cryptogon.com

The Obama administration has lobbied Congress to block the bill’s passage, according to administration officials and congressional aides from both parties, and the Saudi threats have been the subject of intense discussions in recent weeks between lawmakers and officials from the State Department and the Pentagon. The officials have warned senators of diplomatic and economic fallout from the legislation.

Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, delivered the kingdom’s message personally last month during a trip to Washington, telling lawmakers that Saudi Arabia would be forced to sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they could be in danger of being frozen by American courts.

Several outside economists are skeptical that the Saudis will follow through, saying that such a sell-off would be difficult to execute and would end up crippling the kingdom’s economy. But the threat is another sign of the escalating tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United States.

The administration, which argues that the legislation would put Americans at legal risk overseas, has been lobbying so intently against the bill that some lawmakers and families of Sept. 11 victims are infuriated. In their view, the Obama administration has consistently sided with the kingdom and has thwarted their efforts to learn what they believe to be the truth about the role some Saudi officials played in the terrorist plot.

“It’s stunning to think that our government would back the Saudis over its own citizens,” said Mindy Kleinberg, whose husband died in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and who is part of a group of victims’ family members pushing for the legislation.

It’s a tempting thought. But it seems impossible. Lobbying is a multi-billion dollar industry and an accepted—if hated—part of American politics. American courts have ruled that lobbying is constitutionally protected free speech, and lawyers and laymen alike generally accept this.

The same is true of more indirect lobbying, like the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling that allows businesses to spend unlimited sums of money on Super Pacs and advertisements for or against a candidate.

Yet from America’s founding through much of the 19th century, the legal system treated lobbying as a corrupt and illegitimate activity. Lobbying still happened, but a number of states made lobbying a criminal offense, and the federal government banned some forms of lobbying. This all happened without legal challenge, as the courts viewed lobbying as incompatible with the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

This forgotten history of lobbying in America has been documented by Zephyr Teachout, an Elizabeth Warren-style academic turned activist-politician who believes that Americans—and American legal minds—have forgotten the long American tradition of treating lobbying as a violation of a citizen’s responsibility to represent only him or herself in the political process.

The Washington Post reports on Sanders’s income. “The senator from Vermont reported income of just more than $200,000 on his 2014 returns, according to the first few pages of his federal and Vermont filings, which were shared with The Washington Post back in June. On Friday, the couple is planning to release the rest of the returns, including attached schedules,” writes the paper. “The vast majority of the couple’s income came from Sanders’s $174,000 Senate salary and Social Security benefits that both he and his wife, Jane, a former college president, receive.”

In 2014 alone, Clinton gave speeches to GE (for $225,500), the National Automobile Dealers Association ($325,500), Deutsche Bank AG ($280,000), and many more.

As CNN reported at the beginning of this year, “Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, combined to earn more than $153 million in paid speeches from 2001 until Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign last spring, a CNN analysis shows.

Deputy defence secretary Robert Work touted the long-considered “loyal wingman” concept at a forum hosted by the Washington Post in Washington DC on 30 March, where he explained that the air force will pair unmanned Lockheed F-16s with F-35s in future battles.

“You take an F-16 and make it totally unmanned,” Work says. “The F-16 is a fourth-generation fighter, and pair it with an F-35, a fifth-generation battle network node, and have those two operating together.”

Work says he expects “unmanned wingman, unmanned undersea vehicles and surface vessels” as well as pilotless cargo helicopters for delivering supplies to troops on the battlefield to be introduced operationally before robotic military vehicles.

Known as 266P/Christensen and 335P/Gibbs, they have never been investigated before because they were only discovered in 2006 and 2008 respectively. Paris found that they were both in the vicinity of Chi Sagittarii on the day that the ‘Wow!’ signal was detected.

This could be significant because comets are surrounded by clouds of hydrogen gas that are millions of kilometres in diameter. The ‘Wow!’ signal itself was detected by Ehman at 1420MHz, which is a radio frequency that hydrogen naturally emits. He published his idea at the beginning of this year.

But before the case can be closed, Paris must test his hypothesis and for this he needs public support.

Comet 266P/Christensen will pass the Chi Sagittarii star group again on 25 January 2017, while 335P/Gibbs will make its passage on 7 January 2018. Paris plans to observe these events to look for a recurrence of the mystery signal. But time is not on his side for using an existing radio telescope – they are all booked out.

So, he has launched a crowdfunding campaign on gofundme to raise the $13,000 he needs to buy a radio telescope to make the observation. Donations are rolling in and he is already most of the way to his target.

“I would like to [be fully funded] in May, order the stuff so that I can have it by October,” he says. This would give him time to construct the dish, test it and prepare for the January encounter.

Although some other astronomers have voiced scepticism at his hypothesis, Paris points out that even if he turns out to be wrong, it’s still good science because we are learning something about comets, and he and his colleagues have a new radio telescope that they can use for further research.

The revelations are contained in a stack of court documents that were made public after members of a Montreal crime syndicate pleaded guilty to their role in a 2011 gangland murder. The documents shed light on the extent to which the smartphone manufacturer, as well as telecommunications giant Rogers, cooperated with investigators.

According to technical reports by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that were filed in court, law enforcement intercepted and decrypted roughly one million PIN-to-PIN BlackBerry messages in connection with the probe. The report doesn’t disclose exactly where the key — effectively a piece of code that could break the encryption on virtually any BlackBerry message sent from one device to another — came from. But, as one police officer put it, it was a key that could unlock millions of doors.

Despite the seemingly endless stream of Wall Street economists who believe the U.S. is about to snap out of its malaise, most Americans think the economy is bad and getting worse, according to several recent surveys.

One of the more glaring examples of how strong pessimism has become is Gallup’s U.S. Economic Confidence Index. The measure gauges the difference between respondents who say the economy is improving or declining. The most recent results are not good.