BBC World Service fears losing information war as Russia Today ramps up pressureThe BBC World Service is being financially outgunned by Russian and Chinese state-owned news channels, its former director Peter Horrocks has warned, amid high-level concerns that Britain and the US are losing a global “information war” with the Kremlin.
Where’s the outrage? Congress changes savings accounts and retirement funds, and America sleepsDo you remember where you were six years ago? Probably not. It was a long, long time ago. December 2008 is not one of those dates that gets burned on your brain, like the moon landing, or D-Day, or the end of Seinfeld. But I remember where I was.
Responsible Banking Is Responsible GovernmentResponsible Banking Ordinances Are Reforming Municipal Banking — One City at a Time The day that the Northridge earthquake shook our city into chaos in 1994, I went into a small grocery store on San Fernando Road to buy water.
Talking to James Risen About Pay Any Price, the War on Terror and Press Freedoms – The InterceptJames Risen, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for exposing the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, has long been one of the nation’s most aggressive and adversarial investigative journalists.
New ACLU report takes a snapshot of police militarization in the United StatesThe American Civil Liberties Union has released the results of its year-long study of police militarization. The study looked at 800 deployments of SWAT teams among 20 local, state and federal police agencies in 2011-2012. Among the notable findings: 62 percent of the SWAT raids surveyed were to conduct searches for drugs.
Plummeting Oil Prices Could Destroy The Banks That Are Holding Trillions In Commodity DerivativesCould rapidly falling oil prices trigger a nightmare scenario for the commodity derivatives market? The big Wall Street banks did not expect plunging home prices to cause a mortgage-backed securities implosion back in 2008, and their models did not anticipate a decline in the price of oil by more than 40 dollars in less than […]
Solar and Wind Energy Start to Win on Price vs. Conventional FuelsFor the solar and wind industries in the United States, it has been a long-held dream: to produce energy at a cost equal to conventional sources like coal and natural gas. That day appears to be dawning.
UN panel slams US for police brutality, torture, botched executionsA UN report has condemned the United States for violating the terms of an international anti-torture treaty. The panel took Washington to task for police brutality, military interrogations, and capital punishment protocols.
Senate Report: Scale of Wall Street Holdings Are “Unprecedented in U.S. History”Last Thursday, the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Senator Carl Levin, released an alarming 396-page report that details how Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail banks have quietly, and often stealthily through shell companies, gained ownership of a stunning amount of the nation’s critical industrial commodities like oil, aluminum, copper, natural gas, and even uranium.
Does Religion Cause More Harm than Good? Brits Say Yes. Here’s Why They May be Right.Most British people think religion causes more harm than good according to a survey commissioned by the Huffington Post. Surprisingly, even among those who describe themselves as “very religious” 20 percent say that religion is harmful to society.
Co-conspirator of 9/11 attacks says Saudi prince financed operationReuters / Sara K. Schwittek A former self-described Al-Qaeda collaborator serving a life sentence in prison now says he wants to testify in court about what he claims to know about a Saudi Arabian prince’s alleged role in financing the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to ‘Citizens United’ | BillMoyers.comThe following excerpt is the introduction to Zephyr Teachout’s new book, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. The Citizens United decision was not merely bad law; it was bad for politics, and displayed an even worse understanding of history.
The criminalisation of American businessWHO runs the world’s most lucrative shakedown operation? The Sicilian mafia? The People’s Liberation Army in China? The kleptocracy in the Kremlin? If you are a big business, all these are less grasping than America’s regulatory system.
World Socialist Web SiteBy Gabriel Black 10 November 2014 The failure of the insurance giant American International Group (AIG) at the height of the financial crisis in September 2008 “would have been catastrophic for the broader economy” and led to “mass panic on a global scale,” according to recent court testimony by Timothy Geithner, President Obama’s first-term Treasury Secretary and former President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.
Lawmaker asks Nobel Committee to strip Obama of Peace PrizeA representative of the populist LDPR nationalist party claims in an official letter that the US President should be blamed for thousands of innocent people’s deaths and therefore cannot keep his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. ” More and more international experts are calling Obama’s presidency dark times.
FBI demands new powers to hack into computers and carry out surveillanceThe FBI is attempting to persuade an obscure regulatory body in Washington to change its rules of engagement in order to seize significant new powers to hack into and carry out surveillance of computers throughout the US and around the world.
Why our happiness and satisfaction should replace GDP in policy makingSince 1990, GDP per person in China has doubled and then redoubled. With average incomes multiplying fourfold in little more than two decades, one might expect many of the Chinese people to be dancing in the streets. Yet, when asked about their satisfaction with life, they are, if anything, less satisfied than in 1990.
90% of Americans are poorer today than in 1987The American Dream is slipping further away from the vast majority of Americans than it has in a quarter century. Now 90 percent of US households are poorer than they were in 1987, according to both a new study and the head of the Federal Reserve.