Binney, a diabetic amputee, in the shower. They pointed their guns at his head, then led him to his back porch and interrogated him.
The UN Plan For Running The World: Global Carbon Taxes, Global Safety Nets And A One World Green Economy
Did you know that the UN has a plan for running the world and it is right out in the open? It is called “sustainable development”, but it is far more comprehensive than it sounds. The truth is that the UN plan for running the world would dramatically alter nearly all forms of human activity. A 204 page report on “sustainable development” entitled “Working Towards a Balanced and Inclusive Green Economy, A United Nations System-Wide Perspective” has been published in advance of the upcoming Rio + 20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro. You can read the full report right here. It envisions a vast system of global carbon taxes, massive global safety nets and the implementation of a one world green economy. Many of those that are pushing “sustainable development” on a global level believe that they are doing it for the good of the planet. In fact, the 204 page report mentioned above even says that the transition “to a green economy requires a fundamental shift in the way we think and act” but that it will be worth it in the end. What people need to understand is that throughout modern history tyranny has almost always been initially introduced by people that believed that they had “good intentions”. No matter how much friendly language the UN uses in their reports, the truth is that what they are promoting is an insidious agenda of absolute tyranny on a global scale.
The upcoming Rio + 20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro comes 20 years after the original 1992 UN Earth Summit that adopted “Agenda 21“. This new summit will be about renewing that commitment to “sustainable development” and moving that agenda forward.
A lot of people out there will not be alarmed by any of this because they know that the UN does not have the power to impose any of their goals on them right now. But that is not the game that the UN is playing.
The UN is not playing a short-term political game. The UN is ready to play their game for decades if necessary. They will just keep coming back with conference after conference and treaty after treaty until they get what they want.
At the moment, the United Nations is operating as something of a “soft global government”. The UN does not have the power to coerce nations to do their bidding yet, so they rely mostly on cooperation. The UN will “take what they can get” right now, and they know that someday they will eventually have the power to turn their recommendations into mandates.
One of the things that the UN would love to implement is a global carbon tax scheme. The power to tax is the power to control, and if the UN is ever given the power to tax the entire globe they will at that point become much more than a “soft global government”.
Right now, the UN is proposing a global carbon tax scheme that would come to as much as 0.6 percent of GDP for participating nations. The following comes directly from the report….
If, for example, industrialized countries were to use carbon taxes or auctioned emissions permits to reach the GHG emission targets they pledged in the Cancun Agreements, they could raise as much as 0.6 per cent of their GDP or about US $250 billion in revenues per year by 2020 (OECD 2012). In addition, other forms of carbon finance, PES, green stimulus funds, micro-finance, social responsibility investment funds, green bonds and other local financial innovations have emerged in recent years and can open up the space for large-scale green financing. To further scale up the financing for a green economy, public-private innovative financing mechanisms are needed to tap institutional investors’ capital.
The report also envisions the transfer of trillions of dollars a year from wealthy countries to poorer countries. The UN feels that this is necessary for a couple of reasons.
First of all, the UN says that developing nations do not have the resources to pay for the “green infrastructure” that is needed to participate in the new green economy and therefore wealthier nations should pay for it.
Secondly, the UN believes that massive global wealth distribution is needed in order to bring about global “equity”.
Does that sound like radical socialism to you?
It should.
The UN report also speaks of a “social protection floor”. So now instead of just supporting tens of millions of Americans that are relying on “the safety net”, U.S. taxpayers will also be expected to contribute to a global safety net that hundreds of millions of people could end up relying on.
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes ‘FAIR USE’ of any such copyrighted material.]
House clears highway bill with Keystone pipeline mandate, thwarts Obama
By Ben Geman, Russell Berman and Keith Laing
Defying a White House veto threat, the House on Wednesday passed legislation that extends transportation program funding through September and mandates construction of a controversial oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast.
All but 14 Republicans, with support from 69 Democrats, voted 293-127 for legislation that falls far short of Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) earlier plan to move a sweeping five-year, $260 billion package.
But Boehner’s retreat serves two crucial tactical and political purposes for the Speaker. It sets up talks with the Senate on the highway bill and keeps the Keystone pipeline — a centerpiece of GOP attacks on White House energy policy — front and center ahead of the November election.
Republican leaders hailed the bipartisan vote as a rebuke of President Obama. Two senior Democrat leaders, Reps. James Clyburn (S.C.) and John Larson (Conn.), approved the measure.
“The House is on record again in support of the Keystone XL energy pipeline — a project President Obama blocked, personally lobbied against, then tried to take credit for, and now says he’ll veto,” Boehner said in a statement. “There’s no telling where the president stands from one day to the next on Keystone, but he knows the pipeline has broad and bipartisan support in Congress and among the American people.”
EPA finalizes first-ever air pollution rules for natural-gas ‘fracking’
By Andrew Restuccia
The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled first-ever regulations Wednesday aimed at reducing toxic air pollution from the natural-gas drilling practice known as “fracking.”
The regulations — which would also target emissions from compressors, oil storage tanks and other oil-and-gas sector equipment — would cut 95 percent of smog-forming and toxic emissions from wells developed with fracking, EPA said.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, involves high-pressure injections of sand, water and chemicals that allow natural gas trapped in rock formations to flow.
The final regulations have been the subject of an aggressive public relations and lobbying campaign in recent months, with industry groups arguing they will impose huge burdens on companies, and green groups countering that they are essential to protect public health.
EPA altered the final regulations to offer a key concession to the natural-gas industry, which had raised concerns about being able to comply with the proposed regulations issued last year.
Under the final rules, companies can comply with the standards until 2015 using flaring, which reduces harmful emissions by burning off the gases that would otherwise escape during natural-gas drilling. After 2015, companies will need to install so-called “green completions,” which are technologies that capture harmful emissions.
On today’s second anniversary of the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon platform, which killed 11 workers and caused the massive BP oil spill, there will be no gifts.
The Resource and Ecosystems Sustainability, Tourism Opportunities and Revived Economy (RESTORE) of the Gulf Coast Act has been approved by both the House and Senate as an amendment to the mammoth transportation bills Congress takes up every five years or so.
But the RESTORE Act still is not law because the House and Senate have yet to reconcile differing versions of the main bills. And some of those transportation elements are red hot, like the future of the Keystone XL Pipeline.
So, on the day when Gulf residents are looking back at the largest human-caused environmental disaster in U.S. history, they just have to hope the RESTORE Act becomes a reality.
The RESTORE Act establishes a Gulf Coast Restoration Trust Fund, which would collect 80 percent of all the administrative, civil and criminal penalties paid by a “responsible” party in connection with the Deepwater horizon oil spill and any other monies appropriated by Congress.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has both civil and criminal actions going against BP and its drilling partners. Legal experts predict these Oil Pollution Act fines will run into the billions.
CISPA Illustrates Struggle Between Security and Privacy
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) has admirable goals, but has privacy advocates up in arms. We need to find a balance between security and privacy that works for everyone.
By Tony Bradley, Content Works Apr 20, 2012 6:33 AM
A new bill is pending on Capitol Hill that has privacy advocates preparing for battle. The backlash for CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) is reminiscent of the uprising against SOPA and PIPA earlier this year. Whether or not CISPA passes, this probably won’t be the last clash between privacy and security.
Broader information sharing–between businesses and the government, as well as between businesses themselves–would help significantly in the war against cybercrime. In an attack, various entities may uncover different tidbits of information about the attack. Those tidbits may not mean much alone, but when combined with the information from other organizations they form a more complete picture that helps all parties understand and respond to the threat faster.
At face value, that seems to be the intent of CISPA. The problem is that the wording is vague or broad in places and ways that could be abused. Privacy advocates would like to fight cybercrime as well–they’re just not willing to surrender personal liberties to make it happen.
With hundreds of millions of individuals providing their exact location with online or mobile check-ins, or over-sharing information in social network status updates, it certainly seems that privacy has lost some of its value. It’s hard to argue for privacy while posting pictures of your kids, or sharing details of some embarrassing thing that happened on the way to work with the general public.
Mr. Creekmore,
What do you think of Freeze-Dried Foods like Mountain House or the MRE’sthat are being marketed as survival food? A lot of preparedness books and web sites suggest these foods for the long term emergency food stockpile, do you think they are a viable solution? John T.
John, it’s easy to imagine ourselves waiting out the collapse of civilization surrounded by boxes of freeze dried foods or MRE’s, M1-A rifle leaning against the wall in the corner of the room, custom 1911 pistol strapped to our side and the 6500 watt diesel generator with electric start humming in the background.
These things are great, I would love to have all this and more, but cannot afford it and never will be able to. Sometimes the truth hurts, but facing it is part of growing up and once we except it we can move on with our preps and the task of doing the best we can with what we have.
In this video we look at some emergency food & water stores we have & the project to increase the stores we have. Also looking at making a rotation can storage device that is a ‘first in, first out’ type of rotation system.
Plz submit your comments, ideas, tips & suggestions either in the comment section below &/or make a video response. This will help everyone when it comes to their storage solutions whether they are new to prepping or more experienced.
I hope you enjoy this first vid in a series of vids on emergency food & water preppring.
Raising chickens in the city is a means to support local organic food systems and to provide food security to any family. Increasing numbers of cities are changing laws to legalize raising chickens.
While these changes in law seem good as they remove conflict between communities and a local government that should be serving their interests, the public should not be “grateful.” They should remember that having one’s own source of food is a human right.
What’s more, it is clear that chickens and other poultry are an excellent means of mosquito and tick control, a large public health boon. That being so, the case for people raising chickens in cities should be settled for good and all. Raising poultry in the city then leaves only issues of doing so in a clean and quiet way but laws to cover neglect or nuisances are already on the books for many activities.
While local governments have stopped people from having this beneficial source of food available to them and a means to control insects, the federal government, without public or scientific input or any hearings, has planned to release genetically engineered mosquitoes in Florida, allegedly to kill off normal mosquitoes that might harbor diseases. Yet the fact that GMO mosquitoes could do vast unknown harm to animal and human life, and there is no way to recall them once there are released, is without doubt.
Keeping chickens which eat mosquitoes thus becomes not just a source of food but a defense against the government’s ill-conceived and involuntary biological experiment on everyone.
Once one begins to realize how beneficial poultry has been to people, and all the diverse varieties they come in, poultry seems quite a wonder. Poultry has lived in close contact with humans for millennia, being fed by people and offering food, pest control, and even company and delight, in return. The story of the goose who laid the golden egg conveys our past understanding of how valuable poultry is to humans.
But the individual raising of poultry was dealt a devastating blow by the Bush administration in its concoction of “avian flu” – a bonanza for the biotech industry and to Rumsfeld and other members of Bush’s administration with ties to it. Industrial ag (Big Pharm) used the hoax of avian flu to slaughter the birds of poor farmers across Asia, removing the competition and wiping out indigenous biodiversity in poultry. Just as they used the threat of swine flu to come in and slaughter the Haitian pigs which were the mainstay of poor Haitians. Just as hoax of swine flu itself was used to sell billions in untested and deadly H1N1 vaccines.
The avian flu hoax was even worse. Using it as the big bugaboo, a threat of the return of a pandemic that could kill millions as Bush said the 1918 flu had done (flu didn’t, a new pharmaceutical industry product did), pandemic laws were pushed through by Bush in the US that are martial law, absent any public health measures, and which can be triggered without any proof. He used a false terror, just as he used the lie of 9/11, to set in place laws for massive control.
This use of disease for totalitarian control is not new.
“Academic medicine has been and is the most important pillar of support of all dictatorships and governments which do not want to submit to written law, to constitutions, to human rights, that is, to the democratically legitimized social contract.” ~ Virologist Dr. Stephan Lanka – Interview 10.27.2005
So it is not only for the truth of the science that one must expose avian flu as a lie but for the sake of democracy, including the seemingly small but actually crucial human right to raise one’s own food (chickens, in this case). It is a right that the US government removed for millions of small farmers across Asia and in Haiti, using disease scares and “public health measures” that were anti-public health.
A new report circulating in the Kremlin today prepared by the Foreign Ministry on the planned re-opening of talks with Japan over the disputed Kuril Islands during the next fortnight states that Russian diplomats were “stunned” after being told by their Japanese counterparts that upwards of 40 million of their peoples were in “extreme danger” of life threatening radiation poisoning and could very well likely be faced with forced evacuations away from their countries eastern most located cities… including the world’s largest one, Tokyo.
The Kuril Islands are located in Russia’s Sakhalin Oblast region and stretch approximately 1,300 km (810 miles) northeast from Hokkaidō, Japan, to Kamchatka, Russia, separating the Sea of Okhotsk from the North Pacific Ocean. There are 56 islands and many more minor rocks. It consists of Greater Kuril Ridge and Lesser Kuril Ridge, all of which were captured by Soviet Forces in the closing days of World War II from the Japanese.
The “extreme danger” facing tens of millions of the Japanese peoples is the result of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster that was a series of equipment failures, nuclear meltdowns, and releases of radioactive materials at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, following the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011.
According to this report, Japanese diplomats have signaled to their Russian counterparts that the returning of the Kuril Islands to Japan is “critical” as they have no other place to resettle so many people that would, in essence, become the largest migration of human beings since the 1930’s when Soviet leader Stalin forced tens of millions to resettle Russia’s far eastern regions.
Important to note, this report continues, are that Japanese diplomats told their Russian counterparts that they were, also, “seriously considering” an offer by China to relocate tens of millions of their citizens to the Chinese mainland to inhabit what are called the “ghost cities,” built for reasons still unknown and described, in part, by London’s Daily Mail News Service in their 18 December 2010 article titled: “The Ghost Towns Of China: Amazing Satellite Images Show Cities Meant To Be Home To Millions Lying Deserted” that says:
************************************************************************************************************ [In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes ‘FAIR USE’ of any such copyrighted material.]
The Hunger Site – Your click helps to feed the hungry
Wheatgrass Kits.com
FAIR USE NOTICE
The material on this site is provided for educational and informational purposes. It may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. It is being made available in an effort to advance the understanding of scientific, environmental, economic, social justice and human rights issues etc. It is believed that this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have an interest in using the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. The information on this site does not constitute legal or technical advice.
Any materials (ie. graphics, articles , commentary) that are original to this blog are copyrighted and signed by it's creator. Said original material may be shared with attribution. Please respect the work that goes into these items and give the creator his/her credit. Just as we share articles , graphics and photos always giving credit to their creators when available. Credit and a link back to the original source is required.
If you have an issue with anything posted here or would prefer we not use it . Please contact me. Any items that are requested to be removed by the copyright owner will be removed immediately. No threats needed or lawsuit required. If there is a problem and you do not wish your work to be showcased then we will happily find an alternative from the many sources readily available from creators who would find it amenable to having their work presented to the subscribers of this feed.
Thank you for your time and attention, blessings to all :)
A hacker who claims to hate both 
This is not the first DDoS attack to be linked with The Pirate Bay. UK ISP 
Will the 
The court found that Apple Italy was not fully applying a two-year guarantee that is obligatory under European law and was providing unclear information on its own additional commercial warranties, the online edition of the Corriere della Sera newspaper reported.
The 
In an article in The Atlantic, 
This week, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced the establishment of a 
Safe: A security officer poses for photographers in the body scanner at Manchester Airport, Manchester
Mozilla has publicly decried the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a controversial cybersecurity bill recently 
The bill 
A bill that would 
Family Survival Protocol - Microcosm News 