What Adam Curry is reading

whistle.im - privacy for everyone.
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  Thu, 15 Aug 2013 13:30
  At whistle.im we believe that privacy is not a matter of having something to hide but one of our most fundamental rights. Whether you are communicating business secrets with your partners, unveiling a dark secret to the press, talking dirty to your boy- or girlfriend or just joking with your friends, you shouldn't have to worry about governments or companies spying on you for whatever reason they made up for themselves.
  Try the beta already!More platforms coming soon!
  It's easy to useWe decided to skip the frippery and to build an application instead that's intuitively to use in daily living.
  And it's securewhistle.im has been designed in a way that guarantees that even we do not know.
  However, whistle.im is a pretty young research project and it is currently in beta. Keep in mind that also we are just people like you and we all know that people are not perfect, so, for what it's worth, use whistle.im with due care and, if you are smarter than us, please let us know how to improve it even more. Thank you!
  Our cryptography is open source - Contributors welcome!
  Donationswhistle.im is free and we are currently working fulltime on making it constantly better. We appreciate every bit of support!
Certain Portable Electronic Communications Devices, Including Mobile Phones and Components Thereof; Commission Determination Not To Review n Initial Determination Granting Google, Inc.'s Unopposed Motion To Intervene
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  Source: Federal Register Latest Entries
  Thu, 15 Aug 2013 12:40
  Notice is hereby given that the U.S. International Trade Commission has determined not to review an initial determination (''ID'') (Order No. 5) of the presiding administrative law judge (''ALJ'') granting Google, Inc.'s unopposed motion to intervene.
  Michael Liberman, Esq., Office of the General Counsel, U.S. International Trade Commission, 500 E Street SW., Washington, DC 20436, telephone (202) 205-3115. Copies of non-confidential documents filed in connection with this investigation are or will be available for inspection during official business hours (8:45 a.m. to 5:15 p.m.) in the Office of the Secretary, U.S. International Trade Commission, 500 E Street SW., Washington, DC 20436, telephone (202) 205-2000. General information concerning the Commission may also be obtained by accessing its Internet server at http://www.usitc.gov. The public record for this investigation may be viewed on the Commission's electronic docket (EDIS) at http://edis.usitc.gov. Hearing-impaired persons are advised that information on this matter can be obtained by contacting the Commission's TDD terminal on (202) 205-1810.
  The Commission instituted this investigation under section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, 19 U.S.C. 1337, on June 26, 2013, based on a complaint filed by Nokia Corporation of Espoo, Finland and Nokia Inc., of Sunnyvale, California (collectively, ''Nokia''). The complaint, as supplemented, alleges a violation of section 337 by reason of infringement of certain claims of U.S. Patent Nos. 6,035,189 (''the `189 patent''); 6,373,345; 6,711,211 (''the `211 patent''); 7,187,945; 8,140,650 (''the `650 patent''); and 8,363,824. 78 FR 38362 (Jun. 26, 2013). The respondents are HTC Corporation of Taoyuan City, Taiwan, and HTC America, Inc. of Bellevue, Washington (collectively, ''HTC'').
  On July 11, 2013, third party Google Inc. (''Google'') filed a motion to intervene as a party in this investigation with respect to three of the six patents, namely the `189, `211 and `650 patents. The motion states that neither complainants Nokia nor respondents HTC oppose the motion.
  On July 16, 2013, the ALJ issued an ID (Order No. 5) granting Google's motion. The ALJ found, inter alia, that the motion was timely filed and that Google has shown that it has a substantial interest in the investigation. No party petitioned for review. The Commission has determined not to review the ID.
  The authority for the Commission's determination is contained in section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, as amended (19 U.S.C. 1337), and in sections 210.42-.46 of the Commission's Rules of Practice and Procedure (19 CFR 210.42-.46).
  Issued: August 12, 2013.
  By order of the Commission.
  Lisa R. Barton,
  Acting Secretary to the Commission.
  [FR Doc. 2013-19825 Filed 8-14-13; 8:45 am]
  BILLING CODE 7020-02-P
Reviewing Our Global Signals Intelligence Collection and Communications Technologies
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  Source: Federal Register Latest Entries
  Thu, 15 Aug 2013 12:38
  The United States, like all nations, gathers intelligence in order to protect its national interests and to defend itself, its citizens, and its partners and allies from threats to our security. The United States cooperates closely with many countries on intelligence matters and these intelligence relationships have helped to ensure our common security.
  Recent years have brought unprecedented and rapid advancements in communications technologies, particularly with respect to global telecommunications. These technological advances have brought with them both great opportunities and significant risks for our Intelligence Community: opportunity in the form of enhanced technical capabilities that can more precisely and readily identify threats to our security, and risks in the form of insider and cyber threats.
  I believe it is important to take stock of how these technological advances alter the environment in which we conduct our intelligence mission. To this end, by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I am directing you to establish a Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies (Review Group).
  The Review Group will assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust. Within 60 days of its establishment, the Review Group will brief their interim findings to me through the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the Review Group will provide a final report and recommendations to me through the DNI no later than December 15, 2013.
  You are hereby authorized and directed to publish this memorandum in the Federal Register.
  THE WHITE HOUSE,Washington, August 12, 2013.
  [FR Doc. 2013-19960Filed 8-14-13; 8:45 am]
  Billing code 3910-A7
Jim NAILS It With His Michael Hastings Car Bomb Story - Jim Stone Forum
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  Thu, 15 Aug 2013 12:45
  @ tigerwolf no problems, the NSA will have his calls monitored and I am fully confident that the inquiry will follow those leads and bring down the whole Synogogue of Satan as a result..... one word, NOT.(thats excellent analyses on that vid - btw it required me to alow scripts (NoScripts, Firefox, Ubuntu)) and all other videos on this site have not required it...I thought at first the language was from the OOmah Poompah's from the Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory aka pied piper of hamlyn. still a yid made it and starred in it.Inonly guessed tha mde it, but surprise surprisehttp://www.imdb.com/name/nm0835799/?ref_=tt_ov_drmel stewart born stuart solomon.I'm reading Collins syagogue of satan at the moment.www.new-moon.org/TheSynagogueOfSatanByAndrewCarringtonHitchcock.pdf(btw I am not getting into futile technical arguments here, just putting out some possibilities, I dont proclaim to know a lot in expert matters, and I could spend another hour looking up some magnesium fires and compare to this one, the bottom line remains, the lies lies lies and the power mongering that loves nothing better than goys bickering - Monty Pythons Peoples Front of Palestine vs the Peoples Palestinian Front).
  ok, one video, 1955 lemans, wiki page says they fed magnesium fuelled fire with water prolonging it. looks yellow to me.
  better still, lucky no palm trees were in the way. ok two videos. less boring than the Lightning McQueen version.short video, might be good background for the serious researchers here.
'Wordt Paul - 'Nederland doet alles fout' - Krugman binnenkort Belg?'
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  Source: VK: Home
  Thu, 15 Aug 2013 12:24
  OPINIE - Peter de Waard '' 15/08/13, 13:51
  (C) epa. Nobelprijswinnaar Paul Krugman.
  column Dus Nederland doet alles fout, vindt Nobelprijswinnar Paul Krugman. Hij ziet nogal een hoop gemakkelijk over het hoofd, schrijft Volkskrant-columnist Peter de Waard.
  Het grote voordeel van een Nobelprijswinnaar is dat hij zijn standpunten niet hoeft te onderbouwen omdat hij de wijsheid in pacht heeft. Dat geldt zeker voor de Amerikaan Paul Krugman. Als een overtuigd keynesiaan is hij 's werelds populairste economische roeptoeter geworden in een tijd dat iedereen zich van de regen in de drup lijkt te bezuinigen.
  Deze week schreef hij op het weblog van The New York Times dat 'Belgi economisch beter wordt geleid dan Nederland omdat het niet wordt geleid'. De bestuurlijke verlamming bij de zuiderburen door de taalstrijd werkt in zijn ogen beter dan de eensgezinde vastberadenheid in Nederland om precies het verkeerde te doen.
  Krugman reageerde hiermee op een artikel van de Britse econoom Simon Wren-Lewis die betoogt dat de opkomst van extreem-linkse (SP) en -rechtse partijen (PVV) in onder meer Nederland het automatische gevolg is van gebrek aan verzet tegen de bezuinigingen van de 'respectabele' middenpartijen. Hierdoor wordt een uitlaatklep gezocht voor groeiende ontevredenheid. 'Het overheidsbestuur in Nederland sinds het begin van de crisis is precies wat 's werelds Zeer Toegewijde Mensen zich zullen wensen: het hele politieke centrum heeft zich voorgenomen om het Juiste Te Doen.'
  OnderzoekUitgebreid veldonderzoek heeft Krugman hiervoor niet gedaan. Hij zet drie indicatoren op een rij en concludeert dat die eigenlijk niet zo veel verschillen. Nederland betaalt minder rente op de staatsschuld maar ziet op dit moment de werkloosheid sneller toenemen.
  Krugman heeft zich in zijn pleidooi voor politieke apathie niet verdiept in de specifieke problemen die Nederland op dit moment heeft om de hypotheek- en pensioenmarkt te hervormen. Het huidige kabinet heeft het H-woord laten vallen - iets wat geen partij daarvoor in meer dan een eeuw durfde - en heeft daardoor het land in grote onzekerheid gebracht. Dat is verder versterkt doordat de huidige regering geen meerderheidssteun heeft in de Eerste Kamer. Daarnaast heeft Nederland het beste pensioenstelsel ter wereld, maar aanpassingen zijn onontkoombaar.
  Voor Krugman zijn dat details waarin de Nobelprijswinnaar zich niet wenst te verdiepen. Ook ziet hij nogal gemakkelijk over het hoofd dat in Belgi ook extremistische partijen zijn. Het Vlaams Belang en de Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie zijn in sommige opzichten nog extremer dan de PVV en de SP. En ten slotte vergeet hij dat Nederland en Belgi tegenwoordig allebei deels vanuit hetzelfde Brussel worden bestuurd.
  Krugman sloeg onlangs een uitnodiging af om naar Nederland te komen. Hij vond de honorering te laag. Hij blijkt nu deel te nemen aan een discussiebijeenkomst met collega Carmen Reinhart die in november wordt gehouden in Amsterdam. Eigenlijk zou hij zijn veldwerk moeten doen in een boetekleed dat soms zelfs een Nobelprijswinnaar niet zou misstaan.
  Peter de Waard is redacteur van de Volkskrant, en schrijft elke dag een column onder de titel 'De Kwestie' Reageren? p.dewaard@volkskrant.nl
  Deel jouw mening met de andere bezoekers
Blessed are the beasts for they shall inherit
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  Source: Lame Cherry
  Thu, 15 Aug 2013 12:22
  As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.II Chronicles 10:17 Then he said, I did see all Israel scattered upon the mountains, as sheep that have no shepherd: and the LORD said, These have no master; let them return therefore every man to his house in peace.
  Again in this mid August something is generating again past end of September. It is that Snowden union, that Putin and the Control are joining in something of an Orthodox exercising of the Fang Jinn.Think of it like a ghostbuster machine in this raw data. For reason of the cycles, this too points pre June 13, to the December period of 2012 focusing on Air Force One for this exercise. The blame will be that aneurysm, but there is something interesting in this inquiry in the Fang Jinn just disappears. No body obviously as he Jinn is spirit.
  This is what is of interest to me, is the consternation of the Secret Service in finding their cargo just disappears and there is no explanation for it.
  I wondered if this was going to be ployed into some border buster bill or blame the right wing, and it appears to be leveled out on that aneurysm story in the body is produced from the chicken entree.
  I feel this surprises them in whatever this alliance is trying to pull off. I do know that what I saw generating for June 2014 is not good in how this would end on another horizon point is out there. That one involves the Jinn ended in a shoot down, and it is in response to the Jinn offering up a certain French populist and a certain British royal in one of the most blatant crimes in history to split the European American alliance.
  The only reason I even suspected this scenario was the Holy Ghost started pointing to this again as He had been doing so almost the entire Barry Chin years of usurpation.It is as far as I have gotten on this as is of today and I am to tired to track it any more. Apparently I have been popular in someone was in the email and signing TL out of blogger in what I suppose was that Egypt revelation on what was behind that crack down.I doubt it was my explaining the exhaustion or these final straws breaking me as what would the shadowlands care about who is not donating here in the dust off my shoes rich.It was kind in the letters and notes of Baby Girl excelling at work which made me marvel and Marilyn with others in saying how a no one like me had done something good in their lives, when I know it is all God in you and I was only confirming the things you already believed about in yourselves.
  We will see if the Jinn is up.........and I hope posting this does not alert things as before in altering the outcome or giving things the slip. The Jinn is uncomfortable as it is less designed for work than Birther Hussein was
  They really need to check that defrosted corpse as to why the cells are ruptured as if Sgt. Pepper somehow had been frozen like Sheik bin Laden for months.
  Blessed are the beasts for they shall inheritThe windTheir heartsWithout any merit
  Simon & Garfunkel - Blessed - YouTubewww.youtube.com/watch?v=L-D3diwmS34Jun 30, 2008 - Uploaded by caloo9buSimon & Garfunkel - Blessed No video, just the song. ... those who mourn: for they will be comforted. the ...nuff said
  agtG 250
Hate crime: United Nations targets the Internet and social media networks
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  Source: The Top Information Post
  Thu, 15 Aug 2013 04:26
  On Tuesday, the United Nations' Human Rights Office voiced its fears over what the UN claims is the rapid spread of racist hate speech across borders via the Internet and social media networks.
  The UN's Flavia Pansieri, its recently appointed deputy high commissioner for the Human Rights Office, stated that, as she sees it, the Internet racist speech is ''compounded by the lack of a universally acceptable definition of what constitutes hate speech.''
  But according to US Constitutional law scholar, Jay Sekulow, an attorney and founder of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), ''Russia is pushing for a move that would turn over control of the Internet from a US-based entity to the United Nations. This troubling power play would give unprecedented authority to the UN. Such a move would mean only one thing: censorship.''
  Ms. Pansieri spoke at the start of the latest session of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in Geneva.
  The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) is the body of independent experts that monitors implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination by its State parties.
  According to the CERD mandate, ''All States parties are obliged to submit regular reports to the Committee on how the rights are being implemented. States must report initially one year after acceding to the Convention and then every two years. The Committee examines each report and addresses its concerns and recommendations to the State party in the form of 'concluding observations.'''
  Commissioner Pansieri stated that incorporating human rights education in schools would go along way in the prevention and eradication of all forms of discrimination and intolerance.
  She noted during her presentation:
  Where does the right of expression which we all want to respect stop and the need to sanction and prevent hate speech begin? What is the point in time when one right has to recognize that it cannot be exercised if it implies the violation of another one?
  [For example,] persons with albinism have been dismembered alive. There have been abductions in 15 African states and the special Rapporteur has strongly urged governments to really engage in raising awareness and understanding that the different color of skin of persons with albinism doesn't make them less human beings and any less deserving or having all the rights respected and protected.
  However, Sekulow claims that ''the UN's goal is to put the Internet under global government control, consider this clause taken from the Russian proposal '' clearly putting UN member states and the United Nations at the helm of controlling and regulating the Internet: Member States should endeavor to establish policies aimed at meeting public requirements with respect to Internet access and use, and at assisting, including through international cooperation, administrations and operating agencies in supporting the operation and development of the Internet.''
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Desperate Erdogan wondering if he's next
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  Source: The View From Falling Downs
  Thu, 15 Aug 2013 04:10
  Here's something worth reading.Note the tinge of desperation as Erdogan wanly champions the imaginary obligations of the international community to intercede with the generals in Egypt and prevent the wholesale slaughter of the Morsi supporters who have been holding peaceful sit-ins in the streets.
  Don't expect Hurriyet to spell out the irony of Erdogan's appeal to international law after being neck deep in fomenting the Syrian crisis for the past three years.
  Truth is, the big boys have decided that the Muslim Brotherhood is expendable. That's evident by what has happened with the regime change in Qatar and the coup in Egypt. This anti-MB impetus also helps sideline Hamas while the US puts on the latest iteration of the Middle East Peace charade.
  The supposed conversations that Erdogan has been having with his counterparts among the UN Security Council must have been awkward in the extreme.
  It seems that Erdogan is the last to know that the world has turned a page, and that he is being hung out to dry.
  True, he has clapped most of his US-trained high command into prison, but that may not be enough.
  The US-sponsored "democracy activists" remain thick on the ground.
VIDEO-Kris Jenner Responds To President Obama's Takedown Of Kim Kardashian & Kanye West
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  Thu, 15 Aug 2013 03:53
  It's hard enough to believe that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West are subjects that President Obama has to even think about in passing, let alone discuss during interviews, and yet they are.
  Obama made a few disparaging remarks about the couple recently, and it should surprise no one to learn that it didn't sit well with the Kardashian empire matriarch Kris Jenner.
  On Friday's episode of her talk show "Kris," Jenner responded to Obama's critique of the over-the-top lives of West and Kardashian and the effect they have on today's youth, when he explained, "Kids weren't monitoring every day what Kim Kardashian was wearing, or where Kanye West was going on vacation, and thinking that somehow that was the mark of success."
  And oh, boy, Jenner was not pleased.
  "It's really great that people aspire to get a great job ... but I wasn't aware that you could only set the bar so high and that we could only dream so big," Jenner said after she read Obama's remarks aloud on her show. "I was taught: Dream big, work hard and you could have whatever you wanted."
  Jenner then went on to suggest that the president was a bit of a hypocrite for noting that Kim and Kanye live in a 10,000 square foot home:
  ''I bet the President has some friends with 10,000 square foot houses and that he wouldn't mind going over there'... when [he was] asking them to have a party for [him] while [he was] campaigning for dollars to run for president.''
  Not only that, Jenner took issue with the fact that Obama would pick on the couple because, well, they've simply worked for what they have.
  "I find it so odd that he's picking on Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Well, Kanye West, first of all, doesn't go on vacation. Ever," Jenner said. "And Kim Kardashian is the hardest-working young lady in the world. She never sleeps, she never stops, she never slows down and works so hard for what she's got."
  Jenner went on to say that she started thinking that her daughter's job affords her to live in that kind of house, and that's when she realized, if she's not mistaken, "the president's job affords him to live in a 55,000 square foot house."
  Of course Obama is far from the first to criticize the couple, and he definitely won't be the last. We're pretty sure Kris Jenner will always be there ready with the argument that Kim Kardashian is the hardest working woman in show business, which may actually be true.
  Also on HuffPost:
Twitter Transparency: US Requests for User Information Up 33 Percent
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  Source: 33 World News
  Thu, 15 Aug 2013 03:38
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VIDEO-After Obama Criticism of Reality Show Culture, Kardashian-Obsessed NBC Suddenly Agrees | MRCTV
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  Thu, 15 Aug 2013 03:28
  If the player does not load, please check that you are running the latest version of Adobe Flash Player.
  While NBC's Today has done 35 stories on the Kardashians in the past six months and frequently promotes the family's reality show, a panel discussion on Tuesday's program posed this question: "Are We Keeping Up Too Much With the Kardashians?" Why the sudden introspection? It might have something to do President Obama being critical of culture in which kids are "monitoring every day what Kim Kardashian was wearing or where Kanye West was going on vacation, and thinking that somehow that was the mark of success."
  More in the cross-post on the MRC's NewsBusters blog.
Feinstein wants to limit who can be a journalist Watchdog.org
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  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 23:40
  I'VE HAD IT UP TO HERE: U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., says citizen journalists and bloggers should not be covered by a federal shield law.
  By Eric Boehm | Watchdog.org
  The most recent congressional threat to the free press in the United States comes from California Democrat U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
  In a proposed amendment to a media shield law being considered by Congress, Feinstein writes that only paid journalists should be given protections from prosecution for what they say or write. The language in her proposal is raising concerns from First Amendment advocates because it seems to leave out bloggers and other nontraditional forms of journalism that have proliferated in recent years thanks to the Internet.
  ''It rubs me the wrong way that the government thinks it should be in the business of determining who should be considered a journalist,'' said Ken Bunting, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition at the Missouri School of Journalism.
  But on the other hand, Bunting said, there is a great need for federal shield law in light of recent attempts by the U.S. Justice Department to force journalists to give up information about confidential sources.
  The difficulty with writing any such law '-- this is the third time Congress has attempted to craft a federal shield law '-- is that any such law would have to set standards for who counts as a journalist or what qualifies as an ''act of journalism.''
  There are shield laws on the books in 40 states, but they do not apply in federal court. The First Amendment of the U.S Constitution promises that the right to a free press ''shall not be infringed.''
  The proposed federal shield law would protect journalists from having to comply with subpoenas or court orders forcing them to reveal sources and other confidential information. The important question, of course, is how to determine that the shield law applies to one person and not another.
  In other words, how do you determine someone is a journalist?
  Feinstein, chairwoman of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee (and a staunch defender of the government's right to spy on anyone at any time), does not want to see a shield law that would protect employees of WikiLeaks and other leak-driven news organizations.
  At a congressional hearing on the matter last week, Feinstein said shield laws should only apply to ''real reporters.''
  An amendment offered by Feinstein would extend shield-law protections to those who work as a ''salaried employee, independent contractor, or agent of an entity that disseminates news or information,'' though students working for news outlets would similarly be covered. The definition seems to leave out the new tide of bloggers and citizen journalists who thrive on the Internet.
  Calls and emails to Feinstein's office were not returned on Monday.
  In states with shield laws, the difference between being protected by them or not can be great.
  Take the case of Crystal Cox, for example. A self-described ''investigative blogger'' from Seattle, Cox broke a story about financial malpractice at a major investment bank, prompting a lawsuit for defamation.
  Cox argued in court that she should be covered by Oregon's shield laws, but a judge found she was not protected because she was not part of the traditional media.
  As a result, she was ordered to pay $2.5 million to the investment firm.
  The laws in many states are lagging behind the reality of journalism today, where anyone with a camera, smart phone or a computer can break an important story.
  ''The distinction between who gets paid to do journalism and who doesn't is going to be come essentially meaningless as we go forward with this technological revolution,'' said Kelly McBride, a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school based in St. Petersburg, Fla.
  McBride, the recent author of a book on journalism ethics in the Internet age, said shield laws are meant to ensure a vibrant marketplace of ideas where all voices can be heard.
  ''To the extent that you limit the shield law, you limit who is in that marketplace,'' she said.
  Feinstein is not the only member of Congress seeking to limit the definition of journalists. Last week, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., sent letters to a number of organizations '' including the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, which runs Watchdog.org '' seeking information about the legitimacy of nonprofit investigative reporters.
  A spokesman for Durbin later told Watchdog.org the senator was not targeting any specific individual or group.
  Boehm is a reporter for Watchdog.org and can be reached at Eric@PAIndependent.com. Follow him on Twitter @EricBoehm87
  Please, feel free to "steal our stuff"! Just remember to credit Watchdog.org. Find out more
Text of S. 987: Free Flow of Information Act of 2013 (Introduced version) - GovTrack.us
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  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 23:33
  S 987 IS
  To maintain the free flow of information to the public by providing conditions for the federally compelled disclosure of information by certain persons connected with the news media.
  IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
  May 16, 2013
  Mr. SCHUMER (for himself and Mr. GRAHAM) introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary
  To maintain the free flow of information to the public by providing conditions for the federally compelled disclosure of information by certain persons connected with the news media.
  Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
  SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.This Act may be cited as the 'Free Flow of Information Act of 2013'.
  SEC. 2. COMPELLED DISCLOSURE FROM COVERED PERSONS.(a) Conditions for Compelled Disclosure- In any proceeding or in connection with any issue arising under Federal law, a Federal entity may not compel a covered person to comply with a subpoena, court order, or other compulsory legal process seeking to compel the disclosure of protected information, unless a Federal court in the jurisdiction where the subpoena, court order, or other compulsory legal process has been or would be issued determines, after providing notice and an opportunity to be heard to such covered person--
  (1) that the party seeking to compel disclosure of the protected information has exhausted all reasonable alternative sources (other than a covered person) of the protected information; and
  (2) that--
  (A) in a criminal investigation or prosecution--
  (i) if the party seeking to compel disclosure is the Federal Government, based on public information or information obtained from a source other than the covered person, there are reasonable grounds to believe that a crime has occurred;
  (ii) based on public information or information obtained from a source other than the covered person, there are reasonable grounds to believe that the protected information sought is essential to the investigation or prosecution or to the defense against the prosecution;
  (iii) the Attorney General certifies that the decision to request compelled disclosure was made in a manner consistent with section 50.10 of title 28, Code of Federal Regulations, if compelled disclosure is sought by a member of the Department of Justice in circumstances governed by section 50.10 of title 28, Code of Federal Regulations; and
  (iv) the covered person has not established by clear and convincing evidence that disclosure of the protected information would be contrary to the public interest, taking into account both the public interest in gathering and disseminating the information or news at issue and maintaining the free flow of information and the public interest in compelling disclosure (including the extent of any harm to national security); or
  (B) in a matter other than a criminal investigation or prosecution, based on public information or information obtained from a source other than the covered person--
  (i) the protected information sought is essential to the resolution of the matter; and
  (ii) the party seeking to compel disclosure of the protected information has established that the interest in compelling disclosure clearly outweighs the public interest in gathering and disseminating the information or news at issue and maintaining the free flow of information.
  (b) Limitations on Content of Information- A subpoena, court order, or other compulsory legal process seeking to compel the disclosure of protected information under subsection (a) shall, to the extent possible, be narrowly tailored in purpose, subject matter, and period of time covered so as to avoid compelling disclosure of peripheral, nonessential, or speculative information.
  SEC. 3. EXCEPTION RELATING TO CRIMINAL CONDUCT.(a) In General- Section 2 shall not apply to any information, record, document, or item obtained as the result of the eyewitness observations of, or obtained during the course of, alleged criminal conduct by the covered person, including any physical evidence or visual or audio recording of the conduct.
  (b) Exception- This section shall not apply, and, subject to sections 4 and 5, section 2 shall apply, if the alleged criminal conduct is the act of communicating the documents or information at issue.
  SEC. 4. EXCEPTION TO PREVENT DEATH, KIDNAPPING, SUBSTANTIAL BODILY INJURY, SEX OFFENSES AGAINST MINORS, OR INCAPACITATION OR DESTRUCTION OF CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE.Section 2 shall not apply to any protected information that is reasonably necessary to stop, prevent, or mitigate a specific case of--
  (1) death;
  (2) kidnapping;
  (3) substantial bodily harm;
  (4) conduct that constitutes a criminal offense that is a specified offense against a minor (as those terms are defined in section 111 of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 (42 U.S.C. 16911)), or an attempt or conspiracy to commit such a criminal offense; or
  (5) incapacitation or destruction of critical infrastructure (as defined in section 1016(e) of the USA PATRIOT Act (42 U.S.C. 5195c(e))).
  SEC. 5. EXCEPTION TO PREVENT TERRORIST ACTIVITY OR HARM TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY.(a) In General- Section 2 shall not apply to any protected information if--
  (1) the party seeking to compel disclosure is the Federal Government; and
  (2)(A) in a criminal investigation or prosecution of the allegedly unlawful disclosure of properly classified information, the court finds by a preponderance of the evidence that the protected information for which compelled disclosure is sought would materially assist the Federal Government in preventing or mitigating--
  (i) an act of terrorism; or
  (ii) other acts that are reasonably likely to cause significant and articulable harm to national security; or
  (B) in any other criminal investigation or prosecution, the court finds by a preponderance of the evidence that the protected information for which compelled disclosure is sought would materially assist the Federal Government in preventing, mitigating, or identifying the perpetrator of--
  (i) an act of terrorism; or
  (ii) other acts that have caused or are reasonably likely to cause significant and articulable harm to national security.
  (b) Deference- In assessing the existence or extent of the harm described in subsection (a), a Federal court shall give appropriate deference to a specific factual showing submitted to the court by the head of any executive branch agency or department concerned.
  (c) Relationship to Section 2- Subsection (a) shall not apply, and, subject to sections 3 and 4, section 2 shall apply, to any criminal investigation or prosecution of the allegedly unlawful disclosure of properly classified information other than one in which the protected information is sought by the Federal Government to prevent or mitigate the harm specified in subsection (a)(2)(A). In considering the extent of any harm to national security when applying section 2 to such cases, a Federal court shall give appropriate deference to any specific factual showing submitted to the court by the head of any executive branch agency or department concerned.
  (d) Subsequent Unlawful Disclosure- The potential for a subsequent unlawful disclosure of information by the source sought to be identified shall not, by itself and without any showing of additional facts beyond such potential disclosure, be sufficient to establish that compelled disclosure of the protected information would materially assist the Federal Government in preventing or mitigating--
  (1) an act of terrorism; or
  (2) other acts that are reasonably likely to cause significant and articulable harm to national security.
  SEC. 6. COMPELLED DISCLOSURE FROM COMMUNICATIONS SERVICE PROVIDERS.(a) Conditions for Compelled Disclosure-
  (1) IN GENERAL- Except as provided in paragraph (2), if any document or other information from the account of a person who is known to be, or reasonably likely to be, a covered person is sought from a communications service provider, sections 2 through 5 shall apply in the same manner that such sections apply to any document or other information sought from a covered person.
  (2) EXCEPTION- If any document or other information from the account of a person who is known to be, or reasonably likely to be, a covered person is sought from a communications service provider under section 2709 of title 18, United States Code, the provisions of sections 2 through 5 governing criminal investigations and prosecutions shall apply in the same manner that such sections apply to any document or other information sought from a covered person in the course of a criminal investigation or prosecution, except that clauses (i) and (iii) of section 2(a)(2)(A) and the phrase 'particularly with reference to directly establishing guilt or innocence' in section 2(a)(2)(A)(ii) shall not apply.
  (b) Notice and Opportunity Provided to Covered Persons- A Federal court may compel the disclosure of a document or other information described in this section only after the covered person from whose account the document or other information is sought has been given--
  (1) notice from the party seeking the document or other information through a subpoena or other compulsory request, not later than the time at which such subpoena or request is issued to the communications service provider; and
  (2) an opportunity to be heard before the court before compelling testimony or the disclosure of a document.
  (c) Exception to Notice Requirement- Notice under subsection (b)(1) may be delayed for not more than 45 days if the Federal court involved determines by clear and convincing evidence that such notice would pose a substantial threat to the integrity of a criminal investigation, a national security investigation, or intelligence gathering, or that exigent circumstances exist. This period may be extended by the court for an additional period of not more than 45 days each time the court makes such a determination.
  (d) Notice to Communications Service Provider- In all cases in which notice is required to be provided to the covered person under this section, a copy of such notice shall be provided simultaneously to the communications service provider from whom disclosure is sought. Once it has received such notice, the communications service provider shall not comply with the request for disclosure unless and until disclosure is either ordered by the court or authorized in writing by the covered person.
  SEC. 7. SOURCES AND WORK PRODUCT PRODUCED WITHOUT PROMISE OR AGREEMENT OF CONFIDENTIALITY.Nothing in this Act shall supersede, dilute, or preclude any law or court decision compelling or not compelling disclosure by a covered person or communications service provider of--
  (1) information identifying a source who provided information without a promise or agreement of confidentiality made by the covered person as part of engaging in journalism; or
  (2) records, other information, or contents of a communication obtained without a promise or agreement that such records, other information, or contents of a communication would be confidential.
  SEC. 8. PROCEDURES FOR REVIEW AND APPEAL.(a) Conditions for Ex Parte Review or Submissions Under Seal- With regard to any determination made by a Federal court under this Act, upon a showing of good cause, that Federal court may receive and consider submissions from the parties in camera or under seal, and if the court determines it is necessary, ex parte.
  (b) Contempt of Court- With regard to any determination made by a Federal court under this Act, a Federal court may find a covered person to be in civil or criminal contempt if the covered person fails to comply with an order of a Federal court compelling disclosure of protected information.
  (c) To Provide for Timely Determination- With regard to any determination to be made by a Federal court under this Act, that Federal court, to the extent practicable, shall make that determination not later than 30 days after the date of receiving a motion requesting the court make that determination.
  (d) Expedited Appeal Process-
  (1) IN GENERAL- The courts of appeal shall have jurisdiction--
  (A) of appeals by a Federal entity or covered person of an interlocutory order of a Federal court under this Act; and
  (B) in an appeal of a final decision of a Federal court by a Federal entity or covered person, to review any determination of a Federal court under this Act.
  (2) EXPEDITION OF APPEALS- It shall be the duty of a Federal court to which an appeal is made under this subsection to advance on the docket and to expedite to the greatest possible extent the disposition of that appeal.
  SEC. 9. RULE OF CONSTRUCTION.Nothing in this Act may be construed to--
  (1) preempt any law or claim relating to defamation, slander, or libel;
  (2) modify the requirements of section 552a of title 5, United States Code, or Federal laws or rules relating to grand jury secrecy (except that this Act shall apply in any proceeding and in connection with any issue arising under that section or the Federal laws or rules relating to grand jury secrecy);
  (3) create new obligations, or affect or modify the authorities or obligations of a Federal entity with respect to the acquisition or dissemination of information pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801 et seq.); or
  (4) preclude voluntary disclosure of information to a Federal entity in a situation that is not governed by this Act.
  SEC. 10. AUDIT.(a) In General- The Inspector General of the Department of Justice shall perform a comprehensive audit of the use of this Act during the period beginning on the date of enactment of this Act and ending on December 31, 2016. The audit shall include an examination of each instance in which a court failed to compel the disclosure of protected information under this Act, and whether this Act has created any procedural impediments that have had a detrimental operational impact on the activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
  (b) Report- Not later than June 30, 2017, the Inspector General of the Department of Justice shall submit to the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Committee on Intelligence of the Senate and the Committee on the Judiciary and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of the House of Representatives a report containing the results of the audit conducted under subsection (a).
  (c) Review- Not later than 30 days before the submission of the report under subsection (b), the Inspector General of the Department of Justice shall provide the report to the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence. The Attorney General or the Director of National Intelligence may provide such comments to be included in the report submitted under subsection (b) as the Attorney General or the Director of National Intelligence may consider necessary.
  (d) Form- The report submitted under subsection (b) and any comments included under subsection (c) shall be in unclassified form, but may include a classified annex.
  SEC. 11. DEFINITIONS.In this Act:
  (1) COMMUNICATIONS SERVICE PROVIDER- The term 'communications service provider'--
  (A) means any person that transmits information of the customer's choosing by electronic means; and
  (B) includes a telecommunications carrier, an information service provider, an interactive computer service provider, and an information content provider (as such terms are defined in section 3 or 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 153 and 230)).
  (2) COVERED PERSON- The term 'covered person'--
  (A) means a person who--
  (i) with the primary intent to investigate events and procure material in order to disseminate to the public news or information concerning local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest, regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports or publishes on such matters by--
  (I) conducting interviews;
  (II) making direct observation of events; or
  (III) collecting, reviewing, or analyzing original writings, statements, communications, reports, memoranda, records, transcripts, documents, photographs, recordings, tapes, materials, data, or other information whether in paper, electronic, or other form;
  (ii) has such intent at the inception of the process of gathering the news or information sought; and
  (iii) obtains the news or information sought in order to disseminate the news or information by means of print (including newspapers, books, wire services, news agencies, or magazines), broadcasting (including dissemination through networks, cable, satellite carriers, broadcast stations, or a channel or programming service for any such media), mechanical, photographic, electronic, or other means;
  (B) includes a supervisor, employer, parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate of a person described in subparagraph (A); and
  (C) does not include any person who is or is reasonably likely to be--
  (i) a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power, as those terms are defined in section 101 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801);
  (ii) a member or affiliate of a foreign terrorist organization designated under section 219(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1189(a));
  (iii) designated as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the Department of the Treasury under Executive Order No. 13224 (50 U.S.C. 1701);
  (iv) a specially designated terrorist, as that term is defined in section 595.311 of title 31, Code of Federal Regulations (or any successor thereto);
  (v) a terrorist organization, as that term is defined in section 212(a)(3)(B)(vi)(II) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(3)(B)(vi)(II));
  (vi) committing or attempting to commit the crime of terrorism, as that offense is defined in section 2331(5) or 2332b(g)(5) of title 18, United States Code;
  (vii) committing or attempting the crime of providing material support, as that term is defined in section 2339A(b)(1) of title 18, United States Code, to a terrorist organization; or
  (viii) aiding, abetting, or conspiring in illegal activity with a person or organization defined in clauses (i) through (vii).
  (3) DOCUMENT- The term 'document' means writings, recordings, and photographs, as those terms are defined by rule 1001 of the Federal Rules of Evidence (28 U.S.C. App.).
  (4) FEDERAL ENTITY- The term 'Federal entity' means an entity or employee of the judicial or executive branch or an administrative agency of the Federal Government with the power to issue a subpoena or issue other compulsory process.
  (5) PROPERLY CLASSIFIED INFORMATION- The term 'properly classified information' means information that is classified in accordance with any applicable Executive orders, statutes, or regulations regarding classification of information.
  (6) PROTECTED INFORMATION- The term 'protected information' means--
  (A) information identifying a source who provided information under a promise or agreement of confidentiality made by a covered person as part of engaging in journalism; or
  (B) any records, contents of a communication, documents, or information that a covered person obtained or created--
  (i) as part of engaging in journalism; and
  (ii) upon a promise or agreement that such records, contents of a communication, documents, or information would be confidential.
Why Sen. Feinstein Is Wrong About Who's a ''Real Reporter'' | Electronic Frontier Foundation
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 23:31
  During the Senate Judiciary Committee's August 1 mark-up of the shield law bill aimed at protecting journalists' sources, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) reportedly objected to the definition of journalist provided in the bill as introduced, seeking to restrict the definition's scope to apply only to ''real reporters.'' To achieve her misguided goal, Sen. Feinstein has put forward an amendment to S. 987 that would greatly exacerbate the problems with the definition of who's a journalist that existed in the bill as introduced.
  Her amendment, to be submitted for Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Il.) as well, not only retains the problematic requirement that a person ''regularly'' engage in journalism to enjoy shield law protections, but moreover adds new requirements that would make it especially difficult for self-publishers such as independent bloggers and citizen journalists to be protected under the law. Indeed, her new requirements for being either salaried or at least affiliated with a news ''entity'' seem to purposefully target these self-publishers.
  These problems are rooted in the vagueness of many key terms in her definition of journalist. Indeed, most essential terms are not defined. While vagueness provides an interpretative battleground, self-publishing bloggers and citizen journalists are disadvantaged in this fight.
  Three Roads to ''Journalist'' that All Go Nowhere
  Feinstein's amendment effectively advances a traditional vision of journalism through the three definitions of journalist that it provides, each of which requires that a person be affiliated with a journalistic ''entity'' or institution (including news websites and other digital news services, and other periodicals distributed digitally).
  Specifically, the amendment requires that a journalist meet one of the following definitions:
  working as a ''salaried employee, independent contractor, or agent of an entity that disseminates news or information;''either (a) meeting the prior definition ''for any continuous three-month period within the two years prior to the relevant date'' or (b) having ''substantially contributed, as an author, editor, photographer, or producer, to a significantnumber of articles, stories, programs, or publications by an entity . . . within two years prior to the relevant date;'' orworking as a student journalist ''participating in a journalistic publication at an institution of higher education.'' (emphases added)There are problems with each of these three definitions. First, as we pointed out in our critique of the House's bill, requiring that an individual is ''salaried'' is problematic because many people do journalism but do not do it as their primary source of income. Further, it is entirely unclear who or what an ''agent'' or ''entity'' is.
  Second, for an individual to fall under the second, seemingly looser criteria, that individual must have distributed the news ''by means of an entity.'' (emphasis added) While this definition may cover freelancers, it is again unclear what it means to have ''substantially contributed'' to a ''significant'' amount of work of an ''entity.'' Indeed, for both the first and second definitions, essential terms are not defined'--vagueness that, as we'll see later, ultimately hurts independent bloggers and citizen journalists.
  While the amendment's inclusion of student journalists is laudable, it does nothing for those students who do not work for a ''journalistic publication'' at their college or university'--or for those students the moment they graduate.
  Still Requiring that Journalists ''Regularly'' Engage in Journalism
  Additionally, Sen. Feinstein's amendment retains the original Senate shield bill's problematic requirement that individuals ''regularly'' do journalism to count as a journalist. Specifically, the amendment requires either:
  that individuals ''engage[] in . . . the regular gathering, preparation, collection, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting or publishing on'' matters of public interest; orthat individuals ''regularly conducted interviews, reviewed documents, captured images of events, or directly observed events.'' (emphases added)As in the original Senate bill, the amendment fails to define what ''regularly'' means, vagueness that cuts against non-institutional journalists.
  Vague Language Is Bad for Independent Bloggers, Citizen Journalists
  Sen. Feinstein's amendment is riddled with vague language, failing to define key terms including ''agent,'' entity,'' ''substantially contributed,'' and ''regularly'''--on which the definition of who's a journalist turns. Non-traditional journalists are at a disadvantage when the interpretative waters are muddy. Why? Because such vagueness invites interpretations that exclude those who are on the margins of status quo journalism, and who are often in a more vulnerable position and unable to hire legal counsel to sort through the law's ambiguities. As a result, independent bloggers and citizen journalists would likely be interpreted out of Feinstein's definition of journalist.
  The very fact that developing a crisp, clear definition of journalist is difficult should signal to Congress that it might not be equipped to wade into the uncharted waters of deciding who is a journalist. But it's a problem that Congress can easily avoid by linking shield law protections to the act of journalism, not the definition of who is journalist.
Senate takes initial step toward media shield law - Business news - Boston.com
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 23:31
  By HENRY C. JACKSON / Associated Press / August 1, 2013
  WASHINGTON (AP) '-- A Senate panel took a step forward on legislation to protect reporters and the news media from revealing their sources. But lawmakers put off until September a broader debate over whether Congress defines who is a journalist.
  The Judiciary Committee agreed Thursday to legislation sponsored by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., a key supporter of a federal media shield law. The measure would codify many of the regulations proposed earlier this month by Attorney General Eric Holder. The panel approved it on a voice vote.
  The renewed push for a media shield law comes after the disclosure earlier this year that the Justice Department had secretly subpoenaed almost two months of telephone records for 21 phone lines used by reporters and editors for The Associated Press and secretly used a warrant to obtain some emails of a Fox News journalist. The AP received no advance warning.
  ''We need a strong media shield bill now more than ever,'' Schumer said. ''This is an important step forward that strengthens this bipartisan bill and should give it even more momentum to clear the committee and the Senate by the end of the year.''
  The bill would protect reporters and news media organizations from revealing the identities of confidential sources, but it does not grant an absolute privilege for journalists.
  The lack of objection to taking up Schumer's 21-page bill signaled broad support, but it's also clear there will be a number of proposed changes to the language he has crafted with a bipartisan group of senators that includes Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.
  Limited amount of time before Congress' August recess forced lawmakers to postpone further action on the measure until after the break.
  One issue is the definition of reporter in the aftermath of WikiLeaks, the website that exposed U.S. classified information leaked by Army Pfc. Bradley Manning.
  The bill's definition covers four pages and defines the individual as a person ''with the primary intent to investigate events and procure material in order to disseminate to the public news or information concerning local, national or international events or other matters of public interest,'' collects the information by conducting interviews and directly observing events, and has the intent of gathering news.
  Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., proposed an amendment to narrow the definition of what a journalist is.
  Feinstein said she was introducing her amendment because, ''this bill is described as a reporter shield law '-- I believe it should be applied to real reporters.'' She said she was concerned ''that the current version of the bill would grant a special privilege to people who aren't really reporters at all, who have no professional qualifications.''
  Feinstein's amendment, which is co-sponsored by Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., ''defines a journalist as a salaried agent'' of a media entity, such as a newspaper, broadcast news station, news web site or another type of news service distributed digitally. She said there was also language, including a ''look back'' option to protect legitimate reporters not tied to a specific news organization.
  Schumer said he thought his legislation had a tight enough definition of who would be protected by the law.
  ''The bottom line is the world has changed, and we're very careful in this bill to distinguish journalists from those who shouldn't be protected,'' Schumer said. ''Wikileaks and all those others are not protected.''
  Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said senators on the committee had proposed a number of amendments to the bill and that in order to give them all a fair hearing, he wanted to wait until after Congress' August recess to go further.
  He also asked senators to consider consolidating some proposed changes before they returned to work.
  Schumer's measure would incorporate many of the changes proposed by Attorney General Eric Holder in July. Criticism of the collection of the material without any notice to the news organizations prompted President Barack Obama to order Holder to review the department's policy.
  Holder's revised guidelines called for the government to give advance notice to the news media about subpoena requests for reporters' phone records unless the attorney general determines such notice would pose a clear and substantial threat to the investigation. Search warrants for a reporter's email would only apply when the individual is the focus of a criminal investigation for conduct not connected to ordinary newsgathering.Continued...
Project Meshnet
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 20:41
  blogget startedwikiOur objective is to create a versatile, decentralized network built on secure protocols for routing traffic over private mesh or public internetworks independent of a central supporting infrastructure.more info
  guide
  cjdns
  meshlocals
  dev chat
  Google+
Vicepresident ElBaradei van Egypte stapt op
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: VK: Home
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 20:37
  14/08/13, 18:23 '' bron: ANP
  (C) epa. Mohamed El-Baradei
  Mohamed ElBaradei stapt op als vicepresident van Egypte. Dit schrijft de voormalige baas van de VN-atoomwaakhond IAEA in een brief aan waarnemers president Adly Mansour.
  'Zoals u weet, zag ik dat er vreedzame wegen waren om deze botsing in de samenleving te beindigen; er waren aanvaardbare oplossingen voorgesteld die tot een nationale consensus hadden kunnen leiden', aldus de ontslagbrief. ElBaradei wil geen medeverantwoordelijkheid meer dragen voor beslissingen waar hij het niet mee eens is: 'Ik kan de verantwoordelijkheid voor geen enkele druppel bloed dragen.'
  'Ik bid God de Hoogste dat hij ons geliefde Egypte zal behoeden voor alle kwaad en dat hij de hoop en wensen van het volk moge vervullen', aldus ElBaradei, precies een maand na zijn bediging als vicepresident.
Obama Golfs With Comcast CEO | The Weekly Standard
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 20:32
  President Obama is golfing today on Martha's Vineyard. The foursome is made up of the following individuals, according to the White House pool reporter:
  Per the WH, the president's golf partners are:
  Jim Kim, president of the World Bank
  Brian Roberts, chief executive of Comcast.
  Ron Kirk, former US Trade Representative.
  Comcast owns NBC and MSNBC.
Crooked Dem Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. Sentenced To 30 Months In Prison '' Update: Wife Gets 12 Months'...
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Weasel Zippers
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 20:31
  He got off easy, he was expected to get between 4-7 years.
  Via WGTV:
  A federal judge sentenced former congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. to 30 months, or about 2-and-a-half years, in prison for misuse of campaign funds.
  ''This is a very sad day and a difficult case,'' said Judge Amy Berman Jackson before the sentence was handed down. She said she finds he is ''genuinely committed'' to his work in Congress. But, she said he wrote checks and credit charges more than 3,000 times.
  Talking about Jackson's illness, she said ''this disorder can not begin to explain'' the multiple purchases.
  ''You are a member of Congress who never missed a vote,'' the judge said, adding that she received letters from people implying Jackson is ''guilty of bad acts but you are not a bad man.''
  ''But as a public official you are supposed to live up to a higher standard of integrity,'' she said.
  During his sentencing hearing, Jackson addressed the court and admitted fault: ''I misled the American people; I misled the House of Representatives; I misled the media'...I was wrong. I don't fault anyone.''
  Judge Amy Berman Jackson also ruled that Jackson does not have to pay restitution to his former campaign because it is now defunct.
  Update: Only 12 months for stealing $750,000, and they don't have to pay the money back.
BBC News - Radio Times caught up in Premier League's piracy fight
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 20:29
  14 August 2013Last updated at13:48 ETBy Leo KelionTechnology reporterInternet users have been prevented from accessing the Radio Times and hundreds of other websites as a result of the Premier League's battle with an unrelated copyright infringing site.
  The accident occurred because the sites share an internet protocol address with First Row Sports, which offers unauthorised streams of football games.
  Internet providers had been ordered to block the IP.
  The Premier League only become aware of the issue when the BBC contacted it.
  The problem only occurred if users typed in "radiotimes.com" rather than the full "www.radiotimes.com" address, or likewise dropped the "www" ahead of the other sites affected.
  The editor of the Radio Times expressed anger at the news.
  "It's outrageous that our website has been suddenly switched off and our users wrongly informed that it's to protect against copyright infringement," said Ben Preston.
  "The Premier League seems to be behaving like the worst sort of blundering striker who's forgotten the first rule of football - check you're at the right end before you shoot."
  The football body said it was "urgently" looking into the matter and stressed that it had not meant to block other sites.
  Blocked sitesThe High Court has ordered ISPs to prevent access to a growing number of sites including The Pirate Bay, EZTV, Fenopy, and Newzbin2 after rights-holders complained of copyright infringement.
  Last month the Premier League added First Row Sports to that list - a Swedish-based site offering video streams to football games from around the world.
  The way the system works is that the rights-holders are responsible for identifying which IP addresses are being used and then sending the details to the ISPs.
  The court specifically said that ISPs are "wholly reliant" on the rights-holders "accurately identifying" which IPs should be blocked and had "no obligation" to check them themselves.
  In addition to Radio Times, several football clubs - including Blackburn Rovers, Reading and Brentford - as well as the Notes from Nature science project and Galaxy Zoo space education site have been affected.
  Virgin Media confirmed its subscribers had flagged the issue last week and added it had taken action to rectify the problem.
  "As a responsible ISP we obey court orders when addressed to the company," said a spokesman.
  "However, we do not believe the instruction to block this particular IP address meets the criteria of the court order against First Row Sports so we have stopped blocking it and are writing to the Premier League."
  Virgin acknowledged this meant that in some cases users might be able to access First Row Sports again.
  BT added it was taking similar action.
  "Under the terms of the court order to block First Row Sports, it is the Premier League's responsibility to provide BT with IP addresses to block that relate only to First Row Sports," a spokesman said.
  "The Premier League is currently looking into whether the IP addresses provided to BT included any IP addresses that related to radiotimes.com. BT has suspended blocking of the IP addresses in question in the meantime".
  Telefonica - which has sold the Be Unlimited network to Sky, but continues to run the operation - said it had also unblocked the IP address, but planned to use another way to prevent subscribers accessing The First Row site.
  "We anticipate that this will be actioned shortly," added a spokesman.
  TalkTalk said it was not aware of the problem.
  'Respect the rulings'The Premier League said it had never intended legitimate sites to be affected. But it also expressed concern at the idea that the ISPs were taking unilateral action.
  "The court order that requires internet service providers to block this website clearly states that any issues they have in implementing the block must be raised with the Premier League before taking any further action," said a spokesman.
  "This is the first we have heard of this issue and are looking into it as a matter of urgency.
  "The fact remains that the High Court has ordered an injunction requiring ISPs to block First Row Sports and we will continue to implement it and expect the ISPs to respect the ruling."
Encryption is less secure than we thought - MIT News Office
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 19:26
  Information theory '-- the discipline that gave us digital communication and data compression '-- also put cryptography on a secure mathematical foundation. Since 1948, when the paper that created information theory first appeared, most information-theoretic analyses of secure schemes have depended on a common assumption.Unfortunately, as a group of researchers at MIT and the National University of Ireland (NUI) at Maynooth, demonstrated in a paper presented at the recent International Symposium on Information Theory (view PDF), that assumption is false. In a follow-up paper being presented this fall at the Asilomar Conference on Signals and Systems, the same team shows that, as a consequence, the wireless card readers used in many keyless-entry systems may not be as secure as previously thought.
  In information theory, the concept of information is intimately entwined with that of entropy. Two digital files might contain the same amount of information, but if one is shorter, it has more entropy. If a compression algorithm '-- such as WinZip or gzip '-- worked perfectly, the compressed file would have the maximum possible entropy. That means that it would have the same number of 0s and 1s, and the way in which they were distributed would be totally unpredictable. In information-theoretic parlance, it would be perfectly uniform.
  Traditionally, information-theoretic analyses of secure schemes have assumed that the source files are perfectly uniform. In practice, they rarely are, but they're close enough that it appeared that the standard mathematical analyses still held.
  ''We thought we'd establish that the basic premise that everyone was using was fair and reasonable,'' says Ken Duffy, one of the researchers at NUI. ''And it turns out that it's not.'' On both papers, Duffy is joined by his student Mark Christiansen; Muriel M(C)dard, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT; and her student Flvio du Pin Calmon.
  The problem, M(C)dard explains, is that information-theoretic analyses of secure systems have generally used the wrong notion of entropy. They relied on so-called Shannon entropy, named after the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon, who taught at MIT from 1956 to 1978.
  Shannon entropy is based on the average probability that a given string of bits will occur in a particular type of digital file. In a general-purpose communications system, that's the right type of entropy to use, because the characteristics of the data traffic will quickly converge to the statistical averages. Although Shannon's seminal 1948 paper dealt with cryptography, it was primarily concerned with communication, and it used the same measure of entropy in both discussions.
  But in cryptography, the real concern isn't with the average case but with the worst case. A codebreaker needs only one reliable correlation between the encrypted and unencrypted versions of a file in order to begin to deduce further correlations. In the years since Shannon's paper, information theorists have developed other notions of entropy, some of which give greater weight to improbable outcomes. Those, it turns out, offer a more accurate picture of the problem of codebreaking.
  When M(C)dard, Duffy and their students used these alternate measures of entropy, they found that slight deviations from perfect uniformity in source files, which seemed trivial in the light of Shannon entropy, suddenly loomed much larger. The upshot is that a computer turned loose to simply guess correlations between the encrypted and unencrypted versions of a file would make headway much faster than previously expected.
  ''It's still exponentially hard, but it's exponentially easier than we thought,'' Duffy says. One implication is that an attacker who simply relied on the frequencies with which letters occur in English words could probably guess a user-selected password much more quickly than was previously thought. ''Attackers often use graphics processors to distribute the problem,'' Duffy says. ''You'd be surprised at how quickly you can guess stuff.''
  In their Asilomar paper, the researchers apply the same type of mathematical analysis in a slightly different way. They consider the case in which an attacker is, from a distance, able to make a ''noisy'' measurement of the password stored on a credit card with an embedded chip or a key card used in a keyless-entry system.
  ''Noise'' is the engineer's term for anything that degrades an electromagnetic signal '-- such as physical obstructions, out-of-phase reflections or other electromagnetic interference. Noise comes in lots of different varieties: The familiar white noise of sleep aids is one, but so is pink noise, black noise and more exotic-sounding types of noise, such as power-law noise or Poisson noise.
  In this case, rather than prior knowledge about the statistical frequency of the symbols used in a password, the attacker has prior knowledge about the probable noise characteristics of the environment: Phase noise with one set of parameters is more probable than phase noise with another set of parameters, which in turn is more probable than Brownian noise, and so on. Armed with these statistics, an attacker could infer the password stored on the card much more rapidly than was previously thought.
  ''Some of the approximations that we're used to making, they make perfect sense in the context of traditional communication,'' says Matthieu Bloch, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. ''You design your system in a framework, and then you test it. But for crypto, you're actually trying to prove that it's robust to things you cannot test. So you have to be sure that your assumptions make sense from the beginning. And I think that going back to the assumptions is something people don't do often enough.''
  Bloch doubts that the failure of the uniformity assumption means that cryptographic systems in wide use today are fundamentally insecure. ''My guess is that it will show that some of them are slightly less secure than we had hoped, but usually in the process, we'll also figure out a way of patching them,'' he says. The MIT and NUI researchers' work, he says, ''is very constructive, because it's essentially saying, 'Hey, we have to be careful.' But it also provides a methodology to go back and reanalyze all these things.''
Deadly day in Cairo as Mursi protest camps stormed
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  Source: euronews
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 19:25
  Scores of people have been killed in Egypt as security forces moved in to clear the Cairo camps of protesters demanding the reinstatement of deposed President Mohamed Mursi.
  The Health Ministry said 149 people have died from the clashes in Cairo and other cities nationwide with 1,400 injured, but euronews' Egypt correspondent said the death toll is likely to be higher as he had seen scores of bodies in one location alone in Cairo.
  He described it as like a war zone.
  The deaths came as police with armoured vehicles and bulldozers moved in to end a six-week standoff and clear the protest sites.
  Eyewitnesses said security forces opened fire on demonstrators with shotguns and automatic rifles as tear gas canisters rained down.
  The smaller of the two pro-Morsi camps '' at Nahda, near Cairo University in the west of the city '' appeared to have been cleared quickly, but it was early evening before the authorities finally took control of the much bigger camp around the Rabaa al-Adawiya Mosque in the Nasser City neighborhood of north-east Cairo.
  Protesters could be see streaming out of the area having been given safe passage.
  The violence has also spread to other cities, with deaths and injuries reported following attacks on government buildings and police stations in Alexandria in the north, Suez, and the province of Fayoum south of Cairo.
  International condemnation
  There was strong international reaction.
  ''The US strongly condemns the use of violence against protesters in Egypt,'' said Josh Earnest, White House deputy press secretary.
  ''We have repeatedly called on Egypt's security forces to show restraint,'' he added, ''Just as we've urged protesters to demonstrate peacefully.''
  ''We also strongly oppose a return to a state of emergency law and call on the interim government to respect basic human rights,'' Earnest concluded, including the right to public assembly.
  UN secretary General Ban Ki Moon condemned the violence used.
  The European Union also deplored the deaths. EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said: ''Confrontation and violence is not the way forward to resolve key political issues.''
  'Islamists to blame'
  The authorities blame Islamists for provoking the violence. State TV broadcast video which it said showed Mursi supporters shooting at the security forces.
  It said six police had been killed in the clashes and 66 injured with four shot dead away from the main clashes at a Cairo police station .
  The Egyptian presidency announced a one-month state of emergency across the country with a curfew from 7.00 pm to 6.00 am in Cairo and other major cities.
  The latest violence appears sure to further polarise Egypt's 84 million people between backers of Mursi and those who opposed his brief rule.
  There were also reports of Christian churches being burned in revenge for Copt christians having supported the military-led removal of the president on July 3.
  Violence erupted elsewhere in the Egyptian capital. There were clashes on the 6 October bridge, a major overpass through the centre of the city.
  During running battles between the police and Mursi supporters, a bus was hijacked and driven at high speed into the police lines.
  Political unease
  The violence had political repercussions.
  Mohamed ElBaradei, a former UN diplomat, quit his post of vice president in the army-backed government, saying the conflict could have been resolved by peaceful means.
  ''The beneficiaries of what happened today are those call for violence, terrorism and the most extreme groups.''
  Egypt's second largest Islamist party called for an end to political violence it said threatened to split society.
  The Nour Party said it held the army-backed government responsible for the bloodshed.
  View Egypt '' Cairo protests cleared in a larger map
  More about:Cairo, Clashes and riots, Islamists, Mohamed MursiCopyright (C) 2013 euronews
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AUDIO NPR Here & Now Gaga BS promotion
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  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 19:04
  With Tea Party activists determined to defund Obamacare and halt the immigration bill, lawmakers' August recess is anything but sleepy. Congressman Robert Pittenger found that out firsthand.
  Comment | more >>Critics are starting to ask what's happening with the once highly respected actor. ''The Lone Ranger'' is one of the biggest box office bombs of the summer, and it's earned Depp even more negative reviews.
  19 Comments | more >>Staff Sgt. Ed Drew brought his photography equipment from art school to Afghanistan, including equipment to make tintypes '-- a photographic technique from the Civil War.
  7 Comments | more >>Watsi '-- one of the fastest growing non-profits in web history '-- puts up pictures and profiles of people around the world who need money for medical care. It's like Kickstarter for medical care.
  18 Comments | more >>It's been a great summer for actor Ethan Hawke, with films including ''Before Midnight'' and ''The Purge.'' In an interview with Here & Now, he talks about those films, his life and future plans.
  Comment | more >>''Kids Jeopardy'' contestant Thomas Hurley made it all the way to Final Jeopardy and even got the right answer. The only problem? He spelled it wrong. He told his local newspaper he was ''cheated.''
  37 Comments | more >>A new in vitro fertilization (IVF) technique has huge cost-saving implications, but it also raises ethical questions because the process can screen the entire human genome.
  5 Comments | more >>The newspaper's executive editor, Marty Baron, tells Here & Now that employees are optimistic about what Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos can bring to the Post.
  Comment | more >>To mark the one-year anniversary of the mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, the son of the president of the temple '-- who was killed in the shooting '-- invited a Newtown father to speak.
  4 Comments | more >>former U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine says she's concerned that the intercepted messages between members of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula could be a diversionary tactic.
  2 Comments | more >>
DefCon hacker sakes job
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  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 18:51
  LAS VEGAS Closing the curtains in your living room may not close the doors on potential hackers. At a demonstration Friday in Las Vegas, researchers showed an audience of children at Defcon Kids how a Samsung Smart TV can be hacked.So-called smart TVs have an operating system installed that is similar to a smartphone, which hosts third-party apps. People can browse the Internet, launch apps and take photos using their remote controls.
  Hackers come clean on what's most at riskPresented by security engineers Aaron Grattafiori and Josh Yavor of iSEC Partners, the exploit works by inserting malicious JavaScript
Application security | iSEC Partners
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  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 18:50
  iSEC Partners assists clients in improving the security of the software they develop or outsource. iSEC Partners' services help enterprises and product companies to improve security during project design, implementation, testing and once software is released or running in a production environment. Our recommendations help development teams understand the business and security implications of choices made when designing and developing a product or service.
  Here is a selection of the services we can provide:
  Application and Product Penetration TestingIdentification of security weaknesses through penetration testing with or without code reviewDemonstration of weaknesses as needed to validate findingsSimplified architecture review and threat modelingCharacterization of the impact of a successful attackRecommend solutions for addressing weaknessesThe application, protocol, or implementation's security posture is reportedUpon request, a public facing document explaining the test methodology and results can be providedApplication Design ReviewConduct a review of a system's designIdentify security implications of the designPerform threat modelingPerform a gap analysis between the design and industry best practicesEnumerate conflicts between business requirements and security considerations so informed trade offs are madeRecommend solutions for addressing security weaknessesCan be conducted prior to implementation, or once in productionApplication Code ReviewExamine sensitive areas of software codeIdentify security flaws including: race conditions, overflows, character set conversion problems, logical errors, bad assumptions, key management flaws, and cryptographic mistakesRecommend specific fixes and general coding practice improvements appropriate to the Client's environmentLead groups of developer through code review exercises to enhance the Client's ability to audit codeUpon request, a public facing document explaining the test methodology and results can be provided
What Exactly is Eric Holder Getting Credit For? - Hit & Run : Reason.com
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  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 18:26
  Talk Radio News Service/Foter.comYesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced he was ordering prosecutors to omit the quantity of drugs involved in low-level narcotics cases in an effort to circumvent mandatory minimum laws in those kind of cases, and suggesting to them that they should not prosecute every low-level drug case available to them. As Jacob Sullum noted last night, despite this apparent policy shift President Obama has still not used his clemency power to free inmates he acknowledges are serving out indiscriminately harsh sentences, and Eric Holder did not actually order prosecutors to stop prosecuting low-level drug offenders. The exceptions carved out by the attorney-general'--''ties'' to gangs or cartels, previous criminal history'--leave enough room for a sufficiently driven prosecutor to argue all her cases remain justified. Despite calling it the ''so-called'' war on drugs, Holder does not question the wisdom of treating drug use as a public safety issue at all in the ''Smart on Crime'' initiative (pdf). Instead, the Justice Department points to drug courts as a viable alternative'--kinder and gentler, maybe, drug courts are still a tool of prohibition. Getting ''smart on crime'' also doesn't mean laying off medical marijuana dispensaries that are legal in the states they operate.
  Politico wonders whether Holder's policy shift signals an end to Democrats' fear of being labeled ''soft on crime''. The administration's continued reluctance to grant clemency, stop low-level prosecutions wholesale and deal in an adult manner with states that have legalized either just medical marijuana or the recreational kind too suggests the policy shift, while not totally insignificant, isn't driven by any change of heart in the rightness of the criminal justice system and its overall priorities, ''so-called'' war on drugs and all.
VIDEO-John Key: NZers care more about snapper than GCSB - Campbell Live - Video - 3 News
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  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 18:15
  ");jQuery("#mwbanner_td").prepend("");jQuery("#companion760overlay").hide();*/});//Functionsfunction replaceChars(string){string = string.replace(/'/g, "");//string = string.replace(/ /g, "-")string =string.toLowerCase();return string;}var ord=Math.random()*10000000000000000;var flashAID="";//the article idvar pauseFrom="adverts";//variable to handle players current state of interactionvar adbreak="";//toggleable var for adservingvar ispad="";var streamer="";//main streamervar streamerHLS="";//hls streamervar streamerRTSP=""; //rtspvar iospath="";var device="desktop";//default this and chage if needed latervar deviceAgent = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();var agentID = deviceAgent.match(/(iphone|ipod|ipad)/);var isAndroid = deviceAgent.indexOf("android") > -1; //&& ua.indexOf("mobile");var hitEvent = (agentID) ? "touchend" : "click";//change the click type for touchscreenvar nav = navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Safari');var canplay="false";//set as true then deactivate laterif((agentID)||(isAndroid)){device="mobile";}var flyoverInterval = new Object();//make globalVars object to reference vars latervar midrollCounter="0";var midrollBreak="";var currentPlayerPosition="0";/************************************************************/var path = window.location.hostname;sect1=sect; sect2=genre;//sect2="technology";sect3=show;sect4="";sect5="";sect6="";var site=sect1.toLowerCase();//grab the current video player sitevar domain = "3news.co.nz";//for adserving and statsvar videoFolder = "3news";// application instancevar geo= "New Video";var titleForNNR =replaceChars("Key: NZers care more about snapper than GCSB");var tagsForRelated=replaceChars("John Key,GCSB,spying,");var catsForNNR=replaceChars("News,Latest News,News-Politics,Latest politics news,Law and Order,TV Shows,Campbell_Live,CLive_Video,Video,Features,New Zealand,");var cats=replaceChars("cats=News;cats=Latest News;cats=News-Politics;cats=Latest politics news;cats=Law and Order;cats=TV Shows;cats=Campbell_Live;cats=CLive_Video;cats=Video;cats=Features;cats=New Zealand;");var tags=replaceChars("tags=John Key;tags=GCSB;tags=spying;");var wheretrep = wheret.replace("\/",""); //used to get current page path for netratingsvar youtube="";//midrollsvar midRollString = "";if(midRollString==""){midRollString="99:99:99";}var postRollString="00:";var video ="/news/20130812/cl_keynew_120813";//location of filevar videoCheck ="/news/20130812/cl_keynew_120813";//location of filevar videoOrig ="/news/20130812/cl_keynew_120813";//location of file for prog (clean)var imagePlaceholder="http://cdn.3news.co.nz/3news/AM/2013/8/12/308665/cl_key_120813.jpg";var videoDate = new Date("2013/08/12");// date check for 700K crossovervar videoDateh264 = new Date("2013/08/12");// date check for h264 crossovervar youtube =""; var videoOrAudio=""; var os="";var mp3="";var type="";//mp4 or flvvar flashPath="";//main file usually 700kvar flashPath330="";//330k versionvar netRatingsContentGroup ="";var oupage="";if(sect1=="video"){oupage=genre;}else{oupage=sect;}var ou = "http%3A//www.3news.co.nz/video/"+oupage;ou = ou.replace(/ /g, "");ou = ou.toLowerCase();//changeable player variables to suit each websitevar relatedMRSS="http://www.3news.co.nz/DesktopModules/Article%20Presentation/External.aspx?tabid=363&moduleid=18554&videoOnly=1&numbertoshow=6&keyword="+tagsForRelated+"";var playerTarget="flashPlayerDisp";var companion760 ="companion760";var companion728 ="companion728";var companion470 ="companion2";var playerWidth="620";var playerHeight="378";var playerWidthHTML5="620";var playerHeightHTML5="368";// alittle smaller because HTML5 overlays controlsfunction topNewsScroller(){};function syncRoadBlock(id, content, type, clickthrough, width, height) {var companion = "false";//set this false so we can toggle further down thirdparty ="false";var content = content;//spit out the ad response so it can be used further downvar strPos = content.search(/dc_seed/i);//looking for companion DC_SEED - not in use strPos = strPos+8;//its 8 characters long - look out for future 9 charactersvar str2 = content.substring(strPos, strPos+9);//crab the id backvar targetid="";//if the companion string contains 760x120 then override the target id just incaseif( (content.indexOf("760x120") !== -1)|| (content.indexOf('width="760"')!== -1)|| (content.indexOf('width:760px;height:120px')!== -1)){if(adbreak=="midrolls"){showCompaionOverlayAds();targetid=companion760overlay;}else{targetid=companion760;}companion="true";}if( (content.indexOf("470x60") !== -1)|| (content.indexOf('width="470"')!== -1)|| (content.indexOf('width:470px;height:60px')!== -1)){companion="true";targetid=companion470;}if(content.indexOf("thirdparty") !== -1){content = content.replace("","");content = content.replace("
  ","");thirdparty ="true";//document.getElementById('ad_banner').innerHTML = '';}content = content.replace(/(\r\n|\n|\r)/gm,"");//strip out new lines incase they are affecting re-write//if the companion strings is one of our sif(companion=="true"){//only if there is a main companion bannerif (type == "StaticResource") {document.getElementById(targetid).innerHTML = "";} else if (type == "HTMLResource") {if(thirdparty=="true"){jQuery("#"+targetid).writeCapture().html('12 Aug 2013 at 7:00p.m.
  What does the Prime Minister think New Zealanders are thinking about the GCSB bill? Read the article >
Article Two of the United States Constitution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 18:03
  Article Two of the United States Constitution creates the executive branch of the government, consisting of the President, the Vice President, and other executive officers chosen by the President.
  Section 1: President and Vice President[edit source |edit]Clause 1: Executive Power[edit source |edit]The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows[1]Clause one is a "vesting clause," similar to other clauses in Articles One and Three, but it vests the power to execute the instructions of Congress, which has the exclusive power to make laws; "To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof."
  The head of the Executive Branch is the President of the United States. The President and the Vice President are elected every four years.
  Clause 2: Method of choosing electors[edit source |edit]Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
  Under the U.S. Constitution the President and Vice President are chosen by Electors, under a constitutional grant of authority delegated to the legislatures of the several states and the District of Columbia (see Bush v. Gore). The constitution reserves the choice of the precise manner for creating Electors to the will of the state legislatures. It does not define or delimit what process a state legislature may use to create its state college of Electors. In practice, the state legislatures have generally chosen to create Electors through an indirect popular vote, since the 1820s.
  In an indirect popular vote, it is the names of the electors who are on the ballot to be elected. Typically, their names are aligned under the name of the candidate for President and Vice President, that they, the Elector, have pledged they will support. It is fully understood by the voters and the Electors themselves that they are the representative "stand-ins" for the individuals to whom they have pledged to cast their electoral college ballots to be President and Vice President. In some states, in past years, this pledge was informal, and Electors could still legally cast their electoral ballot for whomever they chose. More recently, state legislatures (exercising their constitutional authority to do so) have mandated in law that Electors shall cast their electoral college ballot for the Presidential Candidate to whom they are pledged. The constitutionality of such mandates is uncertain.
  Each state chooses as many Electors as it has Representatives and Senators representing it in Congress. Under the Twenty-third Amendment, the District of Columbia may choose no more electors than the state with the lowest number of electoral votes. No Senators, Representatives or federal officers may become Electors.
  Clause 3: Electors[edit source |edit]The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse [sic] by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse [sic] the President. But in chusing [sic] the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; A quorum for this Purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice. In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse [sic] from them by Ballot the Vice President.(Note: This procedure was changed by the Twelfth Amendment in 1804.)
  In modern practice, each state chooses its electors in popular elections. Once chosen, the electors meet in their respective states to cast ballots for the President and Vice President. Originally, each elector cast two votes for President; at least one of the individuals voted for had to be from a state different from the elector's. The individual with the majority of votes became President, and the runner-up became Vice President. In case of a tie, the House of Representatives could choose one of the tied candidates; if no person received a majority, then the House could again choose one of the five with the greatest number of votes. When the House voted, each state delegation cast one vote, and the vote of a majority of states was necessary to choose a President. If second-place candidates were tied, then the Senate broke the tie. A quorum of two-thirds applied in both Houses: at least one member from each of two-thirds of the states in the House of Representatives, and at least two-thirds of the Senators in the Senate. This procedure was followed in 1801 after the electoral vote produced a tie, and nearly resulted in a deadlock in the House.
  The Twelfth Amendment introduced a number of important changes to the procedure. Now, Electors do not cast two votes for President; rather, they cast one vote for President and another for Vice President. In case no Presidential candidate receives a majority, the House chooses from the top three (not five, as with Vice Presidential candidates). The Amendment also requires the Senate to choose the Vice President from those with the two highest figures if no Vice Presidential candidate receives a majority of electoral votes (rather than only if there's a tie for second for President). It also stipulates that to be the Vice President, a person must be qualified to be the President.
  Clause 4: Election day[edit source |edit]The Congress may determine the Time of chusing [sic] the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.Congress sets a national Election Day. Currently, Electors are chosen on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November, in the year before the President's term is to expire. The Electors cast their votes on the Monday following the second Wednesday in December of that year. Thereafter, the votes are opened and counted by the Vice President, as President of the Senate, in a joint session of Congress.
  Clause 5: Qualifications for office[edit source |edit]No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
  By the time of their inauguration, the President and Vice President must be:
  natural born citizens (including naturalization passed from parents)at least thirty-five years oldinhabitants of the United States for at least fourteen years.Eligibility for holding the office of President and Vice-President were modified by subsequent amendments:
  The Twelfth Amendment (1804) requires the Vice-President must meet all of the qualifications of being a President.The Twenty-second Amendment (1951) prevents a President from being elected more than twice.Clause 6: Vacancy and disability[edit source |edit]In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.
  The wording of this clause caused much controversy at the time it was first used. When William Henry Harrison died in office, a debate arose over whether the Vice President would become President, or if he would just inherit the powers, thus becoming an Acting President. Harrison's Vice President, John Tyler, believed that he had the right to become President. However, many Senators argued that he only had the right to assume the powers of the presidency long enough to call for a new election. Because the wording of the clause is so vague, it was impossible for either side to prove its point. Tyler ended up taking the Oath of Office and became President, setting a precedent that is followed to this day. Tyler's precedent made it possible for Vice Presidents Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson to ascend to the presidency (Gerald Ford took office after the passage of the Twenty-fifth Amendment).
  Tyler's precedent established that if the President's office becomes vacant due to death, resignation or disqualification, the Vice President becomes President. The Congress may provide for a line of succession beyond the Vice President. The Presidential Succession Act establishes the order as: the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the President pro tempore of the Senate and then the fifteen Cabinet Secretaries in order of that Department's establishment.
  The Twenty-fifth Amendment explicitly states that when the Presidency is vacant, then the Vice President becomes President. This provision applied at the time Gerald Ford succeeded to the Presidency. In case of a Vice Presidential vacancy, the Amendment permits the President to appoint, with the approval of both Houses of Congress, a new Vice President. Furthermore, the Amendment provides that the President, or the Vice President and Cabinet, can declare the President unable to discharge his duties, in which case the Vice President becomes Acting President. If the declaration is done by the Vice President and Cabinet, the Amendment permits the President to take control back, unless the Vice President and Cabinet challenge the President and two-thirds of both Houses vote to sustain the findings of the Vice President and Cabinet. If the declaration is done by the President, he may take control back without risk of being overridden by the Congress.
  Clause 7: Salary[edit source |edit]The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.
  The President's salary, currently $400,000 a year, must remain constant throughout the President's term. The President may not receive other compensation from either the federal or any state government.
  Clause 8: Oath or affirmation[edit source |edit]Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:'--"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
  According to the Joint Congressional Committee on Presidential Inaugurations, George Washington added the words "So help me God" during his first inaugural,[2] though this has been disputed. There are no contemporaneous sources for this fact, and no eyewitness sources to Washington's first inaugural mention the phrase at all'--including those that transcribed what he said for his oath.
  Also, the President-elect's name is typically added after the "I", for example, "I, George Washington, do...." Normally, the Chief Justice of the United States administers the oath. It is sometimes asserted that the oath bestows upon the President the power to do whatever is necessary to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution." Andrew Jackson, while vetoing an Act for the renewal of the charter of the national bank, implied that the President could refuse to execute statutes that he felt were unconstitutional. In suspending the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, President Abraham Lincoln claimed that he acted according to the oath. His action was challenged in court and overturned by the U.S. Circuit Court in Maryland (led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney) in Ex Parte Merryman, 17 F. Cas. 144 (C.C.D. Md. 1861). Lincoln ignored Taney's order. Finally, Andrew Johnson's counsel referred to the theory during his impeachment trial. Otherwise, few have seriously asserted that the oath augments the President's powers.
  The Vice President also has an oath of office, but it is not mandated by the Constitution and is prescribed by statute. Currently, the Vice Presidential oath is the same as that for Members of Congress.
  I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.[3]Section 2: Presidential powers[edit source |edit]In the landmark decision Nixon v. General Services Administration former Chief Justice of the United StatesWilliam Rehnquist declared in his dissent the need to "fully describe the preeminent position that the President of the United States occupies with respect to our Republic. Suffice it to say that the President is made the sole repository of the executive powers of the United States, and the powers entrusted to him as well as the duties imposed upon him are awesome indeed."
  Clause 1: Command of military; Opinions of cabinet secretaries; Pardons[edit source |edit]The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.
  The President is the military's commander-in-chief; however Article One gives Congress and not the President the exclusive right to declare war. Presidents have often deployed troops with Congressional authorization, but without an explicit declaration of war. According to historian Thomas Woods, "Ever since the Korean War, Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution '-- which refers to the president as the 'Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States' '-- has been interpreted to mean that the president may act with an essentially free hand in foreign affairs, or at the very least that he may send men into battle without consulting Congress."[4] Since World War II, every major military action has been technically a U.S. military operation or a U.N. "police action", which are deemed legally legitimate by Congress, and various United Nations Resolutions because of decisions such as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or the Authorization for Use of Force.
  The President may require the "principal officer" of any executive department to tender his advice in writing. Thus, implicitly, the Constitution creates a Cabinet that includes the principal officers of the various departments.
  The President, furthermore, may grant pardon or reprieves, except in cases of impeachment. Originally, as ruled by the Supreme Court in United States v. Wilson (1833), the pardon could be rejected by the convict. In Biddle v. Perovich, 274 U.S.480 (1927), however, the Supreme Court reversed the doctrine, ruling that "[a] pardon in our days is not a private act of grace from an individual happening to possess power. It is a part of the Constitutional scheme. When granted it is the determination of the ultimate authority that the public welfare will be better served by inflicting less than what the judgment fixed."[5]
  Clause 2: Advice and Consent Clause[edit source |edit]The President exercises the powers in the Advice and Consent Clause with the advice and consent of the Senate.
  He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
  Treaties[edit source |edit]Main article: Treaty ClauseThe President may enter the United States into treaties, but they are not effective until ratified by a two-thirds vote in the Senate.[6] In Article II however, the Constitution is not very explicit about the termination of treaties. The first abrogation of a treaty occurred in 1798, when Congress passed a law terminating a 1778 Treaty of Alliance with France.[7] In the nineteenth century, several Presidents terminated treaties after Congress passed resolutions requesting the same.[8] In 1854, however, President Franklin Pierce terminated a treaty with Denmark with the consent of the Senate alone. A Senate committee ruled that it was correct procedure for the President to terminate treaties after being authorized by the Senate alone, and not the entire Congress. President Pierce's successors, however, returned to the former procedure of obtaining authorization from both Houses. Some Presidents have claimed to themselves the exclusive power of terminating treaties. Abraham Lincoln, for instance, terminated a treaty without prior Congressional authorization, but Congress retroactively approved his decision at a later point. The first unambiguous case of a President terminating a treaty without authorization, granted prior to or after the termination, occurred when Jimmy Carter terminated a treaty with the Republic of China.[9] For the first time, judicial determination was sought, but the effort proved futile: the Supreme Court could not find a majority agreeing on any particular principle, and therefore instructed the trial court to dismiss the case.
  Appointments[edit source |edit]The President may also appoint judges, ambassadors, consuls, ministers and other officers with the advice and consent of the Senate. By law, however, Congress may allow the President, heads of executive departments, or the courts to appoint inferior officials.
  The Senate has a long-standing practice of permitting motions to reconsider previous decisions. In 1931, the Senate granted advice and consent to the President on the appointment of a member of the Federal Power Commission. The officer in question was sworn in, but the Senate, under the guise of a motion to reconsider, rescinded the advice and consent. In the writ of quo warranto proceedings that followed, the Supreme Court ruled that the Senate was not permitted to rescind advice and consent after the officer had been installed.
  After the Senate grants advice and consent, however, the President is under no compulsion to commission the officer. It has not been settled whether the President has the prerogative to withhold a commission after having signed it. This issue played a large part in the famous court case Marbury v. Madison.
  At times the President has asserted the power to remove individuals from office. Congress has often explicitly limited the President's power to remove; during the Reconstruction Era, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, purportedly preventing Andrew Johnson from removing, without the advice and consent of the Senate, anyone appointed with the advice and consent of the Senate. President Johnson ignored the Act, and was later impeached and acquitted. The constitutionality of the Act was not immediately settled. In Myers v. United States, 272 U.S.52 (1926), the Supreme Court held that Congress could not limit the President's power to remove an executive officer (the Postmaster General), but in Humphrey's Executor v. United States, 295 U.S.602 (1935) it upheld Congress's authority to restrict the President's power to remove officers of the Federal Trade Commission, an "administrative body [that] cannot in any proper sense be characterized as an arm or eye of the executive."
  Congress may repeal the legislation that authorizes the appointment of an executive officer. But it "cannot reserve for itself the power of an officer charged with the execution of the laws except by impeachment."[10] Congress has from time to time changed the number of justices in the Supreme Court.
  Clause 3: Recess appointments[edit source |edit]The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.
  During recesses of the Senate, the President may appoint officers, but their commissions expire at the conclusion of the Senate's next session. For example, see George W. Bush's 2005 appointment of John Bolton as U.N. Ambassador.
  Section 3: Presidential responsibilities[edit source |edit]He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.
  Clause 1: State of the Union[edit source |edit]The President must give the Congress information on the "State of the Union" "from time to time." This is called the State of the Union Clause.[11] Originally, Presidents personally delivered annual addresses to Congress. Thomas Jefferson, who felt that the procedure resembled the Speech from the Throne delivered by British monarchs, chose instead to send written messages to Congress for reading by clerks. Jefferson's procedure was followed by future Presidents until Woodrow Wilson reverted to the former procedure of personally addressing Congress, which has continued to this day[update].[11]
  Kesavan and Sidak explain the purpose of the State of the Union clause:
  "The State of the Union Clause imposes an executive duty on the President. That duty must be discharged periodically. The President's assessment of the State of the Union must be publicized to Congress, and thus to the nation. The publication of the President's assessment conveys information to Congress- information uniquely gleaned from the President's perspective in his various roles as Commander-in-Chief, chief law enforcer, negotiator with foreign powers, and the like-that shall aid the legislature in public deliberation on matters that may justify the enactment of legislation because of their national importance."[11]Clause 2: Making recommendations to Congress[edit source |edit]The president has the power and duty[11] to recommend, for the consideration of Congress, such measures which the president deems as "necessary and expedient". At his inaugurationGeorge Washington declared in his Inaugural Address: "By the article establishing the executive department it is made the duty of the President "to recommend to your consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient."" This is the Recommendation Clause.[12]'
  Kesavan and Sidak explain the purpose of the Recommendation clause:
  "The Recommendation Clause also imposes an executive duty on the President. His recommendations respect the equal dignity of Congress and thus embody the anti-royalty sentiment that ignited the American Revolution and subsequently stripped the trappings of monarchy away from the new chief executive. Through his recommendations to Congress, the President speaks collectively for the People as they petition Government for a redress of grievances, and thus his recommendations embody popular sovereignty. The President tailors his recommendations so that their natural implication is the enactment of new legislation, rather than some other action that Congress might undertake. Finally, the President shall have executive discretion to recommend measures of his choosing."[11]Sidak explained that there is a connection between the Recommendation clause and the Petition Clause of the first amendment: "Through his performance of the duty to recommend measures to Congress, the President functions as the agent of a diffuse electorate who seek the redress of grievances. To muzzle the President, therefore, is to diminish the effectiveness of this right expressly reserved to the people under the first amendment."[12]:2119, note 7 Kesavan and Sidak also cited a Professor Bybee who stated in this context: "The Recommendation Clause empowers the President to represent the people before Congress, by recommending measures for the reform of government, for the general welfare, or for the redress of grievances. The Right of Petition Clause prevents Congress from abridging the right of the people to petition for a redress of grievances."[11]:43
  The Recommendation clause imposes a duty, but its performance rests solely with the President. Congress possesses no power to compel the President to recommend, as he alone is the "judge" of what is "necessary and expedient." Unlike the Necessary and Proper Clause of Article I, which limits Congress's discretion to carrying out only its delegated powers, the phrase "necessary and expedient" implies a wider range of discretion for the President. Because this is a political question, there has been little judicial involvement with the President's actions under the clause as long as Presidents have not tried to extend their legislative powers. In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952), the Supreme Court noted that the Recommendations Clause serves as a reminder that the President cannot make law by himself: "The power to recommend legislation, granted to the President, serves only to emphasize that it is his function to recommend and that it is the function of the Congress to legislate."[13] The Court made a similar point in striking down the line-item veto in Clinton v. City of New York (1998).[13] When President William Jefferson Clinton attempted to shield the records of the President's Task Force on Health Care Reform as essential to his functions under the Recommendations Clause, a federal circuit court rejected the argument and noted in Ass'n of American Physicians & Surgeons v. Clinton (1993): "[T]he Recommendation Clause is less an obligation than a right. The President has the undisputed authority to recommend legislation, but he need not exercise that authority with respect to any particular subject or, for that matter, any subject."[13]
  [edit source |edit]The President may call extraordinary sessions of one or both Houses of Congress. If the two Houses cannot agree on a date for adjournment, the President may adjourn both Houses to such a time as befits the circumstances. The last time this power was exercised was in 1948, when President Harry S Truman called a special session of Congress. That was the twenty-seventh time in American history that a president convened such a session.[14]
  Clause 4: Receiving foreign representatives[edit source |edit]The President receives all foreign Ambassadors. This clause of the Constitution has been interpreted to imply that the President has broad power over all matters of foreign policy.[15]
  Clause 5: Caring for the faithful execution of the law[edit source |edit]The President must "take care that the laws be faithfully executed."[16] This clause in the Constitution imposes a duty on the President to take due care while executing laws and is called the Take Care Clause,[17] also known as the Faithful Execution Clause.[18] This clause is meant to ensure that a law is faithfully executed by the President,[17] even if he disagrees with the purpose of that law.[19] By virtue of his executive power, the President may execute the law and control the law execution of others. Under the Take Care Clause, however, the President must exercise his law-execution power to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."[18] Addressing the North Carolina ratifying convention, William Maclaine declared that the Faithful Execution Clause was "one of the [Constitution's] best provisions."[18] If the President "takes care to see the laws faithfully executed, it will be more than is done in any government on the continent; for I will venture to say that our government, and those of the other states, are, with respect to the execution of the laws, in many respects mere ciphers."[18] President George Washington interpreted this clause as imposing on him a unique duty to ensure the execution of federal law. Discussing a tax rebellion, Washington observed, "it is my duty to see the Laws executed: to permit them to be trampled upon with impunity would be repugnant to" that duty.[18]
  According to former United States Assistant Attorney GeneralWalter E. Dellinger III the Supreme Court and the Attorneys General have long interpreted the Take Care Clause as standing for the proposition that the President has no inherent constitutional authority to suspend the enforcement of the laws, particularly of statutes.[20] Quite the contrary: The Take Care Clause demands that the President obey the law, the Supreme Court said in Humphrey's Executor v. United States, and repudiates any notion that he may dispense with the law's execution.[21] In Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997), the Supreme Court explained how the President executes the law: "The Constitution does not leave to speculation who is to administer the laws enacted by Congress; the President, it says, "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed," Art. II, §3, personally and through officers whom he appoints (save for such inferior officers as Congress may authorize to be appointed by the "Courts of Law" or by "the Heads of Departments" who with other presidential appointees), Art. II, §2."
  The President possesses wide discretion in deciding how and even when to enforce laws. He also has a range of interpretive discretion in deciding the meaning of laws he must execute. When an appropriation provides discretion, the President can gauge when and how appropriated moneys can be spent most efficiently. However, the President may not prevent a member of the executive branch from performing a ministerial duty lawfully imposed upon him by Congress. (See Marbury v. Madison (1803); and Kendall v. United States ex rel. Stokes (1838)). Nor may the President take an action not authorized either by the Constitution or by a lawful statute. (See Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952)). Finally, the President may not refuse to enforce a constitutional law, or "cancel" certain appropriations, for that would amount to an extra-constitutional veto or suspension power.[18]
  Some Presidents have claimed the authority under this clause to impound money appropriated by Congress. President Jefferson, for example, delayed the expenditure of money appropriated for the purchase of gunboats for over a year. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his successors sometimes refused outright to expend appropriated money.[18] The Supreme Court, however, has held that impoundments without Congressional authorization are unconstitutional.[22]
  It has been asserted that the President's responsibility in the "faithful" execution of the laws entitles him to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus[citation needed]. Article One provides that the privilege may not be suspended save during times of rebellion or invasion, but it does not specify who may suspend the privilege. The Supreme Court ruled that Congress may suspend the privilege if it deems it necessary. During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the privilege, but, owing to the vehement opposition he faced, obtained congressional authorization for the same.[citation needed] Since then, the privilege of the writ has only been suspended upon the express authorization of Congress.
  In Mississippi v. Johnson, 71 U.S.475 (1867), the Supreme Court ruled that the judiciary may not restrain the President in the execution of laws. In that case the Supreme Court refused to entertain a request for an injunction preventing President Andrew Johnson from executing the Reconstruction Acts, which were claimed to be unconstitutional. The Court found that "[t]he Congress is the legislative department of the government; the President is the executive department. Neither can be restrained in its action by the judicial department; though the acts of both, when performed, are, in proper cases, subject to its cognizance."[23] Thus, the courts cannot bar the passage of a law by Congress, though it may strike down such a law as unconstitutional. A similar construction applies to the executive branch.
  Clause 6: Officers' commissions[edit source |edit]The President commissions "all the Officers of the United States." These include officers in both military and foreign service. (Under Article I, Section 8, the States have authority for "the Appointment of the Officers . . . of the [State] Militia . . ..")
  The presidential authority to commission officers had a large impact on the 1803 case Marbury v. Madison, where outgoing Federalist President John Adams feverishly signed many commissions to the judiciary on his final day in office, hoping to, as incoming Democratic-Republican President Thomas Jefferson put it, "[retire] into the judiciary as a stronghold." However, in his haste, Adams' Secretary of State neglected to have all the commissions delivered. Incoming President Jefferson was enraged with Adams, and ordered his Secretary of State, James Madison, to refrain from delivering the remaining commissions. William Marbury took the matter to the Supreme Court, where the famous Marbury was decided.
  The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High crimes and Misdemeanors.
  The Constitution also allows for involuntary removal from office. The President, Vice-President, Cabinet Secretaries, and other executive officers, as well as judges, may be impeached by the House of Representatives and tried in the Senate.
  Any official convicted by impeachment is immediately removed from office. The Senate may also choose to bar the removed official from holding any federal office in the future.[24] No other punishments may be inflicted pursuant to the impeachment proceeding, but the convicted party remains liable to trial and punishment in the courts for civil and criminal charges.[25]
  ^The U.S. Constitution With Declaration of Independence, US Government Printing Office^"Joint Congressional Committee on Presidential Inaugurations". Retrieved 2006-11-10. ^5 U.S.C. § 3331^Woods, Thomas (2005-07-07) Presidential War Powers, LewRockwell.com^Biddle, at 486^United States Senate. "Treaties". senate.gov. ^United States Library of Congress (February 15, 2011). "Primary Documents in American History Treaty of Alliance with France". loc.gov. ^John H. Haswell, University of Minnesota; United States Department of State (2010). "Treaties and Conventions Concluded Between the United States of America Since July 4, 1776". google.books.com. pp. 1,232. ^Goldwater v. Carter, 444 U.S.996 (1979)^Bowsher v. Synar, 478 U.S.714 (1986)^ abcdefVasan Kesavan and J. Gregory Sidak (2002). "The Legislator-In-Chief". William and Mary Law Review44 (1). Retrieved 28 June 2012. ^ abSidak, Gregory (August 1989). "The Recommendation Clause". Georgetown Law Journal77 (6): 2079''2135. Retrieved 29 June 2012. ^ abcKesavan, Vasan. "The Heritage Guide to the Constitution: Recommendations Clause". The Heritage Foundation. Retrieved 27 October 2012. ^U.S. Senate Turnip Day Session (2011-01-05).^United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., 299 U.S.304 (1936), characterized the President as the "sole organ of the nation in its external relations," an interpretation criticized by Louis Fisher of the Library of Congress.^"Article II, Section 3, U.S. Constitution". law.cornell.edu. Legal Information Institute. 2012[last update]. Retrieved 7 August 2012. ^ ab"Take Care Clause Law & Legal Definition". USLegal.com. Retrieved 5 July 2012. ^ abcdefgTake Care Clause. "Take Care Clause". The Heritage Guide to the Constitution. The Heritage Foundation. Retrieved 12 October 2012. ^"Chapter 12-The Presidency Flashcards". Flashcard Machine. 16 January 2012. Retrieved 5 July 2012. ^Walter E. Dellinger III (7 September 1995). "CONSTITUTIONAL LIMITATIONS ON FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PARTICIPATION IN BINDING ARBITRATION". United States Department of Justice. Retrieved 5 July 2012. ^Kinkopf, Neil (September/October 2005). "FURIOUS GEORGE - The belligerence of the Bush Administration in pursuing expansive power has a long Republican pedigree". Legal Affairs - The magazine at the intersection of Law and Life. Retrieved 5 July 2012. ^Sai Prakash. "Take Care Clause". The Heritage Guide to the Constitution. The Heritage Foundation. Retrieved 27 August 2012. ^Johnson, at 500^An example of this is Alcee Hastings who was removed from a federal judgeship, but was not barred from serving in another federal office. He was later elected to, and currently serves in, the House of Representatives.^Cf. Ritter v. United States, 677 F.2d 957 (2d. Cir. 19) 84 Ct. Cl. 293, 300 (Ct. Cl. 1936) ("While the Senate in one sense acts as a court on the trial of an impeachment, it is essentially a political body and in its actions is influenced by the views of its members on the public welfare."); STAFF OF H. COMM. ON THE JUDICIARY, 93D CONG., CONSTITUTIONAL GROUNDS FOR PRESIDENTIAL IMPEACHMENT 24 (Comm. Print 1974) ("The purpose of impeachment is not personal punishment; its function is primarily to maintain constitutional government.") (citation omitted), reprinted in 3 LEWIS DESCHLER, DESCHLER'S PRECEDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, H.R. DOC. NO. 94''661 ch. 14, app. at 2269 (1977).
The Anti-Snowden? Ex-SEAL's Firm Caught Between Security and Privacy - Defense One
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 17:42
  Another Pentagon covert operative has left his post at the Defense Department to join the fight for civil liberties. But you probably won't find him buddying up with ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden any time soon.
  Former Navy SEAL commando Mike Janke is a spy-turned-privacy advocate. Unlike Snowden, he still has friendly relations with U.S. special operations teams, as the co-founder of a company that encrypts communications for feds and activists alike.
  Still, his allegiances are split right now.
  The federal government uses his firm, Silent Circle, to hide sensitive information from the public. The public uses its secure email, texts, videos and calls to hide personal information. And the private sector uses its technology to hide trade secrets from foreign governments and the public. As a citizen, father and intellectual property owner, Janke has had all those needs himself.
  "The FBI is a customer of ours," he says. At the same time, "they wanted legislation to put a back door into all kinds of technologies like Silent Circle'' for intercepting transmissions, ''so, we're torn."
  AuthorAliya Sternstein reports on cybersecurity and homeland security systems for Nextgov. She has covered technology for nine years at such publications as National Journal's TechnologyDaily, Federal Computer Week and Forbes. Before joining Government Executive, she covered agriculture and derivatives ... Full Bio
  Late Thursday, company executives said they felt compelled to cut off Silent Mail, the email service, to preempt any government attempt at email-tapping. The move came after the shutdown earlier in the day of another email provider, Lavabit, that Snowden reportedly relied on for secure correspondences.
  Silent Circle might lose some customers in the short term, but the popularity of anti-snooping software is only growing in the wake of the Snowden case. According to Forbes, monthly revenue for Silent Circle jumped more than 400 percent month-on-month after the media's June 6 revelations about NSA Internet surveillance. And Janke's firm will continue to offer its other popular services, which don't collect metadata about conversations and prohibit the company from deciphering content.
  Janke claims that about one percent of his user base abuses the services to conceal illicit activities. But U.S. authorities won't put Silent Circle out of business, Janke says, because those tools alone cannot erase every digital footprint.
  "Criminals and bad people aren't that smart. They have Twitter accounts. They post on Facebook. They use their credit cards that are stolen,'' he says. ''Law enforcement and government today have so many other avenues, electronically, at their disposal to say, 'Oh, we found the bad person. Oh, they're using Silent Circle. So what? We can see them communicating on Gmail.'''
  In May, Silent Circle united with civil libertarians and cryptographers to protest the FBI proposal that would force all web services to plant bugs into real-time communications, like the eavesdropping features embedded in traditional telecommunications.
  That doesn't mean Janke's not a champion of U.S. counterintelligence operations, especially those that disrupt terrorist plots. In the activist community, there are "the fringe groups that say, 'Why are you selling to military?' I say, 'Well, you don't understand -- we're saving lives," he explains. "Everybody wants us to join their cause. We try to say, 'Look, we are for everybody."
  The need for more privacy is a response to the digitization of our lives, Janke asserts.
  "I don't use Google. I don't let my daughter do iCloud or Instagram. I don't let her use a regular browser," he says, referring to Google, Apple and Facebook web services that share certain user data with third parties. "The Moore's law of data collection," Janke says, means that "in ten years they'll be able to get with a single search -- a medical company -- your children's medical reports [going back to] kindergarten and that follows you into jobs and into your healthcare costs."
  While Silent Circle was terminating email services last week, President Obama met with industry leaders at the White House to address electronic monitoring issues. And the next day, he extended the olive branch even further, directing administration officials and lawmakers to rethink post-9/11 surveillance laws.
  "If you are outside of the intelligence community, if you are the ordinary person and you start seeing a bunch of headlines saying, 'U.S., Big Brother looking down on you, collecting telephone records, et cetera,' well, understandably, people would be concerned," Obama said during a Friday afternoon press conference. In light of the questions raised, he said, ''it makes sense to have a discussion with Congress, have a discussion with industry -- which is also impacted by this -- have a discussion with civil libertarians, and see can we do this better."
  Janke, a former SEAL, says he understands the government's right to secrecy and the people's right to privacy.
  "I don't believe that there needs to be any friction between the need for a private individual, a need for a company, a need for the government. Where that friction comes in is when one's duty, which is the government's, frictions against the private individuals," he says.
  (Image by alphaspirit via Shutterstock)
The New York Times takes down the Clinton Foundation. This could be devastating for Bill and Hillary '' Telegraph Blogs
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  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 17:41
  An internal review of the Clinton Foundations' workings has proved troubling
  Is the New York Times being guest edited by Rush Limbaugh? Today it runs with a fascinating takedown of the Clinton Foundation '' that vast vanity project that conservatives are wary of criticising for being seen to attack a body that tries to do good. But the liberal NYT has no such scruples. The killer quote is this:
  For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.
  Over a year ago Bill Clinton met with some aides and lawyers to review the Foundation's progress and concluded that it was a mess. Well, many political start-ups can be, especially when their sole selling point is the big name of their founder (the queues are short at the Dan Quayle Vice Presidential Learning Center). But what complicated this review '' what made its findings more politically devastating '' is that the Clinton Foundation has become about more than just Bill. Now both daughter Chelsea and wife, and likely presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton have taken on major roles and, in the words of the NYT "efforts to insulate the foundation from potential conflicts have highlighted just how difficult it can be to disentangle the Clintons' charity work from Mr Clinton's moneymaking ventures and Mrs Clinton's political future." Oh, they're entangled alright.
  The NYT runs the scoop in its usual balanced, inoffensive way '' but the problem jumps right off the page. The Clintons have never been able to separate the impulses to help others and to help themselves, turning noble philanthropic ventures into glitzy, costly promos for some future campaign (can you remember a time in human history when a Clinton wasn't running for office?). And their "Ain't I Great?!" ethos attracts the rich and powerful with such naked abandon that it ends up compromising whatever moral crusade they happen to have endorsed that month. That the Clinton Global Initiative is alleged to have bought Natalie Portman a first-class ticket for her and her dog to attend an event in 2009 is the tip of the iceberg. More troubling is that businessmen have been able to expand the profile of their companies by working generously alongside the Clinton Foundation. From the NYT:
  Last year, Coca-Cola's chief executive, Muhtar Kent, won a coveted spot on the dais with Mr. Clinton, discussing the company's partnership with another nonprofit to use its distributors to deliver medical goods to patients in Africa. (A Coca-Cola spokesman said that the company's sponsorship of foundation initiatives long predated Teneo and that the firm plays no role in Coca-Cola's foundation work.)
  In March 2012, David Crane, the chief executive of NRG, an energy company, led a widely publicized trip with Mr. Clinton to Haiti, where they toured green energy and solar power projects that NRG finances through a $1 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative.
  This is typical Clinton stuff. The second thing I ever wrote for this website was about how corporations invest in politicians as a way of building their brand and raising their stock price. It can lead to some funny partnerships. This, from 2011:
  Just this month, bedding manufacturer Serta announced that it will be sponsoring Bill Clinton's keynote address to an industry conference in August. "To us,"' said the head of the company, "Clinton represents leadership. This appearance shows Serta is a leader and is taking a leadership position. This singles us out." Some might say that it is beneath a former president to basically endorse Serta's new "Perfect Sleeper" line, even with its "revolutionary gel foam mattress".
  The cynical might infer from the NYT piece that the Clintons are willing to sell themselves, their image, and even their Foundation's reputation in exchange for money to finance their personal projects. In Bill's case, saving the world. In Hillary's case, maybe, running for president.
  It's nothing new to report that there's an unhealthy relationship in America between money and politics, but it's there all the same. While the little people are getting hit with Obamacare, high taxes and joblessness, a class of businessmen enjoys ready access to politicians of both Left and Right that poses troubling questions for how the republic can continue to call itself a democracy so long as it functions as an aristocracy of the monied. Part of the reason why America's elites get away with it is becuase they employ such fantastic salesmen. For too long now, Bill Clinton has pitched himself, almost without question, as a homespun populist: the Boy from Hope. The reality is that this is a man who '' in May 1993 '' prevented other planes from landing at LAX for 90 minues while he got a haircut from a Beverley Hills hairdresser aboard Air Force One. The Clintons are populists in the same way that Barack Obama is a Nobel prize winner. Oh, wait'...
OFA Gets Zero Attendance for Climate Change Rally | Washington Free Beacon
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  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 16:58
  AP
  BY:Washington Free Beacon StaffAugust 13, 2013 2:16 pm
  Not a single person showed up at the Georgetown waterfront Tuesday for a climate change agenda event put on by Organizing for Action, the shadowy nonprofit advocacy group born out of President Obama's 2012 campaign, the NRCC wrote in its blog.
  The event page for the ''Climate Change Day of Action Rally'' disappeared after rainy weather appeared to drive away whatever people planned to attend. The embarrassing showing follows the news that only one volunteer stayed for an OFA Obamacare event in Centreville, Va., last week to work the phones:
  The NRCC blog added:
  Now that I've had Phil Kerpen write half my post for me, here's the other half: it should surprise nobody '' including the, ah, enthusiasts over at OfA, bless their hearts '' that global warming doesn't have nearly the same bite to it that the Left desperately wants it to. The polling is consistent: global warming '' or climate change, or whatever the latest buzzword is/will be '' is at the bottom of any list of things that people worry about, or prioritize. It is thus unsurprising that an admittedly unpleasant sudden rain shower would stop people in Georgetown from attending: after all, OfA doesn't really want to talk about global warming at all. It's just that the two things that they should be talking about '' the economy, and health care '' are also two things that OfA does not dare talk about, largely because President Barack Obama clearly has no idea how to go about repairing the damage that he's caused to either.
VIDEO- Reggie Love Talks Decision Making in the Oval Office - YouTube
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 16:54
Snowden, Manning not whistleblowers: Australian attorney-general | ZDNet
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 16:52
  Summary: In a speech defending telecommunications interception powers, Australia's attorney-general has said that US government leakers Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning are not whistleblowers.
  Australian Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has slammed the leaks of government information by Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, claiming that the two are not "whistleblowers", because the information they leaked was not related to government "wrongdoing".
  In a broad speech to the Security in Government conference in Canberra defending the Australian government's use of telecommunications interception powers for investigating crime, the attorney-general said that disclosures by Manning and the more recent leaks from Snowden about the National Security Agency's interception program known as PRISM could cause "long-lasting harm" to Australia's ability to "identify and respond to the many threats our nation faces".
  He said that Snowden and Manning were not engaged in "whistleblowing", because they were not leaking information about government wrongdoing.
  "Where an activity has been authorised under law and overseen by appropriate government bodies, and where no wrongdoing has been identified, the disclosure of information is not 'whistleblowing'. This is a critical point that is often overlooked in much of the media coverage of the release of classified information by Mr Snowden in particular," Dreyfus said.
  Dreyfus praised the work of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) in averting major threats, and said that at least four planned terrorist attacks in Australia have been thwarted since September 11, 2001, thanks in part to telecommunications interception.
  "Telecommunications interception is one of the most effective means that parliament has given our national security and law enforcement agencies to do their jobs," he said.
  "To illustrate the importance of interception, in the 2011-12 financial year, there were 5,928 prosecutions and 2,267 convictions based on lawfully intercepted material. Most of those were for serious criminal offences."
  But he said that there is oversight into the telecommunications interception regime under current law, and if foreign intelligence agencies such as the NSA want access to communications from an Australian citizen, they need ministerial authorisation.
  The intelligence agencies are currently seeking more powers for telecommunications interception, including forcing telecommunications carriers to retain metadata for up to two years. A parliamentary committee investigating potential overhauls to the telecommunications interception laws recommended against that proposal until privacy concerns have been addressed and drafts of the legislation have been made public.
  Now in the midst of an election campaign, Dreyfus gave no indication of whether the government would forge ahead with data retention plans if it wins the election in September, instead saying that the government will "carefully consider" the parliamentary report.
  He did, however, slam the opposition's lack of policy regarding national security.
  "At the 2010 election, the Coalition were virtually silent on national security issues. Their current policy pamphlet does have a section on counter-terrorism but it consists of only one sentence, which does not give us or the Australian public much to assess," he said.
  "I assume from the virtual silence from the Coalition that they approve of the Federal Labor's current policy settings, and the resourcing of our national security agencies."
Online video forces change on TV industry
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 13:35
  Online video forces change on TV industryJavascript is currently disabled in your web browser. For full site functionality, it is necessary to enable Javascript. In order to enable it, please see these instructions.30 minutes ago by Sophie EstienneA man walks past Hisense super slim LED televisions at the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas on January 10, 2009. Having turned print media upside down, the Internet now is disrupting television, forcing broadcasters to adapt to tablets and video-on-demand to hold onto views and advertisers.
  Having turned print media upside down, the Internet now is disrupting television, forcing broadcasters to adapt to tablets and video-on-demand to hold onto views and advertisers.
  "The gap between what consumers want and the way the industry is delivering it has grown so big that the industry now has to start to make some moves," Forrester Research analyst Jim Nail told AFP.
  Viacom, Time Warner, Disney, 21st Century Fox, CBS'--the second quarter results of the big US media groups confirmed that cable networks remain their cash cows.
  For the first time this year, however, American adults are spending more time with the Internet than in front of television sets'--about five hours a day compared to 4.5, according to a study in eMarketer this month.
  The independent market research firm notes that users sometimes use the Internet and watch television at the same time'--and that video represents only part of online consumption.
  That doesn't stop a group like Netflix, which offers films and original programming on demand, from growing and spawning imitators such as Amazon's online streaming service.
  The formula is favored by youngsters who relish cartoons on their tablet devices and TV binge-viewers who watch multiple episodes of their favorite shows in one sitting.
  Internet giant Google has joined the party with Chromecast, a device that plugs into the HDMI input of a TV set to provide streaming video.
  Apple is meanwhile consistently rumored to be developing online television services.
  A man James uses a Nexus 7 at Google's Developers Conference in San Francisco on June 27, 2012. Having turned print media upside down, the Internet now is disrupting television, forcing broadcasters to adapt to tablets and video-on-demand to hold onto views and advertisers.
  "There will still be some linear real time viewing of TV for the Super Bowl or breaking news events ... but entertainment-based video will move to more on-demand," Nail said.
  "If you own a TV station, you are in the same position as a newspaper. There will be other ways to watch content and you're going to be very challenged," he explained.
  On the other hand, "if you are the content owner, you should not worry at all."
  You might have to abandon cable distribution and get a slot on Netflix, but content is in such high demand "that you will be able to make money... It really shouldn't change your financial outlook or your survival."
  Media groups see the risks in relative terms.
  Time Warner chief executive Jeff Bewkes, whose corporation includes HBO and CNN, told financial analysts in a conference call that he regards Internet streaming as complementary to broadcasting'--something that adds value to programming.
  Viacom talks about adapting to changing public behavior.
  "Certain kids are going to consume content on tablets, and if you want your content to have a shot at being consumed you have to have it on a tablet," its chief operating officer Tom Dooley said.
  Viacom is "aggressively" positioning itself in the tablet market with distribution partnerships like the one it forged with Amazon for such children's shows as "SpongeBob SquarePants" and "Dora the Explorer."
  It has also launched what Dooley called a "phenomenally successful" mobile app for Viacom's Nickelodeon children's channel.
  "Streaming continues to be a terrific growth driver for us," affirmed CBS chief Leslie Moonves, whose network has struck an exclusive deal with Amazon guaranteeing the profitability of its summer series "Under the Dome," based on a Stephen King novel.
  Viacom and CBS have seen their income stemming from program distribution rights leap 28 and 22 percent respectively, due in part to the Internet effect.
  For those who own content, the multiplication of online video services can have a favorable effect by bidding up the money they can get from selling distribution rights.
  In Nail's opinion, there is "a lot more to do before (television companies) meet consumer demand and create the new business model they need to profit" from Internet-driven change.
  Explore further:Original programs beef up streaming video sites
  (C) 2013 AFP
  More from Physics Forums - General Engineering
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  Review: Chromecast streams media at a nice price Jul 31, 2013
  A new device from Google makes it easy to stream video from several popular services to a high-definition TV. Chromecast is tiny enough to dangle from a keychain when not in use, but it packs a big punch ...
  Amazon in streaming video deal with Viacom Feb 08, 2012
  Amazon announced a deal with entertainment giant Viacom on Wednesday, building up its arsenal of television shows as it takes on video streaming market leader Netflix.
  TV seems impervious to Silicon Valley's advances Aug 02, 2013
  Google's unveiling last week of yet another device it hopes will change the way people watch TV highlights a stubborn truth: The revolution may be televised, but television itself has so far been impervious to a revolution.
  Viacom, Time Warner Cable settle dispute over app May 17, 2012
  (AP) -- Viacom Inc., the parent of pay TV networks MTV and Comedy Central, has settled a dispute with Time Warner Cable Inc. over whether its subscribers can watch shows like "Jersey Shore" on mobile devices while at home.
  CBS blasts Time Warner Cable offer to end fight Aug 06, 2013
  CBS chief executive Les Moonves blasted an offer from Time Warner Cable to end a blackout over fees that lingered into its fifth day Tuesday, calling it a clever public relations ploy.
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  Taiwan's Hon Hai Q2 net profit up 41 percent Aug 13, 2013
  Taiwan's tech giant Hon Hai Precision, a major supplier to Apple, said Tuesday that its net profit in the three months to June rose 41 percent year-on-year.
  User comments : 0More news stories
  Advancing resistive memory to improve portable electronicsA team at the University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering has developed a novel way to build what many see as the next generation memory storage devices for portable electronic devices ...
  Competition: Computer science teams determine the perfect baby nameShould the baby be named after Grandpa Gustav or the soccer star Ronaldo? Computer scientists from the University of Kassel are coordinating an international competition for an Internet name suggestion machine. ...
  Networking for high performance computingFrom drug simulation to predicting tsunamis and sea vehicle tracking, high-performance computing has revolutionised the way companies and governments operate. Similarly, embedded computing has revolutionised ...
  Students work to give firefighters critical information the moment they need itIn a fast-moving fire, a moment's delay can lead to extensive property damage or even lives lost. To help prevent that, a team of Princeton University students is developing an easy-to-use database that will ...
  Florida mulls drone war on the mosquito(Phys.org) '--Drones are often associated with war and running down criminals, but this week drones for another purpose have made news. Florida is about to test how drones will do in tracking down mosquitoes. ...
  Plasma-treated nano filters help purify world water supply(Phys.org) '--Access to safe drinking water is a step closer to being a reality for those in developing countries, thanks to new research published today in Nature Communications.
  New catalyst dives into water to produce hydrogen(Phys.org) '--Few catalysts are energy efficient, highly active, stable, and operate in water, but a nickel-based catalyst designed at the Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis at Pacific Northwest National ...
  Designing and building nanocomponents to specHybrid, multifunctional nanostructures with diverse 3D shapes and complex material composition can now be manufactured with a precise and efficient fabrication technique.
  One-pot to prep biomass for biofuels(Phys.org) '--The advantages of the "one-stop" shop have long been recognized in the retailing and services industries. Similar advantages would also be realized for the biofuels industry with the development ...
  Plastic solar cells' new design promises bright futureEnergy consumption is growing rapidly in the 21st century, with rising energy costs and sustainability issues greatly impacting the quality of human life. Harvesting energy directly from sunlight to generate electricity using ...
  (C) Phys.org' 2003-2013
  Online video forces change on TV industryJavascript is currently disabled in your web browser. For full site functionality, it is necessary to enable Javascript. In order to enable it, please see these instructions.30 minutes ago by Sophie EstienneA man walks past Hisense super slim LED televisions at the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas on January 10, 2009. Having turned print media upside down, the Internet now is disrupting television, forcing broadcasters to adapt to tablets and video-on-demand to hold onto views and advertisers.
  Having turned print media upside down, the Internet now is disrupting television, forcing broadcasters to adapt to tablets and video-on-demand to hold onto views and advertisers.
  "The gap between what consumers want and the way the industry is delivering it has grown so big that the industry now has to start to make some moves," Forrester Research analyst Jim Nail told AFP.
  Viacom, Time Warner, Disney, 21st Century Fox, CBS'--the second quarter results of the big US media groups confirmed that cable networks remain their cash cows.
  For the first time this year, however, American adults are spending more time with the Internet than in front of television sets'--about five hours a day compared to 4.5, according to a study in eMarketer this month.
  The independent market research firm notes that users sometimes use the Internet and watch television at the same time'--and that video represents only part of online consumption.
  That doesn't stop a group like Netflix, which offers films and original programming on demand, from growing and spawning imitators such as Amazon's online streaming service.
  The formula is favored by youngsters who relish cartoons on their tablet devices and TV binge-viewers who watch multiple episodes of their favorite shows in one sitting.
  Internet giant Google has joined the party with Chromecast, a device that plugs into the HDMI input of a TV set to provide streaming video.
  Apple is meanwhile consistently rumored to be developing online television services.
  A man James uses a Nexus 7 at Google's Developers Conference in San Francisco on June 27, 2012. Having turned print media upside down, the Internet now is disrupting television, forcing broadcasters to adapt to tablets and video-on-demand to hold onto views and advertisers.
  "There will still be some linear real time viewing of TV for the Super Bowl or breaking news events ... but entertainment-based video will move to more on-demand," Nail said.
  "If you own a TV station, you are in the same position as a newspaper. There will be other ways to watch content and you're going to be very challenged," he explained.
  On the other hand, "if you are the content owner, you should not worry at all."
  You might have to abandon cable distribution and get a slot on Netflix, but content is in such high demand "that you will be able to make money... It really shouldn't change your financial outlook or your survival."
  Media groups see the risks in relative terms.
  Time Warner chief executive Jeff Bewkes, whose corporation includes HBO and CNN, told financial analysts in a conference call that he regards Internet streaming as complementary to broadcasting'--something that adds value to programming.
  Viacom talks about adapting to changing public behavior.
  "Certain kids are going to consume content on tablets, and if you want your content to have a shot at being consumed you have to have it on a tablet," its chief operating officer Tom Dooley said.
  Viacom is "aggressively" positioning itself in the tablet market with distribution partnerships like the one it forged with Amazon for such children's shows as "SpongeBob SquarePants" and "Dora the Explorer."
  It has also launched what Dooley called a "phenomenally successful" mobile app for Viacom's Nickelodeon children's channel.
  "Streaming continues to be a terrific growth driver for us," affirmed CBS chief Leslie Moonves, whose network has struck an exclusive deal with Amazon guaranteeing the profitability of its summer series "Under the Dome," based on a Stephen King novel.
  Viacom and CBS have seen their income stemming from program distribution rights leap 28 and 22 percent respectively, due in part to the Internet effect.
  For those who own content, the multiplication of online video services can have a favorable effect by bidding up the money they can get from selling distribution rights.
  In Nail's opinion, there is "a lot more to do before (television companies) meet consumer demand and create the new business model they need to profit" from Internet-driven change.
  Explore further:Original programs beef up streaming video sites
  (C) 2013 AFP
  More from Physics Forums - General Engineering
  Related StoriesOriginal programs beef up streaming video sites Feb 10, 2013
  The big-budget original series "House of Cards" launched this month on Netflix highlights the growing importance of streaming video, which is ramping up competition against traditional TV.
  Review: Chromecast streams media at a nice price Jul 31, 2013
  A new device from Google makes it easy to stream video from several popular services to a high-definition TV. Chromecast is tiny enough to dangle from a keychain when not in use, but it packs a big punch ...
  Amazon in streaming video deal with Viacom Feb 08, 2012
  Amazon announced a deal with entertainment giant Viacom on Wednesday, building up its arsenal of television shows as it takes on video streaming market leader Netflix.
  TV seems impervious to Silicon Valley's advances Aug 02, 2013
  Google's unveiling last week of yet another device it hopes will change the way people watch TV highlights a stubborn truth: The revolution may be televised, but television itself has so far been impervious to a revolution.
  Viacom, Time Warner Cable settle dispute over app May 17, 2012
  (AP) -- Viacom Inc., the parent of pay TV networks MTV and Comedy Central, has settled a dispute with Time Warner Cable Inc. over whether its subscribers can watch shows like "Jersey Shore" on mobile devices while at home.
  CBS blasts Time Warner Cable offer to end fight Aug 06, 2013
  CBS chief executive Les Moonves blasted an offer from Time Warner Cable to end a blackout over fees that lingered into its fifth day Tuesday, calling it a clever public relations ploy.
  Recommended for youIcahn sets sights on Apple, talks to CEO Tim Cook 5 hours ago
  Activist investor Carl Icahn thinks Apple should be doing more to revive its stock price, and wants to help CEO Tim Cook with the resuscitation.
  Samsung faces Brazil lawsuit over labor conditions 5 hours ago
  A labor group said Samsung Electronics Co. is facing a lawsuit from Brazil's government seeking damages over poor working conditions at the company's assembly lines.
  Icahn takes large stake in 'undervalued' Apple (Update) 17 hours ago
  Corporate raider Carl Icahn said Tuesday he has taken a "large position" in Apple, calling the US tech giant "extremely undervalued."
  Toyota exec: Camry will stay as US top-selling car (Update) 19 hours ago
  Toyota will not relinquish the Camry's spot as America's most popular car this year, a top executive told industry analysts on Tuesday.
  Norway bars Apple from taking aerial photos of Oslo 19 hours ago
  Norway's intelligence agency has blocked US company Apple from flying over Oslo to take 3D aerial photos for its map application, citing national security, officials said Tuesday.
  Taiwan's Hon Hai Q2 net profit up 41 percent Aug 13, 2013
  Taiwan's tech giant Hon Hai Precision, a major supplier to Apple, said Tuesday that its net profit in the three months to June rose 41 percent year-on-year.
  User comments : 0More news stories
  Advancing resistive memory to improve portable electronicsA team at the University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering has developed a novel way to build what many see as the next generation memory storage devices for portable electronic devices ...
  Competition: Computer science teams determine the perfect baby nameShould the baby be named after Grandpa Gustav or the soccer star Ronaldo? Computer scientists from the University of Kassel are coordinating an international competition for an Internet name suggestion machine. ...
  Networking for high performance computingFrom drug simulation to predicting tsunamis and sea vehicle tracking, high-performance computing has revolutionised the way companies and governments operate. Similarly, embedded computing has revolutionised ...
  Students work to give firefighters critical information the moment they need itIn a fast-moving fire, a moment's delay can lead to extensive property damage or even lives lost. To help prevent that, a team of Princeton University students is developing an easy-to-use database that will ...
  Florida mulls drone war on the mosquito(Phys.org) '--Drones are often associated with war and running down criminals, but this week drones for another purpose have made news. Florida is about to test how drones will do in tracking down mosquitoes. ...
  Plasma-treated nano filters help purify world water supply(Phys.org) '--Access to safe drinking water is a step closer to being a reality for those in developing countries, thanks to new research published today in Nature Communications.
  New catalyst dives into water to produce hydrogen(Phys.org) '--Few catalysts are energy efficient, highly active, stable, and operate in water, but a nickel-based catalyst designed at the Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis at Pacific Northwest National ...
  Designing and building nanocomponents to specHybrid, multifunctional nanostructures with diverse 3D shapes and complex material composition can now be manufactured with a precise and efficient fabrication technique.
  One-pot to prep biomass for biofuels(Phys.org) '--The advantages of the "one-stop" shop have long been recognized in the retailing and services industries. Similar advantages would also be realized for the biofuels industry with the development ...
  Plastic solar cells' new design promises bright futureEnergy consumption is growing rapidly in the 21st century, with rising energy costs and sustainability issues greatly impacting the quality of human life. Harvesting energy directly from sunlight to generate electricity using ...
  (C) Phys.org' 2003-2013
Gmail: You weren't really expecting privacy, were you? - CNET Mobile
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 13:12
  The Internet is in a panic over a Google legal brief that claims Gmail users have no expectation of privacy when they use the service. Good headline, but let's be honest: that's the entire point of Gmail.
  Did you really think they weren't going to open it?
  So, I just finished reading Google's motion to dismiss in response to a lawsuit alleging that its e-mail scanning violates California privacy laws. And I'll say this: those Google lawyers are towering writers, indeed. But on to the point: did Google really argue in its rebuttal to the lawsuit that Gmail users do not and never should have an expectation of privacy when they're using Gmail? I mean, they actually just came out and said it like that!?
  Well, yes. But if you read the brief, or the Gmail Terms of Service, or even stop and think about what Gmail actually does, that shouldn't come as a surprise, and it's nothing Google hasn't baldly stated before. I'm not saying I like it, but it's definitely not news. It's actually just how Gmail works.
  So, yes, Google is saying that you don't have an expectation of privacy when you're using Gmail. But what Google is also saying is that you knew you didn't have an expectation of privacy when you signed up, because when you signed up you agreed to contextual advertising, to indexed, searchable email, to spam filters, and to content filters like Priority Inbox.
  Those features, necessarily, involved automated scanning of e-mail. And, Google argues, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act specifically permits such indexing and automated scanning by email providers because it's "necessary" for them to continue to deliver you free, Web-based email (that they use as a vector for serving you ads).
  Now, there are some remarkable notes that should be chilling to anyone who's not on Gmail but has friends who are: Google's brief points out that "[u]nder federal law, the consent of a single party to a communication is complete defense to any liability and so the consent of the Gmail user alone is sufficient to bar a claim." That seems problematic, from a privacy perspective, or at the very least, legitimately surprising.
  But again, this is Google we're talking about. The company that could probably easily create a full-scale digital replica of you that would talk like you, look like you, know everything about you, and maybe even be way smarter than you.
  Google reads your e-mail, knows what's in your calendar, looks at your photos, and knows who your friends are, and that's just via its in-house services. When you include the breadth of its search, Google knows everything about you that's public information, from your address to all your online profiles to your marital status and much, much more.
  Remember that time CNET News Googled Eric Schmidt and got blackballed for like a year because even he didn't like seeing it laid out in plain text like that? Google is freaking scary, full stop.
  The news here is not so much that you don't have an expectation of privacy when you use Gmail. The news is that anyone, anywhere, thought that they did.
  Maybe, if these headlines are good for anything over time, it will be that it's actually kind of helpful to read Google's position in plain English like that, because it clarifies your choices for you.
  You can decide that you really don't care whether the giant Google server banks "read" your email and give you contextual ads and put your spam in a spam folder and prioritize your communications (I, for one, don't particularly care). Or, you can decide you really, really do care (and should have read the ToS from the start) and you can go right ahead and dump Gmail for something like BitMessage, which will actually protect your communications for real (hat tip, No Agenda).
  As for your friends who only use Gmail, I guess it's carrier pigeon time.
Obama donor in process of buying up top pro-gun media outlets | The Daily Caller
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 11:29
  Employees of Obama donor Leo Hindery Jr.'s media conglomerate Intermedia Partners, which now owns most of the top gun-culture media outlets in the country, believe that Hindery plans to gut and destroy all of them as part of a business plan that has already led to numerous layoffs and the virtual shuttering of prominent television production facilities in Minnesota and Montana.
  Hindery, who was in consideration to be President Barack Obama's secretary of commerce, is managing partner of Intermedia Partners. The New York-based media private equity fund owns Intermedia Outdoor Holdings, which publishes 17 hunting, fishing, and shooting magazines, including Guns & Ammo, Handguns, Gun Dog, Rifle Shooter and Shooting Times.
  InterMedia Outdoor Holdings purchased the pro-gun hunting and fishing network the Sportsman Channel in 2007, and is now in the process of acquiring the Outdoor Channel, pending the federal government's approval of last month's merger between InterMedia Outdoors and Outdoor Channel Holdings.
  InterMedia employees believe that Hindery, a Huffington Post blogger who has contributed to numerous Democratic politicians including Andrew Cuomo and Elizabeth Warren, is in the process of consolidating all of America's leading gun-culture media outlets and stripping them down to virtual destruction.
  Prior to its acquisition by InterMedia, the media brand Petersen's Hunting, the television arm of which is broadcast by the Sportsman Channel, was housed in a ''beautiful'' facility in Baxter, Minnesota, overlooking the Mississippi River. The facility had approximately 60 employees, a massive studio, at least nine editing bays and fully-wired machine rooms and was conducting about four studio shoots per year with a full production crew.
  That facility now mostly consists of about 12 employees '-- ''basic administrative types,'' who ''think every day they go into work is going to be their layoff day,'' according to an InterMedia employee who spoke on condition of anonymity.
  ''They have people working out of rental strip malls doing all of their TV production,'' the source said.
  Employees of the Baxter facility were offered the chance to move to Peoria, Ill., which offers a tax credit to companies who ''create'' jobs in town, in order to keep their employment.
  ''That studio in Brainerd was a real staple in that community for years. We used to joke that it was the Microsoft of Brainerd County. Everyone was impressed if you worked there. You made money, you did well, you had this dream life. Then Leo Hindery Jr. bought it and just completely gutted it,'' said the employee. ''It's sad. I know a lot of good people in Brainerd who lost their jobs and had their houses foreclosed on.''
  Petersen's Hunting now ''has its entire TV production staff working out of call centers'' in Peoria, according to the employee.
  InterMedia also purchased a company called Barrett Productions in Missoula, Mont., which was previously a thriving and well-respected television production company. The Barrett facility is now ''gutted.''
  ''There's nothing there but one intern slash production assistant and one administrative type. All the production people are gone. It's a shell,'' according to the employee.
  ''Now that Hindery has the Outdoor Channel, he's in a position to consolidate all of the major pro-Second Amendment media titles in this country, strip them down, and destroy them, like venture capitalists do sometimes,'' the employee said.
  Many Outdoor Channel producers are ''scared shitless,'' realizing that the careers they built are now in the hands of an Obama donor who is in the process of breaking apart pro-gun media companies.
  New York-based InterMedia Outdoors CEO Jeff Paro sent a memo to staff Feb. 4 describing the merger.
  ''It's hard to believe it has been several months since the announcement of the IMO/SC and Outdoor Channel merger. It probably seems like it is taking forever, but unfortunately, despite great progress, that is the nature the beast. Since some time has passed, I just wanted to take a moment and provide you with a brief update of where we are to date and next steps for IMO over the next 4-6 weeks,'' Paro wrote.
  ''Our registration for the new combined company was submitted to the SEC several weeks ago and we are hopeful that we will see final approvals soon. There will then be a short period of review by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) which is required for the cable nets and then the merger ultimately will be subject to a formal vote by the current Outdoor Channel Shareholders. When all is said and done the new company, InterMedia Outdoor Holdings Inc. will be official. While you never know, our expectations are that this process will get us to go by, or around March 1st,'' Paro wrote.
  ''So with this time frame as a target the management teams from SC/IMO and OC have begun the process of evaluating and prioritizing our integration strategy at launch. This process will accelerate over the coming weeks as many of our senior managers have already been recruited to participate on different integration teams. Most of the areas under immediate consideration are on the TV side between SC and OC, but with that said we have several groups forming to evaluate plans for some exciting development opportunities in TV, Digital and Multimedia Sales and Marketing,'' Paro wrote.
Scientists say sugar at levels considered safe is harmful - latimes.com
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 11:23
  When mice were fed a diet that was 25% added sugars '' an amount consumed by many humans '' the females died at twice the normal rate and the males were less likely to reproduce and hold territory, scientists said in a study published Tuesday.
  The study shows "that added sugar consumed at concentrations currently considered safe exerts dramatic impacts on mammalian health," the researchers said in the study, published in the journal Nature Communications. "Many researchers have already made calls for reevaluation of these safe levels of consumption."
  The study's senior author, University of Utah biology professor Wayne Potts, said earlier studies fed mice sugars at levels higher than people eat in sodas, cookies, candy and other items. The current study stuck to levels eaten by people.
  The mice lived in "seminatural enclosures," and the experimental and control groups lived in direct competition with each other. After being fed the two diets for 26 weeks, the mice lived for 32 weeks in mouse barns -- enclosures of 377 square feet ringed by three-foot walls. There were some nesting areas that were more desirable than others.
  "Added sugars" are those added during processing or preparation, not those that occur naturally in fruit or milk. The scientists fed the mice a diet that got its added sugars from half fructose and half glucose monosaccharides, which is about what's found in high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), Potts said. The study, he said, was not set up to differentiate between the effects of different forms of caloric sweeteners.
  The Corn Refiners Assn., a trade group, questioned the use of mice in the study, saying in a statement that the only way to know the effect in people would be to test people.
  "Mice do not eat sugar as a part of their normal diet, so the authors are measuring a contrived overload effect that might not be present had the rodents adapted to sugar intake over time," the group said.
  The trade group for the sugar industry, the Sugar Assn., said it was studying the research. But it maintained that the sweetener used in the study was crucial.
  "Sugar and the various formulations of HFCS are molecularly different '-- they are not the same product, yet too often, and erroneously, HFCS is referred to as an 'added sugar.' " the statement said. "Only sugar is sugar."
  In a statement, Potts said mice were "an excellent mammal to model human dietary issues" because they've been living with people and eating the same food for thousands of years.
  The Utah researchers noted that consumption of added sugars increased in the American diet by 50% from the 1970s to about 2008, primarily because of the higher consumption of HFCS. (The intake has since been declining, and the Sugar Assn. said consumption of sucrose has decreased by 35% in the last four decades.)
  The 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans advise us to limit our total intake of added sugars, fats and other "discretionary calories" to 5% to 15% of total calories consumed every day. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that from 2005 to 2010, we got 13% of our total calories from added sugar.
  The male mice controlled 26% fewer territories and produced 25% fewer offspring, the scientists said. The lower reproduction levels could be the result of a decreased ability to defend their territories, the researchers said. The diet did not affect weight.
  Potts said he has reduced the amount of "refined sugar" he eats and has suggested his family do the same.
  mary.macvean@latimes.com
  @mmacvean on Twitter
NBC's Meet The Press Falls To 21-Year Ratings Low | Mediaite
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  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 11:19
  NBC's ratings woes aren't just limited to weekday mornings, evenings and late night. The network's Sunday morning flagship Meet the Press''the longest-running show on network television, as its announcer reminds the audience every week''has recently fallen to a 21-year low. And as of the past few weeks, the show has come in third place on Sunday morning, trailing CBS' Face the Nation and ABC's This Week.
  More than four years ago, the Los Angeles Times warned that the perennial ''king of Sunday morning TV news talk shows could soon lose its crown,'' a prediction that has been borne out in the years since. According to Nielsen data, Meet the Press is averaging its smallest total viewer audience (2.913 million) in 21 years and smallest 25-54 demo performance (854,000) in more than 21 years, dating back to the 1991-1992 season.
  CBS' Face the Nation is the clear winner, taking the number one spot away from Meet The Press for the first time in 15 years for total viewers and in 18 years for the 25-54 demo. The show even managed to maintain its lead last week when CBS was blocked from three major markets''New York, Los Angeles and Dallas''due to an ongoing dispute with Time Warner Cable. And this summer, on June 28th and August 4th, ABC's This Week jumped to number two in total viewers and the demo, pushing Meet The Press to third place, a position in hasn't seen in years.
  NBC's new struggles on Sunday morning are compounded by the drops in viewership they've seen on weekday mornings with the Today Show and evenings with NBC Nightly News. Last August, ABC's Good Morning Americabeat Today in the 25-54 demo for the first time in 17 years and has maintained a consistent lead since. And just three weeks ago, ABC's World News with Diane Sawyerwon the 25-54 demo, breaking a nearly 5-year-long winning streak by NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams.
  So, why is Meet the Press losing the prominence it once had? It is easy to lay blame on host David Gregory. He had large and venerable shoes to fill when he replaced the late Tim Russert back in December of 2008. Some think he goes too easy on the Obama administration while others, like myself, often think he doesn't grill his Republican guests hard enough. He's certainly courted his fair share of controversy in recent months, from the 30-round magazine he may have illegally used as a prop to the combative way he questionedThe Guardian's Glenn Greenwald.
  This week, The Five's Greg Gutfelddescribed Meet the Press as ''the Sunday show for people who eat kale.'' And perhaps that's the problem. While I can tell you from my own personal experience that Gutfeld is absolutely correct, that characterization may not lend itself to the widest possible audience.
  Gregory cannot pull off the elder statesman gravitas of Face the Nation's Bob Schieffer. Nor does he seem capable of landing the bombshell interviews and explosive panels that This Week's George Stephanopoulos can. But for now at least, Meet the Press has retained its status as the go-to Sunday show for Washington's most powerful politicians who want to speak directly to a small, but influential audience. It may not mean much in the world of TV ratings, but that factor still gives the show clout.
  [Image via NBCUMV.com]
  ''
  >> Follow Matt Wilstein (@TheMattWilstein) on Twitter
BBC News - Hollywood studios reach deal with China over tax row
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  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 11:17
  14 August 2013Last updated at05:11 ETHollywood studios say they have reached a deal with Chinese authorities over missing payments for some of the year's biggest box office films.
  Payments had stopped due to a dispute over a new 2% tax. Some reports say studios are owed $200m (£129m) for films like Man Of Steel and Skyfall.
  But The Motion Picture Association of America says the Chinese government has now intervened in the dispute and "all money will be paid in full".
  Payments have already resumed, it says.
  The money was being withheld by the China Film Group, a state-owned distributor which oversees the release of foreign films in China.
  It had wanted to deduct a new 2% value added tax from what the studios earned in ticket sales.
  The American studios argued that the tax violated World Trade Organisation rules, which stated they should receive 25% of Chinese box office revenue, with no deductions.
  The Hollywood Reporter said film companies had not been paid since October or November and estimated they were owed close to $200m.
  According to the Motion Picture Association of America, China's box office revenues increased by 36% to $2.7bn (£1.8bn) in 2012, making it the world's second-biggest movie market and underscoring its importance as a key market for Hollywood's moviemakers.
  'In breach'The boost came after a World Trade Organisation (WTO) deal reached by US Vice-President Joe Biden and China's then Vice-President Xi Jinping, in which China agreed to increase the number of foreign films allowed to be screened in the country to 34.
  In return, foreign studios would receive a 25% share of box-office takings, up from between 13% and 17%.
  "Chinese authorities agreed that additional payments, including any taxes, would not come out of the 25% split. But late last fall, the China Film Group informed studios that it intended to pass along the tax after all," said the magazine.
  As part of Hollywood's attempt to woo Chinese audiences, Disney released a special version of Iron Man 3, with an extra scene featuring a new character and storyline.
  The Marvel Comics-based movie in which Robert Downey Jr. continues his success as superhero Tony Stark, earned a record-breaking $65m in China its first weekend.
Loopy Ideas Are Fine, If You're an Entrepreneur | Pedestrian Observations
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  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 11:10
  There is a belief within American media that a successful person can succeed at anything. He (and it's invariably he) is omnicompetent, and people who question him and laugh at his outlandish ideas will invariably fail and end up working for him. If he cares about something, it's important; if he says something can be done, it can. The people who are already doing the same thing are peons and their opinions are to be discounted, since they are biased and he never is. He doesn't need to provide references or evidence '' even supposedly scientific science fiction falls into this trope, in which the hero gets ideas from his gut, is always right, and never needs to do experiments.
  Thus we get Hyperloop, a loopy intercity rail transit idea proposed by Tesla Motors' Elon Musk, an entrepreneur who hopes to make a living some day building cars. And thus a fair amount of the media coverage is analysis-free summary of what Tesla already said: see stenography by ABC, Forbes, the Washington Post's Wonkblog, and even BusinessWeek (which added that critics deal with ''limited information''). Some media channels are more nuanced, sometimes even critical; the Wall Street Journal deserves especial credit, but Wonkblog also has a second, mildly critical post. But none has pressed Musk or Tesla about the inconsistencies in his proposal, which far exceed the obvious questions about the proposed $6 billion price tag (compare $53 billion in today's money for California HSR). For better prior criticism, see James Sinclair's post and Clem Tillier's comment on California HSR Blog.
  My specific problems are that Hyperloop a) made up the cost projections, b) has awful passenger comfort, c) has very little capacity, and d) lies about energy consumption of conventional HSR. All of these come from Musk's complex in which he must reinvent everything and ignore prior work done in the field; these also raise doubts about the systems safety that he claims is impeccable.
  In principle, Hyperloop is supposed to get people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour, running in a tube with near-vacuum at speeds topping at 1,220 km/h. In practice, both the costs and the running times are full of magic asterisks. The LA end is really Sylmar, at the edge of the LA Basin; with additional access time and security checks, this is no faster than conventional HSR doing the trip in 2:40. There is a crossing of the San Francisco Bay, but there's no mention of the high cost of bridging over or tunneling under the Bay '' we're supposed to take it on faith the unit cost is the same as along the I-5 corridor in the Central Valley.
  There is no systematic attempt at figuring out standard practices for cost, or earthquake safety (about which the report is full of FUD about the risks of a ''ground-based system''). There are no references for anything; they're beneath the entrepreneur's dignity. It's fine if Musk thinks he can build certain structures for lower cost than is normal, or achieve better safety, but he should at least mention how. Instead, we get ''it is expected'' and ''targeted'' language. On Wikipedia, it would get hammered with ''citation needed'' and ''avoid weasel words.''
  The worst is the cost of the civil infrastructure, the dominant term in any major transportation project's cost. Hundreds of years of incrementally-built expertise in bridge building is brushed aside with the following passage:
  The pods and linear motors are relatively minor expenses compared to the tube itself '' several hundred million dollars at most, compared with several billion dollars for the tube. Even several billion is a low number when compared with several tens of billion proposed for the track of the California rail project.
  The key advantages of a tube vs. a railway track are that it can be built above the ground on pylons and it can be built in prefabricated sections that are dropped in place and joined with an orbital seam welder. By building it on pylons, you can almost entirely avoid the need to buy land by following alongside the mostly very straight California Interstate 5 highway, with only minor deviations when the highway makes a sharp turn.
  In reality, an all-elevated system is a bug rather than a feature. Central Valley land is cheap; pylons are expensive, as can be readily seen by the costs of elevated highways and trains all over the world. The unit costs for viaducts on California HSR, without overhead and management fees, are already several times as high as Musk's cost: as per PDF-page 15 of the cost overrun breakdown, unit costs for viaducts range from $50 million to $80 million per mile. Overheads and contingencies convert per-mile cost almost perfectly to per-km costs. And yet Musk thinks he can build more than 500 km of viaduct for $2.5 billion, as per PDF-page 28 of his proposal: a tenth the unit cost. The unrealistically low tunnel unit cost is at least excused on PDF-page 31 on the grounds that the tunnel diameter is low (this can also be done with trains if they're as narrow as Hyperloop, whose capsule seating is 2-abreast rather than 4- or 5-abreast as on HSR; see below on capacity). The low viaduct unit cost is not.
  This alone suggests that the real cost of constructing civil infrastructure for Hyperloop is ten times as high as advertised, to say nothing of the Bay crossing. So it's the same cost as standard HSR. It's supposedly faster, but since it doesn't go all the way to Downtown Los Angeles it doesn't actually provide faster door-to-door trip times.
  Nor is the system more comfortable for the passenger. Levitating systems can get away with higher cant than conventional rail because they sway less: Transrapid's lateral acceleration in the horizontal plane is about 3.6 m/s^2 in Shanghai, and the company claims 4.37 m/s^2 is possible. On standard-gauge rail, the conversion rate is approximately 150 mm of total equivalent cant per 1 m/s^2. HSR cant tops at 180-200 mm, and cant deficiency tops at 180 mm for Talgos and 270-300 mm for medium-speed Pendolinos, so about 2.5 m/s^2 at high speed; this was shown safe by simulation in Martin Lindahl's thesis, which is also a good source for track construction standards.
  But Hyperloop goes one step further and proposes a lateral acceleration of 4.9 m/s^2: 0.5 g. This is after canting, according to the standards proposed:
  The Hyperloop will be capable of traveling between Los Angeles and San Francisco in approximately 35 minutes. This requirement tends to size other portions of the system. Given the performance specification of the Hyperloop, a route has been devised to satisfy this design requirement. The Hyperloop route should be based on several considerations, including:
  Maintaining the tube as closely as possible to existing rights of way (e.g., following the I-5).Limiting the maximum capsule speed to 760 mph (1,220 kph) for aerodynamic considerations.Limiting accelerations on the passengers to 0.5g.Optimizing locations of the linear motor tube sections driving the capsules.Local geographical constraints, including location of urban areas, mountain ranges, reservoirs, national parks, roads, railroads, airports, etc. The route must respect existing structures.For aerodynamic efficiency, the velocity of a capsule in the Hyperloop istypically:
  300 mph (480 kph) where local geography necessitates a tube bend radii < >760 mph (1,220 kph) where local geography allows a tube bend > 3.0 miles (4.8 km) or where local geography permits a straight tube.These bend radii have been calculated so that the passenger does not experience inertial accelerations that exceed 0.5 g. This is deemed the maximum inertial acceleration that can be comfortably sustained by humans for short periods. To further reduce the inertial acceleration experienced by passengers, the capsule and/or tube will incorporate a mechanism that will allow a degree of 'banking'.
  0.5 g, or 4.9 m/s^2, is extreme. Non-tilting trains do not accelerate laterally at more than 1.2 m/s^2 in the plane of the track (i.e. after accounting for cant), and at high speed they have lower lateral acceleration, about 0.67 m/s^2 with limiting cases of about 0.8 for some tilting trains relative to the plane of the train floor. For example, the Tokaido Shinkansen has 200 mm of cant and maximum speed of 255 km/h on non-tilting trains on 2,500-meter curves, for 100 mm of cant deficiency, or 0.67 m/s^2.
  The proposed relationship between curve radius and speed in the Hyperloop standards is for a lateral acceleration much greater than 4.9 m/s^2 in the horizontal plane: 480 km/h at 1,600 meters is 11.1 m/s^2. This only drops to 5 m/s^2 after perfectly canting the track, converting the downward 9.8 m/s^2 gravity and the sideways acceleration into a single 14.8 m/s^2 acceleration vector downward in the plane of the capsule floor, or 5 m/s^2 more than passengers are used to. This is worse than sideways acceleration: track standards for vertical acceleration are tighter than for horizontal acceleration, about 0.5-0.67 m/s^2, one tenth to one seventh what Musk wants to subject his passengers to. It's not transportation; it's a barf ride.
  Even 4.9 m/s^2 in the horizontal plane is too much. With perfect canting, it combines with gravity to accelerate passengers downward by 11 m/s^2, 1.2 m/s^2 more than the usual, twice as high as the usual standards. Motion sickness is still to be fully expected in such a case. Transrapid's 4.37 m/s^2, which adds 0.93 m/s^2 in the vertical component with perfect canting, is the limit of what's possible.
  Speaking of vertical acceleration, this gets no comment at all in the Hyperloop proposal. At 1,220 km/h, it is very hard to climb grades, which would require very tall viaducts and deep tunnels under mountains. Climbing grades is easy, but vertical acceleration is such that the vertical curve radius has to be very large. A lateral acceleration of 0.67 m/s^2 would impose a minimum vertical curve radius of 170 km, versus 15 km at 360 km/h HSR speed. Changing the grade from flat to 2% would take 3.4 km, and changing back would take the same, so for climbing small hills, the effective average grade is very low (it takes 6.8 km to climb 68 meters).
  Nor does jerk get any treatment. Reversing a curve takes several seconds at the cant and cant deficiency of conventional HSR (about 3 seconds by Swedish standards, more by German ones); reversing a curve with the extreme canting levels of Hyperloop would take much longer. Maintaining comfort at high total equivalent cant requires tight control of the third derivative as well as the second one; see a tilting train thesis for references.
  The barf ride that is as expensive as California HSR and takes as long door-to-door is also very low-capacity. The capsules are inexplicably very short, with 28 passengers per capsule. The proposed headway is 30 seconds, for 3,360 passengers per direction per hour. A freeway lane can do better: about 2,000 vehicles, with an average intercity car occupancy of 2. HSR can do 12,000 passengers per direction per hour: 12 trains per hour is possible, and each train can easily fit 1,000 people (the Tokaido Shinkansen tops at 14 tph and 1,323 passengers per train).
  But even 30 seconds appears well beyond the limit of emergency braking. It's common in gadgetbahn to propose extremely tight headways, presuming computerized control allowing vehicles to behave as if they're connected by a rod. Personal rapid transit proponents argue the same. In reality, such systems have been a subject of research for train control for quite a while now, with no positive results so far. Safety today still means safe stopping distances. If vehicles brake at a constant rate, the safe headway is half the total deceleration time; if a vehicle brakes from 1,220 km/h to zero in 60 seconds, the average acceleration is more than 5 m/s^2, twice the current regulatory safety limit for passengers with seat belts.
  Most of this could be chalked to the feeling of some entrepreneurs that they must reinvent everything. The indifference to civil engineering costs, passenger comfort issues, and signal safety could all be chalked to this. So could the FUD about earthquake safety of HSR on PDF-page 5.
  However, one thing could not: the chart on PDF-page 9 showing that only the Hyperloop is energy-efficient. The chart has a train consuming nearly 900 megajoules per person for an LA-San Francisco trip, about as much as a car or a plane; this is about 1,300 kJ per passenger-km. This may be true of Amtrak's diesel locomotives; but energy consumption for HSR in Spain is on average 73 Watt-hour (263 kJ) per passenger-km (see PDF-page 17 on a UIC paper on the subject of HSR carbon emissions), one fifth as much as Tesla claims. Tesla either engages in fraud or is channeling dodgy research about the electricity consumption of high-speed trains.
  Indeed, a train with a thousand seats, 20 MW of power drawn, 60% seat occupancy, and a speed of 360 km/h can only ever expend 333 kJ per passenger-km while accelerating, and much less while cruising (acceleration at lower speed requires more energy per unit of distance, but cruising at lower speed expends only a fraction of the energy of full-power acceleration). Tesla's train energy consumption numbers do not pass a sanity check, which suggests either reckless disregard for the research or fraud. I wouldn't put either past Musk: the lack of references is consistent with the former, and the fact that Musk's current primary endeavor is a car company is consistent with the latter.
  There is no redeeming feature of Hyperloop. Small things can possibly be fixed; the cost problems, the locations of the stations, and the passenger comfort issues given cost constraints can't. Industry insiders with ties to other speculative proposals meant to replace conventional rail, such as maglev, are in fact skeptical of Hyperloop's promises of perfect safety.
  It's possible to discover something new, but people who do almost always realize the context of the discovery. If Musk really found a way to build viaducts for $5 million per kilometer, this is a huge thing for civil engineering in general and he should announce this in the most general context of urban transportation, rather than the niche of intercity transportation. If Musk has experiments showing that it's possible to have sharper turns or faster deceleration than claimed by Transrapid, then he's made a major discovery in aviation and should announce it as such. That he thinks it just applies to his project suggests he doesn't really have any real improvement.
  In math, one common sanity check on a result is, ''does it prove too much?'' If my ten-page paper proves a result that implies a famous open problem, then either my paper is wrong or I've proved the famous open problem, and it's up to me to take extra care to make sure I did not miss anything. Most people in this situation do this extra step and then realize that they were subtly wrong. If a famous question could be solved in ten pages, it probably wouldn't still be open. The same is even true in undergrad-level proof classes: if your homework answer proves things that are too strong, you've almost certainly made a mistake.
  Musk's real sin is not the elementary mistakes; it's this lack of context. The lack of references comes from the same place, and so does the utter indifference to the unrealistically low costs. This turns it from a wrong idea that still has interesting contributions to make to a hackneyed proposal that should be dismissed and forgotten as soon as possible.
  I write this not to help bury Musk; I'm not nearly famous enough to even hit a nail in his coffin. I write this to point out that, in the US, people will treat any crank seriously if he has enough money or enough prowess in another field. A sufficiently rich person is surrounded by sycophants and stenographers who won't check his numbers against anything.
  There are two stories here. In the less interesting one, Musk is a modern-day streetcar conspiracy mogul: he has a car company, he hopes to make money off of it in the future and uses non-generally accepted accounting to claim he already does, and he constantly trash-talks high-speed rail, which competes with his product. Since he's not proposing to build Hyperloop soon, it could be viewed as clever distraction or FUD.
  The more interesting possibility, which I am inclined toward, is that this is not fraud, or not primarily fraud. Musk is the sort of person who thinks he can wend his way from starting online companies to building cars and selling them without dealerships. I have not seen a single defense of the technical details of the proposal except for one Facebook comment that claims, doubly erroneously, that the high lateral acceleration is no problem because the tubes can be canted. Everyone, including the Facebook comment, instead gushes about Musk personally. The thinking is that he's rich, so he must always have something interesting to say; he can't be a huckster when venturing outside his field. It would be unthinkable to treat people as professionals in their own fields, who take years to make a successful sideways move and who need to be extremely careful not to make elementary mistakes. The superheros of American media coverage would instantly collapse, relegated to a specialized role while mere mortals take over most functions.
  This culture of superstars is a major obstacle frustrating any attempt to improve existing technology. It more or less works for commercial websites, where the startup capital requirements are low, profits per employee are vast, and employee turnover is such that corporate culture is impossible. People get extremely rich for doing something first, even if in their absence their competitors would've done the same six months later. Valve, a video game company that recognizes this, oriented its entire structure around having no formal management at all, but for the most part what this leads to is extremely rich people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg who get treated like superstars and think they can do anything.
  In infrastructure, this is not workable. Trains are 19th-century technology, as are cars and buses. Planes are from the 20th century. Companies can get extremely successful improving the technology somehow, but this works differently from the kind of entrepreneurship that's successful in the software and internet sectors. The most important airline invention since the jet engine is either the widebody (i.e. more capacity) or the suite of features that make for low-cost flights, such as quick turnarounds. What Southwest and its ultra low-cost successors have done is precious: they've figured how to trim every airline expense, from better crew utilization to incentives for lower-transaction cost booking methods. This requires perfect knowledge of preexisting practices and still takes decades to do. The growth rate of Microsoft, Google, and Facebook is not possible in such an environment, and so the individual superstar matters far less than a positive corporate culture that can transmit itself over multiple generations of managers.
  There is plenty of room for improvement in HSR technology, then, but it's of a different kind. It involves adapting techniques used by low-cost airlines to reduce costs, as SNCF is doing right now with its new low-cost TGV product. It perhaps involves controlling construction costs more tightly, though $5 million per km for viaducts seems like an impossible fantasy. But it has to come from within the business, or from someone who intimately understands the business.
  And with the kind of success that US media harps on, this is almost impossible to do domestically. Someone as smart as Musk, or any of many other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, could find a detailed breakdown of the operating and construction costs of civil infrastructure, and figure out ways of reducing them, Megabus- or Southwest-style. That's what I would do if I had the unlimited resources Musk has: I'd obtain unit costs at far greater detail than ''X meters of tunnel cost $Y'' and compare what New York is doing wrong that Madrid is doing right. But I don't have the resources '' in money, in ability to manage people, in time. And the people who do are constantly told that they don't need to do that, that they're smart enough they can reinvent everything and that the world will bow to their greatness.
  Update: people all over the Internet, including in comments below, defend the low cost projections on the grounds that the system is lighter and thinner than your average train. The proposal itself also defends the low tunneling costs on those same grounds. To see to what extent Musk takes his own idea seriously, compare the two proposals: the first for a passenger-only tube, and the second for a larger tube capable of carrying both passengers and vehicles. On PDF-pp. 25-26, the proposal states that the passenger-only tube would have an internal diameter of 2.23 meters and the passenger-plus-vehicle tube would have an internal diameter of 3.3 meters, 47% more. Despite that, the tunneling costs on PDF-p. 28 are $600 and $700 million, a difference of just 17%.
  The same is true of the ''but the Hyperloop capsule is lighter than a train'' argument for lower pylon construction costs. Together with the differences in tube thickness posited on PDF-p. 27, 20-23 mm versus 23-25, there is 60% more tube lining in the passenger-plus-vehicle version, but the tube and pylons are projected to cost just 24% more. In this larger version, the twin tube has 0.025*3.3*pi*2 = 0.5 cubic meters of steel per meter of length, weighing about 4 tons. This ranges from a bit less than twice to a bit more than twice the weight of a train. To say nothing of the pylons' need to support their own considerable weight, which is larger than for HSR due to the need for taller viaducts coming from the constrained ability to change grade. They are far more obtrusive than trees and telephone poles, contra the claims of minimal obtrusiveness and disruption.
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Eurozone hauled out of 18-month recession by Germany and France | Business | theguardian.com
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  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 11:03
  Spain and Italy both remain in recession. Photograph: Susana Vera/Reuters
  A strong performance by Germany and France helped haul the battered eurozone out of recession in the three months to June.
  Figures released in Brussels showed that the 17 nations using the single currency expanded by 0.3% in the second quarter of 2013.
  The return to growth brings to an end six successive quarters of contraction but the data from Eurostat, the European's statistical agency, revealed a big disparity in growth rates and Ollie Rehn, Europe's economic commissioner, said it was too early to celebrate.
  "Yes, this slightly more positive data is welcome '' but there is no room for any complacency whatsoever", Rehn said. "I hope there will be no premature, self-congratulatory statements suggesting 'the crisis is over'. For we all know that there are still substantial obstacles to overcome: the growth figures remain low and the tentative signs of growth are still fragile."
  Financial markets had been expecting the eurozone to grow by 0.2% in the second quarter and the slightly stronger outcome was the result of the big two economies both exceeding forecasts. Germany, the eurozone's biggest economy, grew by 0.7% while France '' the second biggest '' grew by 0.5%.
  But Italy and Spain both remained in recession. Spain's economy shrank by 0.1% percent on the quarter, while Italy posted a 0.2% decline. The Dutch economy also contracted by 0.2% but Portugal '' one of the three countries that required a financial bailout '' recorded the fastest growth of any eurozone country with 1.1% quarterly growth.
  David Brown, of New View Economics said: "These are better than expected second-quarter GDP numbers from the eurozone, but it's nothing for the ECB to celebrate. After six quarters of unrelenting recession misery, the eurozone has finally broken back into positive growth. It is going to be a very long, hard haul back into sustainable, strong growth again.
  "It is a tale of two very different economies. Germany is doing all the hard work in the vanguard of strong recovery as its 0.7% second-quarter GDP expansion showed. On the other side of the equation, the troubled eurozone economies are still mired down in the mud of deep recession risk."
Unease at Clinton Foundation Over Finances and Ambitions - NYTimes.com
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  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 10:59
  Soon after the 10th anniversary of the foundation bearing his name, Bill Clinton met with a small group of aides and two lawyers from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Two weeks of interviews with Clinton Foundation executives and former employees had led the lawyers to some unsettling conclusions.
  The review echoed criticism of Mr. Clinton's early years in the White House: For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.
  And concern was rising inside and outside the organization about Douglas J. Band, a onetime personal assistant to Mr. Clinton who had started a lucrative corporate consulting firm '-- which Mr. Clinton joined as a paid adviser '-- while overseeing the Clinton Global Initiative, the foundation's glitzy annual gathering of chief executives, heads of state, and celebrities.
  The review set off more than a year of internal debate, and spurred an evolution in the organization that included Mr. Clinton's daughter, Chelsea, taking on a dominant new role as the family grappled with the question of whether the foundation '-- and its globe-spanning efforts to combat AIDS, obesity and poverty '-- would survive its founder.
  Video | Clinton Calls to Protect Voting Rights Speaking at an American Bar Association conference, Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized a Supreme Court ruling that allows states to change election laws without advance federal approval.
  Now those efforts are taking on new urgency. In the coming weeks, the foundation, long Mr. Clinton's domain since its formation in 2001, will become the nerve center of Hillary Rodham Clinton's increasingly busy public life.
  This fall, Mrs. Clinton and her staff will move into offices at the foundation's new headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, occupying two floors of the Time-Life Building. Amid speculation about her 2016 plans, Mrs. Clinton is adding major new initiatives on women, children and jobs to what has been renamed the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
  Worried that the foundation's operating revenues depend too heavily on Mr. Clinton's nonstop fund-raising, the three Clintons are embarking on a drive to raise an endowment of as much as $250 million, with events already scheduled in the Hamptons and London. And after years of relying on Bruce R. Lindsey, the former White House counsel whose friendship with Mr. Clinton stretches back decades, to run the organization while living part-time in Arkansas, the family has hired a New York-based chief executive with a background in management consulting.
  ''We're trying to institutionalize the foundation so that it will be here long after the lives of any of us,'' Mr. Lindsey said. ''That's our challenge and that is what we are trying to address.''
  Bill Clinton and his daughter, Chelsea, in South Africa last week.
  Joao Silva / The New York Times
  But the changing of the guard has aggravated long-simmering tensions within the former first family's inner circle as the foundation tries to juggle the political and philanthropic ambitions of a former president, a potential future president, and their increasingly visible daughter.
  And efforts to insulate the foundation from potential conflicts have highlighted just how difficult it can be to disentangle the Clintons' charity work from Mr. Clinton's moneymaking ventures and Mrs. Clinton's political future, according to interviews with more than two dozen former and current foundation employees, donors and advisers to the family. Nearly all of them declined to speak for attribution, citing their unwillingness to alienate the Clinton family.
  Powered by Celebrity
  Last Thursday, Mr. Clinton arrived two hours late to an exuberant welcome at a health clinic about 60 miles north of Johannesburg. Children in zebra-striped loincloths sang as Mr. Clinton and Ms. Clinton made their entrance, and the former president enthusiastically explained how his foundation had helped the South African government negotiate large reductions in the price of drugs that halt the progress of HIV. Aaron Motsoaledi, South Africa's minister of health, heaped praise on the effort. ''Because of your help we are able to treat three and a half times more people than we used to,'' he told the crowd.
  The project is typical of the model pioneered by the Clinton Foundation, built around dozens of partnerships with private companies, governments, or other nonprofit groups. Instead of handing out grants, the foundation recruits donors and advises them on how best to deploy their money or resources, from helping Procter & Gamble donate advanced water-purification packets to developing countries to working with credit card companies to expand the volume of low-cost loans offered to poor inner city residents.
  The foundation, which has 350 employees in 180 countries, remains largely powered by Mr. Clinton's global celebrity and his ability to connect corporate executives, A-listers and government officials. On this month's Africa trip, Mr. Clinton was accompanied by the actors Dakota Fanning and Jesse Eisenberg and the son of the New York City mayoral candidate John A. Catsimatidis, a longtime donor.
  For most of the foundation's existence, its leadership has been dominated by loyal veterans of the Clintons' political lives. Ira C. Magaziner, who was a Rhodes scholar with Mr. Clinton and ran Mrs. Clinton's failed attempt at a health care overhaul in the 1990s, is widely credited as the driving force behind the foundation's largest project, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which, among other efforts, negotiates bulk purchasing agreements and price discounts on lifesaving medicines.
  Mr. Band, who arrived at the White House in 1995 and worked his way up to become Mr. Clinton's closest personal aide, standing behind the president on golf courses and the global stage, helped build the foundation's fund-raising structure. He conceived of and for many years helped run the Clinton Global Initiative, the annual conference that draws hundreds of business leaders and heads of state to New York City where attendees are pushed to make specific philanthropic commitments.
  Today, big-name companies vie to buy sponsorships at prices of $250,000 and up, money that has helped subsidize the foundation's annual operating costs. Last year, the foundation and two subsidiaries had revenues of more than $214 million.
  Yet the foundation's expansion has also been accompanied by financial problems. In 2007 and 2008, the foundation also found itself competing against Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign for donors amid a recession. Millions of dollars in contributions intended to seed an endowment were diverted to other programs, creating tension between Mr. Magaziner and Mr. Band. The foundation piled up a $40 million deficit during those two years, according to tax returns. Last year, it ran more than $8 million in the red.
  Amid those shortfalls, the foundation has sometimes catered to donors and celebrities who gave money in ways that raised eyebrows in the low-key nonprofit world. In 2009, during a Clinton Global Initiative gathering at the University of Texas at Austin, the foundation purchased a first-class ticket for the actress Natalie Portman, a special guest, who brought her beloved Yorkie, according to two former foundation employees.
  In interviews, foundation officials partly blamed the 2008 recession and difficulties in getting donors to provide operating support rather than restricted grants for specific programs for the deficits.
  But others criticized Mr. Magaziner, who is widely seen within the foundation as impulsive and lacking organizational skills. On one occasion, Mr. Magaziner dispatched a team of employees to fly around the world for months gathering ideas for a climate change proposal that never got off the ground. Another time, he ignored a report '-- which was commissioned at significant expense from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company '-- on how the foundation could get involved in forestry initiatives.
  Mr. Magaziner's management style and difficulty keeping projects within budget were also raised in discussions that surrounded the 2011 Simpson Thacher review. (One person who attended a meeting with Mr. Magaziner recalled his lying on a conference room table in the middle of the meeting because of terrible back spasms, snapping at a staff member.)
  Mr. Band repeatedly urged Mr. Clinton to fire Mr. Magaziner, according to people briefed on the matter. Mr. Clinton refused, confiding in aides that despite Mr. Magaziner's managerial weaknesses, he was a visionary with good intentions. The former president, according to one person who knows them both, ''thinks Ira is brilliant '-- and brilliant people get away with a lot in Clinton world.''
  Indeed, by then, Mr. Magaziner had persuaded Mr. Clinton and the foundation to spin the health initiative off into a separate organization, with Mr. Magaziner as its chief executive and the Clinton Foundation appointing a majority of its board members. The financial problems continued. In 2010 and 2011, the first two years when the health initiative operated as a stand-alone organization, it ran annual shortfalls of more than $4 million. A new chief financial officer, hired in 2010, left eight months later.
  A foundation official said the health initiative had only three chief financial officers in 10 years and that its financial problem was a common one in the nonprofit world: For all the grant money coming in '-- more than $160 million in 2011 '-- Mr. Magaziner had also had difficulty raising money for operating costs. But by the end of 2011, the health initiative had expanded its board, adding two seats. Chelsea Clinton took one.
  Growing Ventures
  As the foundation grew, so did the outside business ventures pursued by Mr. Clinton and several of his aides.
  None have drawn more scrutiny in Clinton circles than Teneo, a firm co-founded in 2009 by Mr. Band, described by some as a kind of surrogate son to Mr. Clinton. Aspiring to merge corporate consulting, public relations and merchant banking in a single business, Mr. Band poached executives from Wall Street, recruited other Clinton aides to join as employees or advisers and set up shop in a Midtown office formerly belonging to one of the country's top hedge funds.
  By 2011, the firm had added a third partner, Declan Kelly, a former State Department envoy for Mrs. Clinton. And Mr. Clinton had signed up as a paid adviser to the firm.
  Teneo worked on retainer, charging monthly fees as high as $250,000, according to current and former clients. The firm recruited clients who were also Clinton Foundation donors, while Mr. Band and Mr. Kelly encouraged others to become new foundation donors. Its marketing materials highlighted Mr. Band's relationship with Mr. Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative, where Mr. Band sat on the board of directors through 2011 and remains an adviser. Some Clinton aides and foundation employees began to wonder where the foundation ended and Teneo began.
  Those worries intensified after the collapse of MF Global, the international brokerage firm led by Jon S. Corzine, a former governor of New Jersey, in the fall of 2011. The firm had been among Teneo's earliest clients, and its collapse over bad European investments '-- while paying $125,000 a month for the firm's public relations and financial advice '-- drew Teneo and the Clintons unwanted publicity.
  Mr. Clinton ended his advisory role with Teneo in March 2012, after an article appeared in The New York Post suggesting that Mrs. Clinton was angry over the MF Global controversy. A spokesman for Mr. Clinton denied the report. But in a statement released afterward, Mr. Clinton announced that he would no longer be paid by Teneo.
  He also praised Mr. Band effusively, crediting him with keeping the foundation afloat and expressing hopes that Mr. Band would continue to advise the Global Initiative.
  ''I couldn't have accomplished half of what I have in my post-presidency without Doug Band,'' Mr. Clinton said in the statement.
  Even that news release was a source of controversy within the foundation, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. Mr. Band helped edit the statement, which other people around the Clintons felt gave him too much credit for the foundation's accomplishments. (The quotation now appears as part of Mr. Band's biography on the Teneo Web site.)
  Mr. Band left his paid position with the foundation in late 2010, but has remained involved with C.G.I., as have a number of Teneo clients, like Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical and UBS Americas. Standard Chartered, a British financial services company that paid a $340 million fine to New York regulators last year to settle charges that it had laundered money from Iran, is a Teneo client and a sponsor of the 2012 global initiative.
  Last year, Coca-Cola's chief executive, Muhtar Kent, won a coveted spot on the dais with Mr. Clinton, discussing the company's partnership with another nonprofit to use its distributors to deliver medical goods to patients in Africa. (A Coca-Cola spokesman said that the company's sponsorship of foundation initiatives long predated Teneo and that the firm plays no role in Coca-Cola's foundation work.)
  In March 2012, David Crane, the chief executive of NRG, an energy company, led a widely publicized trip with Mr. Clinton to Haiti, where they toured green energy and solar power projects that NRG finances through a $1 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative.
  Officials said the foundation has established clear guidelines for the Clinton Global Initiative to help prevent any favoritism or special treatment of particular donors or sponsors.
  Teneo was not the only worry: other events thrust the foundation into internal turmoil. In 2011, a wave of midlevel program staff members departed, reflecting the frustration of much of the foundation's policy personnel with the old political hands running the organization. Around the time of the Simpson Thacher review, Mr. Lindsey suffered a stroke, underscoring concerns about the foundation's line of succession. John D. Podesta, a chief of staff in Mr. Clinton's White House, stepped in for several months as temporary chief executive.
  While much attention has focused on Mrs. Clinton's emerging role within the foundation, advisers to the family say her daughter's growing involvement could prove more critical in the years ahead. After years of pursuing other career paths, including working at McKinsey & Company and a hedge fund, Ms. Clinton, 33, has begun to assert herself as a force within the foundation. Her perspective is shaped far more than her parents' by her time in the world of business, and she is poised to play a significant role in shaping the foundation's future, particularly if Mrs. Clinton chooses to run for president.
  She formally joined the foundation's board in 2011, marking her growing role there '-- and the start of intensifying tensions between her and Mr. Band. Several people close to the Clintons said that she became increasingly concerned with the negative impact Mr. Band's outside business might have on her father's work and that she cited concerns raised during the internal review about potential conflicts of interest involving Teneo.
  It was Ms. Clinton who suggested that the newly installed chief executive, Eric Braverman, be considered for the job during a nearly two-year search. A friend and a former colleague from McKinsey, Mr. Braverman, 38, had helped the Clintons with philanthropic projects in Haiti after the earthquake there. And his hiring coincided with Ms. Clinton's appointment as the vice chairwoman of the foundation board, where she will bear significant responsibility for steering her family's philanthropy, both in the causes it tackles and in the potential political and financial conflicts it must avoid.
  Ms. Clinton has also grown worried that the foundation she stood to inherit would collapse without her father, who turns 67 next week. Mr. Clinton, who had quadruple-bypass surgery in 2004 and no longer eats meat or dairy products, talks frequently about his own mortality.
  Mr. Catsimatidis said Ms. Clinton ''has to learn how to deal with the whole world because she wants to follow in the footsteps of her father and her mother.''
  Shifting the Emphasis
  Over the years, the foundation has dived into virtually any cause that sparked Mr. Clinton's interest: childhood obesity in the United States, sustainable farming in South America, mentoring entrepreneurs, saving elephants from poaching, and more. That list will shift soon as Mrs. Clinton and Chelsea build their staffs to focus on issues including economically empowering women and combating infant mortality.
  In the coming months, as Mrs. Clinton mulls a 2016 presidential bid, the foundation could also serve as a base for her to home in on issues and to build up a stable of trusted staff members who could form the core of a political campaign.
  Mrs. Clinton's staff at the foundation's headquarters includes Maura Pally, a veteran aide who advised her 2008 presidential campaign and worked at the State Department, and Madhuri Kommareddi, a former policy aide to President Obama.
  Dennis Cheng, Mrs. Clinton's deputy chief of protocol at the State Department and a finance director of her presidential campaign, will oversee the endowment drive, which some of the Clintons' donors already describe as a dry run for 2016.
  And Mrs. Clinton's personal staff of roughly seven people '-- including Huma Abedin, wife of the New York mayoral candidate Anthony D. Weiner '-- will soon relocate from a cramped Washington office to the foundation's headquarters. They will work on organizing Mrs. Clinton's packed schedule of paid speeches to trade groups and awards ceremonies and assist in the research and writing of Mrs. Clinton's memoir about her time at the State Department, to be published by Simon & Schuster next summer.
  Lydia Polgreen contributed reporting, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
To Judge Sleep Aids, U.S. Looks at Drowsy Driving in the Morning - NYTimes.com
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 10:50
  The first test for a new sleep drug is '-- unsurprisingly '-- how safely it puts people to sleep. Now comes a second test: how safely it lets people wake up.
  The Food and Drug Administration is taking heightened interest in the issue, as new evidence suggests what many people have long suspected: the effects of common prescription sleep aids like Ambien can persist well into the next day. Of particular concern is whether people who take the drugs before bed can drive safely the next morning.
  Consumer advocates have warned for years about possible links between sleep drugs and car accidents. In one prominent example, Kerry Kennedy, the former wife of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, was arrested last year after tests showed she had taken a sleep aid before swerving her car into a tractor-trailer.
  The F.D.A.'s actions are part of a robust national conversation about how to cope with the throngs of drivers who take to roads every day under the influence of prescription drugs. Law enforcement authorities have struggled with how to prosecute those who are impaired, especially when they have a prescription. A government survey in 2007 found that nearly 5 percent of daytime drivers tested positive for prescription or over-the-counter medications.
  Doctors wrote close to 60 million prescriptions for sleep aids in the United States last year, according to the research firm IMS Health, but experts say testing how these drugs affect driving is not easy. Nonetheless, the F.D.A. has been unusually active.
  Last month, it rejected an application by Merck to approve a new sleep drug, suvorexant, in part because tests showed that some people had trouble driving the next day. In May, the agency warned patients taking common allergy drugs like Benadryl against driving, noting that the sedating effects can sometimes last into the following day. In January, citing similar concerns, the F.D.A. took the unusual step of requiring that all manufacturers of zolpidem, the generic name of Ambien, cut in half the dosage for women.
  The agency has since said that it is taking a closer look at all insomnia drugs on the market, and will ask manufacturers to conduct more extensive driving tests for all new sleep drugs. It will also more closely scrutinize any drug that causes drowsiness.
  Part of the problem is that the standard warnings on many drugs '-- against driving or operating heavy machinery '-- are often brushed aside. ''It would be so convenient and it would be so good if you could just tell people, don't drive unless you feel O.K.,'' Dr. Ronald Farkas, the clinical team leader for the F.D.A.'s division of neurology products, told a group of industry experts at a conference in February. ''I think this has penetrated now that this is not adequate. It is still good advice that, if you feel impaired, don't drive. But if you feel fine, you might be impaired.''
  For years, traffic safety officials have called, without success, for a so-called ''safe list'' of drugs that do not affect driving. Some people react more strongly to drugs than others do, making it difficult to predict a person's individual risk. And driving tests can vary significantly, like studies conducted on roads or those done in computer simulators.
  ''It seems like a really simple question, but it's really difficult,'' said Dr. Matthew Rizzo, a professor of neurology at the University of Iowa, who studies driving abilities in people with cognitive impairments caused by conditions like Alzheimer's disease.
  Pharmaceutical companies have long conducted driving tests for certain drugs, but the tests were motivated mainly by marketing goals and not seen as pivotal in getting a drug approved by the F.D.A., said Gary G. Kay, whose company, the Cognitive Research Corporation, leases a driving simulator to pharmaceutical companies. Mr. Kay, for example, helped conduct some of the research showing that the allergy drug Claritin did not cause drowsiness, unlike older antihistamines like Benadryl.
  Until recently, the F.D.A. evaluated driving tests by looking at the reaction of the average patient. But that thinking has shifted as research has shown that some people react more strongly to drugs than others, Dr. Farkas said in a telephone interview. ''Some people have higher blood levels than others, and some seem to be more sensitive than others,'' he said.
  In 2011, the agency recognized this variability when it approved the sleep drug Intermezzo, which treats patients who wake up in the middle of the night, in two doses: one for men and a smaller dose for women. Data had shown that the drug's effects lingered in women for longer than they did in men. The agency's experience with Intermezzo, along with other research, led it to order in January that the dosage for all drugs containing zolpidem '-- the active ingredient in Intermezzo, as well as Ambien and related generic sleep drugs '-- be halved for women.
  In the case of suvorexant, the Merck drug, four women had to stop the driving tests because of extreme drowsiness, and the F.D.A. concluded that the drug was linked to an increase of impaired driving among patients who had taken it. Last month, Merck said that the F.D.A. indicated it would eventually approve the drug if the company lowers the proposed doses.
  The attention has not been limited to insomnia drugs. In 2011, the F.D.A. approved the drug Horizant to treat restless leg syndrome after the drug makers, XenoPort and GlaxoSmithKline, conducted driving tests because the drug also causes drowsiness. Horizant carries a warning against driving until patients know how the drug affects them, and notes that the effects could last until the morning after it is taken.
  Dr. Eric Bastings, the acting director of the F.D.A.'s neurology drug unit, said the agency was writing guidelines to help pharmaceutical companies understand what is expected of them.
  Until then, however, there is a wide range in how pharmaceutical companies measure driving ability. The most well-established test takes place in the Netherlands, where participants drive in specially outfitted cars '-- and alongside a driving instructor '-- on open roads. It is the only place in the world where such tests are conducted on roadways.
  Drug companies still conduct the tests in the Netherlands '-- Merck's drug was tested there, as was Intermezzo '-- but driving simulators are also growing in popularity. Dr. Kay's company leases the MiniSim, a scaled-down version of a state-of-the-art simulator at the University of Iowa. Users sit in a dummy driver's seat, complete with steering wheel and pedals, while three computer screens stand in for the windshield.
  Despite the increased scrutiny for sleep drugs, however, some sought to place the issue in perspective. ''What we have to weigh here is that people who don't sleep well are a hazard on the road because they do fall asleep while driving,'' said Robert Voas, a senior research scientist at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation and an expert on driving safety. ''There's risks on both sides.''
  Justice Dept. Files Antitrust Suit to Block Airline Merger
Fukushima now in state of emergency, leaking 300 tons of radioactive water into the ocean daily
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 10:30
  (NaturalNews) Japan's nuclear watchdog has now declared the leak of radioactive water from Fukushima a "state of emergency." Each day, 300 tons of radioactive water seeps into the ocean, and it's now clear that TEPCO has engage in a two-and-a-half-year cover-up of immense magnitude."I believe it's been leaking into the ocean from the start of the crisis two-and-a-half years ago," disclosed a 12-year TEPCO veteran named Suzuki-san (SOURCE)
  "There are still reactor buildings we haven't gotten into yet," said another worker named Fujimoto-san. "So there's always the possibility of another explosion..."
  Just how out of control is the situation at Fukushima? It's so out of control that TEPCO recently had to admit 10 of its workers were somehow -- yeah, see if you can figure this out -- sprayed with highly radioactive water while waiting for a bus."The workers' exposure above the neck was found to be as much as 10 becquerels per square centimeter," reports Bloomberg.com
  How exactly did highly radioactive water manage to find its way to a bus stop in the first place? TEPCO isn't sure. It's confusing with all those radiation alarms going off all the time. In order to concentrate, the company has found it's easier to just disable all the alarms and pretend nothing's wrong.
  To fully grasp the extent of the TEPCO denial, realize that only recently did the company finally admit that radioactive groundwater has been leaking into the ocean. This follows years of stark denials from the company, whose executes have exhibited a remarkable ability to deny reality even when their own workers are dying in droves from cancer.It's no exaggeration to say that TEPCO's downplaying of the full extent of the Fukushima disaster has put tens of millions of lives at risk -- people who should have been warned about radiation but were denied that information due to the TEPCO cover-up.
  "At this current time in July of 2013, Fukushima is 80 to 100x more expansive and more intense -- letting out about 100x more of the radiation of Chernobyl," reports Dr. Simon Atkins Phoenix Rising Radio on a BlogTalkRadio interview.
  "The problem with Fukushima is that it's not only continuing for 865 days... I mean, let's wrap our minds around that for a second -- it has been leaking out radiation in increasing volumes for 865 days."
  Why has TEPCO been able to cover up the truth about Fukushima for so long? Because Japan is a society of mass conformity. The idea of keeping your head down and not "rocking the boat" is deeply embedded in Japanese culture.Japan is not a nation of "rugged individualism" but of conformist acquiescence.
  As a result, whistleblowers are shunned, and there is immense peer pressure to defend the status quo... even when it's a terrible lie. This culture of conformity at all costs is precisely what allows companies like TEPCO to continue operating extremely dangerous nuclear power plants with virtually no accountability.
  While Japan has entire museums dedicated to the horrifying history of two Japanese cities being bombed by the United States at the end of World War II, when Japan's own power company is involved in a radiological disaster of similar magnitude, the entire incident gets swept under the rug. Radiation? What radiation? If the government says there's no radiation, then there's no radiation! After all, it's invisible!
  The U.S. government, of course, plays along with the charade because its own top weapons manufacturer -- General Electric -- designed and built the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in the first place. And the design decisions made by GE, such as storing spent fuel rods in large pools high above the ground, now look not just incompetent but downright idiotic. It turns out there was never any long-term plan to dispose of the spent fuel rods. The idea was to just let them build up over time until someone else inherited the problem.So while Japan and the USA play this game of "let's all pretend nothing happened," citizens of both countries continue to be exposed to a relentless wave of deadly radiation that now dwarfs the total radiation release of Chernobyl (which the U.S. media played up in a huge way because the disaster made the Russians look incompetent).
  The only reason TEPCO is finally getting around to admitting the truth in all this is because you can't rig all the Geiger counters forever. Radiation follows the laws of physics and atomic decay, not the whims of lying politicians and bureaucrats. As a result, the real story eventually comes out as we're starting to see right now.
  The upshot is that the Fukushima disaster is not only far worse than you've been told; it's very likely going to be worse than you could ever imagine. The radiation leak isn't plugged, in other words, and another explosion -- which many experts believe might be imminent -- would release thousands of times more nuclear material into the open environment.Ultimately, the entire Northern hemisphere has been placed at risk by a bunch of corporate bureaucrats who thought building a nuclear facility in the path of a sure-to-happen tidal wave was a fantastic idea. Instead of acknowledging the problem and working to fix it like a responsible person would, our world's top politicians and ass-coverers have decided it is in their best short-term interests to play along with the TEPCO fairy tale which ridiculously pretends that radioactive leaks can be controlled by wishful thinking.
  Remember: Governments can lie about the national debt, health care costs, inflation and unemployment, but they cannot lie about radiation for very long. Sooner or later the physics of it all simply cannot be denied.
  P.S. We test everything at the Natural News Store for radiation. Click here to read how we do it.
  Sources for this story include:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-12/fukushima-workers-exposed-to...
  http://birthofanewearth.blogspot.se/2013/07/americans-are-in-grave-da...
  http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-12/fukushima-plant-workers-raise-s...
  http://www.blogtalkradio.com/phoenix3333/2013/07/24/phoenix-rising-ra...
  About the author: Mike Adams is a consumer health advocate and award-winning journalist with a mission to teach personal and planetary health to the public He is a prolific writer and has published thousands of articles, interviews, reports and consumer guides, and he is well known as the creator of popular downloadable preparedness programs on financial collapse, emergency food storage, wilderness survival and home defense skills. Adams is a trusted, independent journalist who receives no money or promotional fees whatsoever to write about other companies' products. In 2010, Adams launched TV.NaturalNews.com, a natural health video site featuring videos on holistic health and green living. He's also the CEO of a highly successful email newsletter software company that develops software used to send permission email campaigns to subscribers. Adams volunteers his time to serve as the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, and enjoys outdoor activities, nature photography, Pilates and martial arts training. Known as the 'Health Ranger,' Adams' personal health statistics and mission statements are located at www.HealthRanger.org
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Fukushima plant spilling contaminated water into the sea 'for years' - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 10:30
  Updated August 12, 2013 16:04:25
  Workers at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant have told the ABC that contaminated water has most likely been seeping into the sea since the disaster two-and-a-half years ago.
  Japan's nuclear watchdog has described the leaks as a "state of emergency".
  Workers have told ABC's AM program that they do not have much faith in Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) ability to handle the situation and they claim another accident is inevitable.
  Fujimoto-san, a 56-year-old decontamination worker at the Fukushima nuclear plant, says he has to hide his real job from his two young grandsons for fears they would shun him if they knew.
  Key pointsWorkers at the Fukushima plant say contaminated water has most likely been seeping into the Pacific Ocean since the disaster two-and-a-half years ago.They say operator the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) knew all along but did nothing.The workers accuse the company of underpaying them and say another accident at the plant is inevitable.Japan's nuclear watchdog has described the leaks as a "state of emergency"."We work at the most dangerous place in Japan," Fujimoto-san said.
  "Not only that, I work 12-hour shifts and only get paid 11,000 yen."
  The wage equates to $125 per shift, or $10 an hour.
  Fujimoto-san says if TEPCO caught him speaking to journalists, there would be serious consequences.
  "I'd be fired for sure. Speaking out is an act of suicide," he said.
  TEPCO has been trying to stop the leak of 300 tonnes of radioactive groundwater every day.
  "Steam came out of the Reactor 3 building the other day," Fujimoto-san said.
  "When it came out, TEPCO didn't even tell us.
  "I found out about it on the TV news after I got home from work."
  He is not the only nuclear worker who believes TEPCO is struggling to cope with the crisis at the Fukushima plant.
  Suzuki-san is a 12-year TEPCO veteran and a former Fukushima site foreman.
  He says the leaks of contaminated water into the Pacific began in 2011.
  "I believe it's been leaking into the ocean from the start of the crisis two-and-a-half years ago," Suzuki-san said.
  "TEPCO probably knew this but did nothing because they didn't want to cause an outcry," he said.
  While many in Japan worry about another disaster at the Fukushima plant, the welfare of workers there is not often raised.
  "There are still reactor buildings we haven't gotten into yet," Fujimoto-san said.
  "So there's always the possibility of another explosion, and if that were to happen, we - the workers - would be the first victims.
  "I fear that a lot."
  Topics:environmental-impact, environmental-management, environment, nuclear-accident, disasters-and-accidents, nuclear-energy, japan
  First posted August 12, 2013 10:11:22
Black American citizens file "Articles of Impeachment" against Obama - WatchdogWire - Florida
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 10:27
  NBRA Chairman Frances Rice, Esquire
  The National Black Republican Association (NBRA) based in Sarasota, FL, headed by Chairman Frances Rice, filed Articles of Impeachment against President Barack Obama with the following language:
  We, black American citizens, in order to free ourselves and our fellow citizens from governmental tyranny, do herewith submit these Articles of Impeachment to Congress for the removal of President Barack H. Obama, aka, Barry Soetoro, from office for his attack on liberty and commission of egregious acts of despotism that constitute high crimes and misdemeanors.
  On July 4, 1776, the founders of our nation declared their independence from governmental tyranny and reaffirmed their faith in independence with the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791. Asserting their right to break free from the tyranny of a nation that denied them the civil liberties that are our birthright, the founders declared:
  ''When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.'' - Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.
  THE IMPEACHMENT POWER
  Article II, Section IV of the United States Constitution provides: ''The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.''
  THE ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT
  In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, Barack H. Obama, aka Barry Soetoro, personally and through his subordinates and agents, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice, in that:
  ARTICLE 1
  He has covered up, delayed, impeded and obstructed the investigation of the Benghazi Battle.
  Specific conduct includes: (1) failing to adequately secure the US Consulate and the CIA annex in Benghazi; (2) failing to send a response team to rescue embattled US citizens in Benghazi; (3) lying to the American people about why the US Consulate and the CIA annex were attacked in Benghazi; and (3) hiding from the media and congressional investigators the Central Intelligence Agency personnel and other wounded US citizens who were on the ground in Benghazi by scattering them throughout the United States, forcing them to adopt new identities and subjecting them to monthly polygraph tests.
  Benghazi Battle elements that are under investigation:
  On September 11, 2012, the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, the US Consulate and the CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya was targeted in a premeditated, preplanned attack launched without warning by Islamist militants.
  Footage of the attack broadcast in real time showed armed men attacking the consulate with rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades, assault rifles, 14.5 mm anti-aircraft machine guns, truck mounted artillery, diesel canisters, and mortars. It was not an act of savage mob violence, nor a spontaneous protest in response to an anti-Islamic video on YouTube.
  In that attack, four American citizens were killed: US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens; Information Officer Sean Smith; and two embassy security personnel, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, both former Navy SEALs. Ambassador Stevens is the first U.S. ambassador killed in an attack since Adolph Dubs was killed in 1979.
  ARTICLE 2
  He has disclosed secret grand jury material by exposing the existence of a sealed indictment of one of the Benghazi attackers in violation of Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure that clearly states: '''... no person may disclose the indictment's existence except as necessary to issue or execute a warrant or summons.''
  ARTICLE 3
  He has authorized and permitted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a division of the Justice Department, to conduct Operation Fast and Furious, wherein guns were sold to Mexican drug trafficking organizations that were used to kill innocent Mexican civilians and two rifles sold to a smuggler in January 2010 ended up at the scene of the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in December 2010.
  ARTICLE 4
  He has authorized and permitted confidential income tax returns information from the Internal Revenue Service to be provided to unauthorized individuals, organizations and agencies.
  ARTICLE 5
  He has caused investigations and audits to be initiated or conducted by the Internal Revenue Service in a discriminatory manner, including harassment and intimidation of conservative, evangelical and Tea Party groups applying for non-profit status between 2010 and 2012.
  Elements of this illegal conduct include the facts that: (1) the head of the Internal Revenue Service tax-exempt organization division, Lois Lerner, admitted during a telephonic press event that illegal targeting occurred, then invoked her Fifth Amendment right and refused to answer questions before Congress about the targeting out of fear of self-incrimination; (2) two other career Internal Revenue Service employees stated that they acted at the behest of superiors in Washington '-- Carter Hull, a retired Internal Revenue Service Attorney and Elizabeth Hofacre, an employee of the Cincinnati IRS office which oversaw tax-exempt applications; and (3) Carter Hull stated that he was directed to forward the targeted applications to, among others, one of only two political appointees in the Internal Revenue Service Chief Counsel William Wilkins.
  ARTICLE 6
  He has (1) authorized and permitted the National Security Agency to conduct or continue electronic surveillance of over 300 million average Americans; (2) given access to National Security Agency surveillance data to other intelligence units within the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security in violation of the law; and (3) conducted the surveillance of average Americans unconstrained by Congress, the United Supreme Court or the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court which has, to this date, functioned as a rubber stamp, having approved every request made of it in 2012 and rejecting only two of the 8,591 requests submitted between 2008 and 2012.
  ARTICLE 7
  He has authorized and permitted the Department of Justice to wiretap and secretly obtain two months of telephone and e-mail records of Fox News Reporter James Rosen and over one hundred Associated Press journalists.
  ARTICLE 8
  He has thwarted Congress by (1) failing to enforce all or parts of laws duly enacted by Congress, including the Defense of Marriage Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, and the Affordable Care Act; and (2) after Congress refused to pass his Dream Act, unilaterally issuing an executive order directing immigration officers to no longer deport an entire class of illegal immigrants who came here as children, regardless of individual circumstances, and to give them work-authorization permits.
  ARTICLE 9
  He has violated the Constitution when, on January 4, 2012, (1) he bypassed the U. S. Senate to appoint three members of the National Labor Relations Board, actions that were ruled unconstitutional by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit which affirmed previous decisions by the Court of Appeal for the D.C. Circuit and the Third Circuit; and (2) he bypassed the U. S. Senate to appoint Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
  ARTICLE 10
  He has intimidated whistleblowers and brought twice as many prosecutions against whistleblowers as all prior presidents combined. Egregiously, while refusing to prosecute anyone for actual torture, he prosecuted former Central Intelligence Agency employee John Kiriakou for disclosing the torture program.
  Wherefore Barack H. Obama, aka Barry Soetoro, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.
  About The NBRAOur vision is that black Americans will become power players in the political arena so that they can seize control over their own destiny and move into our ownership society through small business and home ownership.
  MISSION: The mission of the National Black Republican Association (NBRA) is to be a resource for the black community on Republican ideals and promote the traditional values of the black community which are the core values of the Republican Party: strong families, faith in God, personal responsibility, quality education, and equal opportunities for all.
  GOAL: The goal of the NBRA is to return black Americans to their Republican Party roots by enlightening them about how Republicans fought for their freedom and civil rights, and are now fighting for their educational and economic advancement.
  OBJECTIVES: The objectives of the NBRA are to conduct a nationwide grassroots educational campaign in black communities; champion school choice opportunity scholarships to give black parents educational options and access to a quality education for their children; and provide training and resources for grassroots activists and candidates for elected office.
  Contact us by mail to:
  National Black Republican Association 4594 Chase Oaks DriveSarasota, FL 34241-9183
  About Frances Rice, Esquire, Lieutenant Colonel, US Army (Retired)President NBRAFrances Rice joined the Army in 1964 as a Private and retired as a Lieutenant Colonel after 20 years of active service. She received a Bachelor of Science degree from Drury College in 1973, a Master of Business Administration from Golden Gate University in 1976, and a Juris Doctorate degree from the University of California, Hastings College of Law in 1977'--all while serving in the US Army.
  During twenty years of active duty in the US Army, Frances served in a variety of positions, including commander of a WAC company, adjutant of a basic combat training brigade, a prosecuting attorney, and chief of the administrative law division. She also served as a special assistant to the Army Judge Advocate General and an adviser to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Equal Opportunity.
  Subsequent to her military career, Frances worked for the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, serving first as a member of that company's ''think tank,'' and then as a government contract advisor. She later taught Business Law for the European Division of the University of Maryland in Brussels, Belgium.
  Frances became politically active in 1982 and served as a member of President Ronald Reagan's Private Sector Initiatives Task Force. She worked as a volunteer in the campaigns of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, as well as Governors Jeb Bush, Charlie Crist and Rick Scott.
  Frances is active in the Executive Committee of the Republican Party of Sarasota County. In 2005, she became a co-founder and Chairman of the National Black Republican Association, an organization that is committed to returning African Americans to their Republican Party roots. Recently she was honored as the Volunteer of the Year by the Republican Party of Sarasota County. Governor Rick Scott appointed Frances to the Government Efficiency Task Force in July 2011 for the task force's one-year duration.
  Among the awards she received during her military career is the Legion of Merit, the second highest honor that can be bestowed upon a non-combatant. In 1987, she was accorded the distinction of being one of America's top 100 Black Business and Professional Women by the editorial board of Dollars and Sense magazine.
  Dr. Richard SwierDr. Rich Swier is the Editor of Watchdog Wire '' Florida. He holds a Doctorate of Education from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, a Master's Degree in Management Information Systems from the George Washington University, Washington, D.C., and a Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts from Washington University, St. Louis, MO. Richard is a 23-year Army veteran who retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1990. He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his years of service. Additionally, he was awarded two Bronze Stars with ''V'' for Heroism in ground combat, the Presidential Unit Citation, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry while serving with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam. He is a graduate of the Field Artillery Officers Basic and Advanced Courses, and U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. Richard was the Founder/CEO of Sarasota Online, a high technology company that was sold to Comcast Cable in 1996.
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  RELATED ARTICLESEditorial: It's Not Your Father's Republican Party AnymoreBlack American citizens file ''Articles of Impeachment'' against Obama173 cases of alleged interstate voter fraud in Florida & MarylandFlorida's Failing Schools Could Impact 2016 Republican Presidential PrimaryEditorial: President Christie? It Could HappenCOMMENTS
The Wellspring Foundation - Google Search
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  The Wellspring Foundation for Educationwww.thewellspringfoundation.org/- CachedWellspring is a Christian development organization seeking to bringtransformation to Rwanda through quality Christian values based education.Map for The Wellspring Foundation
  Wellspring Foundation Inc.Offers treatment for a variety of mental illnesses and substance abuses.Information included on eating disorders, addictions, and attachment tracks,history and ...Wellspring Foundation | Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/wellspringfoundation- CachedWellspring Foundation. 656 likes · 15 talking about this.The Wellspring Foundation for Education | LinkedInwww.linkedin.com/.../the-wellspring-foundation-for-education- CachedWelcome to the company profile of The Wellspring Foundation for Education onLinkedIn. Today the story of Rwanda's recovery is inspiring hope around the ...Fibromyalgia Wellspring FoundationTuesday, April 30, 2013 -- Fibro Forum In partnership with The Arthritis Society ofBC The focus of this evening forum will be to educate the community about ...The Wellspring Foundation for Education | Rwanda Education NGO ...www.rencp.org/about/.../the-wellspring-foundation-for-education/- CachedThe Wellspring Foundation for Education was formed in 2004 in response to aRwandan vision to build this beautiful nation through high quality, christian ...Wellspring - Wellspring Cancer Support NetworkWellspring is a network of community-based centres that offer programsproviding support, coping skills, and education to cancer patients and theirfamilies.Wellspring Foundation in Bethlehem, CT - US News Best Hospitalshealth.usnews.com/best-hospitals/.../wellspring-foundation-6160015- CachedWellspring Foundation is a psychiatric hospital in Bethlehem, CT, with 36 beds.Wellspring Foundation - Brenda Evanswww.brendaevans.myubertor.com/WellspringFoundation.ubr- CachedBrenda has partnered with the Wellspring Foundation to help the Foundationachieve their mission "To establish high quality, Christian values basededucation ...Wellspring Foundationwww.wellspring1866.org/
  It will stir the foundation of your being - nothing like it on earth!Searches related to The Wellspring Foundation
AUDIO-Sept. 11 Documentarian Wins MacArthur Genius Grant : NPR
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  Melissa Block profiles several of the newly announced 2012 MacArthur Fellows. In this segment she speaks with Laura Poitras, a documentarian who is making a trilogy of films about the post-Sept. 11 world.
  Copyright (C) 2012 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.
  MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
  Today on the program, we're talking with several of the 23 MacArthur Fellows officially announced today. They each received half a million dollars, no strings attached. The winners include a geriatrician, a conceptual photographer, a marine biologist, a stringed instrument bow maker, and the documentary filmmaker we're about to meet, Laura Poitras. She's working on the last in a trilogy of films about America's post-911 war on terror. The first, called "My Country, My Country," is about the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It was nominated for an Academy Award. The second, titled "The Oath," was filmed in Yemen and Guantanamo, focusing on detainee Salim Hamdan.
  (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE OATH")
  UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: The government has alleged that Mr. Hamdan has conspired with al-Qaida, these charges are nothing short of absurd.
  UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: He is a war criminal. We will establish that he is a war criminal.
  BLOCK: Salim Hamdan was the Yemeni detainee, the former driver for Osama bin Laden, whose case let ultimately to a landmark Supreme Court ruling on military commission. How did you approach his story?
  LAURA POITRAS: Well, in this case I went to Yemen with the idea of wanting to do something on Guantanamo, and Hamdan's case was very significant because it was the first military commission case. And so the film documents kinds of the straying away from the rule of law that we've seen at Guantanamo. And it also follows his brother-in-law, a man named Abu Jandal, who worked for Osama bin Laden, and so there's these interwoven storylines.
  BLOCK: How do you describe what ties your films together? The first film on Iraq, the second on the Hamdan case and the third, that you're working on now about surveillance and the NSA. What's the through-line there?
  POITRAS: As a documentarian and as a journalist, I actually felt compelled that we should have a history, and it should be a history of sort of on-the-ground of what's happening post-911. And so, there are big themes that I'm interested in. Those themes are preemptive war, rendition, torture, indefinite detention without trial. I mean these are all things that are really quite large departures from United States policy before that. So, as a documentarian, I felt really compelled to have a record of that, and so they're unified by these sorts of narratives that are essentially written by the choices that the government has made in response to 9/11.
  BLOCK: The work you've done and the interviews that you're describing have led to you being detained dozens of times at airports. You've been interrogated at length, your cell phone, your laptop, your camera have been seized. And you've assumed that you're on a watch list because of your work and where you travel. You've decided to finish your last film, the third in this trilogy, in Europe not here in the United States. Why don't you explain why.
  POITRAS: Well, I mean what's happened, it's a series of events after - in 2006 I was put on a watch list and I've been repeatedly detained at the U.S. border as I travel. And I've had my notes photocopied and these kind of very strong kinds of harassment for the work that I'm doing. And so, you know, as a journalist who's trying to deal with work that the government is very interested in trying to keep secret, I feel an obligation to do whatever I can to protect the sources and the people that I'm working with who are taking great risks to talk me. And, at the moment, it feels safer for me to work outside of the United States, which is a sad thing to say.
  BLOCK: How have you changed the way you work and how you travel knowing that you're going to be detained and questioned every time you come back to the States?
  POITRAS: That's a really complicated question. The project I'm working on now, I have laptops in a couple of different cities that I leave there because I don't want to bring them with me across the border. I don't bring any notebooks with me. I, you know, phone people before, you know, I take off and I text when I land so that somebody can be monitoring how long I'm held for. And, you know, go through long sort of clearing of hard drives every time I enter the United States. And it's something that only happens at U.S. borders.
  BLOCK: Has it become routine to you to do all this?
  POITRAS: No, actually. I still get nervous every time I get on a plane heading home.
  BLOCK: Well, Laura Poitras, thank you very much. And, congratulations on the MacArthur.
  POITRAS: Thank you. Thank you so much.
  BLOCK: That's documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, one of this year's MacArthur winners. Elsewhere in the program, we hear from two other winners, a geochemist who studies volcanoes and a historian who studies property ownership among slaves and their descendants.
  (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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  This is NPR.
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  NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
Zeitgeist Films | My Country, My Country
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  CreditsFeaturingDr. Riyadh
  Also FeaturingPeter Towndrow, Australian private contractorCarlos Valenzuela, U.N. Elections SupportCapt. Kris Scarcliff, U.S. Army, Civil Affairs
  Director/Camera/Sound Laura PoitrasProducers Laura Poitras & Jocelyn GlatzerEditors Erez Laufer and Laura PoitrasSinger/Songwriter Kadhum Al SahirCo-Producer Aliza KaplanAssociate Producer Rosie Bsheer
  MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY is a co-production of Praxis Films and The Independent Television Service (ITVS). Produced in association with P.O.V./American Documentary.
  Additional funding provided by: The Sundance Institute Documentary Fund, The Robert and Joyce Menschel Family Foundation, The Wellspring Foundation, The Appleman Foundation.
Crisis in Syria | U.S. Agency for International Development
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  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 09:59
  Numbers At A Glance6.8 millionPeople in Need of Humanitarian Assistance in Syria
  4.25 millionInternally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Syria
  1.9 millionSyrians Displaced to Neighboring Countries
  The United States is committed to helping the innocent children, women, and men affected by the ongoing conflict in Syria.
  6.8 million people in Syria are in need of humanitarian assistance, and over 1.6 million people have fled to the neighboring countries.
  On August 7, President Barack Obama announced more than $195 million in additional USG humanitarian assistance to help feed, shelter, and provide medical care for children, women, and men affected by the ongoing conflict in Syria. The United States remains the single-largest contributor of humanitarian assistance for the Syrian people, and this new contribution brings total U.S. humanitarian assistance for the crisis in Syria to to more than $1 billion.
  This $195 million in additional humanitarian aid from the United States will increase food aid, medical care, clean water, and provide shelter and other relief supplies for families suffering in Syria and neighboring countries. In addition, the United States is increasing support for activities to protect especially vulnerable populations'--including women, children, and the elderly'--and improving sanitation and hygiene to help prevent the spread of water-borne illness.
  The United States is now providing aid to 3.2 million people in Syria across all 14 governorates and continues to work through all possible channels to deliver aid to those in need in Syria, including through the United Nations, international and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and local Syrian organizations.
  HUMANITARIAN FUNDING TO SYRIA HUMANITARIAN RESPONSE IN FY2012 AND FY2013*USAID/OFDA
  $208,811,613
  USAID/FFP
  $312,783,482
  State/PRM
  $488,759,482
  Total U.S. Government (USG) Assistance to the Syria Humanitarian Response
  $1,010,354,195
  *These figures are current as of August 7, 2013
  Key DevelopmentsOn August 7, President Barack Obama announced more than $195 million in additional USG humanitarian assistance for the Syria response, bringing total USG humanitarian assistance for the Syria crisis to more than $1 billion since the conflict began. The new funding includes $156 million through U.N. agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to support food, health care, psychosocial support, gender-based violence (GBV) response services, the distribution of relief supplies, and other assistance inside Syria. The remaining $40.7 million will support food assistance, including food vouchers, in-kind rations, and ready-to-eat meals where necessary, for refugees in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Egypt.
  On July 23, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah each met with leaders of several U.N. agencies and other international humanitarian organizations. Both the Secretary and Administrator reinforced the unwavering U.S. commitment to addressing the Syria humanitarian crisis. The meetings provided an opportunity to discuss ways to address challenges in delivering aid and to focus attention on the need to increase regional stabilization and development programs.
  On July 25, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated that the Syria conflict has killed more than 100,000 people. The Secretary-General, who made the remarks prior to talks with Secretary Kerry, urged the convening of a peace conference. Both leaders stressed that the conflict has no military solution and can only be resolved through political means.
  Previous Syria Fact SheetsFY 2013Syria '' Complex Emergency07/18/2013 Fact Sheet #20 (436kb PDF) and map (523kb PDF)07/03/2013 Fact Sheet #19 (350kb PDF) and map (3mb PDF)06/17/2013 Fact Sheet #18 (382kb PDF) and map (525kb PDF)06/07/2013 Fact Sheet #17 (288kb PDF) and map (500kb PDF)05/23/2013 Fact Sheet #16 (301kb PDF) and map (900kb PDF)
  Syria Disaster Response Archive
Obama Announces $195 Million in Humanitarian Aid for Syria
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  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 09:57
  President Barack Obama announced the United States is providing an additional $195 million in food and humanitarian aid to help the Syrian people on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan.The White House issued a statement from the president to Muslims celebrating the religious holiday, also known as the Feast of Breaking the Fast.
  The statement says the total U.S. humanitarian aid contribution to the Syrian people since the civil war began there totals more than $1 billion.
  ''Many of us have had the opportunity to break fast with our Muslim friends and colleagues '' a tradition that reminds us to be grateful for our blessings and to show compassion for the less fortunate among us, including millions of Syrians who spent Ramadan displaced from their homes, their families, and their loved ones,'' said the statement by Obama.
  Rebels trying to topple the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have accused Washington of being slow to provide weapons and military support to their uprising, which started two and a half years ago.The U.S. has, though, been providing humanitarian aid throughout the conflict.
Statement by the President on the Occasion of Eid al-Fitr | The White House
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  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 09:56
  The White House
  Office of the Press Secretary
  For Immediate Release
  August 07, 2013
  Michelle and I send our warmest greetings to Muslims celebrating Eid al-Fitr here in the United States and around the world. During the past month, Muslims have honored their faith through prayer and service, fasting and time spent with loved ones. At this year's White House Iftar, I was proud to spend time with some of the many American Muslims whose contributions enrich our democracy and strengthen our economy. Many of us have had the opportunity to break fast with our Muslim friends and colleagues'--a tradition that reminds us to be grateful for our blessings and to show compassion to the less fortunate among us, including millions of Syrians who spent Ramadan displaced from their homes, their families, and their loved ones. To help the many Syrians in need this Eid al-Fitr, the United States is providing an additional $195 million in food aid and other humanitarian aid, bringing our humanitarian contribution to the Syrian people to over $1 billion since the crisis began. For millions of Americans, Eid is part of a great tapestry of America's many traditions, and I wish all Muslims a blessed and joyful celebration. Eid Mubarak.
GLOBAL LOOTING: The numbers that all point to imminent bank bailins | The Slog. 3-D bollocks deconstruction
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  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 09:44
  Unpaid Greek bank loans exceed total Greek bank recapitalisation budget.'‚¬4 trillion hole in the EU banking system
  US Fed ships '‚¬1.3 trillion of prop-up money into eurozone
  French debt is 174% of gdp
  ClubMed debt is now mathematically unrepayable
  ''Ignore what they tell you,'' a famous Wall Street trader once told Mark J. Grant, ''just look at the numbers''. This was always the advice I gave to trainee advertising strategists: most people are bored by tables'...decide not to be bored by the tables, and you will rule the Kingdom of the Blind.
  As you'll have seen from yesterday's comment thread here, the Chairwoman of the EU Parliament's Economic & Monetary Affairs Committee wrote to The Slog yesterday and denied there was any law on the Statute to enable a legal bailin. She did, however, admit that some existing legal instruments ''are an issue''. I pointed out that they had no legal right to subordinate Greek bondholders or rape Cyprus, but they did it anyway. As to the Rapid Response Mechanism(RRM), she had no answer. It was however a very polite letter: it had an air of concern to it, in that MEPs were having to ''insist'' on this, that and the other thing. The truth is, it's already too late for concern; as my original source asserted, all the mechanisms are in place.
  We must now turn to more evidence supporting the proposition that speed is of the essence in the minds of Brussels-am-Berlin and the ECB'....and even Washington/Wall Street. You see, the Americans have done the numbers too. The 'unlikely eventuality' always referred to in EC proposals is a racing certainty. So, here are some key facts'....and a lot of numbers:
  * A German opposition SPD spokesman said on Monday, ''By disputing the need for additional aid for Greece, the Chancellor is lying to the People before the election.'' Well, fair enough, he would say that'...there's an election on. But the numbers here are very clear: last month's approval of a new loan to Athens of '‚¬5.8 billion is a pee in the Pacific compared to the shambolic situation there. Non-performing bank loans in Greece now total '‚¬88 billion. These loans exceed the total funds set aside for the recapitalization of the Greek banks, '‚¬80.5bn. People contacted in the US and Europe over the last week provided a median capital shortfall estimate in the European banking system (that includes the UK by the way, a not inconsiderable part of it) of around '‚¬3 to 5.5 trillion. US investment veteran John Embry offered an uncannily similar figure at the weekend '' $4trillion.
  * Probably because of this widely held view, in July this year alone the US Fed deposited some '‚¬1.3 trillion in unspecified ''European banks''. That's '‚¬48bn more than they have committed to U.S. banks.This isn't the first time the Americans have refilled some of Mario Draghi's insane pit of debt. But this is big money, pop pickers. It might also explain why Uncle Ben's Mice are keen to taper off the free money aka QE to the US markets.
  * Italy's situation is rapidly spiralling down the plughole: government debt rose to a new record '‚¬3trillion earlier this week. But that's no problem, because the economy grew 0.3%, so that'll fix it, hmm? And 0.3% of not very much is'...have to hurry you'...
  * Portugal is desperately close to default. Its deficit has narrowed considerably, but it's way behind on the debt payments. The debt to GDP for this year is forecast to be 123%. More to the point, the country is almost out of cash. If Portugal goes, Spain goes.
  * One suspects that all this maraca-rattling about Gibralter is, as with Argentina and the Falklands, a handy diversion. Spanish bankruptcies are up 45%. Its economy contracted again in Q2, unemployment remains at 26%, and debt to GDP is running at 92%'....up from 85% last year.
  * Greek debt will reach 175% of GDP by the end of this year, according to data in the Economist. Two years ago the idea was for it to be 118% by now. Just a fraction out there, Ms Lagarde. Situation normal.
  * The disaster that still dare not be mentioned very much in the media is France. France is very big, right? What do you think its debt to GDP ratio is '' 85%? 115%. Try 174%. And its economy is contracting'....just at the time Francois Hollande decides to, um, put up personal and corporate taxes. Novel, you have to hand that to the bloke.
  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
  President Hollande's reaction does raise a key issue in relation to debt repayment. It's often ignored by the clever folks because it doesn't use phrases like Open Bank Reconciliation via European Stability Something or Other Mechanism. It's this: sod the debt, look at the revenues available to pay it off.
  This is the Eurozone's core problem: debts are rising, and revenues are falling.
  Some of this is thanks to the Herman van Sch¤uble-Merkel Congolese school of econo-fiscal management, but the vast majority of it is down to the inability of debt holders, Sovereigns and banking firms to write off debt. This is turn is a function of the average very stupid person's inability to extrapolate the effect of ever-more unmanageable debt. Oddly enough, the debt simply gets bigger. But to couple this with the Congolese approach to economic growth was a master stroke that doubled the rate at which debts got worse: because in this game, it's all about the debt v revenue trends. Not rocket science, just the sort of mathematics accessible to most 12 year olds.
  The simple truth is this:
  1. The European banking system is nowhere near solvent.
  2. The ECB is being propped up by the US Fed.
  3. The Fed is tapering off support for the US economy, whose 'recovery' is a mirage, and still overshadowed by gigantic debt.
  4. The entire ClubMed area is underwater with no hope of ever repaying debt based on the existing economic 'model' being applied to it. After Labor Day early next month, the Dow folks are back at their desks. I suspect their general view won't be positive, about either the US or the EU. Shortly after that, Merkel will probably be re-elected. Always beware the politician who just got back in: that's the very time they're most likely to do something drastic.
  5. In the next year or so, bank failures in both regions are a near-certainty. It is possible that the entire Spanish banking system could collapse.
  6. The EC already has mechanisms in place that could railroad bailins through in the EU as a whole. In his Budget speech two months ago, Osborne directly referred to this as ''the future model'' for handling bank defaults. Either an emergency session of the E&MC or the invoking of the RRM in the eurozone could legalise a bailin in the eurozone tomorrow.
  To suggest in this context that Sovereigns and central bankers won't come after the cash in bank accounts and pension funds is to be like the Jew who decides to sit tight in Vienna as the Nazi troops march in. The idiotic thing is that there is nowhere near enough cash lying about among ordinary squeezed middle savers to pick up the tab for the mad banking and borrowing practices that have been allowed to become the norm over the last fifteen years.
  The only sensible and logical conclusion would've been to write off that EU sovereign debt which was obviously unrepayable two years ago. But instead, the facade of sustainability has been maintained, and scorched-earth economics applied. Now we are going to be asked to pay for it.
  We should not. Here in Britain the Co-operative rape has already begun. Next in line, I predict, will be RBS. The time to resist this was three months ago. So I suggest we start yesterday.
  Yesterday at The Slog: How Osborne's feelgood wheeze will rebound on him
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VIDEO-Off Label - Movie Trailers - iTunes
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  Off Label - Movie Trailers - iTunesPlease enable JavaScript to view this page properly.
  Find Showtimes Off Label In theaters: August 9th, 2013Copyright (C) 2013 Oscilloscope LaboratoriesSynopsisDoctors today are liberally writing prescriptions for psychotropic drugs such as Adderall, Ambien, Zoloft, and Prozac (to name but a very few). Often these drugs are combined in polypharmacy cocktails or are given out for unapproved or untested indications, leading to abuse, dangerous side effects, and heavy dependence. In OFF LABEL, Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher (October Country) examine our runaway pharma-culture by weaving together the stories of drug-testing subjects, Big Pharma representatives, and many others touched by the rampant use of pharmaceuticals. Together, they create a poetic, sometimes amusing and frequently heartbreaking emotional road trip through an overmedicated, misdiagnosed, and drug-addled America.
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Canada train crash company shut down
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  Source: The Guardian World News
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 03:10
  The blaze in Lac M(C)gantic, Quebec, after a runaway trail hauling oil tankers crashed. Photograph: EPA
  Canada's transportation agency is suspending the operating licence of the US-based rail company whose runaway oil train derailed and exploded in a Quebec town, killing 47 people.
  The agency said on Tuesday it was taking away the certificate of fitness for the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway and its Canadian subsidiary, effective from 20 August.
  The agency said it was not satisfied that the troubled company, which has filed for bankruptcy since the 6 July disaster, had demonstrated that its third-party liability insurance was adequate to keep operating.
  The parked train, with 72 tankers of crude oil, was unattended when it began rolling and derailed in the center of Lac-M(C)gantic. Several tankers exploded, destroying 40 buildings. The company has blamed the man operating the train for failing to set enough handbrakes.
  The agency said the disaster raised questions about the growing use of rail transport for oil, including important ones regarding the adequacy of third-party liability insurance coverage to deal with catastrophic events, especially for smaller railways.
  "This was not a decision made lightly, as it affects the economies of communities along the railway, employees of MMA and MMAC, as well as the shippers who depend on rail services," said Geoff Hare, the agency's chief executive.
  Messages left at the office of MMA chairman Ed Burkhardt by the Associated Press were not immediately returned.
  In its bankruptcy filings the railway and its Canadian counterpart, Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Canada Co, cited debts to more than 200 creditors following the disaster.
  Lac-M(C)gantic and the Quebec government have sent legal notices to the railway demanding it reimburse the town nearly $8m in environmental clean-up costs.
  Pierre Arseneau, a union representative for MMA workers in Quebec, said he was disappointed the railway would lose its licence but he understood the importance of having sufficient insurance coverage. Arseneau, a member of the United Steelworkers, was concerned about the dozens of jobs at stake and hoped another operator would take over the railroad quickly.
  Twenty-four of the railway's 75 employees in Quebec have already lost their jobs since the derailment but Arseneau feared the impact of the suspension could reach well beyond MMA if a solution was not found quickly. "It's also the whole economy of the region," Arseneau said. "There are lots of companies that depend on the railroad."
  The Canadian decision had no immediate effect across the border because the severed rail line meant Maine shippers had to reroute traffic.
  The US Surface Transportation Board could step in to appoint someone to operate the line if Montreal, Maine and Atlantic stopped rail service or if the service deteriorated, said Nate Moulton, rail director for Maine's transportation department.
  MM&A had already announced its intention to sell the rail line to generate money to pay its debts, Moulton said.
Lawyers to investigate FBI shooting death of Boston suspect's friend | World news | theguardian.com
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 02:56
  Abdul-Baki Todashev holds a photo he claims is of his dead son Ibragim Todashev at an earlier news conference. Photograph: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
  The father of a Chechen man shot and killed by FBI agents investigating the Boston Marathon bombing has hired two prominent Florida civil rights attorneys in his attempt to uncover the truth about his son's death.
  Abdulbaki Todashev spoke at a Tuesday press conference in Tampa at which the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim advocacy group, announced that lawyers Barry Cohen and Eric Ludin had been retained to represent the dead man's family as three separate investigations into the 22 May shooting progressed.
  Federal agents killed Ibragim Todashev, 27, an acquaintance of Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in his Orlando apartment after several hours of interrogation. The FBI has never discussed details of the incident, but launched an internal inquiry, while Jeff Ashton, state attorney for Orange and Osceola counties, announced his own criminal investigation last week.
  CAIR officials, meanwhile, have hired experts to conduct their own examination of the evidence, and said Tuesday they reserved the right to launch civil action depending on the results of the various inquiries.
  "It's not just about the Muslim community, it's about the civil rights of all Americans," Hassan Shibly, the group's executive director, said.
  "No legal authority is above the law. This case is about police accountability and justice. I don't think we want to live in a country where people get shot by federal agents in their own homes."
  Todashev, speaking through a translator, paid tribute to his son as "a good boy who didn't do anything wrong".
  He said he was "certain we will be able to achieve justice" and added that his unarmed son's life was cut short just days before he was due to visit family in Russia, having given his full co-operation to investigators.
  "He was simply not capable of doing it," Todashev said, referring to claim in an early FBI statement that Ibragim Todashev, who had trained at the same mixed martial arts gym in Boston as Tsarnaev, lunged at the agents. His son had recently undergone knee surgery and was incapable of leaping at anybody, he said.
  "He was responsible and conscientious. He was a good brother, a good family member, we all loved him very much and he loved us back."
  Todashev's quiet demeanour was markedly different from a fiery press conference he gave in Russia in May, at which he denounced the FBI agents as "bandits" who murdered his son "execution-style".
  "I'd only seen and heard things like that in the movies '' they shoot somebody and then a shot in the head to make sure," he said then, commenting on CAIR's assertion, based on autopsy photos and reports of friends who prepared the body for burial, that the younger Todashev was shot six times in the torso and once in the back of the head.
  Cohen, a Tampa-based attorney who was not at the press conference, is no stranger to high-profile cases and is renowned as a media-savvy lawyer who specialises in representing clients against federal agencies or corporate giants.
  Ludin, a senior partner of the Clearwater firm Tucker Ludin, was keen to keep media questioning away from speculation about the shooting incident and what he said was "just a rumour" that Todashev was being questioned as a suspect in a 2011 triple homicide in Waltham, Massachusetts, in which a close friend of Tsarnaev was a victim.
  "We have theories of what happened but it would be inappropriate to theorise and it could interfere in some way with Mr Ashton's investigation," Ludin said."We want to be as co-operative as possible and so we aren't going to comment on what we think happened in that room except that we think it was not a justified killing."
  But he did say he "had no reason there was any kind of deadly weapon in the possession of our client's son".
  He said he had no idea how long Ashton's inquiry would take but that he had urged the older Todashev, who was scheduled to return to Russia this week, to stay in the country at least until he had the chance to meet with Ashton.
  The FBI, he added, had tried to talk to Todashev, but that he had declined an interview without a lawyer present.
  Ludin said he understood why the FBI had requested the coroner's office to withhold the autopsy report because it was relevant to an inquiry concerning possible criminal behaviour by law enforcement officers, and its release could compromise the investigation.
  "My client's son may have been an acquaintance with a person involved in an evil act, but merely being an acquaintance, merely being a Muslim, merely being from a Russian province, does not mean he isn't deserving of proper treatment by law enforcement officers," he said.
  The FBI did not respond to a request from the Guardian for comment, but a spokesman said recently that the agency is conducting a "thorough" inquiry into the incident.
Obama's James Clapper Mistake and Laura Poitras's Lists
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  Archived Version
  Source: Interesting News Items
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 01:58
  http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/08/obamas-clapper-mistake.html?mobify=0
Status Quo, there they go '' selling shopping all over the world
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  Archived Version
  Source: Culture | theguardian.com
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 01:57
  Francis Rossi, right, with Rick Parfitt on stage and playing the greatest hits. "Doing them where they're supposed to be, in front of people, is always a joy," he says. Photograph: Peter Wafzig/Getty Images
  Forty years ago Status Quo were known for being long-haired, denim-clad hard rockers. Now they're best known in Australia for giant red hands and a modern reimagining of their biggest hit, Down Down, as a supermarket slogan.
  "They were using Down Down for some few years," Status Quo singer and guitarist Francis Rossi says when asked about the band's deal with Coles. "And our manager got a meeting with the people at Coles to discuss an Australian tour sponsorship, and the idea came back, 'Well, perhaps would they do an ad?'
  "And it was so successful for them that suddenly it was, 'Oh you Status Quo boys, you're marvellous!'" he says, laughing. "It's been a great relationship. We're doing a couple more [ads] with them tomorrow."
  This is what survival looks like for stars of the 60s who failed to die before they got old. What once was sneeringly dismissed as "selling out" now appears to be shrewd monetisation of existing assets.
  What should establishment-threatening rock'n'roll rebels do when they become the establishment: compete with younger, cooler versions of themselves, or accept their best days are behind them and take a solid pay cheque churning out the back catalogue on the nostalgia circuit?
  Rossi made that decision long ago: cool doesn't send his kids to university. "We are our back catalogue."
  Not their first reinvention: the Status Quo were a psychedelic rock band in 1968. Photograph: uppa.co.ukEmerging as a psychedelic rock band in 1967 the band originally called themselves the Status Quo, but had before long dropped the definite article along with the beads and flowers, and reinvented themselves as a straight-ahead, good-time, boogie rock outfit. It made them one of the biggest selling bands of the decade with hits such as Whatever You Want, Rockin' All over the World and the No 1 Down Down.
  The band briefly disbanded in the early 80s, but have been busy ever since '' touring, making albums and now, with Bula Quo!, entering the world of film.
  And while the film's soundtrack forms the new Quo album, it's telling that it comes with a bonus disc of re-recordings of their best-known songs.
  The way Rossi tells it, the biggest motivation for the band these days is simple: fear. "We grew up in the postwar world of England, which was heavily depressed and we were trying to escape it," he says. "This is a person who didn't get much of an education to make it in this capitalist world; success is what makes the man. And it's kind of sad, but I feel that if I fail with Status Quo, then I'm a failure."
  And that is why Rossi sees nothing wrong with playing the old songs night after night. "Lots of acts that have been around a long time have a problem with their catalogue, like they're ashamed of it, and it's so much of a smack in the face for a fan.
  "I've always been a keen Everly Brothers fan, or an Eagles fan or Fleetwood Mac, or Muse, or the Killers '' and if I go and see those acts and they don't do the tracks I know them for, who the hell are they?"
  But doesn't that get '... well, boring? Being known around the world for the singles is a problem that lots of people would like to have, Rossi says."So maybe 85% of the set is for what we call the floating punter: he knows the hits and he's happy hearing that. But the hardcore fans, they want to hear the album tracks and the strange B-sides, and whenever we've done that you see these massive question marks over the heads of most of the people in the hall, going, 'What the hell? Who's this?' "
  It's OK to appease that muso inside who wants to do something different '' but the truth is that the big hits are who Status Quo are, Rossi says. "When you play Rockin' All over the World and it lights the place up, it's fantastic. And luckily it happens every night '' which is I suppose why those songs were hits in the first place.
  "And yes, when you rehearse them on a film stage in London at 10 o'clock on a Monday morning, oh my god, it's just '... " he trails off. "But doing them where they're supposed to be, in front of people, is always a joy."
  There are no concerns about the song being sullied as a jingle, he says. "It's one of those things that when you're younger you'd think, 'There's no way I'd do things like that!' "
  In the same way young people are determined not to become like their parents, and then find age catches up with them, so things can change. "That 25-year-old angry young man, so adamant about what he was going to be and not going to be, and I'm now one of those short-haired old guys with male pattern baldness.
  "Millions of blokes look like that, so what happened to me being unique?," Rossi says, chuckling.
  So what would he say to that 25-year-old self? Rossi laughs again. " 'Don't be a dickhead.' "
TSA Week in Review: 77 Firearms Discovered Over the Last Two Weeks '' Plus a Few Other Interesting Items
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  Archived Version
  Source: The TSA Blog
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 01:54
  77Firearms Discovered Over the Past Two Weeks '' Of the 77 firearms, 69 were loaded and 21 had rounds chambered. See a complete list and more photos at the bottom of this post.Stun Guns Discovered at (L-R) BOI, DAL, DEN, LAS, LAS, LAS, SAN, SFO, SFO, SLC, STL27Stun Guns ''stun guns were discovered in the last two weeks in carry-on bags around the nation. Five were discovered at San Diego (SAN), three at Denver (DEN), three at Las Vegas (LAS), two at Washington Dulles (IAD), and one each at Allentown (ABE), Atlanta (ATL), Boise (BOI), Dallas/Love (DAL), Jacksonville (JAX), Los Angeles (LAX), Medford (MFR), Salt Lake City (SLC), San Francisco (SFO), Seattle (SEA), St. Louis (STL), Delta County (ESC), Tri Cities (TRI), and Westchester (HPN). Items in the Strangest Places ''It's important to examine your bags prior to traveling to ensure no prohibited items are inside. If a prohibited item is discovered in your bag, you could be cited and quite possibly arrested by local law enforcement. Here are a few examples from the past two weeks where prohibited items were found in strange places.Brass knuckles taped between two cell phones were discovered at Orlando (MCO).A credit card knife was discovered at Albuquerque (ABQ).A credit card knife was discovered at Charlotte (CLT).A credit card knife was discovered at Fort Lauderdale (FLL).A 3½-inch knife was discovered in the waistline of an Albuquerque (ABQ) passenger during a pat down.A cane sword was discovered at Washington Dulles (IAD).An anomaly was detected in a checked bag at St. Thomas (STT). After inspecting the bag, 2.2 kilograms of cocaine were discovered concealed inside candles. We're not looking for drugs, but powder inside what should be a solid wax candle does call for additional scrutiny. This is just another example of how our technology can spot anomalies and keep the flying public safe.Miscellaneous Prohibited Items - In addition to all of the other prohibited items we find weekly, our Officers also regularly find firearm components, realistic replica firearms, bb and pellet guns, Airsoft guns, brass knuckles, ammunition, batons, and a lot of sharp pointy things'... Airsoft Guns '' Six Airsoft guns were discovered in carry-on baggage over the last two weeks at Bradley (BDL), Burbank (BUR), Denver (DEN), Honolulu (HNL), Palm Springs (PSP), and Phoenix (PHX). Airsoft guns are prohibited in carry-on bags, but allowed in checked baggage. Read this post for more information: TSA Travel Tips Tuesday: Traveling with Airsoft Guns Firearms Discovered over the Last Two Weeks in Carry-On BagsYou can travel with your firearms in checked baggage, but they must first be declared to the airline.You can go here for more details on how to properly travel with your firearms.Firearm possession laws vary by state and locality. Travelers should familiarize themselves with state and local firearm laws for each point of travel prior to departure. Unfortunately these sorts of occurrences are all too frequent which is why we talk about these finds. Sure, it's great to share the things that our officers are finding, but at the same time, each time we find a dangerous item, the throughput is slowed down and a passenger that likely had no ill intent ends up with a citation or in some cases is even arrested. The passenger can face a penalty as high as $7,500.00. This is a friendly reminder to please leave these items at home. Just because we find a prohibited item on an individual does not mean they had bad intentions, that's for the law enforcement officer to decide. In many cases, people simply forgot they had these items.
  *In order to provide a timely weekly update, I compile my data from a preliminary report. The year-end numbers will vary slightly (increase) from what I report in the weekly updates. However, any monthly, midyear, or end-of-year numbers TSA provides on this blog or elsewhere will not be estimates.
  If you haven't seen it yet, make sure you check out our post highlightingthe dangerous, scary, and downright unusual items our officers found in 2012. The 2011 list can be found here.
  Bob BurnsTSA Blog Team If you have a travel related issue or question that needs an immediate answer, you can contact us byclicking here.
24 Hard Facts About 9/11 That Cannot Be Debunked
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  Archived Version
  Source: The Top Information Post
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 01:00
  9/11 has been one of the biggest events in recent history that sparked a mass awakening across the world. There has been much debate as to how it happened, who is responsible and why. To this day about 1/3 of americans do not believe the official story. In other areas of the world as much as 90% of the country does not believe the official story.
  Here is a list of 24 facts that cannot be debunked about 9/11.
  1) Nano Thermite was found in the dust at Ground Zero. Peer reviewed in the Bentham Open Chemical Physics Journal. 'Niels Harrit', 'Thermite Bentham', ''The great thermate debate'' Jon Cole, 'Iron rich spheres' Steven Jones, 'Limited Metallurgical Examination (FEMA C-13, Appendix C-6)'. 'Nano Tubes'
  2) 1700+ Engineers and Architects support a real independent 9/11 investigation. Richard Gage, Founder. 'Explosive Evidence', 'Blueprint for Truth', 'AE911'², 'Toronto Hearings', 'Kevin Ryan'.
  3) The total collapse of WTC 7 in 6.5 seconds at free fall acceleration (NIST admits 2.25 seconds). Larry Silverstein used the term ''Pull it''. Steel framed high rise buildings have NEVER totally collapsed from fire or structural damage. Builidng 7 was not hit by a plane. 'Building 7'², 'WTC 7'².
  4) Dick Cheney was in command of NORAD on 9/11 while running war games. 'Stand down order'. ''Of course the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary?''. Norman Minetta testimony. ''Gave order to shootdown Flight 93.'', 'NORAD Drills'.
  5) 6 out of the 10 Commissioners believe the 9/11 Commission report was ''Setup to fail'' Co-Chairs Hamilton and Kean, ''It was a 30 year conspiracy'', ''The whitehouse has played cover up'', 'Max Cleland resigned', 'John Farmer'.
  6) FBI confiscated 84/85 Videos from the Pentagon. 'Moussaoui trial' revealed these videos. Released Pentagon Security Camera (FOIA) does not show a 757 and is clearly Missing a frame. 'Sheraton Hotel', ''Double tree', 'Citgo''.
  7) Osama Bin Laden was NOT wanted by the FBI for the 9/11 attacks. ''No hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.'' CIA created, trained and funded ''Al Qaeda/Taliban'' during the Mujahideen. OBL was a CIA asset named 'Tim Osman'. OBL Reported dead in Dec 2001 (FOX).
  8)100'²s of Firefighters and witness testimony to BOMBS/EXPLOSIONS ignored by the 9/11 Commission Report. 9/11 Commission Report bars 503 1st responder eyewitnesses. ''Explosions in the lobby and sub levels'', 'Firefighter explosions', 'Barry Jennings', 'William Rodriguez'.
  9) 100'²s of firefighters and witness testimony to MOLTEN METAL ignored by the Commission report. ''Like you're in a foundry'', ''NIST's John Gross denies the existence of Molten Metal'', 'Swiss Cheese', ''As of 21 days after the attack, the fires were still burning and molten steel was still running.'' Leslie Robertson'.
  10) '5 Dancing Israeli's' arrested in 'Mossad Truck Bombs' on 9/11 that stated ''We were there to document the event.'' 'Urban Moving Systems' front company, 'Dominic Suter'. ''$498,750 Business loan (June 2001)''. ''Officer DeCarlo', 'Art Students', 'Israeli Spying'.
  11) On September 10th, 2001. Rumsfeld reported $2.3 TRILLION missing from the Pentagon. 'Dov Zakheim' Pentagon Comptroller. Former VP of 'Systems Planning Corporation' (Flight Termination System). Signatore of PNAC document.
  12) 220+ Senior Military, Intelligence Service, Law Enforcement, and Government Officials question the official story. '9/11 Whistleblowers', 'Patriots for 9/11'². 'Robert Bowman', 'Sibel Edmonds', 'Albert Stubblebine', 'Wesley Clark', 'Mark Dayton', 'Alan Sabrosky', 'Cyntha McKinney', 'Jesse Ventura', 'Kurt Sonnenfeld'. ''patriotsquestion911.com''
  13) Towers were built to withstand a Boeing jet(s). ''I designed it for a 707 to hit it'', Leslie Robertson, WTC structural engineer. ''Could probably sustain multiple impacts of jetliners'', ''like a pencil puncturing screen netting'' Frank De Martini, deceased Manager of WTC Construction & Project Management. ''As far as a plane knocking a building over, that would not happen.'' Charlie Thornton, Structural Engineer.
  14) History of American False Flag attacks. 'USS Liberty', 'Gulf of Tonkin', 'Operation Northwoods', 'OKC Bombing (Murrah Building)', '1993 WTC attacks'. 'Patrick Clawson'. Project for the New American Century (PNAC) needed ''a New Pearl Harbor'', ''Rebuilding America's Defenses''. 9/11 Achieved those goals.
  15) BBC correspondent Jane Standley reported the collapse of WTC 7 (Soloman Brothers building) 20 minutes before it happened. CNN/FOX/MSNBC also had early reports. 'BBC wtc 7'², 'Jane Standley', Ashleigh Banfield'.
  16) ''Flight 93'" debris was spread out over many miles. Cheney admits to giving the order to shootdown 93. ''shot down the plane over Pennsylvania'' Rumsfeld, ''nothing that you could distinguish that a plane had crashed there'' 'Chris Konicki. ''Not a drop of blood'' Coroner Wallace Miller. ''there was no plane.'' Mayor Ernie Stull.
  17) Bush hesitated for 441 days before starting the 911 Commission. 'Jersey Girls'. 'Phil Zelikow' already wrote the outline before the commission began. Steel shipped over seas. Obstruction of justice. JFK and Pearl Harbor commissions were started within 7 days.
  18) The 911 commission was given extremely limited funds. $15 million was given to investigate 9/11. (Over $60 Million was spent investigating Clintons' affairs with Monica).
  19) Bush said he watched the first plane crash into the North tower on TV before entering the classroom. ''The TV was obviously on.'' Was informed about the second impact while reading 'My Pet Goat' to the children. Remained for at least 8 more minutes while America was under ''attack''.
  20) The PATRIOT ACT was written before 9/11. Signed into law October 26th, 2001.
  21) Marvin Bush was director of Stratasec (Securacom, 'KuAm') which was in charge of security of the WTC, United Airlines and Dulles International Airport. All three were breached on 9/11. ICTS was another company that provided security at the airports. 'Wirt Walker', 'Ezra Harel', 'ICTS'', 'WTC power downs'.
  22) ''Who killed John O'Neil?''. Former FBI task force agent investigating Al Qaeda/Bin Laden. Transferred by Kroll Corporation to head the security just before 9/11. John O'Neil died in the Towers. 'Jerome Hauer' 'Jules Kroll'.
  23) Insider trading based upon foreknowledge. 'Put Options.' Never identified insiders made millions. 'United and American Airlines' 'Raytheon.'
  24) At least 7 of the 19 listed highjackers are still alive (BBC). No video footage of 19 highjackers or passengers boarding the 4 planes. Pilots of the 4 planes never squawked the highjacking code. 'Alive highjackers', 'ACARS', 'Pilots for 9/11 Truth'.
  WTC 7 (The Smoking Gun)
  http://rememberbuilding7.org/
  Building 7 was a 47-story skyscraper and was part of the World Trade Center complex. Built in 1984, it would have been the tallest high-rise in 33 states in the United States. It collapsed at 5:20 pm on September 11, 2001 in 6.5 Seconds at free fall acceleration. It was not hit by an airplane and suffered minimal damage compared to other buildings much closer to the Twin Towers.
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Brazil postpones bullet train contract.
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  Archived Version
  Source: WT news feed
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 00:26
  Brazil has put off bidding for its ambitious high-speed train project, which will connect Rio de Janeiro and S£o Paulo, for at least one year after consortiums from Spain and Germany asked for the postponement.
  Bernardo Figueiredo, the chairman of the state entity that will supervise the bidding, said the decision came after Brazilian authorities spoke with candidate consortiums from the three countries.
  France's Alstom SA and state-owned railway company SNCF Group already had a bid prepared but Spain ''asked for more time,'' while Germany requested that the process be ''postponed for another year,'' said Figueiredo at a news conference on Monday.
  Friday was the deadline for the consortiums to submit their bids. The winner was to have been announced on September 19.
  Spain has two consortiums participating. One is formed by state rail operator Renfe and track manager Adif, with the private firms of high-speed train maker Talgo, ACS, Indra, Elecnor, Abengoa, Thales, Bombardier and Dimetronic. The second group is headed by CAF, which has not released the names of its partners.
  Siemens AG leads the German consortium.
  Transport Minister C(C)sar Borges said the 13-billion-euro project was still on track even though the bidding had been postponed. There are no plans to change the 511-kilometer route that will connect Brazil's two biggest cities and the inauguration date is still set for 2020, he said.
  The high-speed train, the first to be built in Latin America, will have stops in six cities and a branch line to the city of Campinas, northwest of S£o Paulo. This is the third time the Brazilian government has postponed awarding the project, which was first announced in 2007. It is part of a $100-billion investment plan by President Dilma Rousseff to upgrade Brazil's roads, railways, airports and seaports through private concessions.
  Spain's Public Works Ministry hopes to repeat the success it had in 2011 when the government of Saudi Arabia awarded a multi-billion-euro contract to build an AVE line connecting Mecca with Medina.
  Following the July 24 Alvia train accident in Santiago de Compostela '' Spain's worst rail tragedy in 40 years '' concerns were raised on whether the incident would affect Spanish bids in Brazil. One of the conditions the Brazilian government set was that competing companies could not have had a rail accident on their records over the previous five years.
  The cause of last month's accident is being placed on the driver of the train who was speeding through a sharp curve when the cars derailed, killing 79 people and injuring more than 150 other passengers.
YouTube Video Maker Blamed for Benghazi Attacks Breaks Silence on CNN. (video)
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  Archived Version
  Source: WT news feed
  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 00:26
  On Tuesday, CNN host Jake Tapper interviewed Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the filmmaker behind the Innocence of Muslims YouTube trailer which some members of President Barack Obama's administration erroneously blamed for deadly attack on an American consulate in Libya on September 11, 2012. Nakoula was recently released from prison after a parole violation. Nakoula told CNN that he believes the administration was ''irresponsible'' when they blamed the attack on a YouTube trailer.
  Asked by Tapper if the Obama administration put him in danger by blaming the Benghazi attack on him, Nakoula said that he had no comment. The filmmaker added that the government has kept him in hiding for his own safety.
  RELATED: RNC Predicts This Quote Won't Make It into CNN and NBC's Hillary Films
  While he also refused to comment about the members of the State Department, including then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's, decision to blame the Benghazi attack on him, Nakoula praised Obama.
  ''I like him personally,'' Nakoula said. ''I don't blame him. He has a lot of responsibility.''
  Nakoula said his personal feelings about the Obama administration are less warm. He agreed with Tapper when asked if he thinks the administration was ''irresponsible'' when they blamed the video for the attack on the Benghazi consulate.
  Nakoula described his movie as a ''political'' rather than a ''religious'' movie. He emphatically declared that he is opposed to Islamic terrorism.
  ''Do you think that Islam is a religion that promotes terrorism?'' Tapper asked.
  ''No comment,'' Nakoula replied.
  Watch the segment below via CNN:
  > >Follow Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) on Twitter
Wireless devices go battery-free with new communication technique | UW Today
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  Wed, 14 Aug 2013 00:02
  We might be one step closer to an Internet-of-things reality.
  University of Washington engineers have created a new wireless communication system that allows devices to interact with each other without relying on batteries or wires for power.
  University of Washington
  Using ambient backscatter, these devices can interact with users and communicate with each other without using batteries. They exchange information by reflecting or absorbing pre-existing radio signals.
  The new communication technique, which the researchers call ''ambient backscatter,'' takes advantage of the TV and cellular transmissions that already surround us around the clock. Two devices communicate with each other by reflecting the existing signals to exchange information. The researchers built small, battery-free devices with antennas that can detect, harness and reflect a TV signal, which then is picked up by other similar devices.
  The technology could enable a network of devices and sensors to communicate with no power source or human attention needed.
  ''We can repurpose wireless signals that are already around us into both a source of power and a communication medium,'' said lead researcher Shyam Gollakota, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. ''It's hopefully going to have applications in a number of areas including wearable computing, smart homes and self-sustaining sensor networks.''
  The researchers published their results at the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communication 2013 conference in Hong Kong, which begins Aug. 13. They have received the conference's best-paper award for their research.
  ''Our devices form a network out of thin air,'' said co-author Joshua Smith, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering and of electrical engineering. ''You can reflect these signals slightly to create a Morse code of communication between battery-free devices.''
  University of Washington
  Everyday objects could be enabled with battery-free tags to communicate with each other. A couch could use ambient backscatter to let the user know where his keys were left.
  Smart sensors could be built and placed permanently inside nearly any structure, then set to communicate with each other. For example, sensors placed in a bridge could monitor the health of the concrete and steel, then send an alert if one of the sensors picks up a hairline crack. The technology can also be used for communication '' text messages and emails, for example '' in wearable devices, without requiring battery consumption.
  The researchers tested the ambient backscatter technique with credit card-sized prototype devices placed within several feet of each other. For each device the researchers built antennas into ordinary circuit boards that flash an LED light when receiving a communication signal from another device.
  Groups of the devices were tested in a variety of settings in the Seattle area, including inside an apartment building, on a street corner and on the top level of a parking garage. These locations ranged from less than half a mile away from a TV tower to about 6.5 miles away.
  University of Washington
  Researchers demonstrate how one payment card can transfer funds to another card by leveraging the existing wireless signals around them. Ambient RF signals are both the power source and the communication medium.
  They found that the devices were able to communicate with each other, even the ones farthest from a TV tower. The receiving devices picked up a signal from their transmitting counterparts at a rate of 1 kilobit per second when up to 2.5 feet apart outdoors and 1.5 feet apart indoors. This is enough to send information such as a sensor reading, text messages and contact information.
  It's also feasible to build this technology into devices that do rely on batteries, such as smartphones. It could be configured so that when the battery dies, the phone could still send text messages by leveraging power from an ambient TV signal.
  The applications are endless, the researchers say, and they plan to continue advancing the capacity and range of the ambient backscatter communication network.
  The other researchers involved are David Wetherall, a UW professor of computer science and engineering, Vincent Liu, a doctoral student in computer science and engineering, and Aaron Parks and Vamsi Talla, both doctoral students in electrical engineering.
  The research was funded by the University of Washington through a Google Faculty Research Award and by the National Science Foundation's Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering at the UW.
  ###
  For more information, contact Gollakota and Smith at abc@cs.washington.edu or 206-685-2094.
  Tagged with: College of Engineering, David Wetherall, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering, Joshua Smith, Shyam Gollakota
Russia, Azerbaijan Agree on Oil, Gas Project as Putin Visits Baku | Politics | RIA Novosti
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  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 23:21
  MOSCOW, August 13 (RIA Novosti) '' The Russian and Azerbaijani state oil companies on Tuesday agreed to establish a joint venture on a parity basis to prospect and produce oil and gas in Russia and Azerbaijan and in other countries as Russian President Vladimir Putin paid a one-day working visit to Baku.
  Energy Cooperation
  During Putin's visit '' designed to discuss a wide range of bilateral issues, including trade, energy, transportation and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict '' Rosneft reported that it had also agreed with the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) to jointly use some pipelines and terminals to optimize supplies to consumers.
  A cooperation agreement was signed by Rosneft and SOCAR respective chiefs, Igor Sechin and Rovnag Abdullayev, in the presence of Putin and Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev. The two oil giants also said they would cooperate in marketing and sales of oil, gas and oil products.
  Rosneft has shown interest in joining the development of the Apsheron gas field in the Caspian Sea, whereas Russia's largest privately held oil company, LUKoil, is participating in the development of the Shah Deniz gas field in the Caspian Sea and owns a network of gasoline-filling stations in Azerbaijan.
  LUKoil CEO Vagit Alekperov is accompanying Putin on his visit to Azerbaijan, just as Rosneft chief Sechin is.
  Last year, Azerbaijan delivered 1.55 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Russia.
  Bilateral interaction is set to be expanded in the military and technical sphere, and border activities and between the two countries' emergencies ministries. Experts polled by RIA Novosti have said Moscow has yet failed to make Baku its ally rather than partner.
  Military and Emergencies Cooperation
  Azerbaijani President Aliyev told reporters after a meeting with Putin that Moscow and Baku planned to continue military and technical collaboration.
  According to Aliyev, his country's defense industry cooperation with Russia is worth $4 billion and keeps growing. Azerbaijan is among the top buyers of Russian arms and other military equipment, which, Aliyev said, is considered the best in the world.
  The two countries' emergencies ministries signed a cooperation plan for 2013-2015, and a new program to train Azerbaijani emergencies staff will soon be worked out, a Russian ministry spokeswoman said.
  Nagorno-Karabakh
  Putin and Aliyev also touched upon the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh.
  Relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia have been strained for over two decades, since the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly ethnic Armenian region, first erupted in 1988. The region then claimed independence from Azerbaijan to join Armenia.
  ''During the talks we touched upon urgent international issues, including, of course, the Nagorno-Karabakh issue,'' Putin said. ''Russia has been actively contributing to the soonest settlement of the conflict, which is only possible through political means.''
  Aliyev said the conflict may only be solved on the basis of international law.
  More than 30,000 people are estimated to have died on both sides between 1988 and 1994, when a ceasefire was agreed. Nagorno-Karabakh has remained in Armenian control, and tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia have persisted.
  The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh is mediated by the OSCE Minsk Group, which comprises the United States, Russia and France.
Glenn Greenwald Civil Liberties Tour with Bruce Fein and others at UCSD - East County Heathens (Spring Valley, CA) - Meetup
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  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 23:12
  Now known as the East County Heathens, this is a social group for atheists that live and play in East County ... and anyone else who doesn't mind making the drive out here! Atheists, humanists, agnostics and all freethinkers are welcome. Our goal is to provide a social outlet for freethinkers living east of Route 15 including but not limited to El Cajon, La Mesa, Lemon Grove, Santee, Lakeside, Jamul, Spring Valley, and Alpine. We don't at this point cover points north of Poway but that may change as our membership grows. In this conservative part of San Diego it is often difficult to find like-minded people. Join the East County Heathens ... you are not alone.
  Our events comprise all facets of social connection and are membership driven: hiking, exploring new restaurants, play readings, horror movie night, game night, TED.com lectures, music events, humanitarian events, sports, rodeos, book discussions. The only limitations are our own creativity. It is a diverse group and there is something for everyone. So bring your positive energy and make the East County Heathens part of your social life. We are looking forward to meeting you.
Bitmessage's NSA-Proof E-Mail - Businessweek
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  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 22:17
  Revelations about the National Security Agency's surveillance program of the e-mails and phone records of Americans have been a boon to makers of commercial encryption programs such as Hushmail and Silent Circle. Yet unless customers bother to read these programs' service agreements, they may not realize these companies'--just like tech giants Google (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO)'--honor requests for customer data made by governments and courts in cases involving potential security threats.
  That's one reason a new open-source encryption standard called Bitmessage, which is out of the NSA's reach and devilishly difficult to crack, is seeing a surge in users. New York-based developer Jonathan Warren says he had the NSA and its spying techniques very much in mind when creating the software. ''If I wasn't reasonably sure they were tracking our metadata, I wouldn't have done it,'' says the 28-year-old, who worked on Bitmessage in his spare time while employed at an educational company he declined to identify.
  Bitmessage isn't owned by a corporation, nor does it rely on a centralized server that can be accessed by the government. Instead, the encryption software uses peer-to-peer technology that links computers into what is known as a distributed network. To retrieve a copy of an e-mail sent using Bitmessage, the government would have to gain access to an individual's computer. ''Right now, if the Iranian government wants to block Twitter or Gmail, they can. It would be much more difficult to block access to the Bitmessage network,'' says Adam Melton, a developer who collaborated with Warren.
  Warren drew inspiration from Bitcoin, the open-source protocol that established a virtual currency. Downloads of Bitmessage, which was introduced in November 2012, have more than quintupled since news broke in early June about NSA snooping, Warren says. Before that, most of the people using the software were in China; now more than 80 percent of downloads come from the U.S.
  Unlike competing products, Bitmessage also shields the identity of the parties in any online communication. Those who download the free software can create alternate e-mail addresses that are 36-character-long strings of letters and numbers. For ease of use, the new addresses can be stored and shared as a QR code, the pixelated squares that can be scanned with a smartphone. ''It's the most secure messaging system that I've ever seen,'' says Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer of the SANS Institute, a Bethesda (Md.)-based organization that certifies computer security specialists.
  While Bitmessage's creator says he was motivated by politics rather than profit'--Warren says his political inclinations are ''libertarian-ish'''--experts say the software has commercial potential. ''Now that we understand how intrusive the government is being, it will be more important for the business sector to secure data. Not only medical records but lawyer-client communications,'' says Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, a Washington-based research group dedicated to libertarian principles. ''I don't know that a lawyer today will feel he's meeting his ethical obligations if he talks to his client on the phone.''
  Jarad Carleton, a San Francisco-based principal consultant at Frost & Sullivan, thinks investment bank mergers-and-acquisition teams could put software such as Bitmessage to good use. ''Economic espionage has been going on for centuries,'' he says. ''There are executives here in Silicon Valley that refuse to use encryption technologies because they feel it's too hard. They would definitely benefit from something easy to use.''
  Ullrich, of the SANS Institute, believes that Bitmessage will not come into broader use until it is integrated with popular e-mail clients, such as Microsoft (MSFT) Outlook or Google's Gmail, the way the leading paid encryption services are. Cato's Harper sees another obstacle to adoption: Americans in general are not very exercised about privacy issues. In a new poll, 56 percent said they considered the NSA's accessing of phone records ''acceptable.'' Says Harper: ''The question is whether people care enough to use these things.''
  The bottom line: Downloads of a free encryption program are up fivefold since early June, when news of NSA spying surfaced.
White House Changing Its Story On James Clapper's Role In Independent Surveillance Review | Techdirt
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  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 22:11
  Right, so yesterday, President Obama sent a letter to James Clapper, the director of national intelligence (DNI), who is a confessed liar to Congress in his attempts to protect the surveillance program from public scrutiny. In that letter, President Obama directed Clapper to "establish a Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies." This was the fulfillment of Obama's promise to set up an "independent group" of "outside experts" to review the surveillance efforts.As you might imagine, many people found this somewhat ridiculous -- beyond having a fox guard the henhouse, this was asking the fox to set up the group to look into what happened to all those missing chickens. It was just laughable. Today, however, the White House is claiming... something. They're saying that Clapper isn't setting up the group or leading it:
  "Director Clapper will not be a part of the group, and is not leading or directing the group's efforts," Caitlin Hayden, a White House spokeswoman, told The Hill on Tuesday.
  "The White House is selecting the members of the Review Group, consulting appropriately with the Intelligence Community," she said, adding that the administration expects to announce the members of the group soon.
  Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, also said that the group will "not be under direction of or led by" Clapper.
  It seems like, as with absolutely everything in this discussion, Clapper and the administration are choosing their words very, very, very carefully. Here they're saying that he won't be "leading" the group or "directing" the group. But no one has argued that. They're saying -- as the White House did -- that he's in charge of setting up the group. Now, the White House seems to be suggesting that "establishing" the group is different from "selecting the members," which is possible if the process for "establishing" the group is James Clapper holding out his hands and saying, "poof, this group has been established" and then someone else picks the members.Also, while Clapper may not be a "member" of the group and won't "lead" it, the group is clearly reporting to Clapper. From President Obama's letter:
  the Review Group will brief their interim findings to me through the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the Review Group will provide a final report and recommendations to me through the DNI no later than December 15, 2013.
  So, yes, Clapper isn't leading the day-to-day review by the group, but its report is going straight to him, which makes it anything but independent.Honestly, this kind of doubletalk is the exact kind of thing that's pissing so many people off about this. If President Obama's goal here was to rebuild trust, telling Clapper to "establish" this group and to have the group report to Clapper... and then a day later, having the White House carefully choose their language to pretend that Clapper is separate from the group is not the way to do it. Involving Clapper in the first place was a mistake. Actually, having Clapper still on the job after his admitted lying to Congress was a big mistake. Dancing around the fact that he's involved just is making the administration look worse and worse.
The Government Wants the Media to Stop Covering Barrett Brown | VICE
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  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 22:10
  Image via Nikki Loehr
  Barrett Brown has been sitting in prison, without trial, for almost a year. In case you haven't followed his case, the 31-year-old journalist is facing a century of prison time for sharing a link that contained'--within an archive of 5 million emails'--credit-card information stolen from a hack of a security company called Stratfor (Jeremy Hammond, the actual hacker, is going to prison for ten years), threatening the family of an FBI officer who raided his mother's home, and trying to hide his laptops from the Feds.
  The flood of NSA leaks from Edward Snowden has placed extra attention on Barrett, who focused on investigating a partnership that many people are incredibly uncomfortable with'--the connections between private security, surveillance, intelligence firms, and the US government.
  Barrett's website, ProjectPM, used a small team of researchers to pore over leaked emails, news articles, and public corporate information to figure out what this industry does exactly, and how they serve the White House. It's partly because of Barrett that we know about things like persona management, a technology used by the US government and its contractors to disseminate information online using fake personas, also known as sock puppets.
  He also helped the world learn about TrapWire, a surveillance program that's built into security cameras all over the world and ''more accurate than facial recognition technology.'' When it was made public in the pre-Snowden era, most media outlets played it off as not being a big deal. We still don't know exactly how powerful TrapWire is, but, because of the Strafor hack and Barrett's research, at least we know it exists.
  Anyone interested in getting involved with ProjectPM is invited with this call to action: ''If you care that the surveillance state is expanding in capabilities and intent without being effectively opposed by the population of the West, you can assist in making this an actionable resource for journalists, activists, and other interested parties,'' which sums up the quest for information that is, in and of itself, on trial in Barrett's case. As Glenn Greenwald wrote in the Guardian regarding the prosecution of Barrett Brown, ''here we have the US government targeting someone they clearly loathe because of the work he is doing against their actions.''
  Barrett is set to appear in court next month, but his defense attorneys are asking for an extension to sort through the prosecutors' evidence. The defense insists they're in the midst of having a forensics expert process the data. The US government's evidence is stored on a 2 Terabyte hard drive and two DVDs, and the prosecutors are essentially arguing that a.) All of that does not account for much information, despite the forensic processing that is still ongoing, and b.) the defense has had enough time to get their shit together. But, beyond that, they're trying to silence the media coverage surrounding Barrett Brown's case.
  Within the government's ''Opposition to Continuance,'' written to oppose an extension of Barrett's trial is a lengthy section about his supposed media strategy. In this section, the government prosecutors have claimed Barrett's defense team is defying the judge's warning to not ''try the case in the media.'' It also states ''the government has reason to believe that Brown's attorney coordinates and/or approves the use of media.''
  After that is a list of occasions where Barrett communicated with members of the media, myself included. For what it's worth, I did not arrange that interview through Barrett's attorneys, nor did his current attorneys represent him at the time of our conversation. The government is asking for a complete ban on media statements from Barrett and his representatives. It appears to be a desperate strategy to silence criticism and dissent in a case that already deeply threatens the nature of journalism and freedom of information.
  Also alluded to in the government's outline of journalists who have covered Barrett Brown are Glenn Greenwald and the late Michael Hastings, who was a friend of Barrett's. As Hastings himself said: ''Barrett Brown is a journalist, plain and simple. He's also a colleague and friend, and one of the brilliant, if highly unconventional, American writers of his generation. I offer my support to Barrett and his family, and respectfully ask for his immediate release from custody.''
  While the judge waits to decide whether or not Barrett's trial date should be extended, and if a media gag order should be allowed (his defense rightfully points out this request comes without citing any particularly offensive or justice-obstructing statement Barrett has made thus far), we have decided to publish an original article from Barrett Brown himself, which you can read right over here. It compares the Watergate era to the Wikileaks era, and does not deal with the specifics of Barrett's trial.
  Barrett Brown is an imprisoned author who deserves to be published while he navigates the harsh obstacles of today's American justice system. The precedent that a guilty verdict'--and a 100-year prison sentence'--would set is troubling. But, as Barrett told me in March, he's not ''terribly worried'' about the punishment he's facing. While it's hard to fully believe him, it's certainly reassuring for someone like me who is in fact quite worried about what prison time, in this case, could mean for the future of investigative reporting, internet security, and journalism at large.
  If Barrett goes to prison for digging into the pitch-black world of online surveillance, it will make figuring out what America's massive intelligence firms are doing with their powerful, secret surveillance tools even more difficult and dangerous than it already is. With Edward Snowden stuck in Russia and Bradley Manning facing well over a century of hard time, the world simply can't afford to lose Barrett as well.
  Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire
  Previously:
  Why Is Barrett Brown Facing 100 Years in Prison?
  We Spoke to Barrett Brown From Prison
Google Tells Court You Cannot Expect Privacy When Sending Messages to Gmail -- People Who Care About Privacy Should Not Use Service, Consumer Watchdog Says | Consumer Watchdog
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  Archived Version
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 22:06
  SANTA MONICA, CA -- In a stunning admission contained in a brief filed recently in federal court, lawyers for Google said people should not expect privacy when they send messages to a Gmail account. Consumer Watchdog said today that people who care about their email correspondents' privacy should not use the Internet giant's service.
  Google's brief said: ''Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient's assistant opens the letter, people who use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their emails are processed by the recipient's [email provider] in the course of delivery. Indeed, 'a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.''' (Motion to dismiss, Page 19)
  Read Google's motion to dismiss here: http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/googlemotion061313.pdf
  ''Google has finally admitted they don't respect privacy,'' said John M. Simpson, Consumer Watchdog's Privacy Project director. ''People should take them at their word; if you care about your email correspondents' privacy don't use Gmail.''
  Google made the statement that people can't expect privacy when sending a message to a Gmail address in a response to a class action complaint filed in multi-district litigation. The suit says Google violates federal and state wiretap laws when the company reads emails to determine what ads to serve based on the message's content. The class action complaint was filed under seal because it details many of Google's business practices about the way it handles email.
  A highly redacted version of the complaint was filed publicly. Read it here: http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/gmailcomplaint051613.pdf
  A hearing in the case, In re Google Inc. Gmail Litigation, Case No. 5:13-md-02430-LHK, will be held before Judge Lucy H. Koh in U.S. District Court in San Jose, CA. at 1:30 p.m., Sept. 5.
  ''Google's brief uses a wrong-headed analogy; sending an email is like giving a letter to the Post Office,'' said Simpson. ''I expect the Post Office to deliver the letter based on the address written on the envelope. I don't expect the mail carrier to open my letter and read it. Similarly when I send an email, I expect it to be delivered to the intended recipient with a Gmail account based on the email address; why would I expect its content will be intercepted by Google and read?''
  -30-
VIDEO-JPMorgan: We're Being Investigated By DOJ Over Mortgages
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  Archived Version
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 21:42
  JPMorgan Chase said Wednesday it's under federal criminal investigation over its sale of mortgage securities, potentially making the biggest U.S. bank by assets the first large financial institution to face criminal sanctions over securitization practices that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.
  The Justice Department told JPMorgan in May that prosecutors had ''preliminarily concluded'' that the bank violated civil securities laws related to mortgage securities it packaged and sold from 2005 to 2007, the bank disclosed in a quarterly securities filing. JPMorgan has already been sued over similar practices by Eric Schneiderman, New York attorney general, and has settled similar cases brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
  Other large financial groups also have disclosed in securities filings they're under U.S. investigation for their dealings in mortgage securities. Criminal investigations are underway against some banks, according to people familiar with the probes, introducing the possibility that criminal charges against a major financial institution for mortgage-related conduct could be filed -- a potentially surprising development given prosecutors' and securities regulators' past statements suggesting that pre-crisis bad behavior didn't necessarily equate to criminal wrongdoing.
  JPMorgan -- once a darling in Washington -- on Wednesday disclosed a raft of expected enforcement actions that have been broadly mentioned by the bank and its chief executive and chairman, Jamie Dimon, but never before in such detail. Once finalized, the enforcement orders may further damage the bank's already-battered reputation and lead to heightened scrutiny of its practices.
  The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is investigating JPMorgan's collection and sale of delinquent consumer credit card debt, including its use of sworn documents to pursue bad debts. Kamala Harris, California attorney general, has sued the bank over similar practices.
  The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency told JPMorgan it will punish the lender for its credit card collections practices and use of allegedly dubious documents, including for potentially cheating active-duty members of the military under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act. JPMorgan has previously settled cases under the servicemembers act related to home mortgages.
  In addition, the OCC and CFPB have told JPMorgan that they will formally discipline the bank for ''unfair or deceptive'' practices related to identity theft products it previously sold to consumers.
  Perhaps in anticipation of expected settlements, the bank increased its estimate of possible legal losses in excess of its reserves by $800 million to $6.8 billion.
  Efforts to settle the DOJ lawsuit may be complicated by a 2003 settlement the bank reached with federal securities regulators. In July of that year, JPMorgan settled claims by the SEC that it violated securities laws in connection with its dealings with Enron, the failed energy company. As part of that settlement, court filings show, the bank pledged to refrain from violating federal securities laws. It's unclear how the bank could be affected by a federal lawsuit alleging violation of federal securities laws it had pledged not to break in the years immediately following a previous settlement.
  All told, even as some enforcement actions are settled in the coming months the $2.4 trillion financial institution faces further regulatory and legal woes that are unlikely to abate as it contends with international investigations related to alleged attempts to rig benchmark interest rates and stifle competition in certain derivatives markets.
  Mark Kornblau, a JPMorgan spokesman, declined to comment.
  Also on HuffPost:
Activist Post: Destabilization Expert Robert Ford Possible Choice for Ambassador to Egypt
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  Archived Version
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 18:34
  Brandon TurbevilleActivist PostAmid the growing tension in Egypt after the military counter-coup removing former President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood from their posts, the U.S. State Department is considering naming former U.S. Ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, as the new Ambassador to Egypt.
  With the geographic size of Egypt, its geopolitical importance, and both its historic and contemporary influence in the Middle East, the post of Ambassador to Egypt is an immensely important position, particularly now that both sides in the Egyptian turmoil have legitimate reasons to distrust and detest the United States. As Michael Gordon of the New York Times writes,
  The next American ambassador has the difficult task of repairing the United States' image, expanding its influence and working with opposing groups inside the country, as well as diplomats from Arab and European nations, to try to stabilize Egypt and put it on a democratic course.[1]
  Obviously, putting Egypt on a ''democratic course'' is not the intention of the United States, evidenced by the support and assistance provided to Morsi and the fanatical Muslim Brotherhood by the U.S. government all the way until the counter-coup was launched by the Egyptian military in response to popular outrage. Morsi's constant rewriting of the Egyptian Constitution,[2] capitulation to the IMF,[3] and flirtation with Muslim fundamentalists and warmongers[4] was anything but ''democratic'' rule of law.However, with Egypt still finding itself in a state of transition and with increasing tension[5] produced by fanatical elements of the Muslim Brotherhood (itself a creation of Britain[6]) and Morsi supporters against the majority of the Egyptian people,[7] the possible appointment of Ford as Ambassador to the country is a concerning development. This is because, ever since his appointment to the position of Political Counselor to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and his subsequent appointment as Ambassador to Syria, Ford has been nothing more than a destabilization expert, who has sown division and discord between populations and societies as well as serving to weaken the national governments of wherever he is placed.
  Although mainstream reports tend to portray Ford as if he were a man of the people always fighting on the side of the oppressed, the real Robert Ford is very different. Indeed, the reality is that he is nothing more than a globalist destabilization expert who is merely taking over from his mentor John Negroponte, who became quite refined as a enabler of mass slaughter in Central America and Iraq. Negroponte's Iraq affair is where Ford himself honed his skills in the arming and assistance of ruthless death squads who target innocent people in campaigns of terror and mass murder.[8]John Negroponte was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. In this role, he was instrumental in supporting and overseeing the Nicaraguan Contra killers who, although based in Honduras, engaged in horrific acts of terrorism inside Nicaragua. Ultimately, this operation claimed the lives of approximately 50,000 innocent civilians. This is the origin of the term ''Salvador Option'' when speaking of the formation of ''death squads'' for political purposes, an option that has become a hallmark of Negroponte and the system which he represents.
  Negroponte was also responsible for the formation of the Honduran death squads who engaged in a mission of terror against opponents of the US-backed Honduran regime as well as the Sandinistas and civilian populations in Nicaragua.
  As Peter Roff and James Chapin write in their article ''Face-off: Bush's Foreign Policy Warriors,''
  The Sun described the activities of a secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 316, that used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves."
  On August 27, 1997, CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz released a 211-page classified report entitled ''Selected Issues Relating to CIA Activities in Honduras in the 1980s.'' This report was partly declassified on Oct. 22, 1998, in response to demands by the Honduran human rights ombudsman.[9]
  In 2005, Negroponte was appointed as ambassador to Iraq. In this role, he again oversaw the formation of death squads who targeted both the civilian populations and the Iraqi insurgency. The goal here was to foment division within the insurgency and turn it into a fragmented front. A divided opposition is obviously much easier to defeat than a united one. This theory has been proven accurate time and time again.Indeed, in 2005, a story was leaked to Newsweek[10] where the Pentagon confirmed that it was ''considering forming hit squads of Kurdish and Shia fighters to target leaders of the Iraqi insurgency in a strategic shift borrowed from the American struggle against left-wing guerrillas in Central America 20 years ago.''[11]
  The Pentagon did more than ''consider'' this option. Not very long after this information was leaked, Iraq began to see the results of its implementation. As Dahr Jamail of Antiwar.com wrote in 2007,
  Under the "Salvador Option," Negroponte had assistance from his colleague from his days in Central America during the 1980s, Ret. Col James Steele. Steele, whose title in Baghdad was Counselor for Iraqi Security Forces supervised the selection and training of members of the Badr Organization and Mehdi Army, the two largest Shi'ite militias in Iraq, in order to target the leadership and support networks of a primarily Sunni resistance.
  Planned or not, these death squads promptly spiraled out of control to become the leading cause of death in Iraq. Intentional or not, the scores of tortured, mutilated bodies which turn up on the streets of Baghdad each day are generated by the death squads whose impetus was John Negroponte. And it is this U.S.-backed sectarian violence which largely led to the hell-disaster that Iraq is today. Of course, the fact that the death squad option was implemented so quickly after the release of the report suggests that the mercenaries were being organized and applied long before Newsweek was made aware of them.[12]
  Nevertheless, serving in Iraq at the same time that the death squads were beginning to make their bloody mark on the cohesion of the ''insurgency'' was Robert Ford who, at the time, had been appointed political counselor to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Ford remained in this post from 2004-2006 where he worked closely with Negroponte. He was also heavily involved in the organization of the death squads. Ford was instrumental in helping make ''contacts'' with these individuals, as well as developing and maintaining relations with them for other purposes such as continued and future terror campaigns.In fact, Ford was once described by Negroponte as ''one of these very tireless people . . . who didn't mind putting on his flak jacket and helmet and going out of the Green Zone to meet contacts.'' In short, Ford acted as a foot soldier in death squad formation.
  Attempting to summarize the death squad plan, Michael Hirsh and John Barry of Newsweek wrote in 2005:
  [O]ne Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called 'snatch' operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries. [emphasis added][13]
  Notice that the authors mention Syria as a potential target of destabilization as far back as 2005.With this in mind, Ford's action in Syria served the exact same purpose as his presence in Iraq only a few years previous.[14] This time, however, it seems that Ford took on a more central role in the affair. Indeed, many Syrians, if not aware of the more sinister acts of Ford, are at least aware that he has been instrumental in fomenting violent rebellion and negative Western public opinion against the ruling government. This is why Ford's convoy was attacked by ''pro-government'' Syrians[15] as he rode through town meeting with his terrorist pets[16] early on in the Syrian destabilization operation.
  Ford's very presence in Syria was clearly a destabilization tactic.[17] Indeed, he drew quite a bit of international attention to himself by traveling across the country at will, ''meeting with protestors'' and turning terrorists into martyrs in the minds of the gullible Western public.
  Of course, by ''meeting with protestors'' one can read ''instigating terrorism.'' The mainstream media, however, reports Ford's terror encouragement tour as a heroic act of solidarity with ''the people.''
  Eventually, after a succession of terror tours the Assad regime finally slapped restrictions on Ford's travel, requiring him not to leave the boundaries of Damascus. However, Ford openly disregarded those limitations and brazenly began traveling all over Syria, meeting with his terrorist brethren.[18]Yet the Western agitators did not give up. This much was made clear by the recent ''secret'' visit by Ford to the then death squad leader, Gen. Salim Idriss.
  This visit took place Wednesday, May 9, 2013 and was likely initiated via the Bab al-Salama crossing on the Turkey/Syria border. According to Deborah Thomas of NPR,
  Ford met with the head of the Aleppo military council, Abdul Jabbar Okaidi, who thanked him for the shipment of nonlethal aid. Seven trucks transported some 65,000 MREs, or meals ready to eat, the U.S. military's battlefield rations.[19]
  Although no mention is made of the actual lethal aid that has been provided to the death squads by the generosity of the American taxpayer via Gulf State feudal monarchies such as Saudi Arabia,[20] Thomas points out that the MREs were part of ''an additional $10 million aid package'' dedicated to the death squads by the U.S. government. Likewise, Secretary of State John Kerry announced in April that the United States would be donating $123 million to the Syrian death squads, despite facing a worldwide economic depression, drastic levels of unemployment at home, and a manufactured crisis such as the ''sequester'' and a host of other domestic crises. Later, in July, the effectively ''Secret Congress'' authorized the open shipment of arms to the death squads.[21]Ford's visit to Syria[22] is both part of the overarching attempt to further destabilize the country, organize death squad activity, and create a public relations campaign aimed at forming an image of Idriss as a figure around which popular support can be rallied. This, of course, is at least the third time Western interests have attempted to create a ''freedom fighter'' lead image for the Syrian death squads '' Moaz al-Khatib[23] and Ghassan Hitto[24] being the more recent failures. Idriss, although being heavily supported by the West, is now flailing[25] amongst an increasing trend in division amongst the ranks of the death squads.[26]
  As Webster Tarpley commented on PressTV on May 10, 2013,
  Well, I think we have some mixed signals from the Obama regime here. Let us hasten to say that anybody calling themselves ''Free Syrian Army'' is, in fact, a representative of the al-Nusra Front because we're getting reports everyday of more and more units of the so-called FSA showing their true colors or going over to Nusra and proclaiming themselves full-fledged terrorists, al-Qaeda disciples, death squads in every sense of the word. Now, we had, in the last twenty four hours, Ambassador Robert Ford of the State Department, somebody who did a lot to get this tragic rebellion going in the first place . . . Ambassador Robert Ford who is a taskmaster of death squad deployments, having learned it from Negrponte in Baghdad some years ago, he crossed into Syria, not with the permission of the Syrian government, but to go and meet General Idriss. And this General, Salim Idriss, is the new golden boy here. He is the new darling of the CIA and the State Department. And it looks like Ford is trying to coordinate the next move with Idriss. You can think of Idriss as the new Ahmed Chalabi '' somebody the U.S. is grooming to become dictator of the country.[27]
  Of course, this was not the first time that Ford engaged in a publicity-based visit to the Syrian death squads inside Syria, thus drawing the ire of the Syrian government.[28] In 2011, after his travel as U.S. Ambassador had been restricted due to the destabilization efforts already taking place, Ford traveled to Hama in order to promote and encourage the violent assault waged by the Western-backed death squads against innocent Syrian civilians as well as Syrian soldiers.At the very least, Ford's history should be enough to cause some level of concern from both the Egyptian government and from any Westerner of good will. Ford, in virtually all of his appointments has done nothing but serve as a destabilization agent and a hands-on architect of death and destruction.
  For this reason and for those listed discussed in this article, the Egyptians would be wise to reject Robert Ford as Ambassador to their country, even if the United States Senate does not.
  Notes:[1] Gordon, Michael R. ''Former Envoy to Syria Said to be Choice for Cairo Post.'' New York Times. August 4, 2013.http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/05/world/middleeast/kerry-picks-former-syria-envoy-as-ambassador-to-egypt.html?ref=michaelrgordon&_r=0[2] Radwan, Tarek. ''Morsi Rewrites the Rules of the Game, Again.'' EgyptSource of the Atlantic Council Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. November 22, 2012. http://www.acus.org/egyptsource/morsi-rewrites-rules-game-again[3] ''Morsi says IMF loan compatible with Islamic banking.'' AFP. October 6, 2012. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j2lFa7wUsqUyO_t9zmJxKebOKx-g?docId=CNG.bd6e4881b495ca106dfcf0314731157d.931[4] Hendawi, Hamza. ''Morsi seen to endorse holy war in Syria.'' Times of Israel. June 17, 2013. http://www.timesofisrael.com/morsi-seen-to-endorse-holy-war-on-syria/[5] ''Over 200 injured as Morsi supporters, opponents clash north of Cairo.'' RT. June 26, 2013. http://rt.com/news/egypt-clashes-mansoura-morsi-281/[6] Draitser, Eric. ''Unmasking the Muslim Brotherhood: Syria, Egypt, and Beyond.'' Stop Imperialism. December 12, 2012. Reposted by Global Research. http://www.globalresearch.ca/unmasking-the-muslim-brotherhood-syria-egypt-and-beyond/5315406[7] Jones, Brandon. ''Egypt Protest Largest In History, Anti-Morsi and Anti-Obama Signs Fill The Streets, PHOTOS.'' The Global Dispatch. July 3, 2013. http://www.theglobaldispatch.com/egypt-protest-largest-in-history-anti-morsi-and-anti-obama-signs-fill-the-streets-photos-58277/[8] Turbeville, Brandon. ''Syria Under Attack By Globalist Death Squad Experts.'' Activist Post. May 27, 2012. http://www.activistpost.com/2012/05/syria-under-attack-by-globalist-death.html[9] Roff, Peter; Chapin, James. ''Face-off: Bush's Foreign Policy Warriors.'' United Press International. July 18, 2001.http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/ROF111A.html[10] Hirsch, Michael; Barry, John. ''The Salvador Option.'' Newsweek. January 9, 2005. http://web.archive.org/web/20050110030928/http:/www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/[11] ''El Salvador-style 'death squads' to be deployed by US against Iraq militants.'' Times Online. January 10, 2005. As quoted and sourced by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky of GlobalResearch.ca in his article, '' The Pentagon's 'Salvador Option': The Deployment of Death Squads in Iraq and Syria.''[12] Jamail, Dahr. ''Managing Escalation: Negroponte and Bush's New Iraq Team.'' Antiwar.com. January 9, 2007. http://antiwar.com/jamail/?articleid=10289[13] Hirsch, Michael; Barry, John. ''The Salvador Option.'' Newsweek. January 9, 2005. http://web.archive.org/web/20050110030928/http:/www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/[14] Turbeville, Brandon. ''Syrian Under Attack By Globalist Death Squad Experts.'' Activist Post. May 27, 2012. http://www.activistpost.com/2012/05/syria-under-attack-by-globalist-death.html[15] ''U.S. envoy's convoy stoned; Turkey offered Syria support if Brotherhood given posts.'' Al-Arabiya. September 20, 2011.http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/09/29/169334.html[16] Oweis, Khalid Yacoub. ''Syrian crowd stones U.S. envoy's convoy.'' Reuters. September 29, 2011. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/29/us-syria-idUSTRE78S5TD20110929[17] Shadid, Anthony. ''U.S. Ambassador to Syria Leaves Damascus Amid Threats To Safety.'' New York Times. October 24, 2011.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/world/middleeast/us-ambassador-to-syria-leaves-damascus-amid-threats-to-safety.html[18] Rogin, Josh. ''Is Robert Ford Trying to get thrown out of Syria?'' The Cable. August 23, 2011. http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/08/23/is_robert_ford_trying_to_get_thrown_out_of_syria[19] Amos, Deborah. ''Top U.S. Official Meets With Rebels Inside Syria.'' NPR. May 9, 2013. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/05/09/182665171/top-u-s-official-meets-with-rebels-inside-syria[20] Chivers, C.J.; Schmitt, Eric. ''Arms Airlift to Syrian Rebels Expands, With Help From the CIA.'' New York Times. March 24, 2013.http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/world/middleeast/arms-airlift-to-syrian-rebels-expands-with-cia-aid.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimesworld&_r=2&[21] ''US Intel committees approve arming Syrian rebels, top general warns of costs.'' RT. July 23, 2013. http://rt.com/usa/joint-chiefs-us-options-syria-445/[22] ''Azaz and the Arrival of food aid into the countryside. 04/30/2013.'' Youtube. Posted on May 1, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7rncsu_O8M[23] Bayoumy, Yara; Maclean, William. ''Moaz al-Khatib, Syria Rebel Leader, Slams NATO Refusal To Provide Patriot Missile Support.'' Huffington Post. March 27, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/27/moaz-al-khatib-syria-patriot-missiles_n_2962101.html[24] Dettmer, Jamie. ''The Texan Leader of the Syrian Rebels.'' The Daily Beast. March 23, 2013. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/23/the-texan-leader-of-the-syrian-rebels.html[25] Enders, David. ''Syrian rebel leader Salim Idriss admits difficulty of unifying fighters.'' McClatchy. May 7, 2013. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/05/07/190602/syrian-rebel-leader-salim-idriss.html#.UgFYRKzODTo[26] 'They are killing each other:' Western weapons for Syrian rebels will intensify war.'' RT. June 21, 2013. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/05/07/190602/syrian-rebel-leader-salim-idriss.html#.UgFYRKzODTo[27] Tarpley, Webster. ''Al Qaeda's Nusra Front Now Dominant Partner in 'Free Syrian Army.''' PressTV. May 10, 2013. (Posted on May 13, 2013). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcfpXEAL3jA&feature=player_embedded#![28] Rogin, Josh. ''Is Robert Ford Trying to get thrown out of Syria?'' The Cable. August 23, 2011. http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/08/23/is_robert_ford_trying_to_get_thrown_out_of_syria
  Read other articles by Brandon Turbeville here.
  Brandon Turbeville is an author out of Florence, South Carolina. He has a Bachelor's Degree from Francis Marion University and is the author of three books, Codex Alimentarius -- The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, and Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident. Turbeville has published over 200 articles dealing on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville's podcast Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.
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Scripting News: Can the EFF rep the people re NSA?
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  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 16:06
  I did a few searches, and looked around the EFF site to get an idea of where their money comes from. I did not find the information, except in a general sense, that a percentage comes from foundations, some from companies, and some from individuals.
  I'm sure they try to represent all of us, and they have done a great job, except now, when it comes to the NSA revelations, it seems to me that they, like a lot of the pundits in tech, have a conflict, unless little or none of their funding comes from the tech industry.
  As Bruce Schneier observes, the tech industry is now clearly subordinate to the US government. How long this has been going on is in dispute. Schneier believes it's recent. I think it's deeply ingrained in the structure of the tech industry. There's a revolving door between government and the industry, as with every other industry. Tech is younger so it's less developed, but it's catching up quickly.
  Foundations like the EFF may be conflicted as well. Until we know where their money comes from, we won't have a good picture of whether or how conflicted they are.
  There has been some discussion. Bruce Sterling wrote a piece that was critical of the EFF without naming them, criticism that I thought was fair. There was a response from Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing and one by Danny O'Brien who currently works at EFF.
  Doctorow is a former staffer at EFF and a current EFF fellow.
  The discussion so far has been superficial and some of it disappointingly personal. It would be better to get an overall sense of who we're dealing with. Is EFF repping Google, Apple, Amazon, etc? Or the users of the Internet? Can't really represent both now, because the interests are in conflict, imho. And if EFF doesn't represent the people, who does?
  Update
  John Perry Barlow, co-founder of EFF, offers in a tweet: "Please give us a sense of how you'd like #EFF's income stream to be broken down and we'll do it."
  Thanks, that would be great. Any way that answers this question -- how much of EFF's funding comes from the tech industry. And to be complete, how much comes from governments, although I'm pretty sure that's close to nil.
Designation of 5 individual(s) and 2 entity(-ies) Pursuant to Executive Order 13581, ''Blocking Property of Transnational Criminal Organizations''
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  Archived Version
  Source: Federal Register Latest Entries
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 15:12
  The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (''OFAC'') is publishing the names of 5 individual(s) and 2 entity(-ies) whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to Executive Order 13581 of July 24, 2011, ''Blocking Property of Transnational Criminal Organizations.''
  The designations by the Director of OFAC, pursuant to Executive Order 13581, of the 5 individual(s) and 2 entity(-ies) identified in this notice were effective on July 24, 2013.
  Assistant Director, Sanctions Compliance and Evaluation, Office of Foreign Assets Control, Department of the Treasury, Washington, DC 20220, tel.: 202/622-2490.
  This document and additional information concerning OFAC are available from OFAC's Web site (www.treas.gov/ofac). Certain general information pertaining to OFAC's sanctions programs is available via facsimile through a 24-hour fax-on-demand service, tel.: 202/622-0077.
  On July 24, 2011, the President issued Executive Order 13581, ''Blocking Property of Transnational Criminal Organizations'' (the ''Order''), pursuant to, inter alia, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701-06). The Order was effective at 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on July 25, 2011. In the Order, the President declared a national emergency to deal with the threat that significant transnational criminal organizations pose to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.
  Section 1 of the Order blocks, with certain exceptions, all property and interests in property that are in the United States, that come within the United States, or that are or come within the possession or control of any United States person, of persons listed in the Annex to the Order and of persons determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Attorney General and the Secretary of State, to satisfy certain criteria set forth in the Order.
  On July 24, 2013, the Director of OFAC, in consultation with the Attorney General and the Secretary of State, designated, pursuant to one or more of the criteria set forth in subparagraphs (a)(ii)(A) through (a)(ii)(C) of Section 1 of the Order, 5 individual(s) and 2 entity(-ies) whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to the Order.
  The listings for these individuals on OFAC's List of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons appear as follows:
  1. DI LAURO, Marco; DOB 16 Jun 1980; POB Naples, Italy (individual) [TCO].
  2. RICCIO, Mario (a.k.a. RICCIO, Mariano); DOB 28 Jun 1991; POB Mugnano di Napoli, Italy (individual) [TCO].
  3. MENNETTA, Antonio; DOB 03 Jan 1985; POB Naples, Italy (individual) [TCO].
  4. ABETE, Mariano; DOB 03 Apr 1991; POB Naples, Italy (individual) [TCO].
  5. GUARINO, Rosario; DOB 26 Jun 1983; POB Naples, Italy (individual) [TCO].
  1. AVUAR OOO (a.k.a. AVUAR LLC), 12/120, Komn 51, Ulitsa Demokraticheskaya, Samara 443031, Russia; National ID No. 1036300456213 (Russia); alt. National ID No. 14565711 (Russia); alt. National ID No. 6315565439 (Russia) [TCO].
  2. GUGA ARM SRO (a.k.a. GUGA ARM LTD), Dr. Davida Bechera 907/27, Karlovy Vary 36001, Czech Republic; National ID No. 27994783 (Czech Republic) [TCO].
  Dated: July 24, 2013.
  Adam J. Szubin,
  Director, Office of Foreign Assets Control.
  [FR Doc. 2013-19563 Filed 8-12-13; 8:45 am]
  BILLING CODE 4811-AL-P
Mysterious Noises on 46th Street | Times Square New York City
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  Archived Version
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 15:34
  Max Neuhaus, 1999
  In the midst of Times Square, the bustling, light filled, people-packed, center of New York City, there is a secret. As many as one thousand people in an hour cross the pedestrian island that runs between 45th and 46th Street where Broadway and 7th Avenue intersect, not noticing that there is anything that differentiates this island from all the others in Manhattan. However those people with particularly open ears, or those who happen to be walking slightly below the average New York pace, may notice a mysterious humming noise, rather like the clanking of a distant machine.If any of these people were to pause and stand still for a moment, the machine noise would begin to merge with a sound like church bells, seeming to emanate from some unseen place in the sky. They would look up, searching for the origin of the sound, but what they would see are the lights, buildings and advertisements of Times Square backed not by traffic, hollering, and rushing, but by strangely beautiful tones: gongs, bells and drones. The pedestrian island becomes enveloped in a block of sound, as the noise from the surrounding environment fades into the background.
  Although no plaque can be found, no explanatory text to accompany this unique experience, it is, in fact, a work of art, entitled Times Square, and its artist is Max Neuhaus. The work was originally installed at the same site from 1977-1992, at which point Neuhaus dismantled it because he had to return to Europe and the piece required constant monitoring. However, Times Square was missed, and during 2001 and 2002, the Times Square Street Business Improvement District (BID), Christine Burgin, the MTA Arts for Transit, and the Dia Art Foundation collaborated to reinstate Neuhaus's project. The block of sound returned to 46th Street on 22 May 2002, where it has remained for the public to experience twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
  Neuhaus entering his Times Square installation
  While standing inside Neuhaus's project, the sound seems most intense at the level right above your head, enhancing the illusion that the noises have no agent. Neuhaus says the sound must be made to be "almost plausible," so that when people can't find any immediate cause, they think it comes from the subway. In reality, they are correct that the sound originates in the subway chamber below. The North side of the pedestrian island, at 46th Street, is covered by a large subway grating which spans an area of the Times Square 42nd Street station where several subway tunnels intersect. The block of sound that seems to hover above the island is created from resonances that are already present below the ground due to this unusual tunnel junction. Neuhaus listened closely to these sounds, and he built a machine that would amplify and enhance the resonances so they could be heard above ground. He then spent months creating the block of sound that we now experience. Neuhaus did this without the aid of computer or electronic music, and the block of sound is built entirely from already existing resonances. For this reason, Neuhaus speaks of "building" rather than "composing" his sound.Experiencing Times Square involves more than aural sensation, however. Neuhaus in fact argues that art should privilege the visual and the aural sensations equally. This is interesting because Neuhaus himself does not create a visual component to his installation; he hides the machinery that allows us to hear the block of sound underground. Neuhaus says the visual component is Times Square's "billboards, moving neon signs, office buildings, hotels, theaters, porno centers and electronic game emporiums." The visual component is also the thousands of people who are potential experiencers of his work: the "tourists, theatergoers, commuters, pimps, shoppers, hucksters and office workers." Often, when these people shift from the observed to the observers, stumbling into "Times Square," they claim the sounds they hear as a phenomenon of their own discovery. Because the work remains anonymous, they do not think it could be an artist's construction.
  When a person stands within the block of sound, the surrounding environment becomes cinematic. The people rush past, the lights flash, the cars stop and start, but the viewer is free to become a passive observer, detached from what he or she was previously immersed in. The sound block becomes peaceful; a place of respite from the surrounding speed. When I visited Times Square for the first time, I allowed the block of sound to temporarily dissolve the usual sensations that Times Square's environment provokes, and I soon discovered that I could play the space. As I walked around slowly, the frequencies I heard changed according to where my body was located. I began to feel that I could cause the sounds to change, or that I played the sounds myself rather than that I listened to them. The experience became interactive, and I felt that I had agency in a space where I am usually at the mercy of the traffic lights and pressing crowds. When I allowed myself to exit the soun! d block, Times Square's pace felt slightly subdued, as if I had been given access to a special elixir that could slow everything down.
  After experiencing Times Square, Times Square itself is changed. There is a secret there, a small area on a pedestrian island that has the power to completely remove the passerby from the senses saturated environment of midtown. Times Square is a peaceful, private space in the most public of public places; a completely immersive aural and visual environment in the most sound and sight filled part of New York City. I urge you to go there, any time of day or night, to feel this unique stillness in the midst of the city of endless momentum and unstoppable light.
'400 surface-to-air missiles' were 'STOLEN' from Libya during the Benghazi attack, says whistle-blowers' attorney | Mail Online
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  Archived Version
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 13:36
  By David Martosko In Washington
  PUBLISHED: 16:53 EST, 12 August 2013 | UPDATED: 05:49 EST, 13 August 2013
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  As the Benghazi compound went up in flames, says Joe diGenova, 400 missiles capable of bringing down jetliners were 'stolen' from U.S. control, possibly at the nearby CIA annex
  Four hundred American surface-to-air missiles were 'taken from Libya' during the terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, a former U.S. Attorney who represents whistleblowers claimed on Monday.
  He added that the U.S. intelligence community is terrified they might be used to shoot down airliners.
  Joe diGenova, whose wife Victoria Toensing '' a former deputy assistant attorney general '' also represents Benghazi witnesses and others with knowledge of the terror attack, told WMAL radio that the loss of those missiles is also one the reason the U.S. State Department shut down 19 embassies across the Middle East last week.
  'A lot of people have come forward to share information with us,' he said during the radio station's 'Mornings On The Mall' program Monday morning.
  'We have learned that one of the reasons the administration is so deeply concerned' is that 'there were 400 surface-to-air missiles stolen, and that they are ... in the hands of many people, and that the biggest fear in the U.S. intelligence community is that one of these missiles will be used to shoot down an airliner. 400 missiles, surface-to-air missiles, taken from Libya.'
  Asked if the missiles are now 'in the hands of al-Qaeda operatives,' DiGenova replied, 'That is what these people are telling us.'
  SCROLL DOWN FOR AUDIO
  Iranian military units are routinely equipped with surface-to-air missiles. 400 such units were taken during the Benghazi terror attack, says lawyer Joe diGenova
  diGenova (L) and Toensing (R) represent whistle-blowers who were privy to information about the government's response during and after the Benghazi terror attack
  Nightmare scenario: A single surface-to-air missile in the hands of a trained militant could bring down a civilian aircraft like Pan Am 103, which exploded in 1988, killing 270 people
  DiGenova said his sources are 'former intelligence officials who stay in constant contact with people in the Special Ops and intelligence community.'
  'And it's pretty clear that the biggest concern right now are 400 missiles which have been diverted in Libya and have gotten in the hands of some very ugly people.'
  diGenova said that while he was uncertain whether the stolen weapons were being kept at the U.S. Consulate's CIA annex, 'it is clear that the annex was somehow involved in the process of the distribution of those missiles.'
  A longtime legal fixture inside the beltway, diGenova was U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia for four years beginning in 1983, and later was an Independent Counsel appointed to investigate a State Department official who ordered politically embarrassing searches of the passport files of Bill Clinton, Clinton's mother and Ross Perot before the 1992 presidential election.
  In 2007 the New York State Senate retained him to investigate then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer over allegations that he ordered the State Police to track the whereabouts of Republican State Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno when he used police escorts to travel to and around New York City.
  President Obama and then-Secretary of State Clinton originally maintained that the terror attack was the product of a spontaneous protest, a line that diGenova thinks was calculated to conceal the loss of so much military hardware to enemies of the United States
  CNN last week broadcast an audio interview with Ahmed Abu Khattala, the leader of Ansar al-Sharia who is suspected of carrying out the attack. He said U.S. authorities have not sought him out
  Today diGenova and Toensnig, a former chief counsel for the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, represent Gregory Hicks, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya at the time of the Benghazi attacks; and Mark Thompson, a former Marine who serves as Deputy Coordinator for Operations in the State Department's Counterterrorism Bureau.
  The attorneys say Hicks' and Thompson's superiors subjected them to an intimidation campaign after then-Secretary Hillary Clinton's Accountability Review Board ignored their accounts of the Benghazi attack.
  Toensing told Fox News in April that one of the two men was warned about the impact on his career if he cooperated with Republican investigators in Congress.
  'It's frightening, and they're doing some very despicable threats to people,' Toensing said.
  'Not "we're going to kill you," or not "we're going to prosecute you tomorrow," but they're taking career people and making them well aware that their careers will be over.'
  President Obama has said he is unaware of any witnesses from Benghazi who have been prohibited from working with Congress. Secretary of State John Kerry has attributed such stories to 'an enormous amount of misinformation.'
  In a May 30 letter, CIA Director John Brennan told Benghazi-stationed personnel that they were free to speak with Congress, but that they should involve their chain of command and follow specific procedures.
  That measure was seen in some circles as a subtle warning that CIA agents must not approach lawmakers on their own.
  Lawyer fears 400 missiles from Libya may be used to attack
  CIA Director John Brennan wrote to Benghazi survivors that they must undergo a prescribed bureaucratic process if they want to speak with congressional investigators
  Chris Stevens, the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, was killed along with three other U.S. personnel when terrorists opened fire with mortars and other live ammunition
  Audio source WMAL Washington
  Renewed interest in Middle Eastern terrorism appeared in Washington last week, as the State Department shuttered 19 embassies across the region, following what the administration said was a credible terrorist threat articulated by someone high in the command structure of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
  diGenova said Monday that he knows what that threat may have involved.
  The loss of the 400 surface-to-air missiles, he told WMAL's audience, 'is why we shut down the 19 embassies recently.'
  'They were afraid that there was going to be a missile attack on one of the embassies. Remember, you can take a shoulder-held missile and shoot it into an embassy. Not just into the sky.'
  'That's what this was all about,' he insisted. 'That's why they're so worried. That's why they have lied repeatedly about what happened in Benghazi, because they are now responsible for all of the stepchildren of violence that happens as a result of this. This is a very serious matter.'
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Eric Holder Announces Major Shift in Federal Drug Sentencing Policies | TheBlaze.com
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  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 13:34
  WASHINGTON (AP) '-- Attorney General Eric Holder announced a major shift Monday in federal sentencing policies, targeting long mandatory terms that he said have flooded the nation's prisons with low-level drug offenders and diverted crime-fighting dollars that could be far better spent.
  If Holder's policies are implemented aggressively, they could mark one of the most significant changes in the way the federal criminal justice system handles drug cases since the government declared a war on drugs in the 1980s.
  SAN FRANCISCO, CA '' AUGUST 12: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder speaks during the 2013 America Bar Association (ABA) annual meeting on August 12, 2013 in San Francisco, California. Attorney Holder announced plans for major changes in the sentencing of certain drug-related crimes in an effort to reduce overcrowding in the nation•s prisons. Credit: Getty Images
  As a first step, Holder has instructed federal prosecutors to stop charging many nonviolent drug defendants with offenses that carry mandatory minimum sentences. His next step will be working with a bipartisan group in Congress to give judges greater discretion in sentencing.
  ''We will start by fundamentally rethinking the notion of mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes,'' Holder told the American Bar Association in San Francisco.
  There are currently more than 219,000 federal inmates, and the prisons are operating at nearly 40 percent above capacity. Holder said the prison population ''has grown at an astonishing rate '' by almost 800 percent'' since 1980. Almost half the inmates are serving time for drug-related crimes.
  Holder said he also wants to divert people convicted of low-level offenses to drug treatment and community service programs and expand a prison program to allow for release of some elderly, non-violent offenders.
  The speech drew widespread praise, including from some of the people Holder will need most '' Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill.
  Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said he is encouraged by the Obama administration's view that mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent offenders promote injustice and do not serve public safety. Paul and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., have introduced legislation to grant federal judges greater flexibility in sentencing. Leahy commended Holder for his efforts on the issue and said his committee will hold a hearing on the bill next month.
  Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said he looked forward to working on the issue with Holder and senators of both parties.
  But support was not universal. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said Holder ''cannot unilaterally ignore the laws or the limits on his executive powers. While the attorney general has the ability to use prosecutorial discretion in individual cases, that authority does not extend to entire categories of people.''
  Still, the impact of Holder's initiative could be significant, said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a private group involved in research and policy reform of the criminal justice system.
  African-Americans and Hispanics probably would benefit the most from a change. African-Americans account for about 30 percent of federal drug convictions each year and Hispanics account for 40 percent, according to Mauer.
  If state policymakers were to adopt similar policies, the impact of changes at the state level could be even broader. Currently, about 225,000 state prisoners are incarcerated for drug offenses, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. One national survey from 15 years ago by the Sentencing Project found that 58 percent of state drug offenders had no history of violence or high-level drug dealing.
  ''These proportions on state prisoners may have shifted somewhat since that time, but it's still likely that a substantial proportion of state drug offenders fall into that category today,'' said Mauer.
  In a three-page memo to all 94 U.S. Attorneys' offices around the country, Holder said rising prison costs have resulted in reduced spending on law enforcement agents, prosecutors and prevention and intervention programs.
  ''These reductions in public safety spending require us to make our public safety expenditures smarter and more productive,'' the memo stated.
  In some cases where a defendant is not an organizer, leader, manager or supervisor of others, ''prosecutors should decline to pursue charges triggering a mandatory minimum sentence,'' Holder's memo stated.
  In his speech to the ABA, the attorney general said ''we need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, deter and rehabilitate '' not merely to convict, warehouse and forget.''
  Holder said new approaches '' which he is calling the ''Smart On Crime'' initiative '' are the result of a Justice Department review he launched early this year.
  The attorney general said that some issues are best handled at the state or local level and that he has directed federal prosecutors across the country to develop locally tailored guidelines for determining when federal charges should be filed and when they should not.
  He said 17 states have directed money away from prison construction and toward programs and services such as treatment and supervision that are designed to reduce the problem of repeat offenders.
  In Kentucky, legislation has reserved prison space for the most serious offenders and refocused resources on community supervision. The state, Holder said, is projected to reduce its prison population by more than 3,000 over the next 10 years, saving more than $400 million.
  He also cited investments in drug treatment in Texas for non-violent offenders and changes to parole policies which he said have brought about a reduction in the prison population of more than 5,000 last year. He said similar efforts helped Arkansas reduce its prison population by more than 1,400. He also pointed to Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Hawaii as states that have improved public safety while preserving limited resources.
  Praising Holder's efforts, Laura W. Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington Legislative Office, said the attorney general ''is taking crucial steps to tackle our bloated federal mass incarceration crisis.''
  Julie Stewart, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, said, ''For the past 40 years, the Department of Justice, under both political parties, has promoted mandatory minimum sentencing like a one-way ratchet.''
  Featured image via Getty
  ''
How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets - NYTimes.com
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 13:18
  This past January, Laura Poitras received a curious e-mail from an anonymous stranger requesting her public encryption key. For almost two years, Poitras had been working on a documentary about surveillance, and she occasionally received queries from strangers. She replied to this one and sent her public key '-- allowing him or her to send an encrypted e-mail that only Poitras could open, with her private key '-- but she didn't think much would come of it.
  The stranger responded with instructions for creating an even more secure system to protect their exchanges. Promising sensitive information, the stranger told Poitras to select long pass phrases that could withstand a brute-force attack by networked computers. ''Assume that your adversary is capable of a trillion guesses per second,'' the stranger wrote.
  Before long, Poitras received an encrypted message that outlined a number of secret surveillance programs run by the government. She had heard of one of them but not the others. After describing each program, the stranger wrote some version of the phrase, ''This I can prove.''
  Seconds after she decrypted and read the e-mail, Poitras disconnected from the Internet and removed the message from her computer. ''I thought, O.K., if this is true, my life just changed,'' she told me last month. ''It was staggering, what he claimed to know and be able to provide. I just knew that I had to change everything.''
  Laura Poitras filming the construction of a large N.S.A. facility in Utah.
  Conor Provenzano
  Poitras remained wary of whoever it was she was communicating with. She worried especially that a government agent might be trying to trick her into disclosing information about the people she interviewed for her documentary, including Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks. ''I called him out,'' Poitras recalled. ''I said either you have this information and you are taking huge risks or you are trying to entrap me and the people I know, or you're crazy.''
  The answers were reassuring but not definitive. Poitras did not know the stranger's name, sex, age or employer (C.I.A.? N.S.A.? Pentagon?). In early June, she finally got the answers. Along with her reporting partner, Glenn Greenwald, a former lawyer and a columnist for The Guardian, Poitras flew to Hong Kong and met the N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, who gave them thousands of classified documents, setting off a major controversy over the extent and legality of government surveillance. Poitras was right that, among other things, her life would never be the same.
  Greenwald lives and works in a house surrounded by tropical foliage in a remote area of Rio de Janeiro. He shares the home with his Brazilian partner and their 10 dogs and one cat, and the place has the feel of a low-key fraternity that has been dropped down in the jungle. The kitchen clock is off by hours, but no one notices; dishes tend to pile up in the sink; the living room contains a table and a couch and a large TV, an Xbox console and a box of poker chips and not much else. The refrigerator is not always filled with fresh vegetables. A family of monkeys occasionally raids the banana trees in the backyard and engages in shrieking battles with the dogs.
  Greenwald does most of his work on a shaded porch, usually dressed in a T-shirt, surfer shorts and flip-flops. Over the four days I spent there, he was in perpetual motion, speaking on the phone in Portuguese and English, rushing out the door to be interviewed in the city below, answering calls and e-mails from people seeking information about Snowden, tweeting to his 225,000 followers (and conducting intense arguments with a number of them), then sitting down to write more N.S.A. articles for The Guardian, all while pleading with his dogs to stay quiet. During one especially fever-pitched moment, he hollered, ''Shut up, everyone,'' but they didn't seem to care.
  A protest in Hong Kong in support of Edward Snowden on June 15.
  Philippe Lopez / AFP / Getty Images
  Amid the chaos, Poitras, an intense-looking woman of 49, sat in a spare bedroom or at the table in the living room, working in concentrated silence in front of her multiple computers. Once in a while she would walk over to the porch to talk with Greenwald about the article he was working on, or he would sometimes stop what he was doing to look at the latest version of a new video she was editing about Snowden. They would talk intensely '-- Greenwald far louder and more rapid-fire than Poitras '-- and occasionally break out laughing at some shared joke or absurd memory. The Snowden story, they both said, was a battle they were waging together, a fight against powers of surveillance that they both believe are a threat to fundamental American liberties.
  Two reporters for The Guardian were in town to assist Greenwald, so some of our time was spent in the hotel where they were staying along Copacabana Beach, the toned Brazilians playing volleyball in the sand below lending the whole thing an added layer of surreality. Poitras has shared the byline on some of Greenwald's articles, but for the most part she has preferred to stay in the background, letting him do the writing and talking. As a result, Greenwald is the one hailed as either a fearless defender of individual rights or a nefarious traitor, depending on your perspective. ''I keep calling her the Keyser Soze of the story, because she's at once completely invisible and yet ubiquitous,'' Greenwald said, referring to the character in ''The Usual Suspects'' played by Kevin Spacey, a mastermind masquerading as a nobody. ''She's been at the center of all of this, and yet no one knows anything about her.''
  As dusk fell one evening, I followed Poitras and Greenwald to the newsroom of O Globo, one of the largest newspapers in Brazil. Greenwald had just published an article there detailing how the N.S.A. was spying on Brazilian phone calls and e-mails. The article caused a huge scandal in Brazil, as similar articles have done in other countries around the world, and Greenwald was a celebrity in the newsroom. The editor in chief pumped his hand and asked him to write a regular column; reporters took souvenir pictures with their cellphones. Poitras filmed some of this, then put her camera down and looked on. I noted that nobody was paying attention to her, that all eyes were on Greenwald, and she smiled. ''That's right,'' she said. ''That's perfect.''
  Poitras seems to work at blending in, a function more of strategy than of shyness. She can actually be remarkably forceful when it comes to managing information. During a conversation in which I began to ask her a few questions about her personal life, she remarked, ''This is like visiting the dentist.'' The thumbnail portrait is this: She was raised in a well-off family outside Boston, and after high school, she moved to San Francisco to work as a chef in upscale restaurants. She also took classes at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied under the experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr. In 1992, she moved to New York and began to make her way in the film world, while also enrolling in graduate classes in social and political theory at the New School. Since then she has made five films, most recently ''The Oath,'' about the Guantnamo prisoner Salim Hamdan and his brother-in-law back in Yemen, and has been the recipient of a Peabody Award and a MacArthur award.
  On Sept. 11, 2001, Poitras was on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when the towers were attacked. Like most New Yorkers, in the weeks that followed she was swept up in both mourning and a feeling of unity. It was a moment, she said, when ''people could have done anything, in a positive sense.'' When that moment led to the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, she felt that her country had lost its way. ''We always wonder how countries can veer off course,'' she said. ''How do people let it happen, how do people sit by during this slipping of boundaries?'' Poitras had no experience in conflict zones, but in June 2004, she went to Iraq and began documenting the occupation.
  Shortly after arriving in Baghdad, she received permission to go to Abu Ghraib prison to film a visit by members of Baghdad's City Council. This was just a few months after photos were published of American soldiers abusing prisoners there. A prominent Sunni doctor was part of the visiting delegation, and Poitras shot a remarkable scene of his interaction with prisoners there, shouting that they were locked up for no good reason.
  The doctor, Riyadh al-Adhadh, invited Poitras to his clinic and later allowed her to report on his life in Baghdad. Her documentary, ''My Country, My Country,'' is centered on his family's travails '-- the shootings and blackouts in their neighborhood, the kidnapping of a nephew. The film premiered in early 2006 and received widespread acclaim, including an Oscar nomination for best documentary.
  Attempting to tell the story of the war's effect on Iraqi citizens made Poitras the target of serious '-- and apparently false '-- accusations. On Nov. 19, 2004, Iraqi troops, supported by American forces, raided a mosque in the doctor's neighborhood of Adhamiya, killing several people inside. The next day, the neighborhood erupted in violence. Poitras was with the doctor's family, and occasionally they would go to the roof of the home to get a sense of what was going on. On one of those rooftop visits, she was seen by soldiers from an Oregon National Guard battalion. Shortly after, a group of insurgents launched an attack that killed one of the Americans. Some soldiers speculated that Poitras was on the roof because she had advance notice of the attack and wanted to film it. Their battalion commander, Lt. Col. Daniel Hendrickson, retired, told me last month that he filed a report about her to brigade headquarters.
  There is no evidence to support this claim. Fighting occurred throughout the neighborhood that day, so it would have been difficult for any journalist to not be near the site of an attack. The soldiers who made the allegation told me that they have no evidence to prove it. Hendrickson told me his brigade headquarters never got back to him.
  For several months after the attack in Adhamiya, Poitras continued to live in the Green Zone and work as an embedded journalist with the U.S. military. She has screened her film to a number of military audiences, including at the U.S. Army War College. An officer who interacted with Poitras in Baghdad, Maj. Tom Mowle, retired, said Poitras was always filming and it ''completely makes sense'' she would film on a violent day. ''I think it's a pretty ridiculous allegation,'' he said.
  Although the allegations were without evidence, they may be related to Poitras's many detentions and searches. Hendrickson and another soldier told me that in 2007 '-- months after she was first detained '-- investigators from the Department of Justice's Joint Terrorism Task Force interviewed them, inquiring about Poitras's activities in Baghdad that day. Poitras was never contacted by those or any other investigators, however. ''Iraq forces and the U.S. military raided a mosque during Friday prayers and killed several people,'' Poitras said. ''Violence broke out the next day. I am a documentary filmmaker and was filming in the neighborhood. Any suggestion I knew about an attack is false. The U.S. government should investigate who ordered the raid, not journalists covering the war.''
  In June 2006, her tickets on domestic flights were marked ''SSSS'' '-- Secondary Security Screening Selection '-- which means the bearer faces extra scrutiny beyond the usual measures. She was detained for the first time at Newark International Airport before boarding a flight to Israel, where she was showing her film. On her return flight, she was held for two hours before being allowed to re-enter the country. The next month, she traveled to Bosnia to show the film at a festival there. When she flew out of Sarajevo and landed in Vienna, she was paged on the airport loudspeaker and told to go to a security desk; from there she was led to a van and driven to another part of the airport, then taken into a room where luggage was examined.
  ''They took my bags and checked them,'' Poitras said. ''They asked me what I was doing, and I said I was showing a movie in Sarajevo about the Iraq war. And then I sort of befriended the security guy. I asked what was going on. He said: 'You're flagged. You have a threat score that is off the Richter scale. You are at 400 out of 400.' I said, 'Is this a scoring system that works throughout all of Europe, or is this an American scoring system?' He said. 'No, this is your government that has this and has told us to stop you.' ''
  After 9/11, the U.S. government began compiling a terrorist watch list that was at one point estimated to contain nearly a million names. There are at least two subsidiary lists that relate to air travel. The no-fly list contains the names of tens of thousands of people who are not allowed to fly into or out of the country. The selectee list, which is larger than the no-fly list, subjects people to extra airport inspections and questioning. These lists have been criticized by civil rights groups for being too broad and arbitrary and for violating the rights of Americans who are on them.
  In Vienna, Poitras was eventually cleared to board her connecting flight to New York, but when she landed at J.F.K., she was met at the gate by two armed law-enforcement agents and taken to a room for questioning. It is a routine that has happened so many times since then '-- on more than 40 occasions '-- that she has lost precise count. Initially, she said, the authorities were interested in the paper she carried, copying her receipts and, once, her notebook. After she stopped carrying her notes, they focused on her electronics instead, telling her that if she didn't answer their questions, they would confiscate her gear and get their answers that way. On one occasion, Poitras says, they did seize her computers and cellphones and kept them for weeks. She was also told that her refusal to answer questions was itself a suspicious act. Because the interrogations took place at international boarding crossings, where the government contends that ordinary constitutional rights do not apply, she was not permitted to have a lawyer present.
  ''It's a total violation,'' Poitras said. ''That's how it feels. They are interested in information that pertains to the work I am doing that's clearly private and privileged. It's an intimidating situation when people with guns meet you when you get off an airplane.''
  Though she has written to members of Congress and has submitted Freedom of Information Act requests, Poitras has never received any explanation for why she was put on a watch list. ''It's infuriating that I have to speculate why,'' she said. ''When did that universe begin, that people are put on a list and are never told and are stopped for six years? I have no idea why they did it. It's the complete suspension of due process.'' She added: ''I've been told nothing, I've been asked nothing, and I've done nothing. It's like Kafka. Nobody ever tells you what the accusation is.''
  After being detained repeatedly, Poitras began taking steps to protect her data, asking a traveling companion to carry her laptop, leaving her notebooks overseas with friends or in safe deposit boxes. She would wipe her computers and cellphones clean so that there would be nothing for the authorities to see. Or she encrypted her data, so that law enforcement could not read any files they might get hold of. These security preparations could take a day or more before her travels.
  It wasn't just border searches that she had to worry about. Poitras said she felt that if the government was suspicious enough to interrogate her at airports, it was also most likely surveilling her e-mail, phone calls and Web browsing. ''I assume that there are National Security Letters on my e-mails,'' she told me, referring to one of the secretive surveillance tools used by the Department of Justice. A National Security Letter requires its recipients '-- in most cases, Internet service providers and phone companies '-- to provide customer data without notifying the customers or any other parties. Poitras suspected (but could not confirm, because her phone company and I.S.P. would be prohibited from telling her) that the F.B.I. had issued National Security Letters for her electronic communications.
  Once she began working on her surveillance film in 2011, she raised her digital security to an even higher level. She cut down her use of a cellphone, which betrays not only who you are calling and when, but your location at any given point in time. She was careful about e-mailing sensitive documents or having sensitive conversations on the phone. She began using software that masked the Web sites she visited. After she was contacted by Snowden in 2013, she tightened her security yet another notch. In addition to encrypting any sensitive e-mails, she began using different computers for editing film, for communicating and for reading sensitive documents (the one for sensitive documents is air-gapped, meaning it has never been connected to the Internet).
  These precautions might seem paranoid '-- Poitras describes them as ''pretty extreme'' '-- but the people she has interviewed for her film were targets of the sort of surveillance and seizure that she fears. William Binney, a former top N.S.A. official who publicly accused the agency of illegal surveillance, was at home one morning in 2007 when F.B.I. agents burst in and aimed their weapons at his wife, his son and himself. Binney was, at the moment the agent entered his bathroom and pointed a gun at his head, naked in the shower. His computers, disks and personal records were confiscated and have not yet been returned. Binney has not been charged with any crime.
  Jacob Appelbaum, a privacy activist who was a volunteer with WikiLeaks, has also been filmed by Poitras. The government issued a secret order to Twitter for access to Appelbaum's account data, which became public when Twitter fought the order. Though the company was forced to hand over the data, it was allowed to tell Appelbaum. Google and a small I.S.P. that Appelbaum used were also served with secret orders and fought to alert him. Like Binney, Appelbaum has not been charged with any crime.
  Poitras endured the airport searches for years with little public complaint, lest her protests generate more suspicion and hostility from the government, but last year she reached a breaking point. While being interrogated at Newark after a flight from Britain, she was told she could not take notes. On the advice of lawyers, Poitras always recorded the names of border agents and the questions they asked and the material they copied or seized. But at Newark, an agent threatened to handcuff her if she continued writing. She was told that she was being barred from writing anything down because she might use her pen as a weapon.
  ''Then I asked for crayons,'' Poitras recalled, ''and he said no to crayons.''
  She was taken into another room and interrogated by three agents '-- one was behind her, another asked the questions, the third was a supervisor. ''It went on for maybe an hour and a half,'' she said. ''I was taking notes of their questions, or trying to, and they yelled at me. I said, 'Show me the law where it says I can't take notes.' We were in a sense debating what they were trying to forbid me from doing. They said, 'We are the ones asking the questions.' It was a pretty aggressive, antagonistic encounter.''
  Poitras met Greenwald in 2010, when she became interested in his work on WikiLeaks. In 2011, she went to Rio to film him for her documentary. He was aware of the searches and asked several times for permission to write about them. After Newark, she gave him a green light.
  ''She said, 'I've had it,' '' Greenwald told me. ''Her ability to take notes and document what was happening was her one sense of agency, to maintain some degree of control. Documenting is what she does. I think she was feeling that the one vestige of security and control in this situation had been taken away from her, without any explanation, just as an arbitrary exercise of power.''
  At the time, Greenwald was a writer for Salon. His article, ''U.S. Filmmaker Repeatedly Detained at Border,'' was published in April 2012. Shortly after it was posted, the detentions ceased. Six years of surveillance and harassment, Poitras hoped, might be coming to an end.
  Poitras was not Snowden's first choice as the person to whom he wanted to leak thousands of N.S.A. documents. In fact, a month before contacting her, he reached out to Greenwald, who had written extensively and critically about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the erosion of civil liberties in the wake of 9/11. Snowden anonymously sent him an e-mail saying he had documents he wanted to share, and followed that up with a step-by-step guide on how to encrypt communications, which Greenwald ignored. Snowden then sent a link to an encryption video, also to no avail.
  ''It's really annoying and complicated, the encryption software,'' Greenwald said as we sat on his porch during a tropical drizzle. ''He kept harassing me, but at some point he just got frustrated, so he went to Laura.''
  Snowden had read Greenwald's article about Poitras's troubles at U.S. airports and knew she was making a film about the government's surveillance programs; he had also seen a short documentary about the N.S.A. that she made for The New York Times Op-Docs. He figured that she would understand the programs he wanted to leak about and would know how to communicate in a secure way.
  By late winter, Poitras decided that the stranger with whom she was communicating was credible. There were none of the provocations that she would expect from a government agent '-- no requests for information about the people she was in touch with, no questions about what she was working on. Snowden told her early on that she would need to work with someone else, and that she should reach out to Greenwald. She was unaware that Snowden had already tried to contact Greenwald, and Greenwald would not realize until he met Snowden in Hong Kong that this was the person who had contacted him more than six months earlier.
  There were surprises for everyone in these exchanges '-- including Snowden, who answered questions that I submitted to him through Poitras. In response to a question about when he realized he could trust Poitras, he wrote: ''We came to a point in the verification and vetting process where I discovered Laura was more suspicious of me than I was of her, and I'm famously paranoid.'' When I asked him about Greenwald's initial silence in response to his requests and instructions for encrypted communications, Snowden replied: ''I know journalists are busy and had assumed being taken seriously would be a challenge, especially given the paucity of detail I could initially offer. At the same time, this is 2013, and [he is] a journalist who regularly reported on the concentration and excess of state power. I was surprised to realize that there were people in news organizations who didn't recognize any unencrypted message sent over the Internet is being delivered to every intelligence service in the world.''
  In April, Poitras e-mailed Greenwald to say they needed to speak face to face. Greenwald happened to be in the United States, speaking at a conference in a suburb of New York City, and the two met in the lobby of his hotel. ''She was very cautious,'' Greenwald recalled. ''She insisted that I not take my cellphone, because of this ability the government has to remotely listen to cellphones even when they are turned off. She had printed off the e-mails, and I remember reading the e-mails and felt intuitively that this was real. The passion and thought behind what Snowden '-- who we didn't know was Snowden at the time '-- was saying was palpable.''
  Greenwald installed encryption software and began communicating with the stranger. Their work was organized like an intelligence operation, with Poitras as the mastermind. ''Operational security '-- she dictated all of that,'' Greenwald said. ''Which computers I used, how I communicated, how I safeguarded the information, where copies were kept, with whom they were kept, in which places. She has this complete expert level of understanding of how to do a story like this with total technical and operational safety. None of this would have happened with anything near the efficacy and impact it did, had she not been working with me in every sense and really taking the lead in coordinating most of it.''
  Snowden began to provide documents to the two of them. Poitras wouldn't tell me when he began sending her documents; she does not want to provide the government with information that could be used in a trial against Snowden or herself. He also said he would soon be ready to meet them. When Poitras asked if she should plan on driving to their meeting or taking a train, Snowden told her to be ready to get on a plane.
  In May, he sent encrypted messages telling the two of them to go to Hong Kong. Greenwald flew to New York from Rio, and Poitras joined him for meetings with the editor of The Guardian's American edition. With the paper's reputation on the line, the editor asked them to bring along a veteran Guardian reporter, Ewen MacAskill, and on June 1, the trio boarded a 16-hour flight from J.F.K. to Hong Kong.
  Snowden had sent a small number of documents to Greenwald, about 20 in all, but Poitras had received a larger trove, which she hadn't yet had the opportunity to read closely. On the plane, Greenwald began going through its contents, eventually coming across a secret court order requiring Verizon to give its customer phone records to the N.S.A. The four-page order was from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a panel whose decisions are highly classified. Although it was rumored that the N.S.A. was collecting large numbers of American phone records, the government always denied it.
  Poitras, sitting 20 rows behind Greenwald, occasionally went forward to talk about what he was reading. As the man sitting next to him slept, Greenwald pointed to the FISA order on his screen and asked Poitras: ''Have you seen this? Is this saying what I'm thinking it's saying?''
  At times, they talked so animatedly that they disturbed passengers who were trying to sleep; they quieted down. ''We couldn't believe just how momentous this occasion was,'' Greenwald said. ''When you read these documents, you get a sense of the breadth of them. It was a rush of adrenaline and ecstasy and elation. You feel you are empowered for the first time because there's this mammoth system that you try and undermine and subvert and shine a light on '-- but you usually can't make any headway, because you don't have any instruments to do it '-- [and now] the instruments were suddenly in our lap.''
  Snowden had instructed them that once they were in Hong Kong, they were to go at an appointed time to the Kowloon distsrict and stand outside a restaurant that was in a mall connected to the Mira Hotel. There, they were to wait until they saw a man carrying a Rubik's Cube, then ask him when the restaurant would open. The man would answer their question, but then warn that the food was bad. When the man with the Rubik's Cube arrived, it was Edward Snowden, who was 29 at the time but looked even younger.
  ''Both of us almost fell over when we saw how young he was,'' Poitras said, still sounding surprised. ''I had no idea. I assumed I was dealing with somebody who was really high-level and therefore older. But I also knew from our back and forth that he was incredibly knowledgeable about computer systems, which put him younger in my mind. So I was thinking like 40s, somebody who really grew up on computers but who had to be at a higher level.''
  In our encrypted chat, Snowden also remarked on this moment: ''I think they were annoyed that I was younger than they expected, and I was annoyed that they had arrived too early, which complicated the initial verification. As soon as we were behind closed doors, however, I think everyone was reassured by the obsessive attention to precaution and bona fides.''
  They followed Snowden to his room, where Poitras immediately shifted into documentarian mode, taking her camera out. ''It was a little bit tense, a little uncomfortable,'' Greenwald said of those initial minutes. ''We sat down, and we just started chatting, and Laura was immediately unpacking her camera. The instant that she turned on the camera, I very vividly recall that both he and I completely stiffened up.''
  Greenwald began the questioning. ''I wanted to test the consistency of his claims, and I just wanted all the information I could get, given how much I knew this was going to be affecting my credibility and everything else. We weren't really able to establish a human bond until after that five or six hours was over.''
  For Poitras, the camera certainly alters the human dynamic, but not in a bad way. When someone consents to being filmed '-- even if the consent is indirectly gained when she turns on the camera '-- this is an act of trust that raises the emotional stakes of the moment. What Greenwald saw as stilted, Poitras saw as a kind of bonding, the sharing of an immense risk. ''There is something really palpable and emotional in being trusted like that,'' she said.
  Snowden, though taken by surprise, got used to it. ''As one might imagine, normally spies allergically avoid contact with reporters or media, so I was a virgin source '-- everything was a surprise. . . . But we all knew what was at stake. The weight of the situation actually made it easier to focus on what was in the public interest rather than our own. I think we all knew there was no going back once she turned the camera on.''
  For the next week, their preparations followed a similar pattern '-- when they entered Snowden's room, they would remove their cellphone batteries and place them in the refrigerator of Snowden's minibar. They lined pillows against the door, to discourage eavesdropping from outside, then Poitras set up her camera and filmed. It was important to Snowden to explain to them how the government's intelligence machinery worked because he feared that he could be arrested at any time.
  Greenwald's first articles '-- including the initial one detailing the Verizon order he read about on the flight to Hong Kong '-- appeared while they were still in the process of interviewing Snowden. It made for a strange experience, creating the news together, then watching it spread. ''We could see it being covered,'' Poitras said. ''We were all surprised at how much attention it was getting. Our work was very focused, and we were paying attention to that, but we could see on TV that it was taking off. We were in this closed circle, and around us we knew that reverberations were happening, and they could be seen and they could be felt.''
  Snowden told them before they arrived in Hong Kong that he wanted to go public. He wanted to take responsibility for what he was doing, Poitras said, and he didn't want others to be unfairly targeted, and he assumed he would be identified at some point. She made a 12½-minute video of him that was posted online June 9, a few days after Greenwald's first articles. It triggered a media circus in Hong Kong, as reporters scrambled to learn their whereabouts.
  There were a number of subjects that Poitras declined to discuss with me on the record and others she wouldn't discuss at all '-- some for security and legal reasons, others because she wants to be the first to tell crucial parts of her story in her own documentary. Of her parting with Snowden once the video was posted, she would only say, ''We knew that once it went public, it was the end of that period of working.''
  Snowden checked out of his hotel and went into hiding. Reporters found out where Poitras was staying '-- she and Greenwald were at different hotels '-- and phone calls started coming to her room. At one point, someone knocked on her door and asked for her by name. She knew by then that reporters had discovered Greenwald, so she called hotel security and arranged to be escorted out a back exit.
  She tried to stay in Hong Kong, thinking Snowden might want to see her again, and because she wanted to film the Chinese reaction to his disclosures. But she had now become a figure of interest herself, not just a reporter behind the camera. On June 15, as she was filming a pro-Snowden rally outside the U.S. consulate, a CNN reporter spotted her and began asking questions. Poitras declined to answer and slipped away. That evening, she left Hong Kong.
  Poitras flew directly to Berlin, where the previous fall she rented an apartment where she could edit her documentary without worrying that the F.B.I. would show up with a search warrant for her hard drives. ''There is a filter constantly between the places where I feel I have privacy and don't,'' she said, ''and that line is becoming increasingly narrow.'' She added: ''I'm not stopping what I'm doing, but I have left the country. I literally didn't feel like I could protect my material in the United States, and this was before I was contacted by Snowden. If you promise someone you're going to protect them as a source and you know the government is monitoring you or seizing your laptop, you can't actually physically do it.''
  After two weeks in Berlin, Poitras traveled to Rio, where I then met her and Greenwald a few days later. My first stop was the Copacabana hotel, where they were working that day with MacAskill and another visiting reporter from The Guardian, James Ball. Poitras was putting together a new video about Snowden that would be posted in a few days on The Guardian's Web site. Greenwald, with several Guardian reporters, was working on yet another blockbuster article, this one about Microsoft's close collaboration with the N.S.A. The room was crowded '-- there weren't enough chairs for everyone, so someone was always sitting on the bed or floor. A number of thumb drives were passed back and forth, though I was not told what was on them.
  Poitras and Greenwald were worried about Snowden. They hadn't heard from him since Hong Kong. At the moment, he was stuck in diplomatic limbo in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, the most-wanted man on the planet, sought by the U.S. government for espionage. (He would later be granted temporary asylum in Russia.) The video that Poitras was working on, using footage she shot in Hong Kong, would be the first the world had seen of Snowden in a month.
  ''Now that he's incommunicado, we don't know if we'll even hear from him again,'' she said.
  ''Is he O.K.?'' MacAskill asked.
  ''His lawyer said he's O.K.,'' Greenwald responded.
  ''But he's not in direct contact with Snowden,'' Poitras said
  When Greenwald got home that evening, Snowden contacted him online. Two days later, while she was working at Greenwald's house, Poitras also heard from him.
  It was dusk, and there was loud cawing and hooting coming from the jungle all around. This was mixed with the yapping of five or six dogs as I let myself in the front gate. Through a window, I saw Poitras in the living room, intently working at one of her computers. I let myself in through a screen door, and she glanced up for just a second, then went back to work, completely unperturbed by the cacophony around her. After 10 minutes, she closed the lid of her computer and mumbled an apology about needing to take care of some things.
  She showed no emotion and did not mention that she had been in the middle of an encrypted chat with Snowden. At the time, I didn't press her, but a few days later, after I returned to New York and she returned to Berlin, I asked if that's what she was doing that evening. She confirmed it, but said she didn't want to talk about it at the time, because the more she talks about her interactions with Snowden, the more removed she feels from them.
  ''It's an incredible emotional experience,'' she said, ''to be contacted by a complete stranger saying that he was going to risk his life to expose things the public should know. He was putting his life on the line and trusting me with that burden. My experience and relationship to that is something that I want to retain an emotional relation to.'' Her connection to him and the material, she said, is what will guide her work. ''I am sympathetic to what he sees as the horror of the world [and] what he imagines could come. I want to communicate that with as much resonance as possible. If I were to sit and do endless cable interviews '-- all those things alienate me from what I need to stay connected to. It's not just a scoop. It's someone's life.''
  Poitras and Greenwald are an especially dramatic example of what outsider reporting looks like in 2013. They do not work in a newsroom, and they personally want to be in control of what gets published and when. When The Guardian didn't move as quickly as they wanted with the first article on Verizon, Greenwald discussed taking it elsewhere, sending an encrypted draft to a colleague at another publication. He also considered creating a Web site on which they would publish everything, which he planned to call NSADisclosures. In the end, The Guardian moved ahead with their articles. But Poitras and Greenwald have created their own publishing network as well, placing articles with other outlets in Germany and Brazil and planning more for the future. They have not shared the full set of documents with anyone.
  ''We are in partnership with news organizations, but we feel our primary responsibility is to the risk the source took and to the public interest of the information he has provided,'' Poitras said. ''Further down on the list would be any particular news organization.''
  Unlike many reporters at major news outlets, they do not attempt to maintain a facade of political indifference. Greenwald has been outspoken for years; on Twitter, he recently replied to one critic by writing: ''You are a complete idiot. You know that, right?'' His left political views, combined with his cutting style, have made him unloved among many in the political establishment. His work with Poitras has been castigated as advocacy that harms national security. ''I read intelligence carefully,'' said Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, shortly after the first Snowden articles appeared. ''I know that people are trying to get us. . . . This is the reason the F.B.I. now has 10,000 people doing intelligence on counterterrorism. . . . It's to ferret this out before it happens. It's called protecting America.''
  Poitras, while not nearly as confrontational as Greenwald, disagrees with the suggestion that their work amounts to advocacy by partisan reporters. ''Yes, I have opinions,'' she told me. ''Do I think the surveillance state is out of control? Yes, I do. This is scary, and people should be scared. A shadow and secret government has grown and grown, all in the name of national security and without the oversight or national debate that one would think a democracy would have. It's not advocacy. We have documents that substantiate it.''
  Poitras possesses a new skill set that is particularly vital '-- and far from the journalistic norm '-- in an era of pervasive government spying: she knows, as well as any computer-security expert, how to protect against surveillance. As Snowden mentioned, ''In the wake of this year's disclosure, it should be clear that unencrypted journalist-source communication is unforgivably reckless.'' A new generation of sources, like Snowden or Pfc. Bradley Manning, has access to not just a few secrets but thousands of them, because of their ability to scrape classified networks. They do not necessarily live in and operate through the established Washington networks '-- Snowden was in Hawaii, and Manning sent hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks from a base in Iraq. And they share their secrets not with the largest media outlets or reporters but with the ones who share their political outlook and have the know-how to receive the leaks undetected.
  In our encrypted chat, Snowden explained why he went to Poitras with his secrets: ''Laura and Glenn are among the few who reported fearlessly on controversial topics throughout this period, even in the face of withering personal criticism, [which] resulted in Laura specifically becoming targeted by the very programs involved in the recent disclosures. She had demonstrated the courage, personal experience and skill needed to handle what is probably the most dangerous assignment any journalist can be given '-- reporting on the secret misdeeds of the most powerful government in the world '-- making her an obvious choice.''
  Snowden's revelationsare now the center of Poitras's surveillance documentary, but Poitras also finds herself in a strange, looking-glass dynamic, because she cannot avoid being a character in her own film. She did not appear in or narrate her previous films, and she says that probably won't change with this one, but she realizes that she has to be represented in some way, and is struggling with how to do that.
  She is also assessing her legal vulnerability. Poitras and Greenwald are not facing any charges, at least not yet. They do not plan to stay away from America forever, but they have no immediate plans to return. One member of Congress has already likened what they've done to a form of treason, and they are well aware of the Obama administration's unprecedented pursuit of not just leakers but of journalists who receive the leaks. While I was with them, they talked about the possibility of returning. Greenwald said that the government would be unwise to arrest them, because of the bad publicity it would create. It also wouldn't stop the flow of information.
  He mentioned this while we were in a taxi heading back to his house. It was dark outside, the end of a long day. Greenwald asked Poitras, ''Since it all began, have you had a non-N.S.A. day?''
  ''What's that?'' she replied.
  ''I think we need one,'' Greenwald said. ''Not that we're going to take one.''
  Poitras talked about getting back to yoga again. Greenwald said he was going to resume playing tennis regularly. ''I'm willing to get old for this thing,'' he said, ''but I'm not willing to get fat.''
  Their discussion turned to the question of coming back to the United States. Greenwald said, half-jokingly, that if he was arrested, WikiLeaks would become the new traffic cop for publishing N.S.A. documents. ''I would just say: 'O.K., let me introduce you to my friend Julian Assange, who's going to take my place. Have fun dealing with him.' ''
  Poitras prodded him: ''So you're going back to the States?''
  He laughed and pointed out that unfortunately, the government does not always take the smartest course of action. ''If they were smart,'' he said, ''I would do it.''
  Poitras smiled, even though it's a difficult subject for her. She is not as expansive or carefree as Greenwald, which adds to their odd-couple chemistry. She is concerned about their physical safety. She is also, of course, worried about surveillance. ''Geolocation is the thing,'' she said. ''I want to keep as much off the grid as I can. I'm not going to make it easy for them. If they want to follow me, they are going to have to do that. I am not going to ping into any G.P.S. My location matters to me. It matters to me in a new way that I didn't feel before.''
  There are lots of people angry with them and lots of governments, as well as private entities, that would not mind taking possession of the thousands of N.S.A. documents they still control. They have published only a handful '-- a top-secret, headline-grabbing, Congressional-hearing-inciting handful '-- and seem unlikely to publish everything, in the style of WikiLeaks. They are holding onto more secrets than they are exposing, at least for now.
  ''We have this window into this world, and we're still trying to understand it,'' Poitras said in one of our last conversations. ''We're not trying to keep it a secret, but piece the puzzle together. That's a project that is going to take time. Our intention is to release what's in the public interest but also to try to get a handle on what this world is, and then try to communicate that.''
  The deepest paradox, of course, is that their effort to understand and expose government surveillance may have condemned them to a lifetime of it.
  ''Our lives will never be the same,'' Poitras said. ''I don't know if I'll ever be able to live someplace and feel like I have my privacy. That might be just completely gone.''
  Peter Maass is an investigative reporter working on a book about surveillance and privacy. Editor: Joel Lovell
55 Brilliant Louis C.K. Quotes That Will Make You Laugh And Think | Thought Catalog
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  Archived Version
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 04:19
  Louis C.K. is often compared to Woody Allen (whose new movie he's even starring in), but to me, C.K. is this generation's George Carlin, a savagely funny comedian who isn't afraid to touch on real issues. Carlin was something of a people's philosopher, who just happened to swear a lot, and C.K. has touched on issues ranging from politics, environmentalism, consumption, race, class, education and masturbation, one of his personal favorite subjects. He's also just about the only male comedian I know who deals with sexual assault well. Louis C.K. just gets it.
  Here's 55 of his greatest quotes, presented in no particular order.
  1. You'll be fine. You're 25. Feeling [unsure] and lost is part of your path. Don't avoid it. See what those feelings are showing you and use it. Take a breath. You'll be okay. Even if you don't feel okay all the time.
  2. You've got to be optimistic to be single. Stupid. You have to be stupid. That's what optimistic means, you know? It means stupid. An optimist is somebody who goes, ''Hey, maybe something nice will happen.'' Why the fuck would anything nice happen?
  3. I don't stop eating when I'm full. The meal isn't over when I'm full. It's over when I hate myself.
  4. I finally have the body I want. It's easy, actually, you just have to want a really shitty body.
  5. People say, ''My phone sucks.'' No, it doesn't! The shittiest cellphone in the world is a miracle. Your life sucks. Around the phone.
  6. Talking is always positive. That's why I talk too much.
  7. I grew up in Boston, and in Boston, people just beat the shit out of each other for no reason. They just beat the shit out of each other. But I kinda think you need that to keep quality control 'cause in places where it doesn't have it, they're too free.
  8. Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when someone falls into one category for everything, I'm very suspicious. It doesn't make sense to me that you'd have the same solution to every issue.
  9. I don't think women are better than men, I think men are a lot worse than women.
  10. When I was younger, I lied all the time, because once you understand the power of lying, it's really like magic because you transform reality for people.
  11. Farts are'--I just refuse to be snobbish about certain shit with comedy. You know, farts come out of your ass and they make a fucking trumpet sound. That shit smelling gas comes out of your ass and it makes a toot sound. What the fuck is not funny about that? It's perfect, it's a perfect joke. It has all the elements.
  12. Kids are like buckets of disease that live in your house.
  13. I used to like people more, but now I have children and that changes your life in a lot of ways. Like you spend time with people you never would have chosen to spend time with, not in a million years. I spend whole days with people, I'm like, ''I never would have hung out with you. I didn't choose you. Our children chose each other based on no criteria by the way. They're the same size. They don't care who they make me hang out with.''
  14. I just don't trust any of it. Every time I read something about how there's been another ridiculous climb of the Dow Jones, there's a part of me that goes, ''This can't be good.'' None of this is real money. You know what I mean? It's not like there's actually more of anything. It's just ideas. When people are getting richer and richer but they're not actually producing anything, it can't end well.
  15. I've started to kind of hate people, and it's not because I have anything against them. It's just, I enjoy it. It's recreation.
  16. People get angry at environmentalists because they think they're slowing down the economy and creating restrictions and a lot of these people are Christian. A lot of these people are very devout Christians and that's such a confusing thing to me '-- that if you believed that God gave you the Earth, that God created the Earth for you, why would you not have to look after it?'...Why would you not think that when he came back he wouldn't go, ''What the fuck did you do? I GAVE THIS TO YOU MOTHERFUCKERS! ARE YOU CRAZY? THE POLAR BEARS ARE BROWN! WHAT DID YOU DO TO THE POLAR BEARS? Did you shit all over every polar bear?''
  17. I love to shit. It's my favorite thing. I don't know why they call it Number Two. I think it's easily the best one. In my book, it's Number One.
  18. It's like when you're talking to a girl at a bar because you're attracted to her, the first thing you say is always gonna be dog shit. The most honest thing you could say to her is 'I wanna fuck your face.' That's the most honest thing you could say.
  19. As humans, we waste the shit out of our words. It's sad. We use words like ''awesome'' and ''wonderful'' like they're candy. It was awesome? Really? It inspired awe? It was wonderful? Are you serious? It was full of wonder? You use the word ''amazing'' to describe a goddamn sandwich at Wendy's. What's going to happen on your wedding day, or when your first child is born? How will you describe it? You already wasted ''amazing'' on a fucking sandwich.
  20. I read something in the paper that really confused me the other day. It said that 80 percent of the people in New York are minorities'...Shouldn't you not call them minorities when they get to be 80 percent of the population? That's a very white attitude, don't you think? I mean, you could take a white guy to Africa and he'd be like, ''Look at all the minorities around here! I'm the only majority.''
  21. There are two types of people in the world: People who say they pee in the shower and dirty fucking liars.
  22. I killed my Facebook page years ago because time clicking around is just dead time. Your brain isn't resting and it isn't doing. I think people have to get their heads around this thing. All this unmitigated input is hurting folks.
  23. Drugs are so fucking good that they will ruin your life.
  24. It seems like the better it gets, the more miserable people become. There's never a technological advancement where people think, ''Wow, we can finally do this!'' And I think a lot of it has to do with advertising. Americans have it constantly drilled into our heads, every fucking day, that we deserve everything to be perfect all the time.
  25. A man will cut your arm off and throw it in a river, but he'll leave you as a human being intact. He won't fuck with who you are. Women are non-violent, but they will shit inside of your heart.
  26. I really think that white people are from another planet because when we came to America, it was so nice. It was just Indians. And they weren't even Indians. We called them that by accident. And we still call them that. We knew in a month that it wasn't Indians but we just don't give a shit. We never correct it. We came here. They're like, ''Hi.'' And we're like, ''Hey, you're Indians, right?'' And they're like, ''No.'' ''No, this is India, right?'' ''No, it's not. It's a totally other place.'' ''You're not Indians?'' ''No.'' ''Ahh, you're Indians.'' ''You're Indians for hundreds of years after.''
  27. Women try to compete. They're like, ''Well I'm a pervert. You don't know. I have really sick sexual thoughts.'' I'm like, ''No, you have no idea. You have no idea.'' ''Cause you see, you get to have those thoughts. I have to have those thoughts. You're a tourist in sexual perversion. I'm a prisoner there. You're Jane Fonda on a tank. I'm John McCain in the hut.''
  28. I have a lot of beliefs and I live by none of 'em. That's just the way I am. They're just my beliefs. I just like believing them. I like that part.''
  29. If you're older, you're smarter. I just believe that. If you're in an argument with someone older than you, you should listen to 'em. Even if they're wrong, their wrongness is rooted in more information than you have.
  30. Young guys, they're afraid of women. They're afraid of their feelings. ''My girlfriend's mad at me!'' Well, later she won't be, fucking calm down. They're afraid of their bodies, they're afraid of women's bodies. ''My girlfriend's having her period, what do I do?'' Fuck her in the period hole, you idiot, what's the dilemma? I don't give a shit, if you're having your period, come on over. I'm 41, I'll fuck the shit out of you, I'll drink the blood, let's party.''
  31. ''Fuck it.'' That's really the attitude that's keeps a family together. It's not ''We love each other!'' It's ''Fuck it.''
  32. I did a show in New Jersey in the auditorium of a technical high school '... Technical high school, that's where dreams are narrowed down. We tell our children, ''You can do anything you want.'' Their whole lives. ''You can do anything!'' But this place, we take kids '-- they're 15, they're young '-- and we tell them, ''You can do eight things. We got it down to eight for you.''
  33. God is like a shitty girlfriend.
  34. I wish I could know everything ever, like that would be my wish '' that's what I hope heaven is, that they tell you who shot JFK and all that stuff.
  35. Life's too short to be an asshole, as an employer or as an employee.
  36. When you first get married, you have a relationship that's so important to you, and you're working on it together. But then you have a kid. And you look at your kid and you go, ''Holy shit, this is my child. She has my DNA. She has my name. I would die for her.'' And you look at your spouse and go, ''Who the fuck are you? You're a stranger.''
  37. ''I'm bored'' is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you've seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless, it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you're alive is amazing, so you don't get to say ''I'm bored.''
  38. I'm not an atheist. I think god is there and that he is watching and he made us. I just don't give a shit. I don't ''believe in god.'' I have zero idea how everything got here. I would personally say that, if I had to make a list of possibles, God would be pretty far down. But if I were to make a list of people that know what the fuck they are talking about, I would be really far down.
  39. It doesn't have any effect on your life. What do you care?! People try to talk about it like it's a social issue. Like when you see someone stand up on a talk show and say, ''How am I supposed to explain to my children that two men are getting married?'... I dunno. It's your shitty kid. You fuckin' tell 'em. Why is that anyone else's problem? Two guys are in love and they can't get married because you don't want to talk to your ugly child for five fuckin' minutes?
  40. If you do something and people think you're stupid, just go for crazy. You get more respect that way because nobody likes stupid people.
  41. It's in the Ten Commandments to not take the Lord's name in vain. Rape is not up there, by the way. Rape is not a Ten Commandment. But don't say the dude's name with a shitty attitude.
  42. I ate too much and masturbated too recently, you know? It's bad to like jerk off and run out the door, 'cause you run into somebody. ''Oh, she knows'...'' You got to take some time alone to process the shame.
  43. There are people that really live by doing the right thing, but I don't know what that is, I'm really curious about that. I'm really curious about what people think they're doing when they're doing something evil, casually. I think it's really interesting, that we benefit from suffering so much, and we excuse ourselves from it.
  44. If you're a woman and a guy's ever said anything romantic to you, he just left off the second part that would have made you sick if you could have heard it.
  45. I don't think you should ever say anything that you're going to have to apologize for later. If the heat gets hot, just let them get mad. How did somebody make you apologize? Did they literally hit you on your body? Let them be upset. It's not the worst thing in the world. It doesn't mean you're going to be a pauper. It's a desperate thing to need everybody to be really happy with everything you say. To me the way to manage is not to have 50 versions of yourself. I do this thing, and the next time you're going to hear me is the next time I do another one. As soon as you crack your knuckles and open up a comments page, you just canceled your subscription to being a good person.
  46. I am really tired of looking at my hips. I'm seriously really tired of standing naked in the mirror and staring at my hips for hours and hours while muttering, ''You hips. You hips need to get it together.''
  47. Everything that's difficult you should be able to laugh about.
  48. Twitter and Facebook and MySpace; all that stuff makes you warped. We've all basically given ourselves data entry jobs. I've actually heard people say things like, ''Aw shit, I have to update my Twitter.'' Really? You have to? That's a big priority for you?
  49. Even after 9/11, during the darkest moment of our recent history, the President told us, ''Go shopping.'' That's how we were told to uphold American values; go out and fucking buy more shit. So what were we supposed to do?
  50. Friends should always tell you the truth. But please don't.
  51. Out of the people that ever were, almost all of them are dead. There are way more dead people, and you're all gonna die and then you're gonna be dead for way longer than you're alive. Like that's mostly what you're ever gonna be. You're just dead people that didn't die yet.
  52. Bill Gates has 90 billion dollars '... If I had 90 billion dollars, I wouldn't have it for long because I would just dream of all the crazy stuff I could do with it. This guy, 90 billion dollars. He could buy every baseball team and make them all wear dresses and still have 88 billion dollars.
  53. Divorce is always good news. I know that sounds weird, but it's true because no good marriage has ever ended in divorce '... That would be sad. If two people were married and they were really and they just had a great thing and then they got divorced, that would be really sad. But that has happened zero times.
  54. When you write from your gut and let the stuff stay flawed and don't let anybody tell you to make it better, it can end up looking like nothing else.
  55. There's nowhere I won't go. As long as it's horribly, horribly true and/or wrong.
  Your turn, internet. What are your favorite Louis C.K. quotes? Which of his many bits of wisdom help you get through the day? Leave them in the comments section.
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Road to Obamacare? President's ambulance runs out of gas, sparking safety concerns
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  Archived Version
  Source: Twitchy » US Politics
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 04:07
  ABC7 is reporting tonight that a failure to gas up Medic 1, the presidential motorcade's official ambulance, put the first family in danger last week as the president and his wife headed out for his birthday dinner without emergency backup.
  Fire officials confirm that the vehicle was towed away and is now being repaired off-site. Fire officials say that as per policy, the crew should have but did not fill up the tank that day. Sources say the bigger issue is that the vehicle's fuel gauge had been broken for months and not been repaired.
  For months, D.C. Councilman Tommy Wells has been critical of the fire department for not quickly addressing a fleet in despair. He says all District residents, including those in the White House, deserve better:
  ''This is just an example that highlights the fact that we are not where we need to be.''
  The Washington Times reports that Medic 1'²s problems are a further embarrassment to the city's fire department. Three-quarters of the department's ambulance fleet was out for repairs in July when a heat wave knocked out air conditioning systems.
N.S.A. Leaks Make Plan for Cyberdefense Unlikely - NYTimes.com
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  Archived Version
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 04:04
  WASHINGTON '-- Even while rapidly expanding its electronic surveillance around the world, the National Security Agency has lobbied inside the government to deploy the equivalent of a ''Star Wars'' defense for America's computer networks, designed to intercept cyberattacks before they could cripple power plants, banks or financial markets.
  But administration officials say the plan, championed by Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency and head of the Pentagon's Cyber Command, has virtually no chance of moving forward given the backlash against the N.S.A. over the recent disclosures about its surveillance programs.
  Senior agency officials concede that much of the technology needed to filter malicious software, known as malware, by searching incoming messages for signs of programs designed to steal data, or attack banks or energy firms, is strikingly similar to the technology the N.S.A. already uses for surveillance.
  ''The plan was always a little vague, at least as Keith described it, but today it may be Snowden's biggest single victim,'' one senior intelligence official said recently, referring to Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who released documents revealing details of many of the agency's surveillance programs.
  ''Whatever trust was there is now gone,'' the official added. ''I mean, who would believe the N.S.A. when it insists it is blocking Chinese attacks but not using the same technology to read your e-mail?''
  On Friday, the N.S.A. reported for the first time that it ''touches about 1.6 percent'' of all the traffic carried on the Internet each day. In a statement, it said it closely examines only a tiny fraction of that information. But General Alexander's plan would put the agency, or Internet-service providers acting on its behalf, in the position of examining a far larger percentage of the world's information flows.
  Under this proposal, the government would latch into the giant ''data pipes'' that feed the largest Internet service providers in the United States, companies like A.T.&T. and Verizon. The huge volume of traffic that runs through those pipes, particularly e-mails, would be scanned for signs of anything from computer servers known for attacks on the United States or for stealing information from American companies. Other ''metadata'' would be inspected for evidence of malicious software.
  ''It's defense at network speed,'' General Alexander told a Washington security-research group recently, according to participants. ''Because you have only milliseconds.''
  This summer, the N.S.A. has begun assembling scores of new cyber ''offense'' and ''defense'' teams, the agency's most concrete step toward preparing the Pentagon and intelligence agencies for a new era of computer conflict. Erecting a national cyberdefense is a key element of that plan. At an interagency meeting that discussed the flood of cyberattacks directed daily at American networks, from Chinese efforts to steal corporate secrets to Iranian efforts to cripple financial institutions, General Alexander said, ''I can't defend the country until I'm into all the networks,'' according to other officials who were present.
  The appeal of such a program is its seeming simplicity: The worst malware could be blocked before it reaches companies, universities or individual users, many of whom may be using outdated virus protections, or none at all. Normal commercial virus programs are always running days, or weeks, behind the latest attacks '-- and the protection depends on users' loading the latest versions on their computers.
  The government has been testing a model for a national defense against cyberattack with major defense contractors including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon. Early results were disappointing, but participants in the program '-- the specific details of which are heavily classified '-- say they are getting significantly improved results. Each company in the defense industrial base program now shares data on the kinds of attacks it is seeing, anonymously, with other participating companies.
  But for the N.S.A., which is building a target list of servers used by the most aggressive cyberattackers, monitoring all Internet traffic would also be an intelligence bonanza. It would give it a real-time way to watch computer servers around the world, and focus more quickly on those it suspects are the breeding ground for governments or private hackers preparing attacks.
  Even before the Snowden revelations, General Alexander had encountered opposition. Top officials of the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for domestic defense of the Internet, complained that N.S.A. monitoring would overly militarize America's approach to defending the Internet, rather than making sure users took the primary responsibility for protecting their systems.
  The deputy secretary of defense, Ashton B. Carter, described in speeches over the past year an alternative vision in which the government would step in to defend America's networks only as a last line of defense. He compares the Pentagon's proper role in defending cyberattacks to its ''Noble Eagle'' operation, in which it intercepts aircraft that appear threatening only after efforts by the airlines to identify the passengers and by the Transportation Safety Administration to search passengers and luggage have failed.
  It appears unlikely that, with the administration divided, and faced with a backlash against the N.S.A. in Congress, any proposal for a formal plan for national cyberdefense will be submitted soon. Members of the Intelligence Committees in the House and Senate said that they were only vaguely aware of General Alexander's plan, but that it would almost certainly require Congressional approval.
  That is a fight the White House is not interested in having while it struggles to get a much more modest cybersecurity bill through Congress after years of arguments over privacy concerns and corporate America's fears that Washington will dictate how companies protect data and how much they must spend on new defenses. The bill failed last year, and passage this year appears in doubt.
  Before the Snowden revelations, General Alexander's idea appeared to be gaining some ground because of concerns over the cyber-enabled Chinese theft of critical corporate secrets, including some designs for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Internal intelligence reports, based on N.S.A. analysis, attributed an attack on American banks to Iran's cybercorps, a unit of the Revolutionary Guards.
  ''After the Iranian attacks, we were looking at these ideas pretty hard,'' said a recently departed senior official in the Obama national security team, who like other officials declined to be identified because of the sensitivities of the government's discussions about building Internet defenses.
  But this summer, the mood in Congress has changed. The White House only narrowly avoided a House vote to cut off the collection of metadata about telephone calls in the country. Suddenly a national debate emerged; along the way the N.S.A. admitted that until 2011 it had collected about 1 percent of all e-mails in the United States, until the program was canceled after being judged ineffective.
  ''Cyberissues usually change so rapidly because of the advance of technology,'' said Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University professor who worked in the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration.
  ''But the biggest change in the last year has been political: Public skepticism about U.S. cyberoperations is dramatically higher today, and it could result in political constraints that were off the table even a year ago.''
  Charlie Savage contributed reporting.
  New Orleans and U.S. in Standoff on Detentions
Activist Post: Newly Discovered Eighth Grade Exam From 1912 Shows How Dumbed Down America Has Become
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 03:58
  Michael SnyderActivist PostHave you ever seen the movie Idiocracy? It is a movie about an ''average American'' that wakes up 500 years in the future only to discover that he is the most intelligent person by far in the ''dumbed down'' society that is surrounding him.
  Unfortunately, that film is a very accurate metaphor for what has happened to American society today. We have become so ''dumbed down'' that we don't even realize what has happened to us. But once in a while something comes along that reminds us of how far we have fallen.
  In Kentucky, an eighth grade exam from 1912 was recently donated to the Bullitt County History Museum. When I read this exam over, I was shocked at how difficult it was. Could most eighth grade students pass such an exam today? Of course not. In fact, I don't even think that I could pass it. Sadly, this is even more evidence of ''the deliberate dumbing down of America'' that former Department of Education official Charlotte Iserbyt is constantly warning us about.
  The American people are not nearly as mentally sharp as they once were, and with each passing generation it gets even worse. Just check out some of the questions from the eighth grade exam that was discovered. Do you think that you could correctly answer these?'...
  -Through which waters would a vessel pass in going from England through the Suez Canal to Manila?
  -How does the liver compare in size with other glands in the human body?
  -How long of a rope is required to reach from the top of a building 40 feet high to the ground 30 feet from the base of a building?-Compare arteries and veins as to function. Where is the blood carried to be purified?
  -During which wars were the following battles fought: Brandywine, Great Meadows, Lundy's Lane, Antietam, Buena Vista?
  A copy of the exam is posted below. Today, it would be a real challenge for many college students to correctly answer most of these questions correctly'...
  If you would like to know what the correct answers to these questions are, you can find them right here.One of the areas that Americans are horribly deficient in today is geography. If you give them a blank world map, most Americans can only identify a very limited number of countries. In fact, according to a survey that was conducted by the National Geographic Society several years ago, only 37 percent of all Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 could find the nation of Iraq on a map of the world even though the United States was actively fighting a war there at the time.
  Our young people are also horribly deficient when it comes to math and science. At this point, 15-year-olds in the United States do not even rank in the top half of all industrialized nations when it comes to math and science literacy.
  How do we expect to thrive as a nation with these kinds of results?
  In a previous article entitled "Dumb As A Rock: You Will Be Absolutely Amazed At The Things That U.S. High School Students Do Not Know", I discussed some more survey results that show how dumb our high school students have become'...
  *Only 43 percent of all U.S. high school students knew that the Civil War was fought some time between 1850 and 1900.
  *More than a quarter of all U.S. high school students thought that Christopher Columbus made his famous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean after the year 1750.
  *Approximately a third of all U.S. high school students did not know that the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
  *Only 60 percent of all U.S. students knew that World War I was fought some time between 1900 and 1950.
  Even more shocking were the results of a survey of Oklahoma high school students conducted back in 2009. The following is a list of the questions that were asked and the percentage of students that answered correctly'....
  What is the supreme law of the land? 28 percent
  What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution? 26 percent
  What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress? 27 percent
  How many justices are there on the Supreme Court? 10 percent
  Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? 14 percent
  What ocean is on the east coast of the United States? 61 percent
  What are the two major political parties in the United States? 43 percent
  We elect a U.S. senator for how many years? 11 percent
  Who was the first President of the United States? 23 percent
  Who is in charge of the executive branch? 29 percent
  So why is this happening?
  Well, for one thing, our system of public education is a complete and total joke. We have millions of kids ''graduating from high school'' that can barely read, that have almost no ability to speak in public, that cannot write a decent essay and that cannot balance a checkbook.
  It also doesn't help that Americans (especially young Americans) are absolutely addicted to entertainment. Americans spend an average of 153 hours watching television each month, and when we aren't watching television we are watching movies, playing video games, surfing the Internet, etc.When is the last time that you saw a young person actually reading a book that was not required for school? Yes, it does happen once in a while, but it is so rare that it is kind of startling when you spot it happening.
  But it is not just our young people that have been ''dumbed down''. Even our presidents have been ''dumbed down''. If you doubt this, just check out this amazing graphic which shows how the reading level of State of the Union addresses has steadily declined since the beginning of our nation.
  Personally, I have an awareness that I should be able to think much more clearly than I am able to right now. I can feel the effect that our society has had on my own mental abilities, and it frustrates me.
  A lot has been written about the decline of our health here in America, but very little gets written about our mental decline. That is a shame, because our ability to think clearly and rationally is so very critical to our future.
  So what do you think about all of this?
  Do you agree that America has been ''dumbed down''?
  Please feel free to share your opinion by posting a comment below'...
  This article first appeared here at the American Dream. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.
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Bullitt County History - 1912 School Exam Answers
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 03:58
  The museum staff has put together the following answer sheet for the 1912 examination displayed on another page. As we noted on that page, the test focused on some things that were more relevant at that time than now, and it should not be used to compare student knowledge then and now.
  Spelling, Reading, and WritingNote that the spelling list contains a word that was incorrectly typeset: "eneeavor" should be "endeavor." We do not know what was required for reading and writing.
  ArithmeticQuestion #1:.5764 = five thousand seven hundred sixty-four ten-thousandths;.000003 = three millionths;.123416 = one hundred twenty-three thousand four hundred (and) sixteen millionths;653.0965 = six hundred fifty-three and nine hundred sixty-five ten-thousandths;43.37 = forty-three and thirty-seven one-hundredths.
  Question #2:35.7 + 4 = 39.75.8 + 5.14 - 59.112 = -48.172
  Question #3:
  The two long walls are 20' by 9' or 180 square feet each. The other two walls are 16' by 9' or 144 square feet each. The door space to be deducted is 8' by 4.5' or 36 square feet. The two window spaces to be deducted are 5' by 3.5' or 17.5 square feet each. Thus we have (180 — 2) + (144 — 2) - 36 - (17.5 — 2) which reduces to 360 + 288 - 36 - 35 or 648 - 71 = 577 square feet. Since a square yard = 9 square feet, we divide 577 by 9 and get 64.1 square yards. At 12.5 cents per square yard, the cost will be $8.01, rounded to the nearest cent.
  By the way, "kalsomining" is whitewash, a calcium-based cheaper paint. A quote: "Too rich for whitewash, too poor for paint".
  Question #4: $2700 - $2400 = $300. Divide the increase by the original amount, or 300 · 2400 = .125 or 12.5%
  Question #5: Assuming that "a/c" means percent, the solution is to divide the sale price of $180 by .833 [100% - 16.67% = 83.3% or .833]. Thus 180 · .833 = 216.086 or $216.09 rounded to the nearest cent.
  Alternately, if the student recognized that 16 2/3% is one sixth then $180 is 5/6 of the original price. Thus the original price was $180 divided by 5/6, which is exactly $216.00. No rounding is necessary.
  Question #6: Assuming that the question is asking for a total of the principal plus interest earned over the stated time period, the answer will be $63.41 using principal — rate — time.) with 3 years, 3 months, 3 days = 3.258 years. $50.30 — .08 — 3.258 = $13.11 interest.
  Question #7: Since the number of boys equals 2/3 of the number of girls, or B = (2/3)G [or .67G], we can write the equation as 1.67G = 120. Divide both sides of the equation by 1.67 and the equation becomes G = 120 · 1.67 which equals 71.856 which rounds to the whole number of 72. Since there are 72 girls, 120 - 72 = 48 boys.
  Alternately, using just fractions, B = (2/3) G and B + G = 120, we get (5/3) G = 120. Staying in fractions, we can multiple both sides of the equation by 3, giving 5G = 360, or G = 72, from which we can determine that B = 48. Rounding to whole numbers thus becomes unnecessary.
  Question #8: The answer is 50 feet. Use the Pythagorean theorem (a2 + b2 = c2).
  Question #9: 5,092 steps Solution: (assuming the question is saying 2¼ miles), 5280 feet (in a mile) times 2¼ miles = 11,880 feet. Divide that by the size of step (2 1/3 feet) = 5,092
  Question #10: $7.62. A simple volume problem. One cord at 4 — 4 — 8 feet = 128 cubic feet. 24 — 4 — 6¼ = 600 cubic feet. Divide cord volume into measured volume; times $1.62½. (Interesting to note that a cord of wood was $1.62½ in 1912. What does it sell for today?)
  GrammarQuestion #1:Traditionally there are eight grammatical parts of speech identified this way (taken from Wikipedia)
  Noun: any abstract or concrete entity; a person (police officer, Michael), place (coastline, London), thing (necktie, television), idea (happiness), or quality (bravery)Pronoun: any substitute for a noun or noun phraseAdjective: any qualifier of a nounVerb: any action (walk), occurrence (happen), or state of being (be)Adverb: any qualifier of an adjective, verb, clause, sentence, or other adverbPreposition: any establisher of relation and syntactic contextConjunction: any syntactic connectorInterjection: any emotional greeting (or "exclamation")Other more recent sources separate the articles (a, an, the) as a part of speech, and drop the interjection. For example see the Purdue site.
  Question #2:A proper noun is the name of a specific person, place, or thing (such as "Tuesday").A common noun refers to a person, place, or thing in a general sense (The "town" is not far away.)The properties of a noun include... 1. Gender (masculine or feminine) 2. Number (singular, plural) 3. Person (first, second, or third) 4. Case (subject, object, or construct-possessive)
  Question #3: A personal pronoun is a pronoun that refers to a particular person, group, or thing. The following chart is copied from Wikipedia.
  Personal pronouns in standard Modern EnglishSingularPluralSubjectObjectPossessive determinerPossessive pronounReflexiveSubjectObjectPossessive determinerPossessive pronounReflexiveFirstImemyminemyselfweusouroursourselvesSecondyouyouryoursyourselfyouyouryoursyourselvesThirdMasculinehehimhishimselftheythemtheirtheirsthemselvesFemininesheherhersherselfNeuteritits-itself"English personal pronouns have three inflections related to the purpose they serve in a sentence or phrase: nominative, accusative (objective), and possessive. For the first person singular, these are I, me, and mine, respectively." For more details, see this site.
  Question #4: The properties of verbs are person, number, tense, voice, and mood.
  Question #5: "William struck James." is in active voice. Passive voice would be "James was struck by William."
  Question #6: Adjectives have three degrees of comparison.
  positivecomparativesuperlativegoodbetterbestwisewiserwisestbeautifulmore beautifulmost beautifulQuestion #7:
  Question #8:
  "John ran over the bridge."
  "John" is a proper noun used as the subject of the sentence."Ran" is an intransitive verb and forms the simple predicate of the sentence."Over the bridge" is a prepositional phrase that modifies the verb and answers the question "Where did John run?""Over" is the preposition; "bridge" is the object of the preposition, and "the" is an article adjective indicating which bridge.
  "Helen's parents love her."
  "Parents" is a common noun used as the subject of the sentence."Helen's" is a possessive noun used to identify the parents."Love" is a transitive verb and forms the simple predicate of the sentence."Her" is an objective pronoun used as the direct object of the verb's action.
  GeographyQuestion #1: Longitude and latitude are the imaginary lines that divide the Earth into measurable horizontal and vertical lines. Latitude lines are measured from the equator to the poles. Longitude lines extend from the north to south poles and are measured east and west from the prime meridian to the International Date Line.
  Question #2: 1. North Frigid Zone, north of the Arctic Circle; 2: North Temperate Zone, between the Arctic Circle and the Tropic of Cancer; 3. Torrid Zone, between the Tropical Circles; 4. South Temperate Zone, between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Antarctic Circle; 5. South Frigid Zone, south of the Antarctic Circle.
  Question #3: The Gulf Stream is a warm ocean current that flows from the Gulf of Mexico parallel with the US coast toward Newfoundland, Canada, and then continues across the Atlantic Ocean toward northwestern Europe as the North Atlantic Drift.
  Question #4: The Erie Canal is a waterway in New York that runs about 363 miles from Albany, New York, on the Hudson River to Buffalo, New York, at Lake Erie, completing a navigable water route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. It was the first transportation system between the eastern seaboard (New York City) and the western interior (Great Lakes, Chicago) of the United States that did not require portage.
  Question #5. Locate the countries Turkey [Ottoman Empire], Greece, Servia [Serbia today], Montenegro, Roumania [early spelling of Romania]. These are all in south-central Europe. See the map to the right.
  Question #6: Kentucky (Frankfort); Ohio (Columbus); Indiana (Indianapolis); West Virginia (Charleston); Pennsylvania (Harrisburg); Illinois (Springfield).
  Question #7: Locate cities: Mobile (Alabama); Quebec (Canada); Buenos Aires (Argentina); Liverpool (England); Honolulu (Hawaii).
  Question #8: Three largest states ranked by size: Texas, California, Montana (at the time of the test; Alaska had not been made a state yet).
  Question #9: Blue Ridge (eastern U.S. from Georgia to Pennsylvania), Himalaya (Asia, separating the plains of the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau), Andes (western South America extending from north to south through Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina), Alps (alpine countries in central Europe), Wasatch (Utah).
  Question #10: A ship going from England to Manilla by way of the Suez Canal would pass through (perhaps) the English Channel, the North Atlantic Ocean, Bay of Biscay (possibly), Strait of Gibraltar, Mediterranean Sea, Suez Canal, Red Sea, Gulf of Aden/Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean, Gulf of Thailand (may have been called Gulf of Siam at that time), South China Sea.
  PhysiologyQuestion #1: The liver is the largest gland in the body. It lies below the diaphragm in the abdominal-pelvic region of the abdomen. It secretes bile.
  Question #2: The likely intent of this questions was to determine the elements of the human cardiovascular system which include the heart, lungs, and blood vessels.
  Question #3: The heart is the vital organ of the body that pumps the blood. It is about the size of a fist. The four sections of the human heart are the left atrium, right atrium, left ventricle, and right ventricle.
  Question #4: Arteries distribute oxygenated blood throughout the body, while veins carry de-oxygenated blood to the heart. The liver and kidneys purify the blood. Note: H.L. King of Lexington KY points out that "arteries channel blood away from the heart, veins channel it toward the heart. The key is to note that the pulmonary artery channels oxygen-depleted blood from the right ventricle to the lungs. It then returns, oxygenated, to the left atrium via the pulmonary veins."
  Question #5: The body's chief nervous center includes first the brain and then the spinal cord.
  Question #6: The Cerebellum, located just above the brain stem, controls balance, equilibrium and fine movement coordination. The Cerebrum is located in the front portion of the forebrain, and determines intelligence, personality, interpretation of sensory impulses and motor function. It also helps with planning and organization as well as touch sensation.
  Question #7: The spinal column supports the body and provides protection for the spinal cord.
  Question #8: We should study physiology so that we can better understand our body and how to better take care of it, as well as understand the functioning of other creatures. A good understanding of physiology (how the body works) is the basis of all medicine. Without knowing how the body works, how it is made up and how it can go wrong, we cannot even begin to design effective treatments and interventions, including surgery or new pharmaceutical drugs.
  Question #9: Eat right, exercise, get proper sleep, drink plenty of water, maintain proper hygiene (other answers possible).
  Civil GovernmentQuestion #1:
  While a "pure" democracy includes all of its people making all of its decisions as a group, as a practical matter this will not work except in quite small groups. Most countries that claim to be democracies normally have a representative form of government, as does our own nation which is better defined as a republic. A modern definition of democracy, taken from the "Democracy Building" web site is a "form of government, where a constitution guarantees basic personal and political rights, fair and free elections, and independent courts of law." It is quite likely that the expected example in 1912 was the United States itself.
  Limited or constitutional monarchy is a form of government in which a monarch acts as head of state within the guidelines of a constitution. The likely answer in 1912 would have been Great Britain.
  In an absolute monarchy, the monarch wields unrestricted political power over the sovereign state and its people. Until 1905 the Tsars of Russia governed as absolute monarchs. One example that might not be obvious would have been the head of the Roman Catholic Church who rules over Vatican City.
  A republic is a government where the head of state is not a monarch. Leadership positions are directly or indirectly elected or appointed rather than inherited. In 1912 an example might have been the Republic of France.
  Question #2: As citizens of the United States, the Commonwealth of Kentucky, the county of Bullitt, and the local school system, these students would be subject to the jurisdiction of the local school board, and the county, state, and federal governments.
  Question #3: The students may have been required to identify the current officers by name, but we will assume they were to identify them by office.
  The county judge in 1912 served both as an executive head of county government and as a judicial judge. He was also a member of the county fiscal court, the legislative body of the county.Magistrates served as members of the fiscal court, and also had minor judicial duties.The sheriff and his deputies were responsible for enforcing the law within the county.The county court clerk had multiple duties including serving as the county court's clerk and clerk of the fiscal court. He was also responsible for maintaining county records including deeds, marriage records, and wills.The county jailer was responsible for overseeing the incarceration of prisoners.Question #4: The federal government is composed of three distinct branches: legislative, executive and judicial. The legislative branch includes the Congress (Senate and House of Representatives) which is responsible for the passage of all federal laws as outlined in the Constitution. The executive branch includes the president and vice president along with the various executive cabinets. The president is the head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces. He has the responsibility of negotiating treaties, and appointing cabinet members with the concurrence of the Senate. The judicial branch is responsible for interpretation of laws, and in determining the outcome of civil and criminal cases. It is headed by the Supreme Court.
  Question # 5: The president is constitutionally obligated to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." He appoints ambassadors, member of his Cabinet, and federal judges with the advice and consent of the Senate. He directs foreign policy and is commander in chief of the armed forces. He has the power of the veto whereby all bills passed by Congress must be presented to him. He may sign the bill, allowing it to become law; he may veto it and return it to Congress with his objections; or he may take no action. If he vetoes the bill, Congress may override his veto by voting two-thirds majority approval. If he takes no action for ten working days, and Congress is still in session, then the bill becomes law without his signature. However if Congress has adjourned, the bill does not become law. This is commonly known as a pocket veto.
  Question #6: Only Congress can declare war. Only Congress can impeach (House), try (Senate), and remove office holders, including the President and Supreme Court Justices from office. Only Congress can raise and lower taxes.
  Congress can not pass a law that turns an act into a crime after the act was committed; accept a title of nobility; suspend writ of habeas corpus (except under special circumstances); pass a Bill of Attainder (which means they can't punish anyone or group without a trial); tax any goods exported from any state; and Congress cannot vote themselves a pay raise during their current term in office.
  (Note that this answer is not exactly correct for 1912. Constitutional amendments changed the Congressional powers over the years.)
  Question #7: How many presidential electors are each state allowed? Each state receives a number of presidential electors in the electoral college equal to the number of congressional districts in that state (which varies by state population, but is never less than one) plus the number of senators (always two). At the time of this test, Kentucky had 13 electoral votes out of 531 electoral votes nationwide. Today Kentucky has 8 electoral votes out of 538 nationwide.
  Question #8: The president and vice-president of the United States must be a natural born citizen of the United States, be at least thirty-five years old, and have been a permanent resident in the United States for at least fourteen years. The governor of Kentucky must be at least thirty years of age and have resided in the state for at least six years preceding the general election; and never fought a duel.
  Question #9. Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time. A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time, in exchange for the public disclosure of the invention.
  Question #10: The president and vice-president are selected by a group of electors known as the electoral college. Each state is granted a number of electors equal to the number of its members of the United States Congress (Senate and House of Representatives). To be elected, the president and vice-president, running as a team, must receive a majority of the electoral votes. If no one receives a majority, then the members of the House of Representatives select the president. Each state receives one vote, with its representatives voting as a bloc.
  Although there is no legal requirement to do so, a state's electors almost always cast their ballots according to how the state's citizens voted in the general election.
  HistoryQuestion #1. Juan Ponce de Le"n made the first European expedition to Florida, which he named. Vasco Nº±ez de Balboa is best known for having crossed the Isthmus of Panama to the Pacific Ocean. Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto became the first recorded European to reach the Mississippi River. Jacques Cartier was the first European to describe and map the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the shores of the Saint Lawrence River.
  These are likely the expected answers on the 1912 test. Although Native Americans were present in these places before the arrival of the Europeans, the names of their people who first visited these sites are lost in the mists of time.
  Question #2: Sir Walter Raleigh was an English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer. He is also well known for popularizing tobacco in England. In 1594, Raleigh heard of a "City of Gold" in South America and sailed to find it without success. For various reasons, he was executed in 1618.
  Peter Stuyvesant served as the last Dutch Director-General of the colony of New Netherland from 1647 until it was ceded to the English in 1664, after which it was renamed New York. He was a major figure in the early history of New York City.
  Question #3:
  In November 1732 the ship Anne sailed from Britain carrying 114 colonists, including General James Oglethorpe, who settled at what became Savannah, Georgia.
  Maryland was first settled by mainly Roman Catholic families led by the Calvert family as a place where they could freely practice their faith.
  The first English settlers in Massachusetts, the Pilgrims, established their settlement at Plymouth in 1620.
  In 1636, Roger Williams, after being banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his religious views, settled at the tip of Narragansett Bay, on land that would become Rhode Island. A number of non-Puritan colonists as well as those that believed in religious freedom joined him.
  Florida has had a long history of immigration, including French and Spanish settlement during the 16th century, as well as entry of new Native American groups migrating from elsewhere in the South. Florida was under colonial rule by Spain and Great Britain during the 18th and 19th centuries before becoming a territory in 1822 of the United States.
  Question #4:
  The Battle of Brandywine was fought between the American army of Major General George Washington and the British army of General Sir William Howe on September 11, 1777 during the Revolutionary War.
  The Battle of Fort Necessity, or the Battle of the Great Meadows took place on July 3, 1754 in Pennsylvania. The engagement was one of the first battles of the French and Indian War and George Washington's only military surrender.
  The Battle of Lundy's Lane (also known as the Battle of Niagara Falls) was a battle of the War of 1812, which took place on 25 July 1814, in present-day Niagara Falls, Ontario.
  The Battle of Antietam, also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, was fought on Wednesday, September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Antietam Creek, and was the first major battle in the American Civil War to take place on Union soil.
  The Battle of Buena Vista, on February 23, 1847, saw the United States Army use artillery to repulse the much larger Mexican army in the Mexican-American War.
  Question #5: The Battle of Quebec was fought on December 31, 1775 between American Continental Army forces and the British defenders of the city of Quebec, early in the American Revolutionary War. The battle was the first major defeat of the war for the Americans, and it came at a high price. General Richard Montgomery was killed, Benedict Arnold was wounded, and Daniel Morgan and more than 400 men were taken prisoner.
  Question #6: The War of 1812 was a military conflict fought between the forces of the United States of America and those of the British Empire. The Americans declared war in 1812 for several reasons, including trade restrictions due to Britain's ongoing war with France, and the impressment of American merchant sailors into the Royal Navy. One major battle was the Battle of Baltimore, during which the words to the National Anthem were penned.
  Question #7: Three Presidents who were assassinated (for this 1912 test) were Lincoln, McKinley, & Garfield. Presidents who died in office (but not assassinated) were William Henry Harrison, and Zachary Taylor.
  Question #8
  Civil War: Battle of Columbus, Georgia on 16 Apr 1865; commanders were Union General James H. Wilson and Confederate Major General Howell Cobb. [See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Columbus_(1865)]
  War of 1812: By date, the last battle was in February 1815 at Fort Bowyer, Alabama in which a British force of at least 3000 attacked a smaller American force of fewer than 400 led by fort commander William Lawrence who surrendered on 11 Feb 1815. However the generally recognized last battle of the war was the Battle of New Orleans with Andrew Jackson leading the Americans and Edward Pakenham among the British.
  French and Indian War: Battle of Signal Hill on 15 Sep 1762 with British forces led by William Amherst and French forces led by Guillaume de Bellecombe. [See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Signal_Hill]
  Question #9: What President impeached? Andrew Johnson (who succeeded Lincoln) for violating the "Tenure of Office Act", when he sought to remove his Secretary of War without Senate approval. Republicans were mad at him for being lenient to the South.
  Question #10: Magneto - Faraday; telegraph - Samuel Morse; cotton gin - Eli Whitney; sewing machine - generally, Elias Howe, though disputed; telephone - Alexander Graham Bell; phonograph - Thomas Alva Edison.
  If you, the reader, have an interest in any particular part of our county history, and wish to contribute to this effort, use the form on our Contact Us page to send us your comments about this, or any Bullitt County History page. We welcome your comments and suggestions. If you feel that we have misspoken at any point, please feel free to point this out to us.
The Justice Department's New Memorandum to Federal Prosecutors on Charging Drug Offenders
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: The Volokh Conspiracy
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 03:51
  In my last post, I gave a preliminary assessment of Attorney General Eric Holder's recent speech on reforming charging policy for low-level drug offenders. I pointed out that whether or not this really marks a major policy change depends in large part on the details outlined in an internal memorandum Holder issued to federal prosecutors. Here is that memorandum in all its glory [HT: Jacob Sullum, who makes some good points about the memo and its limitations]. Unfortunately, the relevant section is not much more precise than Holder's speech or the NY Times account I quoted in my last post. Overall, this is hardly ''a major shift in criminal justice policy,'' as the New York Times calls it. It looks more like a fairly minor shift dressed up in major rhetorical flourishes.
  Here are the relevant guidelines:
  [I]n cases involving the applicability of Title 21 minimum sentences involving drug type and quantity, prosecutors should decline to charge the quantity necessary to trigger a mandatory minimum sentence if the defendant meets each of the following criteria:
  * The defendant's relevant conduct does not involve the use of violence, the credible threat of violence, the possession of aweapon, the trafficking of drugs to or with minors, or the death or serious bodily injury of any person;
  * The defendant is not an organizer, leader, manager, or supervisor of others within a criminal organization;
  * The defendant does not have significant ties to large-scale drug-trafficking organizations, gangs, or cartels; and
  * The defendant does not have a significant criminal history. A significant criminal history will normally be evidenced by three or more criminal history points but may involve fewer or greater depending on the nature of any prior convictions.
  These four exceptions are both vague and broad. They don't explain what qualifies as a ''large-scale drug-trafficking organization, gangs, or cartel,'' or what it means to have ''significant'' ties to such, or how much evidence is needed to prove any of this. Jacob Sullum suggests that '' Many marijuana dealers and pretty much all cocaine and heroin dealers arguably would fail that test,'' and he's probably right.
  The memo does shed a little light on what it means to have a ''significant criminal history.'' However, the accumulation of 3 points under federal sentencing guidelines is actually fairly easy. Even the shortest possible prior prison sentence counts as 1 point, any sentence of sixty days or more counts as 2 points, and any sentence of more than 13 months counts as 3 points all by itself. Given the lengthy sentences given to low-level drug offenders in the federal system, that isn't much of a constraint, especially since in some cases the 3 point standard need not be reached at all. A ''credible threat of violence'' probably exists in a wide range of drug deals; that's a normal part of conducting business in an illegal market. Finally, the range of people who might qualify as an ''organizer, leader, manager, or supervisor of others within a criminal organization'' is potentially very broad. It could include anyone who issued instructions to anyone else as part of a drug sale, and thereby served as an ''organizer'' or ''manager'' of their activities. The four exceptions are so broad that there isn't that much of a rule left. They are vague enough that, in practice, it's difficult to imagine many cases where the prosecutor who couldn't make at least a plausible argument that the defendant fit within at least one of these four categories.
  I don't mean to be completely negative about the memorandum. It might well encourage some federal prosecutors to cut down on drug charges against low-level offenders at the margin, especially some who may be skeptical about the War on Drugs to begin with. By and large, however, the memorandum does not live up to the hoopla surrounding it.
Obamas Attend Cocktail Party At NPR Host's Home'...
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Weasel Zippers
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 03:05
  Liberal elitists hanging with fellow liberal elitists, or as it is commonly known, hell.
  Via Weekly Standard:
  President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama attended a cocktail party this evening at the Martha's Vineyard home of National Public Radio host and special correspondent Michele Norris, according to the White House pool report. Norris's husband, Broderick Johnson, is a lobbyist who worked on Obama's 2012 reelection campaign.
  The pool report reads:
  West Tisbury, Mass.
  Motorcade was on the move again at 5:46 pm. About 10 minutes later POTUS arrived at a cocktail party at the home of Broderick Johnson, who was an adviser on the Obama 2012 campaign, and his wife, Michele Norris Johnson. FLOTUS is also at the cocktail party.
  No sighting of the first couple. Pool vans pulled off on side of the road while the rest of the motorcade turned onto Nat's Farm Lane.
Obama Picks The Man Who Lied To Congress About Existence of NSA's Domestic Spying To Choose His Intelligence Review Panel'...
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Weasel Zippers
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 03:05
  So we already know how this is going to end.
  Via WaPo:
  On Friday, President Barack Obama promised to appoint an ''independent group'' of ''outside experts'' to review the government's surveillance programs.
  Today, the president formally ordered the formation of this group, giving us a sense forjust how independent the group would be. The announcement doesn't inspire confidence that the president is interested in truly independent scrutiny of the nation's surveillance programs.
  The panel will be chosen by, and report to, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Clapper famously answered ''no sir'' when Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked whether the NSA collects information about millions of Americans. Clapper has since conceded that this answer was ''clearly erroneous.''
  And there are other signs that the group won't turn out quite the way the president described it on Friday. Friday's speech talked about the need for input from outside experts with independent points of view. The president made no mention of the need for outsiders or independent viewpoints in his memo to Clapper.
  Keep reading'...
Report: U.S. Drone Strike Reportedly Wounds Al-Qaeda Master Bomb Maker'...
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Weasel Zippers
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 03:02
  Killing Ibrahim al-Asiri would be huge.
  Via Free Beacon:
  A Saudi national known to be a key al Qaeda bomb maker was wounded during a U.S.-led drone strike in Yemen, according to a Yemeni news report.
  Ibrahim al Asiri, the bomb maker, was targeted during a missile strike launched from a U.S.-operated armed drone in southern Yemen that killed two other al Qaeda terrorists, the online Yemeni news outlet Al Watan reported Sunday.
  A U.S. official had no public comment but urged caution regarding claims that al Asiri was dead.
  The drone attack took place in Yemen's southernmost Lahij Governorate that borders the Gulf of Aden. Covert, U.S. military-operated drones carried out the strike. The United States operates a drone base located in southern Saudi Arabia.
  According to the Al Watan report, photos of the drone strike victims showed one man whose facial features matched al Asiri, who was said to have been severely wounded.
  Al Asiri is one of the most wanted terrorists and was behind at least two unsuccessful plots to blow up airliners.
  Al Watan quoted eyewitnesses as saying the drone strike Saturday was carried out against a passenger car that heard the drone and sought refuge under a bridge. However, before the passengers could get out of the car, a missile struck the vehicle and destroyed it.
  After seeing that the missile had not hit the passengers, the drone fired three more missiles against four people who had fled from the car.
  Keep reading'...
Another Obama-Funded Green Energy Company On Verge of Declaring Bankruptcy'...
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  Archived Version
  Source: Weasel Zippers
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:57
  Groundhog day.
  Via WFB:
  The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has suspended stimulus payments to a major green energy company after the company said it is having trouble finding financing and may have to declare bankruptcy.
  ECOtality admitted that possibility in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week. Lackluster sales caused revenues to fall significantly short of its expenses, the company said.
  ''Although the company is currently exploring options for a restructuring or sale of the entire business and/or assets of the company, the company may need to file a petition commencing a case under the United States Bankruptcy Code as part of any such process or otherwise in the very near future,'' ECOtality said in its SEC filing.
  ECOtality has received more than $100 million in federal funds, the bulk of which came in a $99.8 million stimulus award for the construction of its electric vehicle charging stations.
  Keep reading'...
California Dem Gov. Jerry Brown Signs Bill Allowing Transgender Students To Play For Opposite Sex's Sports Team'...
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  Archived Version
  Source: Weasel Zippers
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:57
  Insanity.
  Via Fox News:
  California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a controversial bill into law Monday afternoon allowing the state's transgender public school students to choose which bathrooms they use and whether they participate in boy or girl sports.
  The law would cover the state's 6.2 million elementary and high school kids in public schools.
  Supporters say the law will help cut down on bullying against transgender students, The families of transgender students have been waging local battles with school districts around the country over what restrooms and locker rooms their children can use.
  ''Now, every transgender student in California will be able to get up in the morning knowing that when they go to school as their authentic self they will have the same fair chance at success as their classmates,'' Masen Davis, Executive Director of Transgender Law Center said.
  While California is the first state to pass a law of this magnitude, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Washington and Colorado have all adopted policies designed to protect transgendered pupils.
  Keep reading'...
Atty For Benghazi Whistleblower: 400 U.S. Surface-To-Air Missiles Were Stolen In Benghazi
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Weasel Zippers
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:57
  Is this part of the threat that closed the embassies, the fear that our own weapons would be used against us? Joe Di Genova, who was a federal prosecutor, also notes that the President mentioned the sealed indictment to make it appear as though he was doing something, but violated a court order to reveal the sealed indictment.
  Via Breitbart:
  On August 12, Joe DiGenova, attorney for one of the Benghazi whistleblowers, told Washington D.C.'s WMAL that one of the reasons people have remained tight-lipped about Benghazi is because 400 U.S. missiles were ''diverted to Libya'' and ended up being stolen and falling into ''the hands of some very ugly people.''
  DiGenova represents Benghazi whistleblower Mark Thompson. He told WMAL that he ''does not know whether [the missiles] were at the annex, but it is clear the annex was somehow involved in the distribution of those missiles.''
  He claimed his information ''comes from a former intelligence official who stayed in constant contact with people in the special ops and intelligence community.'' He said the biggest concern right now is finding those missiles before they can be put to use. ''They are worried, specifically according to these sources, about an attempt to shoot down an airliner,'' he claimed.
  On August 4, Breitbart News covered a report in The Telegraph that said 35 CIA operatives were working in Benghazi when the attack against the consulate took place. The Telegraph claimed these operatives were allegedly in an ''annex near the consulate [working] on a project to supply missiles from Libyan armories to Syrian Rebels.''
  Months earlier, following then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's February 7 testimony on Capitol Hill about the Benghazi attacks, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) suggested that one of the causes behind the terrorist attack ''may have been that there was a gun running operation going on in Benghazi, leaving Libya and going to Turkey and [distributing] arms to the [Syrian] rebels.''
The big, ugly affiliate marketing scam | VentureBeat
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:47
  Ruslan Kogan is the founder and CEO of Kogan.com.
  After CES 2013 in Vegas, I stayed on after the show finished for a few days. An ''Affiliate Summit'' converged in Las Vegas. I was shocked to see the number of shysters involved in this growing trend. And I don't use that term lightly.
  A while ago, one of the marketing consultants at my company, Kogan, came to me and advised that we should get involved with affiliate networks to expand our digital marketing reach. I asked him, ''Where do these affiliates get their traffic from? How will they drive traffic to Kogan.com?'' He couldn't really answer the questions, but I agreed to run a small trial. Based on our results, that marketing consultant is no longer with us.
  To get started with affiliate marketing, we signed up with one of the world's biggest affiliate networks and agreed to pay a 10 percent commission for their sites that drive sales and conversion to Kogan.
  I was shocked when I saw that in the first week, affiliates drove about $200,000 of sales to the Kogan website. We were then able to generate a list of sites that drove the sales to Kogan. I had not heard of a single website on the list. ''Where are these guys getting their traffic from?'' I asked the marketing consultant again. ''I don't know. They must have people going to their site to look for deals,'' he told me.
  I decided to apply simple commercial market fundamentals to the situation. Essentially an ''affiliate'' is a digital salesperson working for your company, driving sales and getting commission. If you offer a salesperson a 10 percent commission to sell your product, assume they will sell $200,000 of product a week for you. What if you raised their commission to 20 percent? You'd assume they would work harder because they get more reward wouldn't you? And if you lowered their commission to just 5 percent, they wouldn't work as hard as they did before.
  So I asked the Marketing Consultant to lower the commission we pay to the affiliate network to 5 percent. I wasn't surprised a week later when he told me that we still did $200,000 of sales through them in a week. I then asked him to lower the commission to 1 percent. Once again, the affiliates delivered $200,000 per week in sales. Whatever these affiliate sites were doing to drive sales to Kogan.com, it didn't change as our commission to them was lowered by 90 percent. This defied general economics principles, so I started to get very skeptical.
  I then got the marketing consultant to lower the commission we pay to half the sites on the network to zero percent. Amazingly, they still kept driving sales. Something wasn't right. Upon further investigation, I noticed that many of the sites that were driving sales were ranking highly for Google search terms like ''Kogan Voucher'' and ''Kogan Discount Code''. The funny thing was that we rarely have any publicly available discount codes active on our site. These guys were all advertising codes that don't even exist and capturing some of our brand traffic.
  At this stage, we decided to remain active on the affiliate network because it was costing us two fifths of sweet nothing, and the effort to properly investigate it would be worth more than we were paying in commission.
  The final revelation occurred when I was playing around with our Google Analytics account and analysing various trends (as I do at least 10 times a day). When I looked at our affiliate network in our Traffic Sources section, everything seemed legit. They drove a lot of visitors who spent a lot of time on our website and checked out many pages. Visitors from this traffic source also had a very high conversion rate. All seemed normal.
  This figure shows the general stats from all visitors who came from the affiliate network. In general, these numbers look fine compared to other traffic sources:
  That is, until I created a segment of people who had transacted on our website, and then looked at the stats for the people who came from the affiliate network:
  The above figure shows the traffic coming from the affiliate network after a segment is created which only shows ''Visits with Transactions''. The ''% New Visits'' is alarming.
  The results were damning proof that affiliate networks are little more than a scam. Of all the traffic our affiliate network sent to us that had made a transaction, only 1.68 percent hadn't been to our site before. This is more than 95 percent lower than our site average. Basically, of anyone coming to our site through an affiliate network, there was a 98 percent chance they had been to our site before.
  If you were hiring a salesperson and paying them commission, you'd expect them to bring new customers into your business wouldn't you? In this case, it's the equivalent of paying a salesperson a commission to go out there and sell to people in your store that are already lined up in the checkout queue ready to make a transaction.
  So here is what was happening:
  1. Someone comes to Kogan.com and finds a product they want to buy.2. They add the product to cart and start to checkout.3. At checkout, they notice a ''Discount Code'' field.4. They open a new tab and Google search for ''Kogan Discount Code.''5. They click around the various affiliates who claim to have a ''Kogan Discount Code.''6. When they visit the affiliates, they drop a cookie and tag the user as coming from that site.7. They fail to find a discount code that works and come back to Kogan and finish their checkout.8. Because the affiliate tagged the user, their reporting system claims that they referred the sale.
  So basically, the affiliates are claiming commission on a sale that was going to happen anyway, and they did not provide any value to anyone at all. This is why I referred to them in my opening sentence as ''shysters.'' They all know exactly what's going on and they're happy to keep taking your money whilst posing as your partner.
  I know there are probably some legitimate affiliates out there. For instance, someone who runs a fashion blog may talk about a certain trend, say black pants. If they showed their readers how black pants could be worn, and then at the bottom of the blog they linked to a few retailers who sell a large range of black pants, that would be a legitimate affiliate. This is based on the assumption that their blog gets a lot of natural readership and organic traffic. This would be a situation where prior to reading the blog, the visitor did not necessarily already want black pants.
  Unfortunately, the shysters are ruining business for the rest of those legitimate use cases.
  Be very careful when you sign up to affiliate networks. Do all your analysis. Profile the traffic, and then make an educated decision for yourself. Even though we were managing to get $200,000 a week of sales for all but nothing, this is not a sustainable business model.
Larry Ellison: Steve Jobs was 'our Edison'
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: CNET News
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:41
  In an upcoming interview with Charlie Rose, the Oracle CEO extolls Jobs' virtues and hints that Apple could be on the downward slide without the former leader at the helm.
  Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.
  (Credit: James Martin/CNET)It's no secret that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison greatly admired Steve Jobs, and he spells out this esteem for the late Apple co-founder in an upcoming interview with Charlie Rose on "CBS This Morning."
  "He was brilliant," Ellison tells Rose in a preview of the interview released Monday. "He was our Edison, he was our Picasso. He was an incredible inventor."
  Ellison was a close friend of Jobs and has frequently commended the Apple co-founder's skill, insight, and attention to detail. As far back as 1998, Ellison sang Jobs' praises, saying that he was Apple's best chief executive. And, when Jobs passed away in 2011, Ellison said, "Steve would translate good ideas into a finished product unlike anyone in the industry."In the "CBS This Morning" interview, Rose asks Ellison what direction Apple will take with Jobs no longer at the helm. Ellison says that we only need to look at history to see that the company's future doesn't look too bright.
  "Well, we already know," Ellison told Rose. "We saw, we conducted the experiment. I mean, it's been done. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. We saw Apple without Steve Jobs. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. Now, we're gonna see Apple without Steve Jobs."
  The Larry Ellison interview will air in full on Tuesday. Besides Jobs, he will also speak about a host of other topics.
How The Legalization Of Marijuana COULD Help Murders Getaway With Their Crime! DUN! DUN! DUN!
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  Source: Uploads by MOXNEWSd0tC0M
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:40
"NYPD Is Unconstitutionally Stopping And Frisking Hundreds Of Thousands Of People Based On Race"
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  Archived Version
  Source: Uploads by MOXNEWSd0tC0M
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:40
"OMFG! Obama's Press Conference Was An Insult To The American Public!"
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  Archived Version
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  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:40
VIDEO: Notorious mob boss convicted of murders
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: BBC News - Home
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:39
  This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets (CSS) enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets (CSS) if you are able to do so.
Presidential Memorandum -- Reviewing Our Global Signals Intelligence Collection and Communications Technologies
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:36
  The White House
  Office of the Press Secretary
  For Immediate Release
  August 12, 2013
  SUBJECT: Reviewing Our Global Signals Intelligence Collection and Communications Technologies
  The United States, like all nations, gathers intelligence in order to protect its national interests and to defend itself, its citizens, and its partners and allies from threats to our security. The United States cooperates closely with many countries on intelligence matters and these intelligence relationships have helped to ensure our common security.
  Recent years have brought unprecedented and rapid advancements in communications technologies, particularly with respect to global telecommunications. These technological advances have brought with them both great opportunities and significant risks for our Intelligence Community: opportunity in the form of enhanced technical capabilities that can more precisely and readily identify threats to our security, and risks in the form of insider and cyber threats.
  I believe it is important to take stock of how these technological advances alter the environment in which we conduct our intelligence mission. To this end, by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I am directing you to establish a Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies (Review Group).
  The Review Group will assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust. Within 60 days of its establishment, the Review Group will brief their interim findings to me through the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the Review Group will provide a final report and recommendations to me through the DNI no later than December 15, 2013.
  You are hereby authorized and directed to publish this memorandum in the Federal Register.
  BARACK OBAMA
Bitmessage v0.3.4 OS X standalone!! No homebrew nonsense.
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:11
  Are you using the standard osx.sh script that ships with PyBitmessage?
  Yes and no. osx.sh just calls the py2app setup file and creates the DMG. I am using osx.sh (because it creates a nice DMG), but I am using a entirely different & simplified build_osx.py (p2app's setup.py file, which is what matters). So it's different.My issue with the current build_osx.py is that it has a lot going on, many moving parts, and was producing an app that was not working reliably for me across my different macs (both 10.8.4). So I started from the most basic py2app set up possible and gradually added in one piece at a time until everything worked.
  I'll create a pull request for it in the next day or two.
Oprah Winfrey branded 'a liar' by Swiss sales assistant in racist handbag row | Mail Online
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:09
  Sale assistant said she feels 'powerless' after the racism accusationsOprah Winfrey claimed assistant refused to show her a handbag because it was 'too expensive'Speaking anonymously, shop worker said claims were 'absurd'By Allan Hall In Berlin
  PUBLISHED: 06:53 EST, 12 August 2013 | UPDATED: 09:15 EST, 12 August 2013
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  The shop assistant who allegedly refused to show Oprah Winfrey a handbag said the billionaire is a liar
  The sales assistant who refused to show U.S. talkshow billionaire Oprah Winfrey a luxury handbag costing nearly £25,000 claims the superstar lied about what happened in the luxury Swiss boutique where she works.
  Speaking anonymously to Sunday newspaper SonntagsBlick, the Italian bag lady said she felt 'powerless' and in the grip of a 'cyclone' after Winfrey went on TV in America to claim she had been the victim of racism.
  Winfrey was in Switzerland in July when she walked into the Trois Pommes boutique in Zurich looking for a handbag to match the outfit she was going to wear to old friend Tina Turner's wedding.
  She claims the sales assistant refused to show her the black crocodile leather bag because - seeing a black woman - she automatically assumed she would not be able to afford it.
  Now the saleslady has hit back, stating: 'I wasn't sure what I should present to her when she came in on the afternoon of Saturday July 20 so I showed her some bags from the Jennifer Aniston collection.
  'I explained to her the bags came in different sizes and materials, like I always do.
  'She looked at a frame behind me. Far above there was the 35,000 Swiss franc crocodile leather bag.
  'I simply told her that it was like the one I held in my hand, only much more expensive, and that I could show her similar bags.
  'It is absolutely not true that I declined to show her the bag on racist grounds. I even asked her if she wanted to look at the bag.
  'She looked around the store again but didn't say anything else. Then she went with her companion to the lower floor. My colleague saw them to the door. They were not even in the store for five minutes.'
  She emphatically denied ever saying to Winfrey: 'You don't want to see this bag. It is too expensive. You cannot afford it.'
  SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO
  Speaking anonymously, the assistant at Trois Pommes, in Zurich, Switzerland (pictured) said it is 'absolutely not true that I declined to show her the bag on racist grounds'
  Ms Goetz said: 'Everyone wants to sell a crocodile bag. It's a misunderstanding' and insisted her saleswomen put customers first and try to be 'kind'
  The shop assistant said she only sells a £25,000 handbag a few times a year and said the racist claims are 'absurd'
  The saleslady went on: 'This is not true. This is absurd. I would never say something like that to a customer. Really never. Good manners and politeness are the Alpha and the Omega in this business.
  'I don't know why she is making these accusations. She is so powerful and I am just a shop girl.
  'I didn't hurt anyone. I don't know why someone as great as her must cannibalize me on TV.
  'If it had all taken place as she claimed, why has she not complained the next day at the wedding of Tina Turner with Trudie Goetz, my boss? She was there also at the Turner wedding as a guest. I don't understand it.
  'I spoke to Oprah Winfrey in English. My English is okay but not excellent, unfortunately.
  'I didn't know who she was when she came into the store. That wouldn't have made any difference if I had.
  Miss Winfrey said of the encounter: 'I could have had the big blow-up thing and thrown down the black card and all that stuff. But why do that?'
  Shop owner Trudie Goetz holds up the handbag (right) that Winfrey wanted to see
  Girls' weekend: Oprah Winfrey and best friend Gayle King ahead of Tina Turner and Erwin Bach's wedding celebrations in Zurich, Switzerland
  Oprah explains how shop owner refused to show her handbag
  'We work really hard to greet all the people who come into the store with the same level of respect and treat them all equally.
  'If someone asks me whether he or she can see an article, I always present these. Because that person is a potential buyer. And my job is to sell it.
  'I'm glad if I can sell an article. It is a reward for me, if I can sell a nice piece. This means that I'm good at my job.'
  She has worked in the store for five years, says 50 per cent of the clientele come from abroad and that a bag costing nearly £25,000 is sold 'only a few times a year.'
  Asked what she would say to Oprah now she added: 'I would apologize and say it was all a misunderstanding. I surely did not intentionally want to insult Ms. Winfrey. I hope this nightmare ends soon.'
  Winfrey was in Switzerland to attend the wedding of her friend Tina Turner and Erwin Back (pictured)
  Share or comment on this article
VIDEO-San Diego 6 - CIA Director Brennan Confirmed as Reporter Michael Hastings Next Target
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Tue, 13 Aug 2013 02:07
  By Kimberly Dvorak
  Created: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 10:51:00 PST
  Updated: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 10:57:18 PST
  This week Elise Jordan, wife of famed journalist Michael Hastings, who recently died under suspicious circumstances, corroborated this reporter's sources that CIA Director, John Brennan was Hastings next expos(C) project (CNN clip).
  Last month a source provided San Diego 6 News with an alarming email hacked from super secret CIA contractor Stratfor's President Fred Burton. The email (link here) was posted on WikiLeaks and alleged that then Obama counter-terrorism Czar Brennan, was in charge of the government's continued crackdown or witch-hunt on investigative journalists.
  After providing the Stratfor email to the CIA for comment, the spymaster's spokesperson responded in lightning speed. Two emails were received; one acknowledging Hastings was working on a CIA story and the other said, ''Without commenting on information disseminated by WikiLeaks, any suggestion that Director Brennan has ever attempted to infringe on constitutionally-protected press freedoms is offensive and baseless.''
  The emails also prompted a phone from CIA media spokesman Todd Ebitz. He said they were saddened by Michael's death and reiterated their position that they had a cordial working relationship with the investigative reporter.
  On the other hand, Stratfor, specifically Fred Burton, remains nonresponsive.
  As for Hastings' final story, his wife said Rolling Stone would publish the Brennan piece in an upcoming edition of the magazine.
  Was speed a factor?
  The release of a new surveillance video from a nearby Italian restaurant by Michael Krikorian, an author, freelance blogger who also writes for LA Weekly, reveals a lot of information about Hastings' final seconds.
  An SDSU professor Morteza M. Mehrabadi, Professor and Interim Chair Areas of Specialization: Mechanics of Materials told San Diego 6 News that calculating the speed of Hastings car follows a simple mathematic equation. By using the video and the distance traveled (195 feet) as well as the seconds that lapsed prior to the explosion '' in his opinion, the car was traveling roughly 35 mph.
  That revelation is important because Jose, an employee of ALSCO a nearby business, and a witness to the accident told KTLA/Loud Labs (Scott Lane) the car was traveling at a high rate of speed and he saw sparks coming from the car and saw it explode BEFORE hitting the tree.
  The pre-explosion could possibly explain the flash of light on the video that preceded the appearance of the car in the video. The pre-explosion and slower speed could also explain the minimal damage to the palm tree and the facts the rear tires rested against the curb. It also provides an explanation for the location of the engine and drive train at more than 100 feet from the tree impact area.
  This new information prompted another round of FOIA/CPRAs and only adds to the questions that remain unanswered. One of those questions is where was Mr. Hastings going at 4:30 in the morning? Based on the accident location, Hastings was only 1.5 miles from his home and was headed away from his address.
  Other unanswered questions point to the contents (computer, phones, notes, etc.) of his home, so far there has been no response from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) FOIA request regarding these issues. Also, numerous FOIAs have been filed with other federal agencies concerning details of Hastings suspicious car ''accident.''
  I would like to thank the tens of thousands of people following this important story and the supportive comments that include many helpful tips. You can post anonymous tips for me at theKDreport.com or sandiego6.com or email: Kimberly.dvorak@hotmail.com
BREAKING: EU Bailin law will move derivatives off balance sheet | The Slog. 3-D bollocks deconstruction
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Mon, 12 Aug 2013 15:37
  ''Look into my eyes look into my eyes look into my eyes''
  The third piece on EU under-the-radar Bailin capability I posted this morning has tempted quite a bit of leakage from the wood work. And some of it is dynamite.
  A regular Slogger source writes to tell me that '''Derivatives'' can remain ''off-balance sheet'' under this ''resolution'' process. Thus the true nature of the problem is going to remain hidden.'
  He quotes how Article 38 of the proposal uses this quite brazen but explosive phrase:
  'Exceptionally and where there is a justified necessity to ensure the critical operations of theinstitution and its core business lines or financial stability (Article 38) the resolution authoritycould exclude derivatives' liabilities.'
  Well damn me boys, there's the E word again. And we all know what that means. But specifically to the point, this part of the proposal will have come down from Count Draghula at the ECB himself: nobody since the start of this four year disaster has grasped the ability of non-netted derivatives to blow the entire banking system to smithereens quite like the Italian Galleon. Il conti Mario doesn't care if Spain splits into three parts, Italy has a revolution and the Greek population starves to death'....as long as the banking system survives. But the derivatives must be faced one day. And that day is always tomorrow.
  Meanwhile, a Dutch Slogger has copied me on an email he sent to Nigel Farage this morning on the subject of a Bailin procedure that can circumnavigate the EU Parliament. He clearly grasps the eurojargon better than I do, writing to Nige that 'this legislation is being handled under the ''regulatory comitology procedure with scrutiny'', which means that it is automatically adopted if your Parliament does not oppose the draft'. Let's see what Farrago Man does with this. I'm happy to settle past differences and join forces to defeat a common enemy.
  Earlier at The Slog: How an EU proposal can become law without a single MEP voting on it
  In the UK, of course, the process is already real'...as in the Co-Op bailin that is strengstens verboten from debate in Westminster. Make your view equally strongly known to the legislature:
  About these ads
Something Decent Out of the Obama Administration
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: EconomicPolicyJournal.com
  Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:51
  Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is set to announce Monday that low-level, nonviolent drug offenders with no ties to gangs or large-scale drug organizations will no longer be charged with offenses that impose severe mandatory sentences, reports WaPo.The new Justice Department policy is part of a comprehensive prison reform package that Holder will reveal in a speech to the American Bar Association in San Francisco, according to senior department officials, says WaPo. He is also expected to introduce a policy to reduce sentences for elderly, nonviolent inmates and find alternatives to prison for nonviolent criminals.
  Of course the devil is in the details and even on its face it doesn't go far enough, but it appears to be a step in the right direction. A better step in this direction, from a libertarian perspective, would be to repeal all drug laws. But this does seem to be a small step in the right direction.
  According to WaP, Holder's prepared remarks reveal that he plans to say:
  A vicious cycle of poverty, criminality and incarceration traps too many Americans and weakens too many communities. However, many aspects of our criminal justice system may actually exacerbate this problem rather than alleviate it.
  Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for no good law enforcement reason. We cannot simply prosecute or incarcerate our way to becoming a safer nation.
TRADERS WAKING UP TO GOLD CONSPIRACY? WELL, MAYBE NOT REALLY'...
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Giza Death Star
  Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:49
  TweetTweetIt was bound to happen sooner or later, and now commodities traders '' well, some of them anyway '' are asking tricky questions about the weirdness of gold's behavior on the ''markets'' lately. Mr. G.B. sent this one to me, and in the light of this past week and a half's blogs, it's worth sharing, and commenting about:
  Markets More: Art Cashin Gold ART CASHIN: Traders Are Talking About A Gold Conspiracy Theory And There's Evidence To Back It Up Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/art-cashin-gold-backwardation-conspiracy-2013-7#ixzz2axBEpZ00
  Now, to begin with, of course there's a gold conspiracy, the real question is, is the outline contained in the above article an adequate delineation of its outlines?
  During Secretary Fitts' visit, during the 11 some hours of conversations with her and Dr. de Hart, she mentioned something very significant: material omissions. She pointed out that during the preparation of an investment prospectus, the omission of key information or data can be construed as a material omission, a deliberate or even inadvertent obfuscation of data pertinent to the investor's decision. If deliberate, it could further be considered an inducement to fraud.
  With this in mind, let's recall some things I outlined in Covert Wars and Breakaway Civilizations, namely, that the decision taken by President Trumen to create a vast and top secret hidden system of finance, based on Axis plunder, and particularly Japanese Operation Golden Lily bullion (otherwise known as Yamashita's Gold), is precisely one such, and a very significant and huge, and very deliberate material omission, and therewith, an inducement to fraud. And fraud there has certainly been in the system since then.
  The point here is very simple: if and until the current conspiracy views among traders includes and incorporates this vast system, the Golden Lily bullion, in their views, then it is at the minimum an inadvertent omission. The consequences are enormous, in terms of the conspiracy as outlined in the article above. As I've noted, the Golden Lily bullion means, probably, that the amounts of gold in existence are badly obfuscated, and may be off by as much as an order of magnitude. In addition, that gold (whatever the amount), was badly obfuscated.
  The bottom lines? (1) there may be a lot more physical gold in existence than traders think to be true, but (2) that gold has been re-hypothecated so much in the futures-paper market that the data is even more obfuscated. Add to this, the NSA computer tracking ability, and the implied ability to manipulate markets and trades, and one has to wonder how deep the conspiracy rabbit hole in this case goes.See you on the flip side.
Michael Hayden, Former NSA Chief: After A Major Attack, U.S. Likely To Seize More Surveillance Powers
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: News 1 Stop
  Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:49
  Ryan GrimHuffington PostAugust 12, 2013
  WASHINGTON '-- Former National Security Agency chief Gen. Michael Hayden hinted Sunday at how the NSA's eavesdropping and data collection program is likely to evolve over time. Critics of the project have warned that by building the capacity to track the electronic communications of all American citizens, the government will inevitably be tempted to employ every tool it has at its disposal and scuttle whatever constitutional safeguards stand in the way. Not to do so eventually would in fact be more surprising, goes the argument.
  In an appearance on CBS' ''Face The Nation,'' Hayden '-- also the former head of the CIA '-- unintentionally opened a window into just how that evolution will likely unfold.
  Asked by host Bob Schieffer about the president's proposal for a civil liberties advocate to argue on behalf of the Constitution in the secret court that oversees the NSA, Hayden said that such a setup would be inappropriate for fast-moving investigations. But he did float a hypothetical scenario in which such a safeguard might be appropriate: After an attack, he said, the NSA would want to use the vast store of information it has been collecting in more aggressive ways.
  Hayden said that in general he was opposed to a civil liberties advocate's involvement in the process, and warned that slowing it down would lead to criticism.
  Full article here
  This article was posted: Monday, August 12, 2013 at 6:14 am
  Tags: constitution, domestic news, domestic spying, government corruption, police state
The Science is IN: HuffPo pushes vaccines - again, just in time for school
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Dr. Jones reports
  Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:48
  Anyone who has suffered from pneumonia -- or witnessed a loved one battle with the illness -- knows how scary the episode can be. The lungs fill with fluid, breathing becomes difficult and at times impossible, requiring hospitalization, and without proper treatment, the consequences can be dire.
  One of the primary causes of pneumonia is the aptly names Streptococcus pneumoniae, better known in some branches of medicine as pneumococcus. This bacterium is considered to be in Ontario one of the top causes of premature mortality. In adults, up to a quarter of pneumonia cases are caused by this microbe. Yet that pales in comparison to children, where 1 out of every 5 children is vulnerable; the pathogen is responsible to over 10 per cent of all deaths in children under 5 years of age worldwide.
  With these startling numbers, one might believe that this bacterium should be hunted down, locked up in a Level 4 laboratory and treated the same way as Ebola and SARS. However, S. pneumoniae can be found pretty much anywhere on earth in one of the most unlikely places: your nose and throat.
  Contrary to the statistics, S. pneumoniae is normally nothing more than a freeloading bacterium that likes to hang out in an area of the body called the nasopharynx . It's warm, moist and can provide a nice selection of nutrients. Once there, the microbe eventually builds a community, better known as a biofilm and lives in a friendly, communal manner without causing any signs of infection. Researchers looking for this bacterium have fount that up to 95% of us have been 'colonized' at some point in our lives.
  However, in the same way as another case of friend turned foe, flesh eating disease, the pneumococcus lives with a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde duality. For some unknown reason, these good tenants suddenly turn on us and begin to not only make us sick, but put our lives at risk. How this transformation happens has been a mystery with few answers.
  Last week, though, a group from the State University of New York offered some incredible clues that might help us all. The team published a study that uncovered just how the change from harmless tenant to raging invader occurs. From studies done both in the petri dish and in the mouse, the team learned that the trigger isn't something that the bacterium does; it's something we do that causes them to go into attack mode. Unfortunately for us, it's not something that we can control.
  When a respiratory infection, such as influenza, occurs, our bodies work to fight off the virus using the immune system and a number of other measures, such as starting a fever and releasing stress hormones. These actions are necessary to keep the body fighting the illness until it has been cleared. Yet, this change also creates a hostile environment for other bacteria, including S. pneumoniae. But unlike other microbes, which usually weather out the storm, these bacteria decide that the gig is up and it's time to fight.
  Over the course of just a few hours, the bacteria change from settlers working together to individual fighters, heading out from their happy shelter into other areas of the body, including the ears, the lungs and the bloodstream. Shooting toxins and other nasty chemicals into the fray, the bacteria can quickly kill cells and show its dominance over the host. Sadly for us, when that happens, especially if there is another infection, medical attention within a few days is the only way to survive.
  Thankfully, over the last few decades, there have been efforts to control the ability of pneumococcus to call our bodies, home. There are currently vaccines available to help reduce the likelihood that a strain with a bad reputation can take residence in the nasopharynx. In addition, with better hygiene practices in place, the spread of the bacterium can also be reduced. As with other respiratory illnesses, such as the flu, handwashing as well as covering coughs and sneezes can go a long way to prevent spread.
  Even with these measures, S. pneumoniae isn't going away any time soon and the risks will remain for some time. This means that when it comes to your health, the best advice is to consult with a medical professional when respiratory sickness occurs. While not everyone will develop pneumonia, it is always good to get an idea as to what the cause might be and whether any problems may lie ahead. There may be little we can do to prevent pneumonia in some people, but there are many ways to be proactive so that something as innocuous as a summer cold doesn't turn into a life-threatening experience.
  Follow Jason Tetro on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JATetro
Beaches near Fukushima plant still open despite contamination
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: euronews
  Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:47
  Beaches near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan remain open despite growing concerns over the large amount of contaminated water that has leaked from the crippled facility.
  The Japanese government is joining efforts to contain a buildup at the plant by using state funds to freeze the soil to prevent an estimated 270 tons of groundwater from leaking into the reactor buildings every day.
  The Tokyo Electric Power Company or TEPCO, which operates the plant, has promised it will urgently reinforce the protective shields.
  The country's nuclear watchdog has described the situation as an ''emergency.''
  Blair Thornton, a Professor at Tokyo University, said that they ''didn't know'' that there were ''high concentration deposits'' so it would be ''necessary to perform more surveys of marine creatures.''
  TEPCO has been heavily criticised for its handling of the crisis since the earthquake and tsunami in 2011 that damaged the nuclear plant.
  JavaScript is required in order to view this article's accompanying video
Doc: News isn't about cable. Or newspapers. It's about us.
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Dave Winer's linkblog feed
  Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:44
  Read Dave's Cable News is Ripe for Disruption. Then Jay Rosen's Edward Snowden, Meet Jeff Bezos. Then everything Jeff Jarvis has been writing about lately.
  Then listen to the August 9 edition of On The Media. Pay special attention to the history of New York's newspapers, and the strike of 1962-3. Note how vitally important papers back then were to the culture back then, how the strike (by a union tragically committed to preserving a dying technology that employed >100k people) killed off three of the seven papers while wounding the rest, and how that event gave birth to TV news and launched many young journalists (Nora Ephron, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, et. al.). Listen to other interviews in the show about the history of media, from telegraph to telephony to radio and beyond. Note also how structural separation assures that the past will have minimal drag on the future, and how laws (e.g. antitrust) learn from bad experiences in the marketplace and society. There's a lot of other meat to chew on there.
  Then, if you're up for it again (I've improved it a bit), read what I wrote here about Al Jazeera giving up on the Net while it goes after CNN, et. al. on cable.
  I have only one complete, though provisional, thought about all of it: TV news is ripe for complete replacement and not just disruption. What will replace it is up to us. (Note: radio is different. I'll explain why in a later post. On the road right now, so no time.)
  Bonus link.
Mike Tyson: ''Brad Pitt is so pretty, I didn't know to fuck him or fight him''
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Jacky Jasper's Diary of a Hollywood Street King
  Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:40
  by Jacky Jasper
  'Undisputed Truth'HSK Exclusive - Mike Tyson has had his share of ups, downs '... and one Pitt fall. We're talking about the time the boxing icon discovered then-wifey, Robin Givens, was busting it wide open for Brad Pitt! Don't believe me.. Just ask Spike Lee, who's directing Tyson's upcoming HBO doc 'Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth'.
  ''Tyson's documentary airs this fall. In it, he talks about his rise to fame, fall from grace, divorce, rape charge, jail time and his life now.''
  From what Tyson had to say on July 18th, at NYC's Imperial Theater '' about the day he found out Robin and Brad were secretly smashing '' Robin wasn't the only one attracted to the actor. Know why? 'Cause Tyson says, ''Pitt is so pretty, I didn't know whether to fuck him or fight him''.
  Here's the drop:
  ''It happened a few nights before they signed their divorce papers. Mike and Robin had a mansion in New Jersey, where they used to smash while going through their divorce.
  One day, Tyson pulled up to the mansion, waiting for Givens '... when Brad Pitt pulled up with Robin in his passenger seat. Mike got out of his car and walked over to Brad's ride. Brad got out of his car, high as hell '... slurring on his words and ducking '... thinking Tyson was going to beat the shit out of him!
  Tyson didn't fuck up Brad, he exchanged words with Robin and drove off.''
  Did one a cast members from the '70s hit television show ''The Brady Bunch'' visit Mike Tyson while he locked up? Of course. Don't believe me.. Ask Florence Henderson.
WashPost Champions Hillary Anew As Women's Advocate -- Ignores the Horny Elephant in the Room
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Tim Graham's blog
  Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:36
  There's such a thing as playing dumb, and then there's just playing like you're in a political coma. On Monday's front page of The Washington Post, political reporter Philip Rucker implied that Hillary Clinton is not going to make her 2008 mistake again of downplaying her gender in a presidential run. She'll make 2016 ''a natural continuation of her lifelong focus on advocating for women.''
  The headline was "Clinton's theme, pre-2016: Women breaking barriers." Nowhere in this story could Rucker find a place to underline why the feminist angle was tricky in her last presidential campaign and might be tricky now: the horny elephant in the room, Hillary's husband, and his record of adultery, sexual harassment, and even rape accusations. This is the one time his name surfaces in the story:
  Now, coming off her four-year tour as the nation's top diplomat and free as a private citizen to pursue her own agenda, she is championing women '-- making speeches about the unfinished business of the women's movement and starting an international project focused on women and girls through the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
  No one at the Post winks and giggles when Bill Clinton wants to ''focus on women and girls.'' They just channel the positive power of amnesia.
  The closest Rucker came to any shading of Clinton's intern Olympics and impeachment came in a quote from Palin-hating Republican analyst Nicolle Wallace, who vaguely said, ''I have never done a book signing or a book event where women have not come up to me and said something about still being upset about what happened to Hillary '-- that sense that there was this unsettled experience.''
  Does that mean the 2008 election? Or something else that ''happened'' to her? Rucker also portrayed Hillary's legal career in Arkansas as simply working for the ''venerable'' Rose Law Firm, and never having her hands dirty in Whitewater legal chicanery (or mysterious cattle-futures trades). She is a "pioneering woman" in law:
  On Monday in San Francisco, the American Bar Association will honor Clinton with the prestigious ABA Medal for her career as a pioneering woman. In 1987, Clinton, then the first lady of Arkansas and the first female partner at the venerable Rose Law Firm, chaired a new ABA commission on women in the legal profession. Aides said she plans to talk about that experience in her acceptance speech.
  ''Go back to a time when women were not a recognized face of the legal profession, and around that time came Hillary Clinton,'' ABA President Laurel G. Bellows said. ''She is an advocate of the highest order.''
  In 1995, Clinton made a global splash when, as first lady of the United States, she declared in Beijing, ''Human rights are women's rights, and women's rights are human rights.'' As secretary of state, she made women's empowerment a core focus. She gave major speeches about the power that women can have in improving government, expanding an economy and securing peace.
  Clinton devoted her first public remarks after leaving the State Department, an address at the Vital Voices Global Partnership gala, to a discussion of the ''untapped potential'' of women. And she continued that theme at the Women in the World conference in April. Women, she said, ''are agents of change, we are drivers of progress, we are makers of peace '-- all we need is a fighting chance.''
  Hillary left out ''We are the enablers of sexually voracious husbands. And we are the crushers of 'bimbo eruptions.''' As George Stephanopoulos told the tale in his memoir All Too Human, Mrs. Clinton turned to him on the first "bimbo eruption" (Connie Hamzy in 1991) and said "We have to destroy her story." (Italics his.)
  The anti-"bimbo" pattern continued, from willing sexual partners (Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinsky) to the accusers of sexual harassment and assault (Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaddrick.) The fact that the Ruckers of the world constantly forget about this shows they are political partners, not independent reporters. They are less feminists than Clinton lackeys.
  PS: Rucker's liberal bias is also obvious in describing Hillary supporters at EMILY's List: ''Emily's List, a group that works to elect more women, is barely disguising its support for Clinton.'' He left out a few adjectives that would underline they're choosier in their mission: ''EMILY's List elects pro-choice Democratic women to office.''
Record number of Germans in second jobs
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: The Local - Germany's news in English
  Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:34
  Photo: DPA
  A record number of Germans are taking on second jobs with women the worst affected, according to government figures.
  Published: 12 Aug 2013 14:32 CET
  A record number of Germans are taking on second jobs, with women the worst affected, according to government figures.Latest figures show 2.66 million Germans are now working part time alongside their normal jobs, the national employment agency said on Monday.
  The number of people taking on second jobs has doubled in less than ten years to 9.1 percent of workers, according to data from the last quarter of 2012.
  There has been no sudden jump in the number of people with two jobs, rather, it is a long-term trend according to the employment agency.
  A spokeswoman said: "There are seasonal variations, but in essence the number has been increasing slowly and continuously."
  Women are the worst affected with 1.5 million working a second job compared to 1.1 million men.
  Analysts blamed the rise on low wages whereas others said consumerism was to blame.
  MP for left wing party Die Linke, Sabine Zimmermann said people were taking on the extra work out of ''pure financial need rather than voluntary'', the Welt newspaper reported.
  dpa/The Local/tsb
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Fake Web Traffic Is Costing Advertisers Billions.
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Dave Winer's linkblog feed
  Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:33
  Fake web traffic has long plagued the online publishing world, but Dr. Paul Barford, computer science professor at the University of Wisconsin, is claiming the problem might be worse than suspected. And it's costing some of the top online advertisers millions in wasted ad impressions.
  Dr. Paul Barford is chief scientist at MdotLabs.Dr. Barford, who is also the chief scientist at startup MdotLabs, is slated to present a study at an Internet security symposium Wednesday in Washington, D.C., where he we will claim that 10 traffic networks are serving up more than 500 million invalid ad impressions a month.
  "We estimate the cost to advertisers for this fraudulent traffic to be on the order of $180 million annually," he said in a statement in advance of the presentation.
  Dr. Barford reached his conclusion by posing as a web publisher and signing up for several different traffic generation services, also called PPV networks, which he filtered through software that uses anomaly detection to identify fake website traffic.
  The study comes as more publishers and advertisers are becoming aware of fake web traffic and taking steps to combat bots that are growing increasingly more sophisticated.
  "We see bots playing games that we didn't see a few years ago," said Brian Pugh, a senior-VP of audience analytics at ComScore.
  MdotLabs, the company that Dr. Barford co-founded this month, is among a number of firms that publishers, media agencies and advertisers use to identify bogus traffic. GroupM, for instance, employs the services of at least three such firms: Double Verify, Integral Ad Science and Spider.io. In February, the London-based Spider.io uncovered a cluster of more than 120,000 computers that had been infected by the Chameleon botnet, which was flooding websites with fake traffic.
  Among the services firms such as MdotLabs offers is the ability for publishers to incorporate software onto their own sites for the purpose of weeding out fake traffic.
  "From a publisher perspective, the platform allows them to differentiate themselves from lower-quality players and charge for higher-quality CPMs," said Timur Yarnall, the CEO and other co-founder of MdotLabs.
  Estimates about the amount of overall fake web traffic varies. Mr. Yarnall claims that as much as 50% of all web traffic is fake -- which is likely on the high end.
  ComScore has indicated that 36% of all traffic is non-human, though that includes certain bots -- such as those from Google -- which do not inflate ad impressions. The percentage has increased sharply from 2011, when it was just 6%. Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of visitors to so-called "long-tail sites," which have an overall reach of less than 1.5% of total internet users, are creating fake ad impressions, according to Mr. Pugh. He said the percentage of fake visitors to large websites is far less.
French Muslims fear surge in attacks by far-right militants
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: The Daily Star >> Live News
  Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:30
  PARIS: Muslim leaders in the French city of Lyon said on Monday they feared a surge in attacks on mosques in the style of one averted last week in which a soldier was arrested on suspicion of planning a shooting during an Islamic feast holiday.
  Anti-Muslim incidents have risen steadily in recent years in France, home to Europe's largest Islamic minority, according to the Committee against Islamophobia in France (CCIF), which blames anti-Muslim rhetoric by far-right politicians.
  A far-right activist said such violence had been provoked by government efforts to suppress "nationalist movements" that provided a legitimate outlet for discontent.
  Kamel Kabtane, rector of the Grand Mosque of Lyon, called on local Muslims to gather for a show of solidarity at the suburban Minguettes Mosque, which police said the soldier arrested on Saturday planned to shoot at on the Muslim Eid al-Fitr holiday.
  The 23-year-old, from an air force base near Lyon, was placed under formal investigation on Monday, accused of "possessing category 4 ammunitions in relation to a terrorist undertaking". Described by the interior ministry as holding extreme right-wing views, he was also accused of lobbing a Molotov cocktail at a mosque near Bordeaux last year.
  "There is a clear will today to hurt the Muslim community," Kabtane said, adding that two minor acts had been carried out against mosques in southeastern France over the weekend.
  "These are no longer isolated acts. It feels like there is a whole organisation being put in place," he said.
  French media say such incidents have increased by 50 percent in the first half of 2013. The presence of far-right militants at anti-gay marriage protests highlighted half a dozen shadowy extremist groups the government has since shut down.
  Alexandre Gabriac, the young founder of a now banned far-right group called the Revolutionary Youths, blamed the rise in anti-Muslim attacks on the clampdown and said the government should take some responsibility.
  "Dissolving nationalist movements drives people to carry out isolated, reckless acts," he said. "Our groups enabled the anger that is rising to be channelled and transformed into a political foundation. These isolated acts will be more and more frequent."
  Staunchly secular France has long struggled to assimilate a Muslim population made up largely of descendants of immigrants from ex-colonies, that has grown to around 5 million people and itself feels shut out of mainstream society and the job market.
  The previous conservative government banned full-face veils in public and far-right politicians have complained about Muslim prayers spilling out onto streets from overcrowded mosques.
  The clampdown on far-right groups was sparked by the death of a left-wing student in a brawl in Paris.
  Kamel Arioua, head of an association that manages the Minguettes mosque, said the soldier's alleged plan to shoot at it on the holiday marking the end of the Ramadan fasting period could have set off a riot, even if there were no casualties.
  The soldier, in police custody on Monday, is also accused of "defacing a place of worship in relation to a terrorist undertaking" for the Bordeaux attack, a legal source said.
  In France, placing a person under formal investigation means there is serious or consistent evidence pointing to their likely implication in a crime, and moves them a step closer to a trial.
SUPPOSITORY BOMB
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: aangirfan
  Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:26
  Ibrahim Asiri has been attempting to design bombs to be implanted inside a bomber's body.Asiri reportedly invented the 'suppository bomb'.One US official told Newsweek about a bomb to be inserted in the terrorist's 'love handle'. Asiri of the CIAAsiri reportedly equipped his 23-year-old brother, Abdullah, with a 'suppository bomb'.
  Abdullah then attempted to kill Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, a senior Saudi interior minister who has led a programme in Saudi Arabia to encourage CIA-terrorists to reform.
  Abdullah al-Asiri
  "Abdullah gained a private audience with Prince Muhammad, detonating the device when he entered his office.
  "It killed Abdullah but missed the prince... Security sources later said Abdullah's own body mass had deflected the charge upwards rather than outwards."
  The CIA's Umar Farouk Abdulmutallib "attempted to detonate an Asiri-made bomb on a flight over Detroit" (ABC/EPA)Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri (Aseery) is alleged to be the bomb maker in:(1) The failed attempt to kill Saudi counter-terrorism chief Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in August 2009
  (2) The failed Christmas bombing by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Underpants Bomber.
  The al-Qaeda 'underpants' bomber was working for CIA, according to the Telegraph
  (U.S. eyeing Saudi-born bombmaker in parcel bomb plot / Yemen parcel bombmaker believed to be al Qaeda terrorist Ibrahim ...)
  Asiri, whose father was in the Saudi military.
  According to the Telegraph (UK):
  Asiri can now make bombs that can pass undetected through airport security.
  Yemen's hunt for master bomber In Yemen "a weak, corrupt and cash-starved central government is pitted against one of the most sophisticated and well-resourced al-Qaeda (CIA militia) franchises on the planet.
  "America only yesterday called off an unprecedented terrorism alert triggered by an intercepted conversation betweenAyman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda, and Nasser al-Wuhaysi, the commander of the terrorist movement's Yemen affiliate."Yemen's hunt for master bomber
  Ayman al-Zawahiri, who works for the US government, and who was granted US residence.Ayman al-Zawahiri is an Egyptian, 'a crypto-Jew', and the leader of al Qaeda.Al-Zawahiri joined the Muslim Brotherhood, a tool of the British and later of the CIA.In Pakistan he was helped by the CIA to get arms, training and money for the Mujahideen.
  The CIA gave him and his accomplices new identities and new passports.
  Al-Zawahiri's brother Muhammad helped the CIA in Bosnia and Croatia.In 1993, al-Zawahiri traveled to the United States and met many people in California.In 1996, he was helping the CIA in Chechnya.
  According to January 2000 U.S. Congressional testimony, al-Zawahiri was granted U.S. residence by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
  aangirfan: USA BEHIND MASSACRE IN EGYPT?Anwar Al-Awlaki is a Yemeni and a top man in al Qaeda.Anwar Al-Awlaki was born in the USA, was once a chaplain at George Washington University, and most likely is an agent of the CIA.On 21st October 2010, it was reported that Al Qaeda's Anwar Al-Awlaki was 'invited to the Pentagon for lunch after 9 11'.
  In 1996 and in 1997, Al-Awlaki was arrested in San Diego for soliciting prostitutes.[14][38][58][59]
  Al-Awlaki studied at George Washington University which is known for having close ties to the intelligence community. (Anwar al-Awlaki and 'CIA Islam')
  Fox News says it has documents revealing how Anwar Al-Awlaki, a top man in al Qaeda, met high-ranking US military personnel just months after the 9 11 atrocities.
  The 'crypto-Jew' Osama bin Laden came from Yemen which was at one time a Jewish state.
  According to the documents, Awlaki was taken to the U.S. Department of Defense's headquarters, to have lunch, in the immediate aftermath of the 9 11 attacks.
  In an FBI interview, conducted after the Fort Hood shooting in November last year, a Defense Department employee told investigators that she helped to arrange the meeting with Awlaki.
  Awlaki is American-born, and of Yemeni descent.
  Awlaki was apparently interviewed at least four times by the FBI in the week after the September 11 attacks because of his links to three 'hijackers', Nawaf al-Hazmi,Khalid al-Mihdhar and Hani Hanjour who were allegedly aboard Flight 77 that 'crashed into the Pentagon'.
  He was also linked to the alleged Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Malik Hasan.
  Awlaki, a former Muslim chaplain at George Washington University, is now believed to be in Yemen.
  In Yemen, he is said to have met with the 'Christmas Day bomber' Farouk Abdulmutallab.
A Scandal Bigger Than Benghazi?
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: FrontPage Magazine » FrontPage
  Mon, 12 Aug 2013 05:18
  In a story that has remained largely under the mainstream media radar, Congress announced late last month that it would finally investigate the Aug. 6, 2011 helicopter crash in Afghanistan that resulted in 38 deaths, including 22 members of SEAL Team 6, made famous three months earlier when they killed Osama Bin Laden. Grieving family members insist that soldiers in the elite unit were placed in unnecessary danger by the recklessness of the Obama administration, whose actions they characterized as criminal. ''We're going to dive into this,'' said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on National Security.
  The families of the slain soldiers have every right to be furious. SEAL Team 6 is a covert unit whose operations are ostensibly classified. As a result, it has never been revealed which members of the team were involved in the killing of the terrorist mastermind, or how many of those same men were among those killed when the Chinook helicopter in which they were traveling was shot down by Taliban terrorists.
  The focus of the families' fury and shock, along with that of SEAL Team 6 members themselves, was the administration's desire to tout their success in killing Bin Laden '-- compromising the safety of the unit in the process. Only two days after the raid, Vice President Biden gave a speech at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Washington, D.C. ''Let me briefly acknowledge tonight's distinguished honorees: Adm. Jim Stavridis is a '-- is the real deal; he could tell you more about and understands the incredible, the phenomenal, the just almost unbelievable capacity of his Navy SEALS and what they did last '-- last Sunday,'' Mr. Biden revealed to audience members gathered for the 50th anniversary of the Atlantic Council, an international affairs think tank.
  What followed was a testament to Biden's disturbing ability to speak before thinking. ''And what was even more extraordinary was '-- and I'm sure former administration officials will appreciate this more than anyone '-- there was such an absolute, overwhelming desire to accomplish this mission that although for over several months we were in the process of planning it, and there were as many as 16 members of Congress who were briefed on it, not a single, solitary thing leaked. I find that absolutely amazing,'' Biden added, apparently oblivious to the reality that he had just perpetrated one of the more egregious leaks of national security information in recent history.
  As a result, SEAL Team 6 members realized they had a target painted on their backs. That reality was hammered home in a May 10, 2013 Fox News interview with Karen and Billy Vaughn, whose son Aaron was killed in the chopper crash. Karen spoke first. ''As soon as Joe Biden announced that it was a SEAL Team who took out Bin Laden, within 24 hours, my son called me and I rarely ever heard him sound afraid in his adult life'....He said, 'Mom, you need to wipe your social media clean'...your life is in danger, our lives are in danger, so clean it up right now','' she revealed.
  Billy Vaughn took on Biden in no uncertain terms. ''The media has let this man get away with saying 'Uncle Joe's gaffes, Uncle Joe's gaffes,'' he fumed. ''This is not Uncle Joe and he's not some senile old grandfather. He is the second in command of the most powerful country in the world and he needs to take responsibility for the comments he makes and quit being given a pass.''
  Charles Strange, the father of slain SEAL Michael Strange, was also furious. During a family conference with reporters at the National Press Club in Washington a day earlier, Strange recounted his exchange with President Obama at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Aug. 9, 2011. Strange noted that, despite Obama saying he would look ''very, very, very deep into this,'' he never heard from the president again. In an exchange with radio host Michael Savage last month, Strange took it one step further. He claimed his son told him, ''Something's going on with the team. Somebody's leaking things out. Something's going on.'' Savage asked: ''Your son knew he was being sent to his death?'' Strange's response was chilling. ''They knew,'' he answered. ''They knew something was up. Every one of them.''
  The military has provided more than 1,000 pages of documentation to the parents. Those documents contain the Defense Department's assertion that they don't believe the SEALs were targeted following the Bin Laden operation. Moreover in a transcript, a Defense Department official disputes the families' assertion that the helicopter was brought down by an ''established ambush,'' contending it was ''a lucky shot of a low-level fighter'' who ''happened to be in the right spot.''
  The families aren't buying that assessment, and they are extremely troubled by other questions surrounding the case as well. Of the 38 people killed in the crash, seven were members of the Afghan National Army. They were replaced at the last minute by other Afghan military officials who were not on the flight manifest, raising the possibility the replacements were Taliban infiltrators.
  The military claimed that when the CH-47 Chinook helicopter was shot down, the bodies were badly burned and had to be cremated. Charles Strange believes the military is lying. ''I saw Mike's dead body,'' he said in an interview. ''It was clearly recognizable. He was clutching his gun. He wasn't burned to a crisp. Why did they cremate my boy? They didn't need to do that. Something's not right.'' Rep. Chaffetz, who said he saw a photo of a deceased SEAL, echoed that assertion. ''The body I saw didn't need to be cremated,'' he said.
  The military claims the helicopter's black box was never recovered because it was washed away in a flash flood. Yet flash floods in that area of Afghanistan are extremely rare.
  Furthermore, the families want to know why their sons were flown into a hot combat zone in a helicopter made in the 1960s. They want to know why such a large group of SEALS was put on a single aircraft and why no aerial backup was deployed, which is standard military procedure when special forces are involved. And they want to know why, during a funeral ceremony held at Bagram Air Base in Kabul, a Muslim cleric was allowed to recite a prayer condemning the American ''infidels'' to eternal damnation.
  Yet perhaps the most damnable reality of all was revealed by Karen Vaughn at the aforementioned National Press Club meeting. ''Why was there no pre-assault fire? We were told as families that pre-assault fire damages our effort to win the hearts and minds of our enemy,'' she told reporters. ''So in other words, the hearts and minds of our enemy are more valuable to this government than my son's blood.''
  This was not the first time the Vaughn family has challenged the so-called Rules of Engagement (ROE) that make a mockery of American soldiers' ability to conduct effective warfare. Three days after Benghazi, they were among several Gold Star families of servicemen lost in combat who held a press conference on the subject. It was there the Vaughns made it known that after their son's helicopter went down, air support refused to fire on the enemy because there might have been ''friendlies'' in the building. The ROE required the military present at the operation to stand down as a result. Billy Vaughn was incensed. ''Our military men go to war because they love what is behind them more than they hate what is in front of them,'' he said at the time. ''The least the government can do is give them the tools and the proper equipment and ROE that favor our warriors more than they favor our enemy.''
  The least the government can do at the present time is conduct a thorough investigation into the the largest loss of life in a single day since the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan began. Freedom Watch is assisting some of the families of the deceased. Founder Larry Klayman minced no words regarding what he thinks about this tragedy. ''This is a scandal even greater than Benghazi,'' he said. ''There we lost four valued American lives; here we sacrificed 30 American soldiers. The big question is were these brave Americans sold out by the Afghani government as payment to the Taliban for the death of bin Laden?''
  Perhaps a bigger question is why the Obama administration can get away with the monumental hypocrisy of being the administration that has prosecuted more leakers than any other, while Joe Biden gets a pass. Republicans need to find answers to the many questions above. Our troops and their families deserve nothing less than a full accounting of this tragic incident.
  Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
Ted Koppel Says the Terrorists Have Won
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: Crooks and Liars
  Mon, 12 Aug 2013 04:13
  (h/t Heather at VideoCafe)Not long after 9/11, Osama bin Laden released a recording to al Jazeera that expressed his goal for the attacks: to bankrupt the US.
  "We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah," bin Laden said in the transcript.
  He said the mujahedeen fighters did the same thing to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, "using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers."
  "We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden said.
  He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration."
  "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.[..]
  As part of the "bleed-until-bankruptcy plan," bin Laden cited a British estimate that it cost al Qaeda about $500,000 to carry out the attacks of September 11, 2001, an amount that he said paled in comparison with the costs incurred by the United States.
  "Every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars, by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs," he said. "As for the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.[..]
  "And it all shows that the real loser is you," he said. "It is the American people and their economy."
  Looking at the collapse of 2008 and the near historical levels of income inequality, it's hard to argue that bin Laden didn't succeed. And that is exactly what Ted Koppel wrote for the Wall Street Journal.
  Terrorism, after all, is designed to produce overreaction. It is the means by which the weak induce the powerful to inflict damage upon themselves'--and al Qaeda and groups like it are surely counting on that as the centerpiece of their strategy.
  It appears to be working. Right now, 19 American embassies and a number of consulates and smaller diplomatic outposts are closed for the week due to the perceived threat of attacks against U.S. targets. Meantime, the U.S. has launched drone strikes on al Qaeda fighters in Yemen.
  But don't tell that to Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. McCaul KNOWS that the threat is "real" and "growing".
  You know, well, listen. I think the threat's real. And what I call the narrative of the president, saying that Al Qaeda's on its heels; the struggles over, "Let's go back to a pre-9/11 mentality" -- I think is a very dangerous narrative. I get the same threat briefings that the president of the United States does, and I'm not seeing his rhetoric meeting reality. And the fact of the matter is, there is a spider web. You know, we were just focused on Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq; core Al Qaeda versus non Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda everywhere: distinction without a difference. It's all Al Qaeda.
  Wait, what? The president has a "pre-9/11" mentality? The guy who ordered the successful hit on Osama bin Laden and who has his own personal "kill list" for drone strikes is thinking pre-9/11? You know McCaul is just reciting Republican talking points and counting on no pushback from David Gregory, because when Gregory does ask him what else Obama could do, he hems and haws and basically can't name anything he'd do differently.
  Telling, that.
  Meanwhile, Ted Koppel has the right side of it. Terrorism has always been around and always be around. How we choose to react to it is the measure of how successful it is.
'Niet-uitchecken chipkaart levert vervoerders ruim 30 miljoen op'
  Link to Article
  Archived Version
  Source: VK: Home
  Mon, 12 Aug 2013 04:08
  Bewerkt door: redactie '' 12/08/13, 05:30
  (C) anp.
  Openbaarvervoerbedrijven zouden samen meer dan 30 miljoen euro per jaar overhouden aan reizigers die vergeten uit te checken met hun ov-chipkaart. Dat is veel meer dan tot nu toe werd gedacht.
  Dat meldt De Telegraaf maandag. Staatssecretaris Wilma Mansveld (Infrastructuur) kondigde juist een maand geleden een onafhankelijk onderzoek aan naar het bedrag dat vervoerders aan de nalatigheid van hun reizigers overhouden.
  BorgWie met een ov-chipkaart reist, betaalt bij het inchecken een instaptarief bij wijze van borg: 4 euro in bus, metro en tram en 20 euro in de trein. Bij het uitchecken wordt dat verrekend met de feitelijke reiskosten. Wie vergeet uit te checken of dat door een storing niet kan, is de borg kwijt.
  Gemiddeld checkt zo'n 1 procent van de reizigers niet uit, zeggen ov-bedrijven. Reizigers kunnen hun geld terugvragen, maar slechts 10 procent doet dat. Consumenten- en reizigersorganisaties als Rover en Voor een Beter OV vinden dat de miljoenen op een simpele en klantvriendelijke manier volledig moeten terugvloeien naar de reiziger.