Koch Industries: A Global Menace
October 3rd, 2011Just another day at the office.
Via: Business Insider:
A just-published bombshell article in the November issue of Bloomberg Markets magazine implicates Koch Industries, the company controlled by Republican mega-donors Charles and David Koch, in dozens of criminal acts around the globe over the past three decades.
According the report, company officials have been caught paying bribes to win contracts, trading with Iran in violation of the U.S. embargo, price-fixing, neglecting safety and ignoring environmental regulations.
Research Credit: noncompliant
The Secret Memo That Explains Why Obama Can Kill Americans
October 3rd, 2011Via: The Atlantic:
Outside the U.S. government, President Obama’s order to kill American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki without due process has proved controversial, with experts in law and war reaching different conclusions. Inside the Obama Administration, however, disagreement was apparently absent, or so say anonymous sources quoted by the Washington Post. “The Justice Department wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting of Anwar al-Aulaqi, the American-born radical cleric who was killed by a U.S. drone strike Friday, according to administration officials,” the newspaper reported. “The document was produced following a review of the legal issues raised by striking a U.S. citizen and involved senior lawyers from across the administration. There was no dissent about the legality of killing Aulaqi, the officials said.”
Isn’t that interesting? Months ago, the Obama Administration revealed that it would target al-Awlaki. It even managed to wriggle out of a lawsuit filed by his father to prevent the assassination. But the actual legal reasoning the Department of Justice used to authorize the strike? It’s secret. Classified. Information that the public isn’t permitted to read, mull over, or challenge.
Why? What justification can there be for President Obama and his lawyers to keep secret what they’re asserting is a matter of sound law? This isn’t a military secret. It isn’t an instance of protecting CIA field assets, or shielding a domestic vulnerability to terrorism from public view. This is an analysis of the power that the Constitution and Congress’ post September 11 authorization of military force gives the executive branch. This is a president exploiting official secrecy so that he can claim legal justification for his actions without having to expose his specific reasoning to scrutiny. As the Post put it, “The administration officials refused to disclose the exact legal analysis used to authorize targeting Aulaqi, or how they considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process.”
Obama hasn’t just set a new precedent about killing Americans without due process. He has done so in a way that deliberately shields from public view the precise nature of the important precedent he has set.
Greece to Miss Deficit Targets Despite Austerity
October 3rd, 2011Via: Reuters:
Greece will miss a deficit target set just months ago in a massive bailout package, according to government draft budget figures released on Sunday, showing that drastic steps taken to avert bankruptcy may not be enough.
The dire forecasts came while inspectors from the International Monetary Fund, EU and European Central Bank, known as the troika, were in Athens scouring the country’s books to decide whether to approve a loan tranche. Without that installment, Greece would run out of cash as soon as this month.
Millions of Bees Mysteriously Die in Florida
October 2nd, 2011Via: CBS:
Florida officials are abuzz as to how millions of honey bees were killed in Brevard County.
Several beekeepers in the county have reported lost colonies this week. Charles Smith of Smith Family Honey Company told Stuart News Thursday he lost 400 beehives. He says the bees appeared to have been poisoned.
Internet Firms Co-Opted for Surveillance
October 2nd, 2011Via: Reuters:
Internet companies such as Google, Twitter and Facebook are increasingly co-opted for surveillance work as the information they gather proves irresistible to law enforcement agencies, Web experts said this week.
…
Demands from governments for Internet companies to hand over user information have become routine, according to online privacy researcher and activist Christopher Soghoian, who makes extensive use of freedom-of-information requests in his work.
“Every decent-sized U.S. telecoms and Internet company has a team that does nothing but respond to requests for information,” Soghoian told Reuters in an interview.
Soghoian estimates that U.S. Internet and telecoms companies may receive about 300,000 such requests in connection with law enforcement each year — but public information is scarce.
While U.S. courts are obliged to publish reports on wire-tapping of telephone lines, no similar information is required to be made public with respect to the Internet — which grew up after the laws on electronic communications were passed.
…
The ease and cost of surveillance are at an all-time low, Soghoian said, with Google charging an administrative fee of $25 to hand over data, Yahoo charging $20, and Microsoft and Facebook providing data for free.
“Now, one police officer from the comfort of their desk can track 20, 30, 50 people all through Web interfaces provided by mobile companies and cloud computing companies,” he said.
“The marginal cost of surveilling one more person is now essentially approaching zero.”
Britain: Sharp Rise in Demand for Food Handouts from Poverty-Stricken Families
October 2nd, 2011Via: Guardian:
Britain has seen a sharp increase in the number of people unable to afford to feed themselves at the most basic level, thanks to the worsening economic climate and changes to the benefit system, according to a survey by a leading food charity.
In the past year FareShare, which redistributes waste food from major food manufacturers and supermarkets to social care charities, has seen a 20% rise in the number of people it is feeding – from 29,500 a year to 35,000.
And many of those, blighted by rising unemployment and business failures, are coming from the sorts of stable family backgrounds once considered immune to the worst effects of recession.
More:
Poverty-Stricken Families Join a Lengthening Queue for Food Handouts
20% of British Employees Are Earning Less Than a Living Wage
Ministers Plan Big Rise in Use of Electronic Tags on Offenders [h/t noncompliant]
New Fast and Furious Documents
October 1st, 2011Via: CBS:
Late Friday, the White House turned over new documents in the Congressional investigation into the ATF “Fast and Furious” gunwalking scandal.
The documents show extensive communications between then-ATF Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix office Bill Newell – who led Fast and Furious – and then-White House National Security Staffer Kevin O’Reilly. Emails indicate the two also spoke on the phone. Such detailed, direct communications between a local ATF manager in Phoenix and a White House national security staffer has raised interest among Congressional investigators looking into Fast and Furious. Newell has said he and O’Reilly are long time friends.
ATF agents say that in Fast and Furious, their agency allowed thousands of assault rifles and other weapons to be sold to suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels. At least two of the guns turned up at the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry last December.
The email exchanges span a little over a month last summer. They discuss ATF’s gun trafficking efforts along the border including the controversial Fast and Furious case, though not by name. The emails to and from O’Reilly indicate more than just a passing interest in the Phoenix office’s gun trafficking cases. They do not mention specific tactics such as “letting guns walk.”
A lawyer for the White House wrote Congressional investigators: “none of the communications between ATF and the White House revealed the investigative law enforcement tactics at issue in your inquiry, let alone any decision to allow guns to ‘walk.'”
Among the documents produced: an email in which ATF’s Newell sent the White House’s O’Reilly an “arrow chart reflecting the ultimate destination of firearms we intercepted and/or where the guns ended up.” The chart shows arrows leading from Arizona to destinations all over Mexico.
In response, O’Reilly wrote on Sept. 3, 2010 “The arrow chart is really interesting – and – no surprise – implies at least that different (Drug Trafficking Organizations) in Mexico have very different and geographically distinct networks in the US for acquiring guns. Did last year’s TX effort develop a similar graphic?”
The White House counsel who produced the documents stated that some records were not included because of “significant confidentiality interests.”
Germany Must Hit the Eject Button
October 1st, 2011Absent significant monetary instability or an injunction for use of bancor for the making of an important set of payments (e.g. payment of taxes), surmounting the barriers to wide acceptance would be a key and perhaps prohibitive challenge.
—IMF on the Proposed Global Currency Called the Bancor, Reserve Accumulation and International Monetary Stability, April 13, 2010
There is serious trouble ahead.
Via: Stratfor / Business Spectator:
It seems that if the eurozone is to be saved, Greece needs to be disposed of.
This cannot, however, be done cleanly.
Boston Dynamics’ AlphaDog Quadruped Robot Prototype
October 1st, 2011Via: ieee Spectrum:
…those weights that AlphaDog is carrying in a few of the clips weigh a total of 400 pounds (180 kilograms), and the robot will be able to carry that load up to 20 miles (30 kilometers) over the course of 24 hours without having to refuel.
Sunlight Falling On Catalyst-Coated Silicon Wafer Splits Water Into Hydrogen and Oxygen
October 1st, 2011This is nowhere near viable, but it’s definitely interesting.
Via: Massachusetts Institute of Technology / YouTube:
An “artificial leaf” made by Daniel Nocera and his team, using a silicon solar cell with novel catalyst materials bonded to its two sides, is shown in a container of water with light (simulating sunlight) shining on it. The light generates a flow of electricity that causes the water molecules, with the help of the catalysts, to split into oxygen and hydrogen, which bubble up from the two surfaces.
More: Nature News: Secrets of Artificial Leaf Revealed
