Massacre of Civilians in Tunisia
January 11th, 2011Via: AFP:
Anger over a crackdown on protesters in Tunisia grew Tuesday as a union official said 50 were killed in three days of unrest while artists and hospital staff joined demonstrations.
Locals reported looting in the town of Kasserine overnight and said demonstrators were fired upon from rooftops.
Meanwhile schools and universities across the country were shut as the government tried to quell weeks of protests centred on unemployment.
A union official told AFP that at least 50 people were killed over three days in Kasserine, one of three remote, farming areas with high rates of youth unemployment that have seen the worst of the violence.
“The number killed has passed 50,” said Sadok Mahmoudi from the regional branch of the Tunisian General Union of Labour (UGTT), citing tolls issued by medical staff in the regional hospital.
The Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) said at least 35 people were killed in the weekend unrest.
“We have a list of the names of the 35,” FIDH president Souhayr Belhassen told AFP. “The total figure is higher. It’s somewhere around 50, but that’s an estimate.”
The Fed’s QE2 Traders Are Buying Hundreds of Billions of Dollars Worth of U.S. Debt
January 11th, 2011Via: New York Times:
Deep inside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the $600 billion man is fast at work.
In a spare, government-issue office in Lower Manhattan, behind a bank of cubicles and a scruffy copy machine, Josh Frost and a band of market specialists are making the Fed’s ultimate Wall Street trade. They are buying hundreds of billions of dollars of United States Treasury securities on the open market in a controversial attempt to keep interest rates low and, in the process, revive the economy.
To critics, it is a Hail Mary play — an admission that the economy’s persistent weakness has all but exhausted the central bank’s powers and tested the limits of its policy making. Around the world, some warn the unusual strategy will weaken the dollar and lead to crippling inflation.
But inside the Operations Room, on the ninth floor of the New York Fed’s fortresslike headquarters, there is no time for second-guessing. Here the second round of what is known as quantitative easing — QE2, as it is called on Wall Street — is being put into practice almost daily by the central bank’s powerful New York arm.
Ashley W. Turton: Energy Lobbyist, Wife of Key White House Aide, Dies in Fire
January 10th, 2011Update: Grandmother Uses Toy Horse to Fend Off Burglar
Via: KSDK:
A grandmother used a toy horse to fend off a robber in her Washington, DC home Tuesday.
Catherine Turton moved there to take care of three grandchildren last year after their mother, lobbyist Ashley Turton, died in a bizarre garage fire.
One of the kids spotted the intruder Tuesday morning.
Turton went downstairs and saw the burglar with an armful of her belongings, so she grabbed the kids’ hobby horse and confronted the intruder.
“He grabbed my hair and pulled my neck, pulled my head over and shouted obscenities at me, and I recovered and said, ‘Now, put the stuff down!'” Turton said.
Turton was able to push the man out of the house.
Police found him hiding behind a car around the corner and arrested him.
—End Update—
Update: Police: Ashley Turton’s Death Was An Accident
You’ve heard of Magic Bullet theories. Here’s a Magic Spontaneously Combustive BMW theory.
Via: DCist:
According to the Metropolitan Police Department, Turton — who was married to White House deputy director of legislative affairs Dan Turton — was heading to catch a flight when she got behind the wheel of a 2008 BMW X5 shortly before 5 a.m. on January 10. She then fell unconscious. The vehicle proceeded to roll into a workbench inside the garage, and a fire ignited in the car’s engine compartment. Turton reportedly never woke up after first slipping into unconsciousness and before flames engulfed the vehicle.
—End Update—
Update: Turton Was Intoxicated When She Died
Via: NBC Connecticut:
An autopsy report has revealed that a former aide to Rep. Rosa DeLauro was intoxicated when she died.
Ashley Turton was found dead just after 5 a.m. on Jan. 10 after her car caught fire in a parking garage in Washington, D.C.
The Chief Medical Examiner’s office told “The Hill” that “acute alcohol intoxication” was a contributing factor in Turton’s death.
—End Update—
Update: Ruled Accidental
Via: AP:
The D.C. Medical Examiner’s office says the death of a lobbyist in a car fire last month was accidental.
The office said Friday that 37-year-old Ashley Turton died from burns and inhaling products of combustion. The Washington Post reports that an autopsy also revealed acute alcohol intoxication contributed to her death.
—End Update—
Update: The Magic Headlights and Coolant Theory
Via: NBC:
Investigators in Washington, D.C. say their investigation into the death of Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s former aide is focusing on the headlights of her 2008 BMW X5.
Ashley Turton died January 10 after a fire engulfed her car.
Turton was at the a lobbyist for Progressive Energy and wife a senior aide to President Barack Obama.
WTOP radio in Washington, D.C. is reporting that sources have told them that Turton’s high-intensity headlights of the SUV may have started the fire.
“Investigators believe the radiator in Turton’s BMW was punctured when it rolled into a workbench. The halogen headlights, which emit a bluish light and illuminate the road better than conventional headlights, stayed on after the radiator was punctured,” according to WTOP. “Heat from the headlights, in proximity to the radiator’s antifreeze, either caused of exacerbated the initial fire, which ignited the garage.”
Two engineers from BMW have joined the investigation by the Metropolitan Police
Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Although an autopsy is still pending, authorities believe Turton was somehow stricken and was unconscious before the fire started, WTOP reported.
—End Update—
Update: ‘Some Unusual Circumstances’
Via: Politico:
“The leading theory is accidental, [that] the car crashed through the garage doors and…was found on fire in the garage area,” Piringer said, adding that the incident is under joint investigation by the fire and police departments. “There were some unusual circumstances – just the way the car was, low-speed, significant fire, things like that….For the most part, the fire was confined to the area of origin.”
—End Update—
Via: Washington Post:
The wife of a key White House aide was found dead early Monday in a sport-utility vehicle that was heavily damaged by fire in the garage of the couple’s Capitol Hill home, sources familiar with the incident said. The cause of her death is uncertain.
Ashley W. Turton, 37, an energy company lobbyist and one-time top aide to former U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), was found dead shortly before 5 a.m. in a burning BMW, the back end of which was partly out of the garage, as if the vehicle had been entering or leaving when the fire started, authorities said Turton was the wife of Daniel A. Turton, 43, the White House’s deputy director of legislative affairs for the U.S. House. As such, he is President Obama’s point man on legislation moving through the House.
He and Ashley Turton, who have three children, were a Washington power couple well known in Democratic circles. She was a lobbyist for North Carolina-based Progress Energy, which announced a merger Monday with Duke Energy.
Australia: Severe Flooding Continues
January 10th, 2011Update: Toowoomba Flood
—End Update—
Via: BBC:
Flash floods have hit Queensland, killing at least four people with several more missing, as heavy rains continue to pound the Australian state.
A massive deluge overwhelmed Toowoomba, a city west of the state capital Brisbane, without warning.
Cars were swept away by the torrent of water.
State Premier Anna Bligh called the flash floods Queensland’s “darkest hour” since the flood crisis began.
“The event that started in Toowoomba can only be described as a complete freak of nature, an extraordinary deluge that almost came out of nowhere,” the Australian Broadcasting Corporation quoted her as saying.
“What we have here in Queensland tonight is a very grim and desperate situation.”
Map
Helicopters have joined the rescue operation to reach those trapped in cars and on the roofs of buildings.
The tropical storms began in November, triggering the worst flooding in the state in decades. Some 200,000 people have been affected across Queensland.
The flooding has been so widespread that while some communities are still bracing themselves for the worst, in others the clean-up is well under way.
The forecast is for more rain to come, and there are reports of flooding in neighbouring New South Wales.
Portugal Might Be Next
January 10th, 2011Via: AP:
Europe’s debt crisis flared up once again Monday, as Portugal’s borrowing rates briefly spiked to euro-era highs amid reports Germany and France are pushing it to accept outside help to avoid contagion to other countries.
The yield on Portuguese 10-year bonds — a key gauge of investor sentiment — touched a potentially unsustainable 7.18 percent at one stage Monday. It then fell back to 6.94 percent on speculation that the European Central Bank was intervening by buying bonds — yields drop as prices rise.
CIA Asset Susan Lindauer Blows the Whistle on 9/11, Iraq
January 10th, 2011Via: Truth Jihad:
Susan Lindauer, author of Extreme Prejudice, is the first CIA asset to have spoken out, under her own name and for the record, on Israeli complicity in 9/11, the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center, and the specific, detailed foreknowledge of the time, target, and means of the 9/11 attacks held throughout the months prior to 9/11 by the CIA in general and Lindauer’s CIA handler, Richard Fuisz, in particular. She has also exposed her first-hand knowledge of pre-war intelligence and negotiations showing that Iraq was willing to give the US “anything it asked” and that the war was therefore–from the perspective of US interests–not only utterly unnecessary, but wildly counterproductive. Lindauer’s evidence points strongly to 9/11 being a coup d’etat by hard-line Zionists determined to steer the US into a self-destructive war on Israel’s enemies.
Listen to my complete interview with Susan Lindauer here. Below is a transcript of the first half of the interview.
China Leads List of Biggest U.S. Creditors
January 10th, 2011Via: Reuters:
President Barack Obama will host Chinese President Hu Jintao for a state visit on January 19, and the leaders of the two economic powerhouses are expected to discuss thorny issues such as China’s trade surplus and its currency policies.
The United States will tread carefully as Beijing is the country’s largest creditor, holding more than $900 billion worth of U.S. Treasury bonds.
Britain: Trial Collapses After Undercover Officer Changes Sides
January 10th, 2011Woops.
Via: BBC:
The trial of six green campaigners has collapsed after an undercover policeman who had infiltrated their group offered to give evidence on their behalf.
The six were charged with conspiring to shut down the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottingham in 2009.
The case was due to start on Monday, but was abandoned after Pc Mark Kennedy contacted the defence team to say he would be prepared to help them.
The prosecution subsequently dropped their case.
Research Credit: PW
Britain: Royal Family Granted New Right of Secrecy
January 10th, 2011Via: Independent:
The Royal Family is to be granted absolute protection from public scrutiny in a controversial legal reform designed to draw a veil of secrecy over the affairs of the Queen, Prince Charles and Prince William.
Letters, emails and documents relating to the monarch, her heir and the second in line to the throne will no longer be disclosed even if they are in the public interest.
Sweeping changes to the Freedom of Information Act will reverse advances which had briefly shone a light on the royal finances – including an attempt by the Queen to use a state poverty fund to heat Buckingham Palace – and which had threatened to force the disclosure of the Prince of Wales’s prolific correspondence with ministers.
Lobbying and correspondence from junior staff working for the Royal Household and Prince Charles will now be held back from disclosure. Buckingham Palace confirmed that it had consulted with the Coalition Government over the change in the law. The Government buried the plan for “added protection” for the Royal Family in the small print of plans called “opening up public bodies to public scrutiny”.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Mind Control: Is Free Will Simply a Myth?
January 10th, 2011Decades old, basic information, but just in case…
Via: Independent:
We have vain brains; we see ourselves as better than we really are. We like to think that we exercise free will, that put into a situation where we were challenged to do something we thought unacceptable then we’d refuse. But, if you believe that, then you are probably deluded.
I make this claim, based partly on the work of psychologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram devised and carried out ingenious experiments that exposed the frailty and self-delusion that are central to our lives. He showed how easy it is to make ordinary people do terrible things, that “evil” often happens for the most mundane of reasons.
Related: Human Resources
Research Credit: latincognito
