Senior Democrat says decision to demote Halliburton worker will chill whistleblowingThe top U.S. Army contracting official who first raised criticism over Halliburton's no-bid contract in Iraq was demoted Sunday for what the army called poor job performance -- the first time her performance was rated low in 20 years.
Today, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) blasted the Bush administration’s decision to fire the lead government whistleblower in a statement to RAW STORY. Democrats also sent a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld today demanding an explanati... (more)
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Strategizing a Christian Coup d'Etat: A group of believers wants to establish Scriptures-based government one city and county at a time.It began, as many road trips do, with a stop at Wal-Mart to buy a portable DVD player.
But Mario DiMartino was planning more than a weekend getaway. He, his wife and three children were embarking on a pilgrimage to South Carolina.
"I want to migrate and claim the gold of the Lord," said the 38-year-old oil company executive from Pennsylvania. "I want to replicate the statutes and the mores and the scriptures that the God of the Old Testament espoused to the world."<... (more)
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Drunk soldier kills five A DRUNKEN Colombian soldier threw a grenade into a small town street party and killed a 7-year-old boy and four other people overnight, military and civilian authorities said.
The soldier went absent without leave from his base in the southwestern province of Huila and got drunk in the town of El Jardin before detonating the grenade, said an official at the nearby municipality of San Jose de Isnos.
Five people were killed and eight injured in the incident, the offi... (more)
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Chile officials take over colonyThe Chilean authorities have taken control of a secretive religious commune that has been accused of aiding the former military dictatorship.
Officials entered Colonia Dignidad in to take over its assets as part of an investigation into its former leaders.
Former Nazi Paul Schaefer, 83, is accused of aiding secret police under Chile's 1973-1990 military rule and sexually abusing 26 children.
Mr Schaefer was arrested in March after eight years on the r... (more)
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Malaysia targets mobile phone sexThe Malaysian government has ordered police to randomly check mobile phones for pornographic images.
The move follows reports by a local newspaper that young people were swapping sex videos and images on their mobile phones.
Deputy Interior Minister, Noh Omar, said he worried the practice was becoming increasingly common.
Officers have been ordered to immediately delete any explicit images they find stored in the phones.
The owners of i... (more)
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Iraq violence will rise, Bush saysPresident Bush warned yesterday that insurgents in Iraq will become more violent in the coming months in an attempt to subvert the country's constitutional process.
"As democracy in Iraq takes root, the enemies of freedom, the terrorists will become more desperate, more despicable and more vicious," Mr. Bush said yesterday from his ranch in Crawford, Texas.
Iraq's Shi'ite-majority parliament finished the draft constitution yesterday. However, some minority S... (more)
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Gonzales Faults Senate Version of Patriot Act LegislationAttorney General Alberto R. Gonzales yesterday criticized a Senate bill that would place new restrictions on law enforcement in the USA Patriot Act, saying the legislation would hamper the government's ability to prevent terrorist attacks.
Gonzales, during a meeting with editors and reporters at The Washington Post, said he favors a competing House version of the antiterrorism law that includes fewer restrictions on the government.
"I have a personal preference for ... (more)
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Shrinking La. Coastline Contributes To FloodingTwo months ago, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) told an audience of congressional staffers and scientific experts the federal government needs to spend billions of dollars over the next two decades to restore her state's wetlands. She warned that intentional rerouting of the Mississippi River over the past century, coupled with rising sea levels due to climate change, had eroded Louisiana's natural buffer against massive storms.
"This is not Disneyland. This is the real deal," Landrieu... (more)
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Obama in group locked up at Russian airportSen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) were not allowed to leave a Russian airport Sunday and were locked in a room briefly.
The incident prevented their departure for about three hours, but Obama told the Sun-Times "it ended up not being a very big deal."
Russia on Monday apologized, and the Foreign Ministry said that the delay, which it said "was incorrectly called a detention," arose because of questions over whether the international flight e... (more)
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Is Bird Flu Pandemic Chicken Little Scenario?In 2003 it was SARS, the deadly virus that caused lethal pneumonia and lung failure was sweeping the globe and it was only a matter of time before the west would succumb to its devastating wrath.
It never happened.
The number of SARS cases never topped 1000, none of which were proven to be anything more than traditional lung infections.
SARS has been replaced by a new enemy, an enemy that may require martial law, quarantines and forced vaccinations - ... (more)
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Justice Weighs Desire v. Duty (Duty Prevails)It is not every day that a Supreme Court justice calls his own decisions unwise. But with unusual candor, Justice John Paul Stevens did that last week in a speech in which he explored the gap that sometimes lies between a judge's desire and duty.
Addressing a bar association meeting in Las Vegas, Justice Stevens dissected several of the recent term's decisions, including his own majority opinions in two of the term's most prominent cases. The outcomes were "unwise," he said, but "... (more)
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Accident halts work to ship soil containing uranium to U.S.A governmental nuclear research and development institute began work Monday to ship soil containing uranium ore from Yurihama, Tottori Prefecture, to the United States for disposal, but the work was suspended almost immediately due to an accident.
The operation, planned to be completed in 19 days, was suspended after a bag containing the soil fell from a vehicle during transportation, causing slight injuries to a worker, the Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute said. Under th... (more)
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FBI Snooping In ConnecticutAn FBI demand for library records in Connecticut is exactly the kind of unsupervised prying that is bound to scare patrons who fear government monitoring of their reading habits.
Under a 1986 law, the FBI has issued a so-called national security letter demanding that an unnamed institution turn over "subscriber information, billing information and access logs." Under terms of the sweeping law, no judge had to review that request. The law even bars the letter's recipient and its le... (more)
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'Crown' rules (eminent) domain"The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake, the wind may blow through it. The storms may enter. The rain may enter. But the king of England may not enter. All his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement."
Those famous words, from a speech in 1760 by William Pitt the Elder, are one of the world's great quotes. The thought wasn't exactly true, of course, even at the time. British history show... (more)
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India: Banks Hire Criminals, Torture to Recover LoansAlleging that a few private financing companies and cooperative banks are engaging criminals for recovery of loans from their clients, Jana Chetana Manch has urged the government to take strong actions against such criminals.
Talking to reporters here yesterday, Manch convenors, Mr Lenin Mohanty and Mr Utpal Bhagat alleged that a few private sector financing companies had engaged criminals for recovery of loans without having a proper method of redressing the grievance or without ... (more)
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Social Security number almost never is legally required as IDEVERYBODY WANTS it. Your bank, health club, utility company. Sometimes even the guy at the video store.
That nine-digit number which started as a way for the Social Security Administration to track worker's earnings and benefits now is routinely requested by all sorts of businesses and groups.
"This is not supposed to be a national identification number ... but that's what it has become," said Cheryl Hystad, executive director of the Maryland Consumer Rights Coaliti... (more)
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The latest casualty in the war on civil libertiesFor those of you sitting in the back of the classroom, America has initiated another front to its war.
Once the double take is over, go back and read that sentence again.
Yes, another front in the War on Terror. This time around, however, there aren’t any human casualties as a result of this front.
The casualties of this war are the basic rights of our progeny and us. The primary cause of these basic infringements is the nefarious bastard child ... (more)
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On the Heels Of Death Threats Coming Out Of Washington, WTC Janitor Has Jersey City Apartment BurglarizedComing on the heels of reports today that government operatives are trying to assassinate someone highly critical of the Bush administration, William Rodriguez, the WTC janitor who has been speaking out across the nation about a 9/11 government conspiracy, came home to find his Jersey City apartment burglarized Saturday.
Rodriguez, who has damaging eye-witness testimony that bombs exploded in the WTC basement prior to the airplanes striking, said today his apartment was burglarize... (more)
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Do surveillance cameras make the city safer? CON: They push crime elsewhere and spy on the rest of usSan Francisco is the latest city to succumb to the siren song of Big Brother technology. The announcement of a 90-day pilot program to post two video surveillance cameras in the Western Addition is a well-intentioned but ultimately misguided response to the problem of street crime. High-tech cameras sacrifice precious privacy while providing very little in return in the way of added safety. In a city that has long prided itself on its dedication to civil liberties, this is a disheartening turn o... (more)
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'Big brother' watches Indian call centre workers When Neha Sharma reaches her office in the suburb of Gurgaon, she is frisked by the guard. Her handbag is searched and her mobile phone and any pens or notebooks are removed. Inside her cubicle, where she takes calls from American and British customers for Hero ITES, a major Indian provider of outsourced business services, cameras watch her constantly. Her phone conversations are recorded. When Sharma leaves for the day, the contents of her bag are checked again.
This is the new ... (more)
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Black box catches bad driving on filmIt's bad news for boy racers: Big Brother is watching you - and so are your parents on a new in-car video camera that records how motorists drive.
The palm-sized device, to be launched in Britain this month, is fixed to the windshield beneath the rear-view mirror and captures any dangerous or erratic driving.
Parents can then download the colour footage onto a computer to see - and hear - how their children behave behind the wheel.
The $2,100 camera, ... (more)
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US Establishment Helped Empower Chinese Police StateDoing business in China could potentially endanger the national security of Taiwan and the United States as well as violate democratic values, American scholar-businessman Ethan Gutmann argued yesterday at a forum held in Taipei.
Gutmann was basing his arguments on those made in his book titled "Losing the New China - A Story of American Commerce, Desire and Betrayal," which discusses in detail how American businesses played a role in restricting freedom of thought in China, in tu... (more)
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Greenspan Terrorizes EconomyInfowars | August 29, 2005
What we're seeing is massive inflation: oil has more than doubled in the past two years in cost per barrel, the dollar's value has decreased more than 40 percent against the Euro over the past three years. Explosive inflation is a fact, not some danger on the horizon.
The private Federal Reserve purposefully sets the economic policy to actually cause these problems to occur. After they have thoroughly prot... (more)
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US Army commander warns blogs are a security riskA WEBSITE called the Project on Government Secrecy claimed to have published a memo sent to all army leaders cautioning personnel not to file information that could be used against soldiers by the enemy.
According to Secrecy News, General Peter J. Schoomaker said some soldiers were posting sensitive matters to websites and blogs, revealing tactics, techniques, procedures and vulnerabilities.
Schoomaker said, according to Secrecy News, that "the enemy is actively sea... (more)
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Beslan mothers: Putin is culpableShamil Basayev is Russia's Osama bin Laden. Yet as Beslan prepares to mark the one-year anniversary of the school siege he engineered, many of the victims' mothers are increasingly laying blame for the September massacre not on Mr. Basayev, but on Russian authorities.
They are stoking controversy by demanding that top leaders, including President
Vladimir Putin, stay away from this week's service to commemorate the 331 victims, half of them children, who perished in the Sep... (more)
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