Home Owned by Saudi Government Near CIA Raided for Possible Human Trafficking
May 6th, 2013Via: CBS:
Immigration officials have removed two domestic workers from a northern Virginia home owned by the government of Saudi Arabia as part of an investigation into a report of human trafficking.
Agents went to the home in McLean on Tuesday night, Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Brandon Montgomery said Thursday. Fairfax County police were called in to help.
Montgomery said the investigation is in the early stages. The two women who were removed from the home are from the Philippines, Montgomery said, but there has been no formal determination that they needed to be rescued.
Officials received a tip that alleged two workers were being held in circumstances that amounted to human trafficking, said John Torres, ICE’s special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations in the Washington field office. But he declined in an interview Thursday to discuss the case in more detail.
Research Credit: cptmarginal
Breakthrough In Solar Panel Technology Wasn’t Expected for Another Decade
May 6th, 2013Via: Sydney Morning Herald:
Australian scientists have found a way of hugely increasing the efficiency of solar panels while substantially reducing their cost.
The University of NSW researchers have come up with improvements in photovoltaic panel design that had not been expected for another decade.
The breakthrough involves using hydrogen atoms to counter defects in silicon cells used in solar panels. As a consequence, poor quality silicon can be made to perform like high quality wafers.
The process makes cheap silicon “actually better than the best-quality material people are using at the moment”, the head of the university’s photovoltaics centre of excellence, Professor Stuart Wenham, said.
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Silicon wafers account for more than half the cost of making a solar cell. “By using lower-quality silicon, you can drastically reduce that cost,” he said.
“We’ve been able to figure out what the secret is that enables hydrogen to sometimes work the way people want it to, and sometimes doesn’t.”
At present, the best commercial solar cells convert between 17 per cent and 19 per cent of the sun’s energy into electricity. UNSW’s technique, patented this year, should produce efficiencies of between 21 per cent and 23 per cent.
German Euro Founder Calls For ‘Catastrophic’ Currency To Be Broken Up
May 6th, 2013Imagine what would happen if a neo-Deutsche Mark suddenly appeared on the scene. The value of that thing vs. every other currency would balloon, making German exports unaffordable in most other places.
No matter how you slice it, the situation is a shit sandwich.
Via: Telegraph:
Oskar Lafontaine, the German finance minister who launched the euro, has called for a break-up of the single currency to let southern Europe recover, warning that the current course is “leading to disaster”.
“The economic situation is worsening from month to month, and unemployment has reached a level that puts democratic structures ever more in doubt,” he said.
“The Germans have not yet realised that southern Europe, including France, will be forced by their current misery to fight back against German hegemony sooner or later,” he said, blaming much of the crisis on Germany’s wage squeeze to gain export share.
Mr Lafontaine said on the parliamentary website of Germany’s Left Party that Chancellor Angela Merkel will “awake from her self-righteous slumber” once the countries in trouble unite to force a change in crisis policy at Germany’s expense.
Lenticular Photo Used To Secretly Convey Hot Line Number To Abused Kids
May 6th, 2013I wonder if states have targeted children with this technology…
You can imagine how some of these might read in the U.S.
Via: DIY Photography:
The ANAR Foundation is a Spanish organization which helps kids in risk. They Operate a unique phone number – 116 111 – where minors at risk can get aid and consultation.
Anar did a campaign advertizing the number, but were facing a problem where they did not want potential aggressors to see that a kid was even looking at the ad.
The solution was using Lenticular printing on street signs. According to Wikipedia, Lenticular printing is a technology in which Lenticular lenses (a technology that is also used for 3D displays) are used to produce printed images with an illusion of depth, or the ability to change or move as the image is viewed from different angles.
So Lenticular prints are unique in the way that they display different images to viewers at different angles. You may remember Lenticular images from when you were a kid and everybody had a magic ruler that changed shape back at school.
Anar created a poster that conveys a secret message to people at different heights, even if accompanied by a potential aggressor.
This Is The World’s First Entirely 3D-Printed Gun (Needs a Nail for the Firing Pin)
May 5th, 2013Via: Forbes:
Eight months ago, Cody Wilson set out to create the world’s first entirely 3D-printable handgun.
Now he has.
Early next week, Wilson, a 25-year-old University of Texas law student and founder of the non-profit group Defense Distributed, plans to release the 3D-printable CAD files for a gun he calls “the Liberator,” pictured in its initial form above. He’s agreed to let me document the process of the gun’s creation, so long as I don’t publish details of its mechanics or its testing until it’s been proven to work reliably and the file has been uploaded to Defense Distributed’s online collection of printable gun blueprints at Defcad.org.
All sixteen pieces of the Liberator prototype were printed in ABS plastic with a Dimension SST printer from 3D printing company Stratasys, with the exception of a single nail that’s used as a firing pin. The gun is designed to fire standard handgun rounds, using interchangeable barrels for different calibers of ammunition.
U.S. Judge Receives 28-Year Jail Term for His Role in Private Prison Kids-for-Cash Scheme
May 5th, 2013Via: Independent:
An American judge known for his harsh and autocratic courtroom manner was jailed for 28 years for conspiring with private prisons to hand young offenders maximum sentences in return for kickbacks amounting to millions of dollars.
Mark Ciavarella Jnr was ordered to pay $1.2m (£770,000) in restitution after he was found to be a “figurehead” in the conspiracy that saw thousands of children unjustly punished in the name of profit in the case that became known as “kids for cash”.
…
Federal prosecutors accused Ciavarella Jnr and a second judge, Michael Conahan, of taking more than $2m in bribes from the builder of the PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care detention centres and extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the facilities’ co-owner. Ciavarella Jnr filled the beds of the private prisons with children as young as 10, many of them first-time offenders convicted minor crimes.
Former FBI Agent: U.S. Government Recording All Telephone Calls, Internet Activity; ‘There’s a Way to Look At Digital Communications in the Past… No Digital Communication Is Secure’
May 5th, 2013Well, Cryptogon readers have only been aware of this for about a decade.
Via: Guardian:
The real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.
…
On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:
BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?
CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.
BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.
CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”
“All of that stuff” – meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant – “is being captured as we speak”.
On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that “all digital communications in the past” are recorded and stored:
Let’s repeat that last part: “no digital communication is secure”, by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications – meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like – are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.
Family Visits Hydroponic Store, Cops Raid Family’s House for Drugs… Find Tomatoes
May 5th, 2013Via: Kansas City Star:
It took eight months for authorities to decide to raid the Leawood home of Robert and Adlynn Harte for drugs.
And then it took a year for the Hartes to find out why sheriff’s deputies thought they had drugs in the first place.
Banana Republic: Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Husband Wins CA Rail Contract
May 5th, 2013Via: California Political Review:
U.S. Sen. Diane Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum won the first-phase construction contract for California’s high-speed rail.
I’m shocked, shocked I tell you.
If I didn’t witness the insanity and corruption in politics every day, I wouldn’t have believed this.
“The Perini-Zachary-Parsons bid was the lowest received from the five consortia participating in the bidding process, but “low” is a relative term,” the Laer Pearce, author of Crazifornia wrote. ”The firms bid $985,142,530 to build the wildly anticipated first section of high speed rail track that will tie the megopolis of Madera to the global finance center of Fresno. Do the division, and you find that the low bid came in at a mere $35 million per mile.”
Former Bush Regime Official: Chemical Weapons Use in Syria May Be Israeli False Flag Operation
May 5th, 2013Update: UN Has Testimony that Syrian Rebels Used Sarin Gas
Via: Reuters:
U.N. human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria’s civil war and medical staff indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said on Sunday.
The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria has not yet seen evidence of government forces having used chemical weapons, which are banned under international law, said commission member Carla Del Ponte.
“Our investigators have been in neighbouring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated,” Del Ponte said in an interview with Swiss-Italian television.
“This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities,” she added, speaking in Italian.
—
Via: Jerusalem Post:
A former senior official in the Bush administration said on Thursday the use of chemical weapons in Syria might have been a “false flag operation” of Israel, meant to implicate Syrian President Bashar Assad.
“We don’t know what the chain of custody is. This could’ve been an Israeli false flag operation, it could’ve been an opposition in Syria… or it could’ve been an actual use by Bashar Assad. But we certainly don’t know with the evidence we’ve been given. And what I’m hearing from the intelligence community is that that evidence is really flakey,” retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, told Cenk Uygur in an interview with Current TV.
