DEA Tactic More Secret Than “Parallel Construction”
February 5th, 2014Via: MuckRock:
To reiterate, the DEA redacted the name of a method its trainers and legal auditors deemed not only constitutional but also palatable to the public.
As its position on the list suggests, this shielded tactic is “tips and leads paradigm” that is the “primary methodology for protecting [intelligence community] information that is shared with [law enforcement agencies].”
Scenes from a Militarized America
February 4th, 2014Via: Washington Post:
Watch this video, taken from a police raid in Des Moines, Iowa. Send it to some people. When critics (like me) warn about the dangers of police militarization, this is what we’re talking about. You’ll see the raid team, dressed in battle-dress uniforms, helmets and face-covering balaclava hoods take down the family’s door with a battering ram. You’ll see them storm the home with ballistics shields, guns at the ready. More troubling still, you’ll see not one but two officers attempt to prevent the family from having an independent record of the raid, one by destroying a surveillance camera, another by blocking another camera’s lens.
Scalia to Law Students: “You Are Kidding Yourself” If You Think That Internment Camps in U.S. Are a Thing of the Past
February 4th, 2014Via: AP:
“Well, of course, Korematsu was wrong. And I think we have repudiated in a later case. But you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again,” Scalia told students and faculty during a lunchtime question-and-answer session.
Scalia cited a Latin expression meaning “In times of war, the laws fall silent.”
“That’s what was going on — the panic about the war and the invasion of the Pacific and whatnot. That’s what happens. It was wrong, but I would not be surprised to see it happen again, in time of war. It’s no justification but it is the reality,” he said.
Chaos Computer Club Files Criminal Complaint Against the German Government
February 4th, 2014Via: Chaos Computer Club:
On Monday, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) and the International League for Human Rights (ILMR), have filed a criminal complaint with the Federal Prosecutor General’s office. The complaint is directed against the German federal government, the presidents of the German secret services, namely Bundesnachrichtendienst, Militärischer Abschirmdienst, Bundesamt für Verfassungschutz, and others. We accuse US, British and German secret agents, their supervisors, the German Minister of the Interior as well as the German Chancelor of illegal and prohibited covert intelligence activities, of aiding and abetting of those activities, of violation of the right to privacy and obstruction of justice in office by bearing and cooperating with the electronic surveillance of German citizens by NSA and GCHQ.
After months of press releases about mass surveillance by secret services and offensive attacks on information technology systems, we now have certainty that German and other countries’ secret services have violated the German criminal law. With this criminal complaint, we hope to finally initiate investigations by the Federal Prosecutor General against the German government. The CCC has learned with certainty that the leaders of the secret services and the federal government have aided and abetted the commission of these crimes.
A Rash of Deaths and a Missing Reporter — With Ties to Wall Street Investigations
February 4th, 2014Via: Wall Street on Parade:
In a span of four days last week, two current executives and one recently retired top ranking executive of major financial firms were found dead. Both media and police have been quick to label the deaths as likely suicides. Missing from the reports is the salient fact that all three of the financial firms the executives worked for are under investigation for potentially serious financial fraud.
…
The case of David Bird, the oil markets reporter who had worked at the Wall Street Journal for 20 years and vanished without a trace on the afternoon of January 11, has this in common with the other three tragedies: his work involves a commodities market – oil – which is under investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for possible manipulation. The FBI is involved in the Bird investigation.
Bird left his Long Hill, New Jersey home on that Saturday, telling his wife he was going for a walk. An intentional disappearance is incompatible with the fact that he left the house wearing a bright red jacket and without his life-sustaining medicine he was required to take daily as a result of a liver transplant. Despite a continuous search since his disappearance by hundreds of volunteers, local law enforcement and the FBI, Bird has not been located.
Research Credit: Sgt Doom
Worldwide Cancer Cases Expected to Soar by 70% Over Next 20 Years
February 3rd, 2014Via: Guardian:
Cancer cases worldwide are predicted to increase by 70% over the next two decades, from 14m in 2012 to 25m new cases a year, according to the World Health Organisation.
The latest World Cancer Report says it is implausible to think we can treat our way out of the disease and that the focus must now be on preventing new cases. Even the richest countries will struggle to cope with the spiralling costs of treatment and care for patients, and the lower income countries, where numbers are expected to be highest, are ill-equipped for the burden to come.
Related: Cancers That Result from Medical Imaging
XStat for Gunshot Wounds
February 3rd, 2014Via: Popular Science:
When a soldier is shot on the battlefield, the emergency treatment can seem as brutal as the injury itself. A medic must pack gauze directly into the wound cavity, sometimes as deep as 5 inches into the body, to stop bleeding from an artery. It’s an agonizing process that doesn’t always work–if bleeding hasn’t stopped after three minutes of applying direct pressure, the medic must pull out all the gauze and start over again. It’s so painful, “you take the guy’s gun away first,” says former U.S. Army Special Operations medic John Steinbaugh.
Even with this emergency treatment, many soldiers still bleed to death; hemorrhage is a leading cause of death on the battlefield. “Gauze bandages just don’t work for anything serious,” says Steinbaugh, who tended to injured soldiers during more than a dozen deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. When Steinbaugh retired in April 2012 after a head injury, he joined an Oregon-based startup called RevMedx, a small group of veterans, scientists, and engineers who were working on a better way to stop bleeding.
RevMedx recently asked the FDA to approve a pocket-size invention: a modified syringe that injects specially coated sponges into wounds. Called XStat, the device could boost survival and spare injured soldiers from additional pain by plugging wounds faster and more efficiently than gauze.
The team’s early efforts were inspired by Fix-a-Flat foam for repairing tires. “That’s what we pictured as the perfect solution: something you could spray in, it would expand, and bleeding stops,” says Steinbaugh. “But we found that blood pressure is so high, blood would wash the foam right out.”
Wall Street Attracts Chop Shops 20 Years After ‘Wolf’
February 3rd, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
When Paul Taboada ran Charles Morgan Securities Inc. at 120 Wall St., he set himself apart by wearing suits with the brokerage’s name stitched into the pinstripes.
He ran into trouble within a few years. A client was sent to jail in 2010 for a fraud prosecutors alleged Taboada facilitated. Customers complained about a fund he set up to invest in Facebook Inc. (FB) before it went public. That didn’t slow him down. He shut the firm amid an investigation by regulators and moved to Blackwall Capital Markets Inc. at 100 Wall St., where trainees call hundreds of strangers a day to pitch stocks.
“What Wall Street does is it affords the common man participation in deals the institutions are doing,” said Taboada, 49, who hasn’t been sanctioned in either matter.
Twenty years after Jordan Belfort and his Stratton Oakmont Inc. defrauded investors out of more than $200 million from its offices on Long Island — a story retold in the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street” — New York’s financial district has become a hub for veterans of defunct boiler rooms who use decades-old scripts to pressure investors into speculative trades, more than 40 current and former brokers said in interviews.
“They’re preying on the few people who still answer a landline phone,” said Joshua Brown, chief executive officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management in New York, whose 2012 book “Backstage Wall Street” described the sales tactics. “You pitch 50 guys a stock, and you pitch 50 guys another. If one goes higher, you go back to that pile.”
Research Credit: afterhours
U.S. Army Tests Fully Autonomous Convoy
January 31st, 2014Via: Wired:
U.S. Army convoys will soon be able to roll into even the roughest of unfriendly foreign urban areas and combat zones without the worry of loss of life, thanks to new technology that will make large vehicles fully autonomous.
In demonstrations earlier this month at Fort Hood, Texas, the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) and Lockheed Martin demonstrated the ability of the Autonomous Mobility Appliqué System (AMAS), which gives full autonomy to convoys to operate in urban environments. In tests, driverless tactical vehicles were able to navigate hazards and obstacles including pedestrians, oncoming traffic, road intersections, traffic circles and stalled and passing vehicles.
Under an initial $11 million contract in 2012, Lockheed Martin developed the multiplatform kit which integrates low-cost sensors and control systems with Army and Marine tactical vehicles to enable autonomous operation in convoys. According to Lockheed, AMAS also gives drivers an automated option to alert, stop and adjust, or take full control under user supervision.
“The Economic Picture Is Looking Brighter”: Nearly Half of America Lives Paycheck-to-Paycheck
January 31st, 2014Recovery!
Via: Time:
But as evidenced by a report out Thursday from the Corporation for Enterprise Development, nearly half of Americans are living in a state of “persistent economic insecurity,” that makes it “difficult to look beyond immediate needs and plan for a more secure future.”
In other words, too many of us are living paycheck to paycheck. The CFED calls these folks “liquid asset poor,” and its report finds that 44% of Americans are living with less than $5,887 in savings for a family of four.
