March 2012
47 posts
1 tag
Homeland Security Buying 450 Million New Bullets
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office is getting an “indefinite delivery” of an “indefinite quantity” of .40 caliber ammunition from defense contractor ATK. U.S. agents will receive a maximum of 450 million rounds over five years, according to a press release on the deal. The high performance HST bullets are...
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NY Police Called on Medical Alert Kill 68 year old...
Kenneth Chamberlain Sr., a former Marine who had heart problems and wheezed if he walked more than 40 feet, triggered his medical alert system pendant. The system operator came on the loudspeaker in his one-bedroom apartment, asking: “Mr. Chamberlain, are you O.K.?”..Mr. Chamberlain didn’t respond. So the operator signaled for an ambulance. Police patrol cars fell in behind — standard operating...
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Trayvon Martin's Mother Seeks Trademarks
The mother of Trayvon Martin has filed two applications to secure trademarks containing her late son’s name, records show. Sabrina Fulton is seeking marks for the phrases “I Am Trayvon” and “Justice for Trayvon,” according to filings made last week with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. In both instances, Fulton is seeking the trademarks for use on “Digital materials, namely, CDs and...
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US Military Had 15,634 Megaupload Accounts
In recent weeks the battle has continued to save the data stored at the now-defunct site Megaupload. Contrary to the image painted by the entertainment industries, untold numbers of people used the file-hosting service for completely legitimate sharing. Today we can reveal that not only did people at the Senate, Department of Homeland Security, FBI and NASA hold Megaupload accounts, so did more...
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China legislation would have legalised...
China unveils new legislation on police powers of detention. Experts warned that original draft legislation would have legalised disappearances, allowing police to hold suspects without informing families. The revisions to the criminal procedure law were unveiled at the National People’s Congress on Thursday, and will be passed by what is essentially a rubber stamp parliament. Lawyers have...
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Google Wants To Serve You Ads Based On The...
Google was awarded a patent Tuesday for advertising based on based on “environmental conditions,” as the search giant calls it in the patent documents. Advertising can be served on the basis of a sensor that detects temperature, humidity, sound, light or air composition near a device, and ads are served accordingly. The patented technology is meant for personal computers, digital...
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FBI uses entrapment to manufacture its own...
In an astonishing admission that goes to the heart of the intelligence surveillance of Muslim communities in America in the years after 9/11. While police and FBI leaders have insisted they are acting to defend America from a terrorist attack, civil liberties groups have insisted they have repeatedly gone too far and treated an entire religious group as suspicious. Monteilh was involved in one of...
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UFO fragment falls to earth in Siberia
The 6-foot wide metal cylinder partially made of titanium steel was found near Otradnensky, a village two thousand miles from Moscow, according to the Daily Mail. Locals have labeled it as space junk, a UFO fragment or the fuel tank of a ballistic missile. The Russian space agency has said the object is not from space, a piece of space technology nor a missile fragment. It has been evaluated for...
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Gun boom continues despite Florida shooting
Despite calls for stricter guns laws in response to the shooting of Trayvon Martin, firearm stocks are soaring as gun companies struggle to keep up with high demand. Shares of Sturm Ruger & Co. (RGR) were up as high as 14 percent Thursday afternoon after CEO Michael Fifer announced the company was temporarily suspending its acceptance of new orders in an effort to meet a dramatic surge in...
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60 terabyte hard drives possible
Seagate breaks 1 terabit barrier, 60TB hard drives possible. That breakthrough is managing to squeeze 1 terabit (1 trillion bits) of data into a square inch or space, effectively opening the way for larger hard drives over the coming years beyond the 3TB maximum we currently enjoy. How much of an improvement does this storage milestone offer? Current hard drives max out at around 620 gigabits per...
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Lobbyists Getting Rich Off of the War on Drugs
John Lovell is a lobbyist who makes a lot of money from making sure you can’t smoke a joint. That’s his job. He’s a lobbyist for the police unions in Sacramento, and he is a driving force behind grabbing Federal dollars to shut down the California marijuana industry. Some of the groups who want to keep the drug illegal are police unions that want more members to pay more dues. One of the primary...
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Trayvon Martin - Will Florida law let killers go...
The legal question at the heart of the case involves Florida’s so-called “stand your ground” law, which the legislature passed, at the behest of the National Rifle Association, in 2005. Before that time, Florida law resembled that of most other states; during confrontations, individuals had a duty to retreat rather than to respond to provocations. Under the new law, a person is...
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Is your TV watching you? Latest models raise...
Samsung’s 2012 top-of-the-line plasmas and LED HDTVs offer new features never before available within a television including a built-in, internally wired HD camera, twin microphones, face tracking and speech recognition. While these features give you unprecedented control over an HDTV, the devices themselves, more similar than ever to a personal computer, may allow hackers or even Samsung to see...
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Sweden leads move to cashless mobile economy
Sweden has been moving towards a cashless economy for several years now, encouraging transactions to be made by cards instead of money. Robberies are down and bank processes are more efficient without cash to manage. But not everyone is happy with the change. Buses no longer accept cash after a series of robberies. Now, in order to get on the bus, you can use a prepaid ticket or cell phone text...
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Pirate Bay to Fly 'Server Drones' to Avoid Law...
The world’s largest and most resilient BitTorrent site plans to redefine “cloud computing” with a plan to move at least some of its servers onto unmanned drones miles above Sweden. The group said: “One of the technical things we always optimise is where to put our front machines. They are the ones that re-direct your traffic to a secret location. ”We have now decided to try to build...
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CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your...
CIA director David Petraeus has said that the rise of new “smart” gadgets means that Americans are effectively bugging their own homes, saving US spy agencies a job when it identifies any “persons of interest”. All those new online devices are a treasure trove of data if you’re a “person of interest” to the spy community. Once upon a time, spies had to place a bug in your chandelier to hear your...
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WE MUST 'BRAINWASH' PEOPLE ON GUNS
“What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we changed our attitudes about cigarettes.”..Local political leaders and celebrities, Holder said, including Mayor Marion Barry and Jesse Jackson, had...
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30 million Chinese live in caves...
Like many peasants from the outskirts of Yanan, China, Ren Shouhua was born in a cave and lived there until he got a job in the city and moved into a concrete-block house..”It’s cool in the summer and warm in the winter. It’s quiet and safe,” said Ren, a ruddy-faced man with salt-and-pepper hair who moved to the Shaanxi provincial capital, Xian, in his 20s. “When I...
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Iraq War Veteran Accused In 6 Murders
Disturbing new details are being released about the Iraq war veteran accused of at least six brutal murders in Orange County.. allegedly stabbing each of the victims at least a dozen times with a seven-inch knife made of heavy metal. Itzcoatl Ocampo’s alleged victims include four homeless men. Now, a secret grand jury transcript obtained by the Orange County Register reveals that 23-year-old...
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COST OF LIVING SOARS
The cost of living in the U.S. rose in February by the most in 10 months, reflecting a jump in gasoline that failed to spread to other goods and services. The biggest jump in gasoline in more than a year accounted for about 80 percent of the increase in prices last month, leaving households with less money to spend on other goods and services. Federal Reserve policy makers say the advance in fuel...
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Marines asked to disarm before Leon Panetta speech
In a highly unusual move, around 200 U.S. Marines were asked to leave their weapons outside the tent where U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was set to speak during his trip to Afghanistan on Wednesday. Typically, American forces in Afghanistan have kept hold of their weapons when Panetta addressed them. The commander on the scene, Sgt. Maj. Brandon Hall, said he was acting on orders from...
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Danielle Maudsley tasered brain dead; Cop cleared...
A Florida police officer who tasered a 20-year-old US woman until she was brain dead has been cleared of wrongdoing. Danielle Maudsley was arrested by the Florida Highway Patrol (FHP) for being involved in two misdemeanor traffic incidents and reportedly driving without a license. Police said she had cocaine and oxycodone in her system when she ran out the back door of a Florida Highway...
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Four Million Fewer Covered at Work Under Obamacare
A new report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office states that by 2016, Obamacare will result in 4 million people fewer people getting health insurance coverage from their employers. It’s not clear how many of the 4 million would be forced out as a result of employers dropping coverage. But it can be assumed that many will indeed lose their insurance and have to seek it elsewhere, since...
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60 percent of U.S. workers said they have less...
About 60 percent of U.S. workers said they have less than $25,000 in savings and investments, according to an Employee Benefit Research Institute survey. “People get the fact they shouldn’t be optimistic, but instead of saying I’m going to save more today, they just say I’m going to defer my retirement age once I get to 65,” said Jack VanDerhei, EBRI’s research director and a coauthor of the...
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Google Caught ‘Vandalizing’ Open Source Maps
High-ranking members of the OpenStreetMap project — an open source mapping project that competes with Google Maps — have claimed that user accounts attached to a range of Google internet addresses in India have been maliciously tampering with its data. The accusation from OpenStreet Map follows a widely reported incident in which users behind a Google IP address in India were caught scraping data...
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Homeless people used as mobile Wi-Fi hotspots
Homeless people as wireless transmitters. Which product at this year’s South by Southwest technology conference received more attention than perhaps any other? ”A charitable experiment,” New York ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty enlisted more than a dozen homeless Austin residents to carry wireless 4G hotspots, onto which app-addled SXSW-goers can log in and check into their esoteric...
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Mount Sterling Police Chief Resigns
A Central Ohio police chief has resigned, but says his decision has nothing to do with the report that one of his officers used a Taser on a 9-year-old boy last week. A 9-year-old boy was reportedly shocked twice with a stun gun for refusing to leave his home with an Ohio police officer. The boy’s mother said she never expected Mount Sterling police officer Scott O’Neil would use his Taser on...
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Insurgents opened fire on senior Afghan...
Suspected insurgents opened fire on Tuesday on senior Afghan investigators of the massacre of 16 civilians by a lone U.S. soldier, Afghan officials said, just hours after the Taliban threatened to behead American troops to avenge the killings. Karzai’s brothers were unharmed in the brief battle, which began during meetings with local people at a mosque near Najiban and Alekozai villages,...
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Shooting in Afghanistan
A United States Army sergeant methodically killed at least 16 civilians, 9 of them children, in a rural stretch of southern Afghanistan early on Sunday, igniting fears of a new wave of anti-American hostility, Afghan and American officials said. At the first, the man gathered 11 bodies, including those of 4 girls younger than 6, and set fire to them, villagers said. President Hamid Karzai...
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The Joseph Kony 2012 Deception
KONY 2012 is the product of a group called Invisible Children, a controversial activist group and not-for-profit. Last year, the organization spent $8,676,614. Only 32% went to direct services (page 6), with much of the rest going to staff salaries, travel and transport, and film production. The group is in favour of direct military intervention, and their money supports the Ugandan government’s...
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Trayvon Martin, Shot & Killed By His Own...
17-year-old Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African-American teenager, was shot and killed in a gated community in Florida late last month by a white neighborhood watch captain, according to police. But the watch captain, George Zimmerman — a 26-year-old college student who has admitted to police that he shot the young man — still walks free. And Martin’s family is pleading for answers and...
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Vatican listed as money laundering center
The 2012 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report was made public on Wednesday and Washington’s list of 190 countries classifies them in three categories: of primary concern, of concern and monitored…With the large volumes of international currency that goes through the Holy See, it is a system that makes it vulnerable as a potential money-laundering center..The Vatican Bank...
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400 million year old machine found in Russia -...
Image of apparent fossil found in Kamchatka peninsula and analyzed by Yuri Golubev appears to be a HOAX as no professor by the name of Yuri Golubev is listed on the St-Petersburg university website. The image appears to be that of Laudonomphalus regularis from the Crinoids species that are marine animals that make up the class Crinoidea of the echinoderms. In fact the same non cropped image can...
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Wells Fargo to charge $7 monthly fee on more...
Wells Fargo will start charging $7 a month for checking accounts in six more states, expanding on its efforts to do away with free checking accounts altogether. Wells Fargo stopped offering free checking accounts to new customers in 2010, existing customers were able to hold onto their free accounts. But then last year, the bank transitioned a group of existing customers to the same $7-a-month...
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Court Rules Police Can Search Cell Phones Without...
U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled it is now legal for police to search cell phones without a warrant. The decision stems from an Indiana case where police arrested a man for dealing drugs. An officer searched the suspect’s cell phone without warrant. The judge in the appeal case, Judge Richard Posner, agreed that the officer had to search the phone immediately or risk losing...
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Iran Building Drones for Hugo Chavez
Iran and Middle East-based extremist groups are stepping up their activities in South America, aiming to make friends and score cash, a senior U.S. military official says. Tehran intends to build military drones in Washington’s backyard for the Venezuelan military led by Hugo Chavez, U.S. Southern Command chief Gen. Douglas Fraser told reporters Wednesday during a breakfast meeting in...
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The largest solar storm in five years
The largest solar storm in five years was due to arrive on Earth early Thursday, promising to shake the globe’s magnetic field while expanding the Northern Lights. Astronomers say the sun has been relatively quiet for some time. And this storm, while strong, may seem fiercer because Earth has been lulled by several years of weak solar activity. The massive cloud of charged particles could...
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TSA nude body scanners fail to detect metallic...
Engineer Jonathan Corbett has published a video where he shows how he took a small metal case through two of the TSA’s $1billion fleet in a special side pocket stitched into his shirt. This is because, he suggests, the scanners blend metallic areas into the dark background - so if an object is not directly placed on the body, it will not show up on the scan. The metallic box, he claims,...
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Soda-Cancer Link Suggested By Controversial Report...
The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a consumer interest group released a report today linking Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Pepsi and Diet Pepsi — the 1st-, 2nd-, 3rd- and 6th- best-selling sodas in the world, respectively to a chemical that has been known to cause cancer in lab rats and mice. The CSPI argues that the amount of the chemical present in the sodas presents a risk to...
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Eastern Libya declares autonomy
Cyrenaica, the eastern region of Libya, has elected a regional congress and declared semi-autonomy from the capital Tripoli. The “blatant call for fragmentation” of the country was condemned by Libya’s ruling NTC…A painful breakup between eastern and western Libya is a real threat to the future of the country, believes Eric Denece, the director and founder of the French Centre for...
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Bin Laden Hoax, body not buried at sea
The body of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was not buried at sea, according to leaked emails of intelligence firm Stratfor, as revealed by WikiLeaks. The official version is that the body of Al-Qaeda’s top man, who was killed by a US raid in Pakistan on May 2, 2011, was buried at an undisclosed location at sea in a proper Muslim ceremony. How ever in leaked emails, Stratfor’s vice-president for...
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Possible Re-Election of Obama Sparks Gun Sales
Gun sales are booming across Texas, and some buyers say their growing belief that President Barack Obama’s re-election is inevitable is fueling their race to bear more arms. Residents speculate if re-elected, Obama will go after firearms in a way we have never seen before…read more @ NBC
Original Article
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Outage in Africa as four undersea cables chopped
Underwater data cables linking East Africa to the Middle East and Europe have been severed, bringing transfer rates to their knees in nine countries. In a bizarre coincidence, a ship allegedly dropped anchor off the coast of Kenya on Saturday in a restricted area, cutting The East African Marine Systems (TEAMS) cable - shortly after three other cables were chopped in the Red Sea between Djibouti...
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Syria says seized large cache of weapons from...
Syrian authorities say large amounts of weapons and ammunitions have been seized in the Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs after the army cleared the area of armed groups. According to the Syrian army, the terrorist fighting against the government of President Bashar al-Assad have been killed, arrested or escaped and Baba Amr is now under full government control after almost three weeks of heavy...
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Speech Jamming Gibberish Gun Freezes Any Talker...
Researchers from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tskuba and Ochanomizu University in Japan have created a speech jamming gun..In tests, the researchers said the device works well at a distance, rendering the person at the receiving end without causing any physical discomfort..The researchers see it as a tool to maintain order in meetings or discussion...
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Energy Secretary Admits Administration OK with...
President Barack Obama’s Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu uttered the kind of Washington gaffe that consists of telling the truth when inconvenient. According to Politico, Chu admitted to a House committee that the administration is not interested in lowering gas prices. Chu, along with the Obama administration, regards the spike in gas prices as a feature rather than a bug. High gas prices...
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Bernanke warns lawmakers country headed for...
The central bank boss suggested the economy could hit a serious roadblock if Congress allows the Bush tax rates and a payroll tax cut to expire and $1.2 trillion in spending cuts to be implemented simultaneously in January. The tax hikes and spending cuts could knock GDP growth in 2013 down from 2.6 percent to 1 percent, according to Andrew Fieldhouse, a federal budget policy analyst with the...
