Archive for the 'Economy' Category
Michigan School District Can’t Pay Teachers; Schools Will Remain Closed Until Further Notice
May 13th, 2013Via: ClickOnDetroit: A shuttered Michigan school district that says it can’t afford to pay its teachers plans to remain closed until further notice. The update is posted on the website of Buena Vista School District, located near Saginaw. It hasn’t held classes since May 3. The district laid off teachers and all but three employees […]
Bloomberg Spied on Market Data Subscribers
May 11th, 2013Via: CNN: That was the unsettling realization Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500) executives came to a few weeks ago when a Bloomberg reporter inadvertently revealed the surveillance capabilities reporters from the news and financial data provider have over users of Bloomberg terminals. Traders throughout the financial world depend on Bloomberg terminals for real-time data on […]
Afghanistan: ‘U.S. Kicks Drug-War Habit, Makes Peace With Afghan Poppies’
May 10th, 2013You’ll love this one. Via: Wired: Because of the poppies, the raw material for most of the world’s heroin, the list of things 1st Lt. Christopher Gackstatter and his 2nd Platoon can’t do in Sartok is far longer than the list of things they can. Marching into the mud-walled village in this sun-baked district of […]
Granddaughter of Mao Zedong Has Net Worth Over $800 Million
May 10th, 2013“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” — Animal Farm by George Orwell Via: AFP: The appearance of a grand-daughter of Mao Zedong, founding father of Communist China, on a list of the country’s richest citizens prompted online accusations of hypocrisy Thursday. Kong Dongmei, now in her early 40s, and […]
Special Inspector General Claims Obama Regime Applying Pressure Over ‘Damning Audits’
May 10th, 2013Via: Politico: The watchdog who tracks the billions of taxpayer dollars spent to rebuild Afghanistan says government officials have tried to silence him because they think he’s embarrassing the White House and Afghan President Hamid Karzai by pointing out the waste and fraud. John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, used a speech […]
Hanford Nuclear Waste “Cleanup” Disaster
May 10th, 2013Via: Scientific American: The most toxic and voluminous nuclear waste in the U.S.—208 million liters —sits in decaying underground tanks at the Hanford Site (a nuclear reservation) in southeastern Washington State. It accumulated there from the middle of World War II, when the Manhattan Project invented the first nuclear weapon, to 1987, when the last […]
One-Third of U.S. Honeybee Colonies Died Last Winter, Threatening Food Supply
May 10th, 2013Via: Wired: Nearly one in three commercial honeybee colonies in the United States died or disappeared last winter, an unsustainable decline that threatens the nation’s food supply. Multiple factors — pesticides, fungicides, parasites, viruses and malnutrition — are believed to cause the losses, which were officially announced today by a consortium of academic researchers, beekeepers […]
Nordstrom Using Smart Phones To Track Customer Movements
May 8th, 2013WiFi Auto Turn Off Via: CBS: Nordstrom says it wants to serve you better, so it’s tracking your movements through their stores. The CBS 11 I-Team has learned the retailer is using software to track how much time you spend in specific departments within the store. The technology is being used in 17 Nordstrom and […]
Your Body Is a Corporate Test Tube
May 8th, 2013Via: Tom Dispatch: A hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them. We can’t escape it in our cars. It’s in cities and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, young and old. And there’s […]
Government Accessing Data on Individuals Stored by Corporations
May 8th, 2013Via: The Atlantic: Our government collects a lot of information about us. Tax records, legal records, license records, records of government services received– it’s all in databases that are increasingly linked and correlated. Still, there’s a lot of personal information the government can’t collect. Either they’re prohibited by law from asking without probable cause and […]
