 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Thursday, October 31, 2013 at 06:22PM 
Police have used tear gas against protesters as hundreds marched through central Rome demanding better housing policies. The rally turned violent when demonstrators started throwing eggs, smoke bombs and bottles at law enforcers.
Thursday, October 31, 2013 at 09:19AM The National Security Agency spied on the future Pope Francis before and during the Vatican conclave at which he was chosen to succeed Benedict XVI, it was claimed on Wednesday.
The American spy agency monitored telephone calls made to and from the residence in Rome where the then Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio stayed during the conclave, the secret election at which cardinals chose him as pontiff on March 13.
The claims were made by Panorama, an Italian weekly news magazine, which said that the NSA monitored the telephone calls of many bishops and cardinals at the Vatican in the lead-up to the conclave, which was held amid tight security in the Sistine Chapel.
Thursday, October 31, 2013 at 09:17AM NY TIMES
WASHINGTON — President Obama finds himself under fire on two disparate fronts these days, both for the botched rollout of his signature health care program and for the secret spying on allied heads of state. In both instances, his explanation roughly boils down to this: I didn’t know.
As a practical matter, no president can be aware of everything going on in the sprawling government he theoretically manages. But as a matter of politics, Mr. Obama’s plea of ignorance may do less to deflect blame than to prompt new questions about just how much in charge he really is.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013 at 12:53PM WASH POST
The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.
By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from among hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013 at 12:26AM WSJ
The White House has issued a clarification. When the president said if you like your insurance plan you can keep it, what he meant was you can keep it if he likes it.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans who are getting policy cancellation notices this month can't be as surprised as they pretend to be. President Obama made it clear at his 2010 health care summit what he thought of their taste in insurance.
"It's the equivalent of Acme Insurance that I had for my car. . . . It's basically not health insurance," he explained. "It's house insurance. . . .
Wednesday, October 30, 2013 at 12:16AM BLOOMBERG
The U.S. Treasury’s bailout fund has lost about $9.7 billion on its rescue of General Motors Co. (GM) and would need to sell its remaining shares in the automaker for an average of $147.95 to break even, a report to Congress said.
The Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program in a report issued yesterday estimated the realized losses on all GM shares sold from November 2010 through Sept. 13, 2013, at $9.7 billion. At that point, the U.S. owned 101.3 million shares. If it sold those for yesterday’s closing price, the government would lose about $760 million more, bringing the total loss to about $10.5 billion.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013 at 11:20AM By: NBC News Investigators
President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.
Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013 at 11:13AM Given the failed launch of Obamacare, there’s a real chance that the entire scheme falls into an “insurance death spiral” — but not as visibly (or rapidly) as the way these sorts of unsuccessful insurance pools usually unravel.
A death spiral happens when only the sickest beneficiaries get into an insurance pool, causing the cost of medical claims to rise, and in turn raising future premiums.
These higher premiums, in turn, dissuade healthier beneficiaries from buying coverage. This exacerbates the strains and makes sure the pool continues to attract only the sickest consumers who are most in need of the medical coverage, and willing to pay the rising premiums.
Sunday, October 27, 2013 at 11:25PM LA TIMES
WASHINGTON — As America's road planners struggle to find the cash to mend a crumbling highway system, many are beginning to see a solution in a little black box that fits neatly by the dashboard of your car.
The devices, which track every mile a motorist drives and transmit that information to bureaucrats, are at the center of a controversial attempt in Washington and state planning offices to overhaul the outdated system for funding America's major roads.
Sunday, October 27, 2013 at 12:18PM President Barack Obama was personally informed about secret US monitoring of Angela Merkel three years ago, according to latest reports on the eavesdropping affair.
The President allowed the National Security Agency (NSA) to continue spying on the German chancellor, it was claimed.
Mr Obama was told of the secret monitoring of Mrs Merkel by General Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, in 2010, according to Bild am Sonntag, a German newspaper.
“Obama did not stop the action at that time but allowed it to continue,” a US intelligence source close to the NSA operation told the Sunday newspaper.
Sunday, October 27, 2013 at 12:06PM From the darkness of a box in the Nevada desert, he watched as three men trudged down a dirt road in Afghanistan. The box was kept cold—precisely sixty-eight degrees—and the only light inside came from the glow of monitors. The air smelled spectrally of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. On his console, the image showed the midwinter landscape of eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar Province—a palette of browns and grays, fields cut to stubble, dark forests climbing the rocky foothills of the Hindu Kush. He zoomed the camera in on the suspected insurgents, each dressed in traditional shalwar kameez, long shirts and baggy pants. He knew nothing else about them: not their names, not their thoughts, not the thousand mundane and profound details of their lives.
He was told that they were carrying rifles on their shoulders, but for all he knew, they were shepherd’s staffs.
Sunday, October 27, 2013 at 11:35AM 
The operator of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant is making final preparations before starting the most delicate and dangerous procedure attempted at the plant since three reactors were wrecked in the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Engineers from Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) need to remove 1,533 rods of highly irradiated spent fuel from the damaged storage pool alongside the Number 4 reactor without exposing them to the air. The rods must then be carefully transported to a safer location for longer-term storage.
The 18-month project is due to start in early November.
Sunday, October 27, 2013 at 08:47AM New claims emerged last night over the extent that US intelligence agencies have been monitoring the mobile phone of Angela Merkel. The allegations were made after German secret service officials were already preparing to travel to Washington to seek explanations into the alleged surveillance of its chancellor.
A report in Der Spiegel said Merkel's mobile number had been listed by the NSA's Special Collection Service (SCS) since 2002 and may have been monitored for more than 10 years. It was still on the list – marked as "GE Chancellor Merkel" – weeks before President Barack Obama visited Berlin in June.
Saturday, October 26, 2013 at 11:56AM Federal regulators have warned banks to be careful about padding their profits with money set aside to cover bad loans. But some of the nation's biggest banks did more of it in the third quarter than earlier this year.
J.P. Morgan Chase JPM +0.55% & Co., Wells Fargo WFC +0.40% & Co., Bank of America Corp. BAC +0.64% and Citigroup Inc., C -0.18% the nation's largest banks by assets, tapped a total of $4.9 billion in loan-loss reserves in the third quarter, up by about a third from both the second quarter and the year-ago quarter after adjustments. All the banks except Citigroup showed significant increases compared with the second quarter.
Saturday, October 26, 2013 at 11:41AM Here’s some good news: the Secretary of the Army, John McHugh, sent an Army-wide memorandum ordering a halt to all briefings classifying Christian groups as domestic hate groups.
The Oct. 18. order came a few days after Fox News reported that a large number of active duty and reserve troops were instructed that a Christian group called the American Family Association is an extremist hate group which poses a threat to America.
McHugh was reacting to the Fox report as well as pressure from Congress.
Saturday, October 26, 2013 at 11:29AM Maryland state police and federal agents used a search warrant in an unrelated criminal investigation to seize the private reporting files of an award-winning former investigative journalist for The Washington Times who had exposed problems in the Homeland Security Department's Federal Air Marshal Service.
Reporter Audrey Hudson said the investigators, who included an agent for Homeland's Coast Guard service, took her private notes and government documents that she had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act during a predawn raid of her family home on Aug. 6.
Friday, October 25, 2013 at 05:21PM The most under-discussed aspect of the NSA story has long been its international scope. That all changed this week as both Germany and France exploded with anger over new revelations about pervasive NSA surveillance on their population and democratically elected leaders.
As was true for Brazil previously, reports about surveillance aimed at leaders are receiving most of the media attention, but what really originally drove the story there were revelations that the NSA is bulk-spying on millions and millions of innocent citizens in all of those nations. The favorite cry of US government apologists -–everyone spies!
Friday, October 25, 2013 at 01:16PM The National Security Agency monitored the phone conversations of 35 world leaders after being given the numbers by an official in another US government department, according to a classified document provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The confidential memo reveals that the NSA encourages senior officials in its "customer" departments, such as the White House, State and the Pentagon, to share their "Rolodexes" so the agency can add the phone numbers of leading foreign politicians to their surveillance systems.
Friday, October 25, 2013 at 01:07PM The Independent
Just who is looking over your shoulder when you browse the Internet? Tomorrow, web users will be given a new tool to shine a light on the commercial organisations which track your every movement online.
Lightbeam, a download produced by Mozilla, the US free software community behind the popular Firefox browser, claims to be a “watershed” moment in the battle for web transparency.
Thursday, October 24, 2013 at 06:08PM The heads of state of Germany, Brazil, and Mexico may be far from the only world leaders who've reportedly attracted the attentions of the US National Security Agency.
An agency memo leaked by Edward Snowden and published by the UK's Guardian newspaper Thursday contains a plea from the NSA for access to US officials' "Rolodexes" of contacts -- including "foreign political or military leaders" -- and mentions one instance in which an official provided 200 phone numbers for 35 world leaders.
Forty-three of those numbers, previously unknown to the agency, were "tasked" by the NSA, along with "several other" of the numbers.
 |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
