Author: NW0.eu

Time Magazine has enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon to back Microsoft executive Craig Mundie’s call for Internet licensing, as authorities push for a system even more stifling than in Communist China, where only people with government permission would be allowed to express free speech.

CIA boss Leon Panetta told Congress today that “homegrown extremists” working for al-Qaeda will strike America in three to six months.

The introduction of full body scanners at Heathrow and Manchester airports has today caused outrage among civil liberty campaigners who say that they are an invasion of privacy.

As sure as the sun rises, so Verichip keeps spawning and shape shifting to gain market acceptance as people from across the globe unite and reject the IBM seed-funded, Raytheon-manufactured Human Implantable microchip company.

If there is any indicator of the toll that the Great Recession has taken on the public, it would be the statistics beginning to emerge about hunger in the US.

It was not long ago when President Barack Obama’s new drug czar, former Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske, swept into Washington, D.C. and declared the “drug war” a public policy relic.

The American elite’s unbounded, unquestioned, indeed unconscious sense of imperial entitlement and dominance — based ultimately on war, the threat of war and the profit from war — is one of the defining characteristics of our age.

Three weeks after a massive earthquake, Haitian authorities on Tuesday indefinitely postponed upcoming legislative elections amid rising security concerns in the crippled Caribbean nation.

Would someone please explain to me how it’s possible that millions of Toyota vehicles have that accelerator problem? I thought the federal government was supposed to keep us safe from these sorts of things.

The embattled chief of the UN’s climate change body has hit out at his critics and refused to resign or apologise for a ­damaging mistake in a landmark 2007 report on global warming.

President Obama is coming under pressure from Democrats and civil liberties groups for failing to fill positions on an oversight panel formed in 2004 to make sure the government does not spy improperly on U.S. citizens.

Jesus Diaz writes a very thought-provoking article on Gizmodo:

Hubble has discovered a mysterious X-shaped object traveling at 11,000mph. NASA says that P/2010-A2 may be a comet, product of the collision between two asteroids. Or a Klingon Bird of Prey. Either way, UCLA investigator David Jewitt is excited:

This is quite different from the smooth dust envelopes of normal comets. The filaments are made of dust and gravel, presumably recently thrown out of the nucleus. Some are swept back by radiation pressure from sunlight to create straight dust streaks. Embedded in the filaments are co-moving blobs of dust that likely originated from tiny unseen parent bodies.

OK, David, we will believe you until Jerry Bruckheimer finish his next movie, in which a “comet” suddenly stops, turns to Earth, and starts firing anti-matter rays…

This story from Hemmy.net is one of the first sites I found taking about this. Since then, the Guardian reported on it. Via Hemmy.net:

Every year, farmers in the rural town Inakadate, Japan create rice field art by using red rice in with their regular rice in special patterns. A few others fields in rural Japan also followed the trend of this beautiful rice field art.

Reported by the American Free Press via the Tehran Times:

BAGHDAD (AFP) — China has agreed to cancel 80 percent of the 8.5-billion-dollar debt it is owed by Iraq, the finance ministry in Baghdad said in an official statement on Tuesday.

It said a bilateral agreement was signed in Beijing, without specifying the date, and that China’s ambassador to Iraq had met officials in Baghdad to confirm the agreement.

The statement added that the two countries entered into trade deals valued at 3.8 billion dollars in 2009.

From CBC News:

Defence Minister Peter MacKay said Friday that he doesn’t know what people in southern Newfoundland saw recently but he promised the federal government does have plans to help them.

“We will provide money to build a landing strip for UFOs at Harbour Mille,” said MacKay, speaking in St. John’s to announce federal funding for road construction in the province.

“No, I’m only kidding. I’m joking. That’s a joke.” Jokes aside, MacKay said there’s no need to worry about the unidentified flying object. “We’ve checked with other countries and we’ll continue to do so but I don’t think it is any cause for panic,” said MacKay.

A model plane flier said an earlier a comment from the Prime Minister’s Office about a mysterious object spotted near Harbour Mille is laughable. Thursday, a…

From Alternet:

Society-wide depression has struck America. Why it’s happened and what we can do about it. This is the cover article for the January/February issue of Tikkun magazine. For more on the article and the magazine go here.

An unnatural economic and psychological disaster has struck America. Five contributors, each interacting with and shaping the others, have devastated the American moral, economic, psychological, and social landscape. Each is fed by related streams, but each contributes its own force to the disaster. The American dream in which each generation surpassed the previous generation in real wages has all but disappeared, along with dreams of an intact family, a steady job, a home, and an honest supportive community.

This article looks at each of five collaborators in the crisis in order to answer the…

Cyber attacks are on the rise and everyone who connects to the internet needs to educate themselves in possible attacks and be diligent in keeping them at bay. The International Telcommunications Union, a UN agency, believes that the only way to do this is to require a type of driver’s license for anyone who […]

Sarah Boseley writes in the Guardian:

The Lancet today finally retracted the paper that sparked a crisis in MMR vaccination across the UK, following the General Medical Council’s decision that its lead author, Andrew Wakefield, had been dishonest.

The medical journal’s editor, Richard Horton, told the Guardian today that he realised as soon as he read the GMC findings that the paper, published in February 1998, had to be retracted. “It was utterly clear, without any ambiguity at all, that the statements in the paper were utterly false,” he said. “I feel I was deceived.”

Many in the scientific and medical community have been pressing for the paper, linking the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) jab to bowel disease and autism, to be quashed. But Horton said he did not have the evidence to do…

My favorite parts of this are towards the end of this clip: “More than likely MSNBC replayed it at home with the slo-mo button with their pants off” and Fox News: “We’re going to cut away because this is against the narrative we present.” Via the Daily Show:

By Phil McKenna for New Scientist:

Nuclear power got a boost and big oil took a hit yesterday when US President Barack Obama submitted his 2011 federal budget proposal to Congress. The budget calls for an immediate $36 billion increase in loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants and eliminates $36.5 billion in subsidies to oil and natural gas companies over a 10-year period.

Federal loan guarantees could be a huge boost to the US nuclear power industry, which hasn’t had an order for a new plant since the 1970s. The guarantees allow power companies to get lower interest rates when they secure project financing.

The US Department of Energy already has authority to grant $18.5 billion in loan guarantees, enough for two to four nuclear plants. If approved by Congress, the additional…