Google Glass: Orwellian surveillance with fluffier branding
In the online world – for now, at least – it’s the advertisers that make the world go round. If you’re Google, they represent more than 90% of your revenue and without them you would cease to exist. So how do you reconcile the fact that there is a finite amount of data to be [...]
The Newtown, Connecticut Town Clerk is seeking to deny newspapers from viewing public record death certificates of Sandy Hook victims, according to the Newtown Bee. The Clerk maintains that access to vital records such as death and marriage certificates should be limited to immediate family members or their representatives, and has undertaken to change present [...]
Princeton professor Cornel West says President Obama is a “war criminal.” West, the prominent black academic and activist who has consistently been a harsh Obama critic, took issue with the White House’s covert drone program, saying that “the chickens are coming home to roost.” “We’ve been talking about this for a good while, the immorality [...]
Yale will train US Special Forces in interrogation techniques using immigrants as guinea pigs
February 19, 2013 No Comment
Yale University is planning to train US Special Forces to detect lies by practicing on immigrants. The program strives to provide soldiers with such interview tactics by practicing on “someone they can’t necessarily identify with”. Starting as early as April, the university will launch a new training center on its campus for interrogators to practice [...]
Tens of millions of dollars of U.S. military financing will continue to flow to Yemen and three other countries that recruit and use child soldiers, despite a 2008 U.S. law designed to restrict U.S. taxpayer funding of foreign militaries that enlist children to fight in war. The White House issued a memorandum Tuesday evening to [...]
It hasn’t drawn much attention, but Facebook’s first annual earnings report contains an accounting gem: a multibillion-dollar tax deduction for the cost of executive stock options and share awards. Even though Facebook (FB) reported $1.1 billion in pre-tax profits from U.S. operations in 2012, it will probably pay zero federal and state taxes—and even receive [...]
Japan’s aggressive attempts to spur on its struggling economy were set to escape censure from the G20 nations today as bickering in Moscow kept alive fears of a “currency war”. Finance ministers at the G20 gathering are understood to have pulled back from explicit criticism of Japan, whose prime minister Shinzo Abe has embarked on [...]
A former member of the Westboro Baptist Church–a fringe group based in Topeka, Kansas that pickets soldiers’ funerals–apologized to the mother of a 21-year-old soldier killed in Afghanistan on a talk show Wednesday. Libby Phelps Alvarez, the former Westboro member, apologized to Sherry and Randy Wyatt for picketing the funerals of fallen soldiers like their [...]
CO Gov. Hickenlooper admits to ‘ritual-like’ drinking of fracking fluid
February 13, 2013 No Comment
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) told a Senate committee that he drank a glass of fracking fluid as a way to illustrate safety advances by the oil and gas industry, the Washington Times reported on Tuesday. “We did drink it around the table, almost ritual-like, in a funny way,” Hickenlooper said at a Senate Committee [...]
NYPD officer threatened to shoot grandmother of killed teen, lawsuit claims
February 4, 2013 No Comment
After shooting dead an unarmed teenager in his bathroom, a New York City police officer threatened to kill the boy’s distraught grandmother, a newly filed lawsuit alleges. Filed Friday, a day before the one-year anniversary of the death of 18-year-old Ramarley Graham, the suit accuses the NYPD of improperly training its officers, disproportionately targeting minority [...]
GENEVA (Reuters) – U.N. human rights investigators called on Israel on Thursday to halt settlement expansion and withdraw all half a million Jewish settlers from the occupied West Bank, saying that its practices could be subject to prosecution as possible war crimes. A three-member U.N. panel said private companies should stop working in the settlements [...]
1 million terabytes a day saved forever. The ARGUS array is made up of several cameras and other types of imaging systems. The output of the imaging system is used to create extremely large, 1.8GP high-resolution mosaic images and video. The U.S. Army, along with Boeing, has developed and is preparing to deploy a new [...]
Stop-And-Frisks In Bronx Buildings To Resume: Judge Temporarily Lifts ‘Operation Clean Halls’ Decision
January 22, 2013 2 Comments
NEW YORK — A federal judge let the New York Police Department on Tuesday temporarily resume stop-and-frisk stops she believes are unconstitutional while she decides what permanent remedies are necessary to prevent illegal stops in thousands of privately owned buildings. U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin in Manhattan lifted immediate implementation of the order she issued [...]
Three days ago, January 4, Haim Schwarczenberg took this photograph. He writes: “Skunk trunk spraying putrid liquid all over residential homes in the village of Nabi Saleh.” If you’ve ever been to this village, you know that these are ordinary people’s homes, and that almost all the village, whether it likes it or not, is [...]
Firebrand black activist Dr. Cornel West gave a speech at the Tavis Smiley Presents Poverty In America series on Thursday that may surprise libertarians – in how much they agree with the “socialist radical.” Decrying the erosion of civil liberties today, Dr. West loudly lamented the “crypto-fascist” state developing in America – contrasting the federal government to [...]
