Federal authorities have accused two former executives of a Massachusetts software company of concealing financial ties to a man on the government’s terrorism list.
The Quincy [Massachusetts] office of PTech, Inc., was raided by federal agents in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Indictments were unsealed Wednesday against PTech’s former chief executive, Oussama Ziade, and former chief financial officer Buford George Peterson. They are accused of trying to conceal in a loan application an approximately $10 million financial interest in the company held by Yassin Kadi (KAH’-dee). Kadi is a Saudi Arabian on the Treasury Department’s list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists.
Vaccine makers and federal officials will be immune from lawsuits that result from any new swine flu vaccine, under a document signed by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, government health officials said Friday.
Since the 1980s, the government has protected vaccine makers against lawsuits over the use of childhood vaccines. Instead, a federal court handles claims and decides who will be paid from a special fund.
Paul Kanjorski, a Pennsylvania Democrat, asked Mr Paulson to reveal details of officials' concerns, which were relayed to Congress in hasty conference calls last year. The calls included discussion of law and order and whether it would be possible to feed the American people, and for how long, according to Mr Kanjorski.
"In a world where information can flow, money can move with the speed of light electronically, I looked at the ripple effect, and looked at when a financial system fails, a whole country's economic system can fail," Mr Paulson said. "I believe we could have gone back to the sorts of situations we saw in the Depression.
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Genetically modified crops could contaminate their conventional counterparts, critics say. Their effects on humans haven’t been adequately studied, and their cultivation could lead to herbicide-resistant “super weeds,” among other concerns...
And allowing Roundup Ready sugar beets — which are genetically tinkered with to create a resistance to the active chemical in Roundup herbicide — to be grown on open space land, as is now being proposed, besmirches Boulder’s good, organic name, he said. In the land of organic products, in fact, Boulder is something of its own brand; one that’s become associated with natural foods.
An ugly scramble is brewing over the swine flu vaccine — and when it becomes available, Britain, the United States and other nations could find that the contracts they signed with [international] pharmaceutical companies are easily broken.
Experts warn that during a global epidemic, which the world is in now, governments may be under tremendous pressure to protect their own citizens first before allowing companies to ship doses of vaccine out of the country.
Under a $16.4 million contract, Booz Allen will provide information security services to the Defense Logistics Agency...The agreement covers enterprise security and calls for support of information technology services that improve awareness of emerging cyber threats and network intrusions.
Under a $6.2 million contract, Booz Allen will provide services and support to the Air Force Space Command’s Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Directorate, DOD announced July 15. The scope of work covers IT services to enhance the survivability of space intelligence and threat assessments.
Nobody knows for sure what the gunk is, but Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer says the Coast Guard is sure what it is not. "It's certainly biological," Hasenauer said. "It's definitely not an oil product of any kind. It has no characteristics of an oil, or a hazardous substance, for that matter. "It's definitely, by the smell and the makeup of it, it's some sort of naturally occurring organic or otherwise marine organism."
He saw some jellyfish tangled up in the stuff, and someone turned in what was left of a dead goose -- just bones and feathers -- to the borough's wildlife department.
The master computer which controlled last week’s massive cyber attack on websites in the US and South Korea is in Britain, Asian computer security investigators claim.
The attack, which paralysed the websites of South Korean and United States government agencies, banks and businesses over the course of a week, was first blamed on communist North Korea. But having traced the attack back via proxy computers used in the attack, a security company in Vietnam has identified a server belonging to Global Digital Broadcast, a Brighton-based internet television company as the source of the attacks.
A person who legally possesses a gun would not have it seized during periods of martial rule under a proposal that has been signed into law by the governor.
The measure was signed by Gov. Phil Bredesen on Thursday and takes effect immediately.
President Obama's Science Czar, John Holdren, took a controversial and amoral approach to the science of population by recommending mass compulsory sterilization and even forced abortion (and/or forced marriages) under certain circumstances. His 1977 tome, Ecoscience, which he co-authored with Paul and Anne Ehrlich, also displays a revealing disregard for the institution of the traditional human family.
“Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.”
According to [Rick] Weiss [the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Director of Strategic Communications], Holdren “made clear that he did not believe in coercive means of population control” and is not an advocate for measures expressed in the book “and they are certainly not endorsed by this administration in any way.”
...[T]he Montana National Guard will be performing a joint exercise with FEMA and NORTHCOM to help coordinate emergency response to natural and manmade disasters. The exercise is one of many regional Vigilant Guard exercises being held by the National Guard this year...These Vigilant Guard exercises are part of a larger, national-level program called Ardent Sentry 2009. Ardent Sentry is conducted by NORTHCOM and NORAD and its major “venues” include not only the Vigilant Guard exercises, but an “AMALGAM DART exercise involving air defense activities at Camp Rilea, Oregon” and “a Nuclear Weapons Incident exercise (NUWAIX) with a U.S. Air Force response near Cheyenne, Wyoming.”
...Vigilant Guard “provides an opportunity for National Guard Joint Task Forces and field units to improve command and control, and operational relationships with internal, civilian, and military partners against homeland security threats. The exercise involves all the command elements of Northern Command, National Guard Bureau, Department of Defense, U.S. Transportation Command, Department of Homeland Security and other supporting U.S. government agencies"...
A feature of recent exercises has been foreign military involvement. The Iowa Vigilant Guard exercise involved troops from Mexico, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Bahamas, and Senegal. The Montana Vigilant Guard exercise will include the participation of Kyrgyzstan...
In addition to unifying “emergency response” and exercising NORTHCOM’s capacity to command local government in times of crisis, the Vigilant Guard exercises are noteworthy because they are connected to the Vigilant Guardian Exercises that were occurring on the morning of September 11, 2001. The Vigilant Guardian Exercises were also conducted by NORAD and featured scenarios that strangely mimicked real-world events. The 2009 Vigilant Guard Exercises in Montana will focus on a hypothetical earthquake of 7.2 magnitude...
A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.
Robotic Technology Inc.'s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that's right, "EATR" — "can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable," reads the company's Web site.
That "biomass" and "other organically-based energy sources" wouldn't necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they'd be plentiful in a war zone.
EATR will be powered by the Waste Heat Engine developed by Cyclone Power Technology of Pompano Beach, Fla., which uses an "external combustion chamber" burning up fuel to heat up water in a closed loop, generating electricity.
The advantages to the military are that the robot would be extremely flexible in fuel sources and could roam on its own for months, even years, without having to be refueled or serviced.
Upon the EATR platform, the Pentagon could build all sorts of things — a transport, an ambulance, a communications center, even a mobile gunship.
In press materials, Robotic Technology presents EATR as an essentially benign artificial creature that fills its belly through "foraging," despite the obvious military purpose.
To date, Obama has not revealed his original long-form, hospital-generated "Certificate of Live Birth" that includes details such as the name of the medical facility and the doctor who delivered him.
Here is an actual Hawaii birth certificate from 1963 (the same era as Obama's birth), which while redacted includes detailed information documenting a birth, including the name of the birth hospital and the attending physician. Beneath it is the short-form "Certification of Live Birth" offered by Obama as proof of his Hawaiian birth. It is possible to have been born outside of Hawaii and still obtain the latter form, but not the former:
 Long-form birth certificate from state of Hawaii (Image courtesy Philip Berg) |
Here is the "Certification of Live Birth" presented by Obama:
 Short-form "Certification of Live Birth" |
WND has reported on dozens of legal challenges to Obama's status as a "natural born citizen." The Constitution, Article 2, Section 1, states, "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President."
Some of the lawsuits question whether he was actually born in Hawaii, as he insists. If he was born out of the country, Obama's American mother, the suits contend, was too young at the time of his birth to confer American citizenship to her son under the law at the time.
Other challenges have focused on Obama's citizenship through his father, a Kenyan subject to the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom at the time of his birth, thus making him a dual citizen. The cases contend the framers of the Constitution excluded dual citizens from qualifying as natural born.
Source: World Net Daily
1) The US Military is in the process of constructing a surveillance grid that will give them instant information on any event going on anywhere in the world. Being able to retrieve and disseminate information to soldiers on the ground in real-time at the users immediate request. (aka soldiers "quelling" a protest can instantly get information on how many people are protesting, who everyone there is (name, age, bloodtype etc.) and where they are standing all at the push of a button or a verbal request.)
2) The US Air Force is also investing huge sums of money into creating various types of Unmanned Vehicles that it seems will eventually eliminate the use for humans direct involvement in "hostile" areas reducing the manpower throughout the military (since they won't need us anyway because if they had their way most of us would be dead). Thus giving them, along with this global information grid, complete and total autonomy over the entire planet. No matter where you go or what you do there is an unmanned vehicle made to keep an eye on you making sure your being a good slave and not falling out of line...(aka sitting in a room talking about how much you hate the government and what its doing while they secretly have an unmanned spy vehicle the size and appearance of a fly sitting in the room transmitting all audio and video data back to the control room allowing them to immediately deploy troops to arrest you...
The wave of violence last week in this religiously divided and politically troubled archipelago has made residents skittish even in Manila, the capital some 500 miles to the north, where a bomb damaged a government office in June and several others were found.
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has beefed up an anti-terrorist command center and troops have been placed on high alert. Bomb-sniffing dogs patrol the airport and weapons checkpoints have sprung up throughout the metropolitan area of 12 million residents.
The country has recorded 62 bombings and attempted bomb attacks since January, Sen. Rodolfo Biazon bared today.
Biazon, chairman of the Senate Committee on National Defense, said the latest bombing incident in Iligan City -- where 22 people were wounded -- is the 62nd case.
"That will make an average of 10 bombing and bombing attempt incidents a month," Biazon said in a radio interview.
There appears no end in sight for when Dick Cheney, a rare former vice president with Secret Service protection, will lose his security detail. Whispers has learned that the political battler's Secret Service protection has been extended, though there were no details on the length.
Viking Lander 2 is far enough north that frost deposits may form on the surface during winter. This image, taken in May 1979, shows a thin, white layer of water frost, estimated to be only micrometers (1 micrometer = 0.001 millimeters) thick, covering parts of the surface. The reddish regions are soil and rock not covered by the frost. Portions of the spacecraft are visible in the right foreground. (Viking Lander image 21I093.)
``Even the primitive and simplistic DDoS attacks have successfully disrupted the country's online banking system although customers' money was protected this time around,'' Korea Information Security Agency (KISA) official Yoo Jin-ho said.
``What if more sophisticated and intensive schemes are launched to hit the whole system? If we are not ready, this could disrupt Internet banking trading, thus spawning another financial crisis,'' Yoo said.
Persons unknown disrupted the #iranelection tag used by Iran opposition activists on Twitter for almost all of Saturday 11th July. Legitimate messages coordinating political opposition to the Iranian government were drowned out by massive volume of tweet spam for a product called Turbo Cash Generator, and also for www.tonig.ht -a free domain registration service.
It’s true that the government pays for and signs off on the assessment, but much of the analysis and even some of the underlying intelligence gathering is corporate. Corporations have so penetrated the Intelligence Community that it’s impossible to distinguish their work from the government’s. Although the President’s Daily Brief has the seal of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, it is misleading. For full disclosure, the PDB [President's Daily Brief] really should look more like NASCAR with corporate logos plastered all over it.
Key functions of intelligence agencies are now run by private corporations. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) revealed in May that 70 percent of the intelligence budget goes to contractors.
For all practical purposes, effective control of the NSA is with private corporations, which run its support and management functions. As the Washington Post's Walter Pincus reported last year, more than 70 percent of the staff of the Pentagon's newest intelligence unit, CIFA (Counterintelligence Field Activity), is made up of corporate contractors.
