cryptogon.com

The mysterious building which leads to an underground vault sits next to two giant symbols carved into the ground – believed to be markers for the religion’s followers to find their way back from the ends of the universe after humanity is destroyed in the future.

“The executive branch has now confirmed that the rules, regulations and court-imposed standards for protecting the privacy of Americans’ have been violated thousands of times each year,” said senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, two leading critics of bulk surveillance, who responded Friday to a Washington Post story based on documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

“We have previously said that the violations of these laws and rules were more serious than had been acknowledged, and we believe Americans should know that this confirmation is just the tip of a larger iceberg.”

On July 31, Wyden, backed by Udall, vaguely warned other senators in a floor speech that the NSA and the director of national intelligence were substantively misleading legislators by describing improperly collected data as a matter of innocent and anodyne human or technical errors.

In keeping with their typically cautious pattern when discussing classified information, Wyden and Udall did not provide details about their claimed “iceberg” of surveillance malfeasance. But they hinted that the public still lacks an adequate understanding of the NSA’s powers to collect data on Americans under its controversial interpretation of the Patriot Act.

Longo said Tobiassen owns knives, axes, machetes and switch blades. He sharpens his knives as a hobby, and shows other just how sharp the weapons are by using them to shave his own legs. That information was in court documents, in which Longo asked a judge in 2011 to grant him a restraining order against Tobiassen.

The order was dismissed, and Tobiassen, a crane operator, and Longo, a handyman, became roommates.

The document obtained by a US university describes the 1955 acquisition of the Nevada site for testing of the secret spy plane.

It also explains the site’s lingering association with UFOs and aliens.

The remote patch of desert surrounding Groom Lake was chosen because it was adjacent to a nuclear testing facility.

“The U-2 was absolutely top secret,” Chris Pocock, a British defence journalist and author of histories of the programme, told the BBC.

“They had to hide everything about it.”

The U-2 plane, developed to spy on the Soviet Union during the Cold War, is still flown by the US Air Force.

The document, a secret 1992 internal CIA history of the U-2 programme, was originally declassified in 1998 with heavy redactions.

Many of the blacked-out details were revealed this month after a public records request by the National Security Archive at the George Washington University in Washington DC.

While a lengthy account of the development of the U-2 spy plane programme, the history also attempts to shed light on the public’s fascination with the Area 51 site and its lingering associations with extra-terrestrials and UFOs.

It notes that testing of the U-2 plane in the 1950s – at altitudes much higher than commercial aeroplanes flew then – provoked “a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs)”.

Numbers from the world’s second largest economy are treated with skepticism by some economists, but this latest report has attempted to quantify the scale of discrepancy.

“There is strong evidence indicating that the rate of real Chinese GDP growth, and ultimately total real GDP, may be significantly over stated,” said Christopher Balding, associate professor at Peking University’s HSBC Business School, and the report’s author.

Through “significant and systematic irregularities”, official estimates overstate China’s true GDP by 8 to 12 percent, or $1 trillion, according to Balding.

Balding looked at data from between 2000 and 2011, and found that inflation numbers had been manipulated in a way that distorted other measures such as GDP and disposable income.

The death toll, which stood at 525, according to the latest Health Ministry figures, makes Wednesday by far the deadliest day since the 2011 popular uprising that toppled longtime ruler and autocrat Hosni Mubarak — a grim milestone that does not bode well for the future of a nation roiled in turmoil and divisions for the past 2 1/2 years.

It will cost an estimated $241,080 for a middle-income couple to raise a child born last year for 18 years, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report released Wednesday. That’s up almost 3% from 2011 and doesn’t even include the cost of college.

At the same time, wages aren’t keeping up. The country’s median annual household income has fallen by more than $4,000 since 2000, after adjusting for inflation, and many of the jobs lost during the recent recession have been replaced with lower-wage positions.

The chip maker is pitching MXC as a “next-generation optical connector” that could be a big step in standardizing optical technology and ultimately help bring it to servers faster.

Light provides high-bandwidth connections that are much faster than older electrical wiring technology found in most computers today.

The optical interconnect “can carry up to 1.6 terabits per second and is smaller than the connectors used today,” Intel said in a brief description of an upcoming session on MXC on its website for the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, slated for Sept. 10 to 12. Optical signals will also be able to go more than 300 meters and provide swift transfer rates, according to the session notes.

The chip maker will share more information about MXC at IDC. Intel started working on the technology with Corning Cable Systems two years ago.