The Urban Farming Guys in India
May 14th, 2012Via: Urban Farming Guys:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Florida Farm Workers Tell How Drugs, Debt Bind Them in Modern Slavery
May 14th, 2012Via: Tampa Bay Times:
LeRoy Smith thought he had hit rock bottom when he found himself trolling Atlanta’s gay district, looking to exchange sex acts for a hot hit off a crack pipe. Then he wound up on a Florida farm near the small town of Hastings, being bilked blind, he says, by a man with a fifth-grade education, sweating all day for a few dirty dollars, with no way to escape from the middle-of-nowhere camp.
He did not think slavery existed in modern America. He knows better now.
The recruiters had found LeRoy Smith playing chess in a park in Jacksonville on May 1, 2010. They pegged him for a black man with a back strong enough for farm work and an addiction strong enough to stick around and work for nothing. He was hooked on crack, but he had enough sense to recognize peonage when he saw it, and to slip away by night to safety.
And now he’s talking. He filed a lawsuit last month in federal court against the man he says enslaved him. And he’s talking to the Tampa Bay Times in hopes that publicity will cleanse Florida of indentured servitude.
The man he accuses says it’s all a lie. Confronted with the allegations, Ronald Uzzle dismissed them and told a reporter to get off his property.
Gold
May 14th, 2012Warning: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
The mega monthly candle ascending triangle… failed.
The traditional Fibonacci retracements are in green on the chart below.
Spot Gold Monthly Interval
230,000 Unemployed Lost Benefits Over Weekend
May 14th, 2012Vi: The Hill:
More than 230,000 unemployed workers will lose their jobless benefits this weekend as portions of federal programs expire across several states.
All told, 409,300 long-term unemployed Americans in 27 states will have lost upward of 20 weeks of federal unemployment benefits by this past Saturday, even as the many state jobless rates remain high, according to a new analysis by the National Employment Law Project (NELP).
The latest batch of cuts affects 236,300 unemployed people in eight states — California (11%), Texas (7%) Pennsylvania (7.5%), Florida (9%), Illinois (8.8%) North Carolina (9.7%) Colorado (7.8%) and Connecticut (7.7%) — half of which have jobless rates above the 8.1 percent national average posted in April.
“A growing number of long-term unemployed workers are being left behind,” said Christine Owens, executive director of the NELP.
“Job openings are not taking the place of these cuts,” Owens said.
Forty-Nine Headless Corpses Found Along Highway in Northern Mexico
May 14th, 2012Via: Reuters:
Suspected drug gang killers dumped 49 headless bodies on a highway near Mexico’s northern city of Monterrey in one of the country’s worst atrocities in recent years.
The mutilated corpses of 43 men and 6 women, whose hands and feet had also been cut off, were found in a pile on a highway in the municipality of Cadereyta Jimenez in the early hours of Sunday, officials from the state of Nuevo Leon said.
“What’s complicating the identification of all the people was that they were all headless,” said Jorge Domene, the Nuevo Leon government’s spokesman for public security, who said the other body parts were missing.
Domene said the brutal Zetas drug gang claimed responsibility for the murders in a message found at the scene.
The massacre was the latest in a string of mass slayings that have convulsed Mexico in recent months, many of them in the north of the country, where the Zetas have waged a war against rival groups for control of smuggling routes.
‘Greece is screwed, there are no jobs and it has been run by crooks.’
May 14th, 2012They’re shifting assets to pound denominated British real estate in an attempt to hide from the euro wreck.
Via: Reuters:
Worsening financial and political turmoil in southern Europe caused a surge of interest in London property last month with buyers from Greece and Spain showing strongly among investors seeking a safe haven for their money.
The number of Greeks searching for homes costing more than 1.5 million pounds ($2.4 million) on the website of property agent Savills jumped 39 percent in April compared with the average of the preceding six months, the company said.
“The reason Greeks are coming is very simple,” said Dinos Joannou, a 65-year-old Cypriot who works in the Athenian Grocery in the Bayswater district of London and has seen growing numbers arrive this year. “Greece is screwed, there are no jobs and it has been run by crooks.”
The number of Europeans buying property in London has grown steadily over the last year as the euro zone debt crisis has worsened but numbers spiked ahead of elections in Greece last weekend that failed to produce a government.
George Kastaros, 37, dresses as a traditional Greek soldier handing out leaflets for the Kalamaras restaurant on Queensway in Bayswater, an area popular among Greeks and home to the St Sofia’s Greek Orthodox cathedral.
The Athenian moved to London before the crisis began in 2007 and said the number of Greeks arriving jumped after Christmas.
“Dressed like this, Greek people who have just got off the plane come up to me with their suitcases and ask where they can find a place to live or a job. I was stopped by more than 100 people in January.”
The chef at Kalamaras arrived five months ago with his son and daughter, who are a doctor and teacher, he said. “These are well-educated people who cannot find jobs in Greece.”
“What we’re seeing is another stage in the euro zone crisis gathering pace,” said Liam Bailey, head of residential research at property agent Knight Frank. “It’s ironic that the more instability you get in the euro zone the more the London property market benefits.”
Euro Officials Begin to Weigh Greek Exit
May 14th, 2012Via: Reuters:
Greece’s possible exit from the euro area moved to the center of Europe’s debt-crisis debate, with officials beginning to weigh the fallout of a withdrawal even as authorities in Athens struggled to form a government.
Meetings brokered by Greek President Karolos Papoulias are set to continue today after Syriza, the largest anti-bailout party, rejected a unity government following last week’s inconclusive elections. The country where the 2 1/2-year-old crisis began moved closer to a new vote, and to the possibility of a euro-area exit that was once a taboo among policy makers.
Greek withdrawal “is not necessarily fatal, but it is not attractive,” European Central Bank Governing Council member Patrick Honohan said in Tallinn on May 12. An exit was “technically” possible yet would damage the euro, he said. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble reiterated in an interview in Sueddeutsche Zeitung that member states seeking to hold the line on austerity for Greece could not force the country to stay.
Violent Criminal on Federal Payroll as Informant
May 14th, 2012Via: Seattle Times:
Despite a history of abusing women and violent behavior in prison, Joshua Allan Jackson managed to become a federal informant, trigger a citywide Seattle police alert and hold a 18-year-old woman as his sexual prisoner.
…
For all of this, the 34-year-old Jackson would be just another habitual criminal except for one startling fact: He was working the entire time as a paid informant for the Seattle office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The agency made Jackson an informant even though he had come out of prison early last year with a documented reputation as a violent, mentally unstable inmate who had been arrested in nearly every state and posed a serious threat to law-enforcement officers.
Research Credit: ottilie
California: Large Search for FBI Agent Who Worked in ‘National Security Affairs’
May 13th, 2012Update: Body of Missing FBI Agent Found in Burbank
Obviously, temperature and humidity will affect this, but if the hikers smelled the corpse, what does that say about when Ivens died?
Via: KABC:
The body of missing FBI agent Stephen Ivens has been found in a wooded area in Burbank, police confirmed on Tuesday.
Authorities say the family has been notified. An official identification of the body will be done by the coroner’s office.
Ivens, 35, was last seen on May 10 near his home in the 1700 block of Scott Road.
On Monday night, two hikers walking in the foothills above Burbank smelled a suspicious odor in the 3600 block of Scott Road. They found what appeared to be human remains and immediately called police.
Police said a weapon was recovered at the scene.
Before becoming an FBI agent three years ago, Ivens was an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department for eight years. He has a wife and a 1-year-old baby.
—End Update—
Update: Ivens Was Assigned to Counter Terrorism
Via: CNN:
Ivens is a Special Agent with the FBI and is assigned to agency’s Los Angeles division.
“He worked in national security type cases — counter terrorism,” FBI agent Steven Gomez told KCAL. “That’s all I can really say about his casework.”
—End Update—
Suicidal. *wink*
Between 100 and 200 FBI agents involved with the search…
Via: Los Angeles Times:
Authorities launched Burbank’s largest manhunt in 20 years in search of a missing FBI agent who was believed to be suicidal and possibly carrying a handgun, officials said Saturday.
More than 150 law enforcement personnel joined in a search that began Friday and fanned through the rugged Verdugo Mountains and other parts of Los Angeles County looking for Stephen Ivens, 35, a Los Angeles-based agent specializing in national security affairs.
He was last seen Friday at his home in the 1700 block of Scott Road in Burbank. Also missing from the home he shared with his wife and 1-year-old son was his handgun, officials said.
Officials would not reveal why they believed Ivens was suicidal.
“He’s been a valuable member of our office,” FBI Special Agent Steve Gomez said at a news conference at the Burbank Police Department.
A 40-member search and rescue team from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department along with a dozen Burbank police officers were assisting between 100 and 200 FBI agents in the search, officials said. Helicopters and bloodhounds were also used.
“The last search Burbank had of this kind was 20 years ago,” Burbank Police Capt. Denis Cremins said.
FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said the “prime reason for the amount of resources is there is concern there is a weapon.”
Navy Commander Halts SPAWAR LENR Research
May 13th, 2012I had a total of zero on-the-record submissions on the NANOR presentation and data, but some people who have been involved with U.S. Government research into LENR did communicate with me.
One of the issues that came up was that the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) has inexplicably halted research into LENR. I was directed to an article about this, which I linked below.
A researcher explained to me that the “triple-tracks” particle pattern, with regard to LENR experiments, is a sort of genie that can’t be put back into the bottle. The literature is out there now for anyone who wants to look for it, even if the military brass hopes that this will go away somehow.
See, for example, Comparison of Pd/D co-deposition and DT neutron generated triple tracks observed in CR-39 detectors, European Physical Journal Applied Physics, 51, 20901 (2010):
Triple tracks have been observed in CR-39 detectors used in Pd/D co-deposition experiments. These triple tracks are indistinguishable from those generated using a DT neutron source. Both symmetric and asymmetric triple tracks have been observed. The most likely source of the neutrons responsible for the triple tracks is DT fusion inside the Pd lattice. This is supported by the observations of charged particles and neutrons consistent with primary and secondary fusion reactions. However, the possibility that these neutrons are created by an unknown nuclear process, as suggested by Roussetski, cannot be ruled out. Although theories are currently under development, the mechanism by which nuclear reactions can occur in Pd is not yet fully understood.
At least one LENR researcher, in her capacity as a private citizen, and not as a government employee, will soon be examining the NANOR system at MIT.
Via: New Energy Times:
After 23 years, researchers at the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, Calif., have been ordered to stop their low-energy nuclear reaction research.
