News – Page 6336

America slides deeper into depression as Wall Street revels

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
London Telegraph
Monday , January 11th, 2010

December was the worst month for US unemployment since the Great Recession began.

The labour force contracted by 661,000. This did not
show up in the headline jobless rate because so many Americans dropped
out of the system. The broad U6 category of unemployment rose to
17.3pc. That is the one that matters.

Wall Street rallied. Bulls hope that weak jobs data will postpone
monetary tightening: a silver lining in every catastrophe, or perhaps a
further exhibit of market infantilism.

The home foreclosure guillotine usually drops a year or so after
people lose their job, and exhaust their savings. The local sheriff
will escort them out of the door, often with some sympathy
–– just like the police in 1932, mostly Irish Catholics who
tithed 1pc of their pay for soup kitchens.

Realtytrac says defaults and repossessions have been running at over
300,000 a month since February. One million American families lost
their homes in the fourth quarter. Moody’s Economy.com expects
another 2.4m homes to go this year. Taken together, this looks awfully
like Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

Full article here

Torture Is Continuing Under the Obama Administration, Creating More Terrorists and Further Destabilizing the Economy

Washington’s Blog
Monday , January 11th, 2010

As I pointed out in May 2008:

The U.S. has imprisoned 2,500 children since 9/11 as “enemy combatants”, in violation of the Geneva Convention against classifying children as POWs …

Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Seymour Hersh says that the U.S. Government has videotapes of boys being raped at Abu Ghraib prison (and see this; see also this – General Taguba discusses the sexual humiliation of a father with his son – see this and this).

This doesn’t come as a complete surprise, given that assistant deputy Attorney General John Yoo has publicly argued that the president can order the torture of a child of a suspect in custody – including by crushing that child’s testicles.

In April 2009, I noted:

Respected political scientist Michael Haas
has confirmed that children were tortured, and Raw Story has explained
that the newly-release Bush torture memos may corroborate claims that
at least some detainees’ children were tortured using insects.

The number two man at the State Department, Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, said
that many of those tortured at Guantanamo Bay were innocent, but that
the Bush administration did not really care whether they were innocent
or not.

Last December, I wrote:

Many reporters have said that the Bagram prison facility in Afghanistan is worse than Guantanamo ever was. Moreover, abuse is apparently still occurring there.

As Spiegel wrote on September 21, 2009, in an article entitled “Prisoner Abuse Continues at Bagram Prison in Afghanistan”:

US President Barack Obama has spoken out against CIA
prisoner abuse and wants to close Guantanamo. But he tolerates the
existence of Bagram military prison in Afghanistan, where more than 600
people are being held without charge. The facility makes Guantanamo look like a “nice hotel,” in the words of one military prosecutor…

Bagram is “the forgotten second Guantanamo,” says
American military law expert Eugene Fidell, a professor at Yale Law
School. “But apparently there is a continuing need for this sort
of place even under the Obama administration.

“From the beginning, “Bagram was worse than
Guantanamo,” says New York-based attorney Tina Foster, who has
argued several cases on behalf of detainee rights in US courts.
“Bagram has always been a torture chamber.”

And what does Obama say? Nothing. He never so much as mentions
Bagram in any of his speeches. When discussing America’s
mistreatment of detainees, he only refers to Guantanamo…

From the beginning, Bagram was notorious for the brutal
forms of torture employed there. Former inmates report incidents of
sleep deprivation, beatings and various forms of sexual humiliation
[and rape with sticks]…

At least two men died during imprisonment. One of them, a
22-year-old taxi driver named Dilawar, was suspended by his hands from
the ceiling for four days, during which US military personnel
repeatedly beat his legs. Dilawar died on Dec. 10, 2002. In the autopsy
report, a military doctor wrote that the tissue on his legs had
basically been “pulpified.” As it happens, his interrogators had already known — and later testified — that there was no evidence against Dilawar…

However attorney Tina Foster feels that the new initiative is just a cosmetic measure. “There
is absolutely no difference between the Bush administration and the
Obama administration’s position with respect to Bagram
detainees’ rights,” she says during an interview with SPIEGEL in her office in the New York borough of Queens.

And see this.

Moreover, Obama is still apparently allowing “rendition flights” – where prisoners are flown to countries which freely torture – to continue…
Finally, Jeremy Scahill – the reporter who broke most of the stories on Blackwater – says that some forms of torture at Guantanamo have continued under Obama, and may even have gotten worse. For example, Scahill points out that:

The Center for Constitutional Rights released a report
titled “Conditions of Confinement at Guantánamo: Still In
Violation of the Law,” which found that abuses continued. In
fact, one Guantanamo lawyer, Ahmed Ghappour, said that his clients were
reporting “a ramping up in abuse” since Obama was elected.

Now, reports are circulating that boys were tortured last year – after Obama was sworn in as President – at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan:

As the Washington Post reported Friday:

The U.S. military has begun investigating allegations
that two Afghan teenagers were beaten and humiliated by guards while in
American custody last year at a secret detention center at Bagram air
base, according to U.S. and Afghan officials.

U.S. military officials took statements from the teenagers last
month and are contacting others who say they were held at what Afghans
call Bagram’s “black prison,” a detention center run
by U.S. Special Operations forces. This classified facility is separate
from the main prison at Bagram, which holds about 700 detainees.

The allegations of physical violence and sexual humiliation.

And see this:

Popout

Change?

Not much …

Way to create more terrorists and to further disrupt the civilian economy, Obama administration.

The mini ice age starts here

David Rose
UK Daily Mail
Monday , January 11th, 2010

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern
Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather
that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the
world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of
natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans
– challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most
deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be
free of ice in summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado,
Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per
cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming
activists do not dispute this.

The scientists’ predictions also undermine the standard
climate computer models, which assert that the warming of the Earth
since 1900 has been driven solely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions
and will continue as long as carbon dioxide levels rise.

Full article here

US Weather Bureau Report: Arctic Ocean Getting Warm: Seals Vanish And Iceburg Melt

Article Tags: Headline Story, Via Email, William Gray, William Kininmonth

This report was sent to me by a colleague. It appears too good not to pass along. Bill Gray

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

I’m sorry, I neglected to mention that this report was from November 2, 1922 as reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post.

Read in full with comments »

File attachment: changing-artic_monthly_wx_review.pdf

January 12, 2010

TV Presenter Warned By Police – Carrying Knife In Own Home Is Illegal

Press Association
Monday , January 11th, 2010

Myleene Klass was said to be “aghast” and
“bemused” after being warned by police for waving a knife
at youths who entered her garden.

The TV star and Marks & Spencer model was in the
kitchen with her daughter upstairs when she spotted the teenagers
peering into her window just after midnight on Friday. She grabbed a
knife and banged the windows before they ran away.

Hertfordshire Police officers warned Miss Klass she should not have
used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an
“offensive weapon” – even in her own home – was
illegal.

Her spokesman Jonathan Shalit said the former Hearsay singer was
“utterly terrified” and was stepping up security at the
property near Potters Bar.

Full article here

Awesome Sega Genesis and Space Invaders business card cases

mega_drive_card__holder

If you’re an old-school gamer, the Sega Genesis (known as Sega Mega Drive outside North America) sure does have a special place in your heart. And if your current job requires you to give away business cards from time to time, this new business card holder that’s shaped like Sega’s legendary 16-bit console might be the right thing for you.

space_invaders_card_holder_red

In case you want to go even more retro, there’s also a Space Invaders business card case in red and another one in black now.

space_invaders_card_holder_black

Both the Genesis and the Space Invaders cases are made of aluminum. They’ll go on sale in Japan in March, but import/export specialist Geek Stuff 4 U lets people living outside Japan pre-order the cases already (price: $24.30 each).

Alternatively, you can still go for the Nintendo Famicom-shaped or the Pac Man business card holder that Banpresto, the maker of all these cases, introduced last year. Geek Stuff 4 U is still selling those, too.

Via Akihabara News

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

Read Original Article

January 12, 2010

Firefox's Fifth Birthday Celebrated with Some Amazing Art

Firefox owes its success to a solid list of features and its overall quality, but it also owes a lot to the Mozilla community and people all over the world who got behind the project and promoted it to their friends and families and everywhere else they could. This community spirit is alive today, five years after Firefox landed, and Mo… (read more)

January 12, 2010

Bankergate: Emails Expose Criminal Financial Dictatorship At Work

‘Explosive emails
released last week could see Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner become
embroiled in criminal charges for his role in a cover up that exposes
the monumental criminality behind the $182.3 billion bailout of
American International Group Inc. In
November and December 2008, The Federal Reserve Bank of New York
instructed the bailed out AIG to hide from the public details regarding
payments the insurance giant made to banks, including Goldman Sachs
Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA.

Using Fed secured
taxpayer bailout money, AIG paid several banks 100 percent of the face
value of credit-default swaps, as other financial institutions were
negotiating deep discounts for the unregulated paper assets that do not
have to be backed by cash. The decision to pay the banks in full may have cost AIG, and therefore taxpayers, at least $13 billion over the odds.’

Climategate Flashback: Snowfalls are a Thing of the Past

‘Sledges, snowmen,
snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has
settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s
culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global
climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer
white Januaries and Februaries.’

85-Year-Old Woman Terrorized By Airport Security Thugs

‘An 85-year-old woman who
was terrorized by airport security thugs at Ottawa Airport yesterday
got little sympathy from Canadian transport minister John Baird, who
refused to apologize, warning that disabled grandmas will continue to
be treated as possible Al-Qaeda suicide bombers.

“Baird was asked by
media Sunday about the treatment of the four-foot-10, 90-pound woman
who was travelling from Ottawa to Toronto on Dec. 28. The woman was
asked to remove her boots and then unzip her pants. A female inspection
officer then poked at her abdomen,” reports the Montreal Gazette.

These are the same thugs
who will be sitting in back rooms enjoying high resolution naked images
of your children once full body scanners are rolled out nationwide.’

Did Court Deal Fatal Blow to Tasers for Police?

‘In what is being heralded as a landmark
decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
recently declared that police officers could be held liable for using a
Taser without proper cause. And in making their determination, the
court also set new legal parameters on how law enforcement is to use
Tasers, stating, “The objective facts must indicate that the suspect
poses an immediate threat to the officer or a member of the public.”
The federal finding substantially changes the landscape of Taser usage,
and may signal the end of Tasers for law enforcement agencies who are
now more vulnerable to civil and criminal action then ever before.’

GM plans an all-electric variant of Chevrolet Volt

chevy volt_1

Eco Factor: Zero-emission vehicle powered by electricity.

General Motors has announced that the company is planning an all-electric variant of the Chevrolet Volt, that will be built by expanding the battery pack of the vehicle is eliminating its internal combustion engine. The Volt, as of now, gets a range of 40 miles on a charge before the 1.4-liter internal combustion engine kicks in.

(more…)

January 12, 2010

Daily Express: Fury at Vaccine Scandal

‘Hundreds of public sector workers who claim their lives have been wrecked by vaccines say the Government has abandoned them.

Up to 200 doctors,
nurses, firefighters, prison officers, police officers, forensic
scientists and binmen say they have developed serious physical and
mental health problems after injections essential for their work over
the past 10 years. All have given up their jobs and some are now 60 per
cent disabled.’

NAIAS: Fiat 500 BEV Concept Revealed

Chrysler and Fiat have used the flesh of the 500 model to showcase electric technology bones, by revealing the Fiat 500 BEV at Detroit.

The electric concept car uses Chrysler’s modular electric technology, developed over the last three years, but no further technical details have been released about the vehicle.

However, it has been declared that the 500 BEV is just a concept car and there are no plans to make it available for the public. Apparently, it was only cre… (read more)

January 12, 2010

America Infects the World With its False Beliefs About Mental Illness

‘For more than a generation now, we in
the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental
illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science,
believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic
suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is
now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest
of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western
“symptom repertoire” as well.

That is, we’ve been changing not
only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other
cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders —
depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them
— now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of
contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua
franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental
illness.’

TSA Lies Exposed: Full-body Scanner Machines Do Save and Transmit Images, Secret Documents Reveal

‘The TSA has been lying
to the American people about full-body scanners. The agency has
insisted that these “digital strip search” machines are incapable of
saving, storing or transmitting the images they take. This, we are
told, makes it okay for people to be digitally strip-searched.

But secret documents
uncovered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center have revealed
that these machines do indeed posses precisely such capabilities.
According to TSA specification requirement documents that have been
uncovered by the EPIC, all full-body scanners purchased by the TSA must
have the ability to both save and transmit the scanned images of air
passengers.’

U.S. to Store $800m in Military Gear in Israel

‘The
U.S. Army will double the value of emergency military equipment it
stockpiles on Israeli soil, and Israel will be allowed to use the U.S.
ordnance in the event of a military emergency, according to a report in
Monday’s issue of the U.S. weekly Defense News. The report, written by
Barbara Opall-Rome, the magazine’s Israel correspondent, said that an
agreement reached between Washington and Jerusalem last month will
bring the value of the military gear to $800 million.

This is the final phase of a process that began over a year ago to
determine the type and amount of U.S. weapons and ammunition to be
stored in Israel, part of an overarching American effort to stockpile
weapons in areas in which its army may need to operate while allowing
American allies to make use of the ordnance in emergencies.’

The Countdown to the Second Gaza War Has Begun

‘Next week, or the week
after, Barack Obama may well see intelligence reports of tank
battalions moving south and west along Israeli highways, and whole
infantry brigades setting up camp in the western Negev. The
countdown to the Second Gaza War has begun in earnest. Date it, if you
like, to Sunday, and a coolly terrifying analysis by Yom Tov Samia,
former overall Israeli military commander of the Gaza Strip and the
adjacent Negev.

Or date it, if you
prefer, according to the axiom of contemporary Israeli history which
reads: A future war becomes all but inevitable the moment a key IDF
reserve major general declares it so. Alternatively,
date it from the moment that selective amnesia allows Israeli political
figures to court the illusion that Hamas can be invaded to death.’

NAIAS: Triac Electric Vehicle [VIDEO]

One of the attendees of the Electric Avenue at the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit, the largely (yet unknown) manufacturer Green Vehicles, is displaying their Triac pure electric vehicle and announced the start of production for the three-wheeler.

The Triac will help reduce the number of polluting vehicles on the road while giving drivers the real pleasure of experiencing well-applied technology at an affordable price, Mike Ryan, Green Vehicles’ presiden… (read more)

January 12, 2010

INCHEON | Songdo OK(Overseas Korean) Center | 813 ft | 248m | 72 fl | prep

Project’s Name-Songdo OK Center Development
Location-Songdo IBD G4-1 Block(IFEZ Arts Center Expansion Block)
Developer-Incheon Metropolitan City,IFEZ,IUDC(Incheon Unban Development Corporation)
Strategic Investor-Mirae Asset Management,NSIC(New Songdo International City Limited)
Main Investor-TWG(Truth World Group,New York,Overseas Korean Enterprise,USA)
Contractor-Hanhwa Consortium,Songdo OK Center Development Co. Ltd
Purpose-Business & Residential Hotel,Retail,Mutliplex
Advertisemental Homepage-http://okonline.incheon.go.kr/
Official Homepage-Coming Soon(2010.2)
Construction start-2010 February
Completion-2013 June.

January 12, 2010

Category: News

America slides deeper into depression as Wall Street revels

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Torture Is Continuing Under the Obama Administration, Creating More Terrorists and Further Destabilizing the Economy

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The mini ice age starts here

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US Weather Bureau Report: Arctic Ocean Getting Warm: Seals Vanish And Iceburg Melt

TV Presenter Warned By Police – Carrying Knife In Own Home Is Illegal

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Awesome Sega Genesis and Space Invaders business card cases

Firefox's Fifth Birthday Celebrated with Some Amazing Art

Bankergate: Emails Expose Criminal Financial Dictatorship At Work

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Climategate Flashback: Snowfalls are a Thing of the Past

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85-Year-Old Woman Terrorized By Airport Security Thugs

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Did Court Deal Fatal Blow to Tasers for Police?

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GM plans an all-electric variant of Chevrolet Volt

Daily Express: Fury at Vaccine Scandal

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NAIAS: Fiat 500 BEV Concept Revealed

America Infects the World With its False Beliefs About Mental Illness

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TSA Lies Exposed: Full-body Scanner Machines Do Save and Transmit Images, Secret Documents Reveal

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U.S. to Store $800m in Military Gear in Israel

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The Countdown to the Second Gaza War Has Begun

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NAIAS: Triac Electric Vehicle [VIDEO]

INCHEON | Songdo OK(Overseas Korean) Center | 813 ft | 248m | 72 fl | prep