"WVNS 59 posted this video in their website and Facebook; when the news came on for the evening the video was edited so as the man seemed uncontrollable and was in the wrong. If you listen at around 1:52 it sounds like the officer seems to say something along the lines of 'turn the camera off because if he gets out again I'm going to kill him.'" Continue reading →
"Governments voiced a mix of outrage and concern after the Brazilian daily O Globo, citing documents leaked by fugitive former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, said several nations were targets of US electronic surveillance. The snooping included lifting data on leftist Venezuela’s oil and military purchases and Mexico’s drug war and energy sector as well as mapping the movements of a Marxist guerrilla group in Colombia, the newspaper said. The Mexican daily Excelsior reported Wednesday that Pena Nieto’s predecessor had allowed the United States to install a system to intercept phone calls and Internet chatter." Continue reading →
"A government minister in Venezuela, which has offered fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden asylum, is urging her countrymen to cancel their Facebook accounts lest they be targeted by US snooping. 'Fellow Venezuelans: cancel your Facebook accounts, since you unwittingly have worked as CIA informants! Look at the Snowden case!' prisons minister Maria Iris Varela said in a Twitter posting. Varela also said victims of 'gringo espionage' should file lawsuits to demand 'fair compensation' and bankrupt the US government." Continue reading →
"Half way through his four-year term, Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho is trying to curb popular resentment over what opponents say is a widening gulf between private employees and about 600,000 public workers who have mostly stayed immune to mass job cuts. What’s bothering the Portuguese isn’t just that austerity helped prolong a recession and sent unemployment to a record 18 percent, it’s also that the government used taxation more than those in Greece and Ireland to try to narrow the budget deficit. Some workers on the state payrolls are perceived to have escaped the deterioration in living standards being felt by others." Continue reading →
"The DOE requested about $537 million for the B61 Life Extension Programs, but the GOP-led House Appropriations Committee provided $23.7 million more than the department asked for. In a report, the committee explained the nuclear program had its funding boosted because it had a 'troubling history of insufficiently planning for its ongoing production requirements.' Polis noted that the Air Force had recently doubted the effectiveness of the B61 nuclear bomb. A former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the bomb was virtually useless, Polis explained. In addition, some European allies no longer wanted the bomb deployed in their country." Continue reading →
"One can make a case that both UKIP and the US Tea Party movement are the 'managed opposition,' at this point any way. But at the same time, their emergence obviously indicates that there is a larger social movement that has taken shape. If one feels the need to 'manage' something – as those at the top of society evidently and obviously do – it is because there is something that has emerged to begin with. And that something is obviously a deep dissatisfaction with many of the building blocks of modern society, from its military-industrial complex to its central banking economy and the regulatory democracy that flows out of vast government spending." Continue reading →
"EU finance ministers have just given the go-ahead for Latvia to join the euro in January 2014. No matter that the latest SKDS poll shows that only 22pc of Latvians support this foolish step, and 53pc are opposed. This is a very odd situation. The elites are pushing ahead with a decision of profound implications, knowing that the nation is not behind them. No country has ever done this before. The concerns of the Latvian people are entirely understandable. Neighbouring Estonia found itself having to bail out Club Med states with a per capita income two and a half times as high after it joined EMU. Latvia may find itself embroiled in an even bigger debacle." Continue reading →
"Lynne Stewart read a note to the press that was construed as exhorting Egyptian radicals to rise up and violently overthrow the Egyptian military dictatorship under Hosni Mubarak. She is now living the rest of her life in a federal penitentiary. Thus, the state of U.S. law is this: In principle, it’s okay to support the right of people to use force to resist tyranny. After all, that’s what the Declaration of Independence says, a document that Americans just celebrated on the Fourth of July. But in the minds of U.S. officials, by exhorting Egyptians to violently overthrow their tyrannical, U.S.-supported regime, Stewart was guilty of being a supporter of terrorism." Continue reading →
"Unlike clients of a government agency, customers of a commercial enterprise really are customers, representing potential profit, not cost. In contrast to the DMV sign I shared the other day, consider the sign below, spotted at a small restaurant (via Niels van der Linden)." Continue reading →
"Parents in East Ramapo, New York celebrated the firing Monday night of their local school board’s attorney in the wake of a profanity-laced tirade caught on video, WNBC-TV reported. The decision followed a protest at school district headquarters demanding the removal of Christopher Kirby, an attorney with Minerva & D’Agostino, a Long Island-based firm. However, Kirby did not provide an apology for his actions. The video, shot after the board’s July 2 meeting by a local parent, Antonio Luciano, shows Kirby calling Peggy Hatton a 'fat c-nt,' as well as accusing Luciano of 'hiding behind his women' while filming." Continue reading →