Some Obama Top Political Appointees Using Secret U.S. Government Email Accounts
June 4th, 2013Via: AP:
Some of President Barack Obama’s political appointees, including the secretary for Health and Human Services, are using secret government email accounts they say are necessary to prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed with unwanted messages, according to a review by The Associated Press.
The scope of using the secret accounts across government remains a mystery: Most U.S. agencies have failed to turn over lists of political appointees’ email addresses, which the AP sought under the Freedom of Information Act more than three months ago. The Labor Department initially asked the AP to pay more than $1 million for its email addresses.
British Nutrition Foundation Student Survey
June 4th, 2013Via: BBC:
Almost a third of UK primary pupils think cheese is made from plants and a quarter think fish fingers come from chicken or pigs, suggests a survey.
Nearly one in 10 secondary pupils thinks tomatoes grow under ground, according to the poll for the British Nutrition Foundation (BNF).
Some 27,500 five-to-16-year-olds were questioned last month.
The charity says the figures prove the need for better teaching about cooking and healthy eating.
The survey also revealed confusion about the source of staples such as pasta and bread among younger pupils, with about a third of five-to-eight-year-olds believing that they are made from meat.
About 19% of this age group did not realise that potatoes grew under ground, with 10% thinking they grew on bushes or trees.
Dear Leader Dreams of Sushi
June 4th, 2013Via: GQ:
The chef’s name, an alias, is Kenji Fujimoto, and for eleven years he was Kim Jong-il’s personal chef, court jester, and sidekick. He had seen the palaces, ridden the white stallions, smoked the Cuban cigars, and watched as, one by one, the people around him disappeared. It was part of Fujimoto’s job to fly North Korean jets around the world to procure dinner-party ingredients—to Iran for caviar, Tokyo for fish, or Denmark for beer. It was Fujimoto who flew to France to supply the Dear Leader’s yearly $700,000 cognac habit. And when the Dear Leader craved McDonald’s, it was Fujimoto who was dispatched to Beijing for an order of Big Macs to go.
U.S. Manufacturing Unexpectedly Shrank in May at the Fastest Pace in Four Years
June 3rd, 2013Via: Bloomberg:
Manufacturing (NAPMPMI) in the U.S. unexpectedly shrank in May at the fastest pace in four years, showing slowdowns in business and government spending are holding back the world’s largest economy.
The Institute for Supply Management’s factory index fell to 49, the lowest reading since June 2009, from the prior month’s 50.7, the Tempe, Arizona-based group’s report showed today. Fifty is the dividing line between growth and contraction. The median forecast of 81 economists surveyed by Bloomberg was 51.
Enlarge image May ISM Manufacturing Index Decreased to 49 from 50.7 in April
Across-the-board federal budget cuts and overseas markets that are struggling to rebound will probably continue to curb manufacturing, which accounts for about 12 percent of the economy. At the same time, demand for automobiles, gains in residential construction and lean inventories may spark a pickup in orders and production in the second half of the year.
China Is Reaping Biggest Benefits of Iraq Oil Boom
June 3rd, 2013For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The Chinese had nothing to do with the war, eh?
Attention Michael Makovsky: China bought hundreds of billions of dollars worth of U.S. Debt, which provided the funding that made the war possible.
Now China’s getting the oil along with interest payments from the next few generations of Americans.
Via: New York Times:
Since the American-led invasion of 2003, Iraq has become one of the world’s top oil producers, and China is now its biggest customer.
China already buys nearly half the oil that Iraq produces, nearly 1.5 million barrels a day, and is angling for an even bigger share, bidding for a stake now owned by Exxon Mobil in one of Iraq’s largest oil fields.
“The Chinese are the biggest beneficiary of this post-Saddam oil boom in Iraq,” said Denise Natali, a Middle East expert at the National Defense University in Washington. “They need energy, and they want to get into the market.”
Before the invasion, Iraq’s oil industry was sputtering, largely walled off from world markets by international sanctions against the government of Saddam Hussein, so his overthrow always carried the promise of renewed access to the country’s immense reserves. Chinese state-owned companies seized the opportunity, pouring more than $2 billion a year and hundreds of workers into Iraq, and just as important, showing a willingness to play by the new Iraqi government’s rules and to accept lower profits to win contracts.
“We lost out,” said Michael Makovsky, a former Defense Department official in the Bush administration who worked on Iraq oil policy. “The Chinese had nothing to do with the war, but from an economic standpoint they are benefiting from it, and our Fifth Fleet and air forces are helping to assure their supply.”
Related: Who Won the Iraq War? China
SEC Bringing Lowest Number of Corporate Accounting Fraud Cases in a Decade
June 3rd, 2013Post 2008, what’s fraud?
Via: New York Times:
In April 2003, a New York Times article discussed the push by federal prosecutors to crack down on accounting fraud in which one expert said, “These have become the hot, sexy cases.”
What followed were the convictions of chief executives including Jeffrey K. Skilling of Enron, Bernard J. Ebbers of WorldCom and John J. Rigas of Adelphia Communications.
The attraction seems to have worn off. The number of corporate accounting cases at the Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped to its lowest level in a decade, with only 79 such cases filed in the most recent fiscal year.
Fire Kills 119 at Poultry Plant in Northeast China
June 3rd, 2013Via: AP:
A fire at a poultry plant in northeastern China trapped workers inside a cluttered slaughterhouse, killing at least 119 in one of China’s worst industrial disasters in years despite recent work safety improvements.
Several dozen other people were hurt in Monday’s blaze in Jilin province’s Mishazi township, which appeared to have been sparked by three early morning explosions, the official Xinhua News Agency said. The provincial fire department attributed the blasts to an ammonia leak. The chemical is kept pressurized as part of the cooling system in meat processing plants.
The fire was one of China’s worst recent industrial disasters, with the death toll the highest since a September 2008 mining cave-in that claimed 281 lives.
It was the third major industrial blaze to be reported in China in the past four days. The two earlier fires were an oil tank explosion in Liaoning province that caused another oil tank to catch fire, killing two, and a blaze in a large granary in Heilongjiang province that wiped out 1,000 tons of grain.
Monday’s accident highlighted the high human costs of China’s lax industrial safety standards, which continue to plague workplaces despite improvements in the country’s work safety record in recent years.
SUPREME COURT: POLICE MAY TAKE DNA FROM EVERYONE THEY ARREST
June 3rd, 2013Via: CBS:
A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday said police can routinely take DNA from people they arrest, equating a DNA cheek swab to other common jailhouse procedures like fingerprinting.
“Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court’s five-justice majority.
But the four dissenting justices said that the court was allowing a major change in police powers.
“Make no mistake about it: because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason,” conservative Justice Antonin Scalia said in a sharp dissent which he read aloud in the courtroom.
At least 28 states and the federal government now take DNA swabs after arrests.
New Affiliate Programs
June 3rd, 2013Disclosure: I am an affiliate for both AstaSupreme and Deca Aloe Arborescens. I will be paid a commission if you click through to the companies from Cryptogon and place an order.
Warning: Nothing that appears on Cryptogon should be considered medical advice.
Pookie let me know about some supplements that she was interested in buying, and that the companies have affiliate programs. I signed up for both of them:
For those who are interested, here are a couple of links about Astaxanthin:
LifeExtension: Astaxanthin Overview
LifeExtension: Astaxanthin Provides Broad Spectrum Protection
And here’s a Rural Delivery piece that goes into how AstaSupreme got started. (I like small business stories.)
There is a lot of info on the Aloe Arborescens product at the site.
I don’t have any personal experience with either of these products. I’m posting them mainly for FYI purposes, because I know, from personal communications with many of you, that you’re going through some hard stuff. As for my own family, my dad is in a cardiac care unit at the moment and he’s also suffering from very debilitating rheumatoid arthritis. He’s not the sort of guy to ever ask for help, but he knew he was a dead man walking… or not walking, actually, and he let my sister intervene. He’s still alive because of her.
He’s 80 years old and he did a demolition project on his house back in September 2012. He demmoed the balcony on his house that was dry rotted and needed to come down. He would have been breathing a lot of lead dust, mold and rodent feces/urine particles. He’s the last person on earth who would consider using a respirator for such an activity.
Over the last couple of months, he started depending more and more on aspirin for pain and stiffness. You have to understand, I don’t think he ever took pain medication for anything, ever. I walked in on him once as he was pulling one of his own teeth out of his jaw with a pair of pliers.
“Holy sh*t! WTF are you doing?”
“Getting relief, man. It feels better now.”
Ok, so flash forward to the present: to hear him straining to talk through the arthritis pain and jonesing for aspirin was very strange. It just got worse and worse. My sister took him over to her place, and one morning, he couldn’t get out of bed.
Emergency room. Cardiac care unit. Carvedilol, Prednisone, Rivaroxaban, Sotalol. etc. etc.
I’m not saying that the lead, mold and rat shit caused this situation, but he went from doing heavy construction and yard work to clinging to life inside of eight months. Anyway, this is my way of saying that my interest in these products goes beyond simply trying to earn a commission.
Most of you have seen Pookie on Cryptogon over the years. She’s actually a close family friend of ours, and we discuss a lot of things in private. Pookie knows a lot about alternative medicine. She’s on the front lines, every day. If she wants to tell you more, that’s up to her. But my point is, if Pookie tells me that she’s interested in something, I check it out.
Situation in Turkey
June 3rd, 2013Amnesty International Turkey has ongoing coverage of the protests.
