STARTLING new evidence has emerged about how banks overcharge customers who go into the red.
Managers at Barclays boasted to an undercover reporter that bouncing a cheque or stopping a direct debit costs the bank as little as £1.50 or £2 to administer.
The revelation comes as hundreds of thousands of bank customers attempt to reclaim "illegal" current account charges of up to £40.
By law, the banks are not allowed to make a profit fr... (more)
Hong Kong triads, or organised-crime gangs, are believed to be behind a sinister and elaborate poison-dart device embedded in the turf near the starting point for races at the Happy Valley racecourse.
During a routine examination of the track an inspector came across the poison dart shooter, which had 12 metal tubes, each around a foot long, filled with darts buried in the grass under the spot where the starting stalls would be placed for the three races over 1,200 metr... (more)
When a felon's not engaged in his employment
Or maturing his felonious little plan
His capacity for innocent enjoyment
Is just as great as any honest man
... (more)
The Bank of England deliberately stoked the consumer boom that has led to record house prices and personal debt in order to avert a recession, the former Bank Governor Eddie George admitted yesterday.
Lord George said he and his colleagues on the Monetary Policy Committee "did not have much of a choice" as they battled to prevent the UK being dragged into a worldwide economic slump by slashing interest rates. And he said his legacy to ... (more)
Howard St. John Hunt remembers the night of the Watergate break-in as a bonding experience with his father.
A sweating and disheveled E. Howard Hunt roused his 19-year-old son from a dead sleep to help him wipe fingerprints from the burglars' radios and pack the surveillance equipment into a suitcase. Then, father and son raced to a remote Maryland bridge, where they heaved the evidence into the Potomac River just before dawn on June 17, 1972.
The U.S. military is working on computers than can scan your mind and adapt to what you're thinking.
Since 2000, Darpa, the Pentagon's blue-sky research arm, has spearheaded a far-flung, nearly $70 million effort to build prototype cockpits, missile control stations and infantry trainers that can sense what's occupying their operators' attention, and adjust how they present information, accordingly. Similar technologies are being employed to help intelligence analysts find targets... (more)
In addition to borrowing from the world's poorest countries, Bush & Co. are secretly confiscating your hard-earned dollars to support their out-of-control spending habits.
Sometime in the next year, Congress will start going through their periodic rituals and related public relations charades in an effort to absolve themselves of any blame for raising of the federal government's debt ceiling.
With Bush and cronies having added over $3 trillion dollars to the nationa... (more)
The future may include the reality of science fiction's "cyborgs," persons who have developed some intimate and occasionally necessary relationship with a machine. It is likely that computer chips implanted in our brains and acting as sensors or actuators may soon not only assist the blind and those with failing memory, but even bestow fluency in a new language, enable "recognition" of previously unmet individuals and provide instantaneous access to encyclopedic databases.
While the number of the world's billionaires grew from 793 in 2006 to 946 this year, major mass uprisings became commonplace occurrences in China and India. In India, which has the highest number of billionaires (36) in Asia with total wealth of $191 billion USD, Prime Minister Singh declared that the greatest single threat to 'India's security' were the Maoist led guerrilla armies and mass movements in the poorest parts of the country. In China, with 20 billionaires with $29.4 billion USD net ... (more)
The confessions made by KSM while taking responsibility for the planning of more than thirty attacks raise the following question: Was it Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who confessed responsibility for 9/11? And while considering the coverage of Mohammed, still more questions arise, such as: Was he ever extradited to the U.S.? And is he still actually alive?
Problems could be seen in the coverage of Mohammed's confessions from the very beginning. 'Mr. Mohammed, 41, is an ethnic Pakistani... (more)
NAPA, Calif. (AP) - A seventh-grader might end up in court for wearing Winnie the Pooh socks to school.
Toni Kay Scott, 14, was sent to an in-school suspension program called Students With Attitude Problems last year for violating a dress code, according to a lawsuit against the Napa Valley Unified School District and Redwood Middle School.
She had donned socks with the Tigger character from the Winnie the Pooh cartoons on them, along with a denim skirt and a brow... (more)
Statement Before the U.S. House of Representatives March 20, 2007
The $124 billion supplemental appropriation is a good bill to oppose. I am pleased that many of my colleagues will join me in voting against this measure.
If one is unhappy with our progress in Iraq after four years of war, voting to de-fund the war makes sense. If one is unhappy with the manner in which we went to war, without a constitut... (more)
The FBI's general counsel, Valerie Caproni, testified today on Capitol Hill that the FBI entered into contracts with AT&T, Verizon and MCI to harvest phone records on American citizens under a national security letter program that has come under fire from Congress and the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General for circumventing privacy laws.
Caproni confirmed during a House Judiciary hearing that AT&T and Verizon, which bought MCI in 2005, had and continue to have co... (more)
A local man wants police to pay for damage to a home he's restoring.
Curtis Allen said the damage happened when officers used a residence they thought was vacant for a training exercise.
"They kicked in the door. They busted up the door jam," Allen told KMBC's Maria Antonia. "I want them to stop using people's property as a training tool."
Police said they sometimes use vacant homes for training purposes. Officers said they look for places typical of ... (more)
More than 600,000 people a year applying for a passport for the first time will from May have to attend a compulsory interview up to 20 miles from their home, it was announced yesterday.
The new applicants, half of whom will be aged 16 to 19, will be asked to prove their identity by responding to a stock of about 200 possible questions on their family and financial history.
The admission that each passport application would be checked ... (more)
The US will increase the amount of information it holds on foreign visitors when it takes all 10 fingerprints from air travellers rather than the usual two.
Currently foreign travellers must have their index fingers scanned into a database when they enter the US by agents of the Department of Homeland Security. Those prints can then be checked against a database of fingerprints held by police forces or the FBI.
The Cheney speech to AIPAC – reassuring militant rightwingers in Israel and the US that America is leaning forward on Iran, and that we are never leaving Iraq – was filled with honesty and conviction, and gives us a clear window into the administration's thinking.
Cheney's description of terrorists is somewhat emotional and overblown. Calling th... (more)
Almost six months after the Democrats recaptured both Houses and political sleeping gas sent the "progressive" left off into dream world, establishment liberals like Nancy Pelosi and the MoveOn.org foundation continue to whore themselves in service of the Neo-Con war agenda and their Bush administration pimps.
While the media obsesses about the sideshow of the attorney firings "scandal," preparations for a war with Iran and the continued feeding of U.S. troops... (more)
The most outspoken critics of the $124 billion wartime spending bill in the House are facing withering support in their fight to defeat it.
California Democratic Reps. Maxine Waters and Lynn Woolsey said that many of their liberal colleagues were caving under pressure from Democratic leaders who, according to at least one congressman, have threatened to block requests for new funds for his district.
ARLINGTON, Va.--A senior U.S. Department of Homeland Security official on Wednesday said he finds privacy concerns prompted by the proposed Real ID regime puzzling.
Stewart Baker, the department's assistant secretary for policy, said a forthcoming system of uniform national identification cards will not put more personal information into the hands of motor vehicle administrators or result in a massive centralized database that's more ... (more)
The U.S. housing market, long considered vulnerable by many economists, is now on the verge of suffering a serious collapse in many regions. Commodities guru and hedge fund manager Jim Rogers warns that real estate in expensive bubble areas will drop 40 or 50%. Mainstream media outlets like the New York Times are reporting breathlessly about the possibility of widespread defaults on subprime mortgages.
When the bubble finally bursts completely, millions... (more)
Neil Cavuto, Fox's "money guy" (his words) is at times, as regular readers of this site know, very adept at creating the illusion that his show is about "business news" while simultaneously beating the propaganda drums for the Bush administration. Today he was at the top of his game. With the help of cohort Brenda Buttner, he blew out some smoke and flashed some mirrors and he put the fear of losing money into his audience due to the "witch hunt" the Democrats are conducting over the Atto... (more)
