Federal Judge Asks Why Wall Street Executives Haven’t Been Prosecuted

FDL

A federal judge has decided to publicly ask the questions millions of Americans have been wondering for years – given that we know people on Wall Street broke the law leading to the crash why hasn’t anyone been prosecuted?

This is particularly pressing given that the 5 year statute of limitations is fast approaching for any crimes committed before the crash. Soon it will be too late to bring charges against any of the perpetrators of the financial crisis.

The article asking the question is by Judge Jed  Rakoff a federal judge for the Southern District of New York.

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IMF paper warns of 'savings tax' and mass write-offs

TELEGRAPH

Much of the Western world will require defaults, a savings tax and higher inflation to clear the way for recovery as debt levels reach a 200-year high, according to a new report by the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF working paper said debt burdens in developed nations have become extreme by any historical measure and will require a wave of haircuts, either negotiated 1930s-style write-offs or the standard mix of measures used by the IMF in its “toolkit” for emerging market blow-ups.

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2014 Will Bring More Social Collapse — Paul Craig Roberts

Paulcraigroberts.org/

2014 is upon us. For a person who graduated from Georgia Tech in 1961, a year in which the class ring showed the same date right side up or upside down, the 21st century was a science fiction concept associated with Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” To us George Orwell’s 1984 seemed so far in the future we would never get there. Now it is 30 years in the past.

Did we get there in Orwell’s sense? In terms of surveillance technology, we are far beyond Orwell’s imagination. In terms of the unaccountability of government, we exceptional and indispensable people now live a 1984 existence.

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U.S. Has Few Answers on How to Handle Atomic Waste It Dumped in the Sea

More than four decades after the U.S. halted a controversial ocean dumping program, the country is facing a mostly forgotten Cold War legacy in its waters: tens of thousands of steel drums of atomic waste.

From 1946 to 1970, federal records show, 55-gallon drums and other containers of nuclear waste were pitched into the Atlantic and Pacific at dozens of sites off California, Massachusetts and a handful of other states. Much of the trash came from government-related work, ranging from mildly contaminated lab coats to waste from the country’s effort to build nuclear weapons.

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Government Official Hangs Up When Asked About Iodide Purchase

An official with the Department of Health and Human Services hung up when asked if the federal government’s purchase of 14 million doses of potassium iodide was linked to the Fukushima crisis.

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Gerald Celente Forecasts 2014 Trends

The Trends Journal® is the World's #1 source for the most important trends that are shaping the future. The Trends Journal® shows you how these trends will affect your life, how to profit from them, and what to do to avoid pitfalls. Regardless of business or profession, the Trends Journal® provides insights, strategies and opportunities to help you navigate these treacherous, unprecedented times.

Federal judge upholds government's right to search electronics at border

U.S. border agents should have the authority to search laptop computers carried by news photographers and other travelers at international border crossings without reasonable suspicion, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled Friday.

In a written decision, U.S. District Judge Edward Korman granted a government motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by civil rights attorneys that claimed the practice was unconstitutional and sought to have it halted.

Korman found that the plaintiffs hadn't shown they suffered injury that gave them standing to bring the suit. He also cited previous rulings finding that the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches doesn't apply to the government's efforts to secure international borders from outside threats.

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Pentagon plans to weaponize more drones

The U.S. Defense Department wants to arm more drones with lightweight, precision-guided weapons to support a larger range of combat missions.

As the war in Afghanistan ends and new threats emerge in the Asia-Pacific region, the Pentagon is considering adapting multiple weapons for drones, including the Cold War-era Hydra 70 rocket and the Laser Homing Attack or Anti-Tank Missile, or LAHAT, according to its latest report on the future of unmanned systems.

“Unmanned systems can be used in significantly different operating and threat conditions than manned platforms, come in a much wider range of classes and sizes than manned systems, can exhibit greater persistence and endurance than manned systems, and have the potential to support a large range of mission sets,” the recently released report states.

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NSA seeks to build quantum computer that could crack most types of encryption

In room-size metal boxes, secure against electromagnetic leaks, the National Security Agency is racing to build a computer that could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world.

According to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the effort to build “a cryptologically useful quantum computer” — a machine exponentially faster than classical computers — is part of a $79.7 million research program titled, “Penetrating Hard Targets.” Much of the work is hosted under classified contracts at a laboratory in College Park.

[Read an annotated description of the Penetrating Hard Targets project]

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Nuclear Expert: Fukushima reactor cores melted right down into the ground — That radioactive material is getting washed out into Pacific Ocean (AUDIO)

Gordon Edwards, nuclear expert and president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility: What happened in Fukushima [...] was a series of explosions, four reactors exploded, and three of those reactors melted down — the molten fuel has gone right down into the ground […] There are about 300 tons of contaminated water every day going into the Pacific Ocean underground. That‘s because the cores of the reactors have melted into the ground, and now the groundwater is flowing underneath the reactors and it’s washing that radioactive material out into the Pacific Ocean at the rate of 300 tons per day. […] They have been pumping 400 tons of water from the surface down into the reactor cores and then pumping the contaminated water back up again […]

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NSA has complete access to your iPhone, leaked docs show

FOX NEWS

Through a secret program code-named DROPOUTJEEP, the National Security Agency (NSA) has nearly total access to the Apple iPhone, according to documents from security research Jacob Appelbaum and Der Spiegel.

A leaked NSA document, posted by tech news site The Daily Dot, describes a “software implant for the Apple iPhone” that can be used to gather information from the phone:

It can turn on the microphone and camera, intercept text messages, creep through a contact list and more.

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Poll: USA Poses Greatest Threat to Peace...

CNS NEWS

The past year witnessed bloodshed in Syria and Iraq, turmoil in Egypt, anarchy in Central Africa, threats by a nuclear-armed North Korea and Chinese military posturing, but as 2013 ends a global poll finds that the country seen as representing the greatest threat to peace today is ... the United States.

Not only did the U.S. top the list with an aggregate of 24 percent, but the runner-up threat country, Pakistan, was way behind at eight percent.

China was third at six percent, followed by North Korea, Iran and Israel at five percent each.

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NSA can hack WiFi devices from eight miles away (video)

The NSA may have the ability to intercept data from around the world, but we now know that it has some impressive (and intimidating) equipment for snooping on nearby targets. Security guru Jacob Appelbaum told those at the Chaos Communications Congress this weekend that the NSA's big box of tools includes Nightstand, a custom device that can compromise WiFi networks for the sake of inserting spy software.

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Lynn Margulis (PhD - Scientist): 9/11 Truth

EDITOR'S NOTE: Even though she passed in 2011, her legacy will live on forever!

"Whoever is responsible for bringing to grisly fruition this new false-flag operation, which has been used to justify the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as unprecedented assaults on research, education, and civil liberties, must be perversely proud of their efficient handiwork." -- Lynn Margulis

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NSA 'hacking unit' infiltrates computers around the world – report

In January 2010, numerous homeowners in San Antonio, Texas, stood baffled in front of their closed garage doors. They wanted to drive to work or head off to do their grocery shopping, but their garage door openers had gone dead, leaving them stranded. No matter how many times they pressed the buttons, the doors didn't budge.

The problem primarily affected residents in the western part of the city, around Military Drive and the interstate highway known as Loop 410.

In the United States, a country of cars and commuters, the mysterious garage door problem quickly became an issue for local politicians.

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Fukushima: USS Reagan cancer levels are miles above comparative levels

We have seen strong evidence of poor build quality in the original General Electric construction at Fukushima. We have seen example after example of covered up seriousness and urgency by both Tepco the plant owners, and the Tokyo government keen to keep its ownership of the 2020 Olympic Games.

Now evidence is coming through to flatly contradict Establishment reassurances about cancer levels both among Fukushima residents, and on board USS Ronald Reagan - the US aircraft carrier that sailed offshore from Fukushima after the 2011 tsunami to bring aid and relief to a stricken population.

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Gundersen: Nuclear fuel has been moved by groundwater at Fukushima Daiichi — It’s time to walk away from plant for next 100 years once there’s an underground sarcophagus — Much more difficult to contain than Chernobyl (VIDEO)

At Fukushima Daiichi, the nuclear fuel is in contact with the groundwater, because the groundwater has leaked into the bottom of the containment building and it’s gotten into other buildings that surround the containment. That makes Fukushima Daiichi  much more expensive to solve and much more difficult to contain [compared to Chernobyl].

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SPECIAL REPORT- Japan's homeless recruited for murky Fukushima clean-up

Seiji Sasa hits the train station in this northern Japanese city before dawn most mornings to prowl for homeless men.

He isn't a social worker. He's a recruiter. The men in Sendai Station are potential laborers that Sasa can dispatch to contractors in Japan's nuclear disaster zone for a bounty of $100 a head.

"This is how labor recruiters like me come in every day," Sasa says, as he strides past men sleeping on cardboard and clutching at their coats against the early winter cold.

It's also how Japan finds people willing to accept minimum wage for one of the most undesirable jobs in the industrialized world: working on the $35 billion, taxpayer-funded effort to clean up radioactive fallout across an area of northern Japan larger than Hong Kong.

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Explosive Allegations About ‘Fast and Furious’ and Brian Terry’s Death

John Dodson, the federal agent who blew the lid off the Justice Department’s “Fast and Furious” gun-walking scandal, claims the FBI had ties to the men who killed U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in 2010 near Nogales, Ariz. In fact, Dodson says the Mexican bandits who gunned down Terry were working for FBI operatives and had been sent to the border to do a “drug rip-off” using intelligence gathered by the DEA.

Dodson, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said he doesn’t think the FBI was part of the rip-off crew, but the agency was “directing the rip crew.” The explosive claims were made in an interview with The Arizona Republic this week and are already creating some waves across the Internet.

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CHRIS HEDGES on Capitalism and the Resistance

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, teacher, and writer. He served for 15 years as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. He served four of those years as Middle East Bureau Chief before covering the war in the former Yugoslavia as Balkan Bureau Chief and then covered Al Qaeda in Europe and the Middle East From Paris.

The following presentation was given at the West End Cultural Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba , Canada on September 21, 2013. CKUW and Global Research would like to thank the West End Cultural Centre, as well as Canadian Dimension Magazine and the Uniter weekly journal who sponsored Hedges’s visit to winnipeg and supplied the audio of his talk.

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