". . . a republic, if you can keep it."
TSA Nabs Suspected Al Queda Terrorist At Chicago Airport, A toddler in a wheelchair
South Park’s TSA Spoof (Video) — MUST SEE!!!!!
www.macbrosplace.com/south-parks-tsa-spoof-video/
JAPANESE MAKE FUN OF U.S. TSA SCREENING
TSA molests mom, brings her to tears
From Air Force Magazine online:
Russia Considering Allowing NATO a Transit Hub: Russia’s legislature will consider a proposal to allow US and allied airlifters use of a Russian air base to ferry supplies to Afghanistan, according to Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. “We want those who are fending off threats directed at Russia to efficiently fulfill their tasks,” stated Lavrov, reported the Associated Press. “We are helping the coalition to proceed from our own interests,” he added, noting that Russia may allow NATO to access the airfield near Ulyanovsk, but not station troops there. Since Pakistan barred NATO from using the over-land supply route from the port of Karachi last November, NATO relies heavily on air and rail corridors permitted through Russia. “Clearly we welcome the cooperation we have with Russia already on transit to and from Afghanistan,” said NATO spokeswoman Oana Lugescu last week.
Germany will send a sixth nuclear-capable submarine to Israel and will subsidize the cost, German Defense Minister Thomas de Maiziere announced on Tuesday after meeting his Israeli counterpart Ehud Barak in Berlin.
The sale comes after years of negotiations that Israeli media reported were stalled due to tensions over Israel’s continued construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. Berlin reportedly agreed to the sale after Israel released millions of dollars in withheld customs duties to the Palestinian Authority last year.
Three German-made Dolphin-class submarines are already in use in the Israeli navy, delivered in 1999 and 2000. Two other submarines have been ordered and are under construction, slated for delivery later this year.
De Maiziere, right, did not specify how much Germany would subsidize the submarine
De Maiziere confirmed that Germany would subsidize the cost of the sixth submarine but declined to give details on how much. Sources in Berlin said last November that a third of the cost would be covered, totaling a maximum of 135 billion euros ($178 million). (Read more)
These great photos say a lot about the horrors of central economic planning.
For all that Poland has accomplished since the fall of the Iron Curtain, it has long resisted fully coming to terms with its Communist past — the oppression, the spying, even the massacres. Society preferred to forget, to move on.
So it may come as a surprise that Poland and many of its neighbors in Central and Eastern Europe have decided the time is right to deal with the unfinished business. Suddenly there is a wave of accounting in the form of government actions and cultural explorations, some seeking closure, others payback.
A court in Poland last month found that the Communist leaders behind the imposition of martial law in December 1981 were part of a “criminal group.” Bulgaria’s president is trying to purge ambassadors who served as security agents. The Macedonian government is busy hunting for collaborators, and Hungary’s new Constitution allows legal action against former Communists.
On Sunday in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel nominated as the next president a former pastor and East German activist, Joachim Gauck, who turned the files of the Ministry for State Security — better known as the Stasi — into a permanent archive.
“In order to defend ourselves in the future against other totalitarian regimes, we have to understand how they worked in the past, like a vaccine,” said Lukasz Kaminski, the president of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance. Across Central and Eastern Europe, a consensus of silence appears to have ended, one that never muted all criticism and discussion but did muffle voices crying out for a long-awaited reckoning. (Read more)
It was Vladimir Putin’s much flaunted love of animals that brought him face to face with a tiger four years ago. Deep in the woods of Russia’s far east, the powerful leader was on a mission to help save the endangered amur tiger, when one of the fierce beasts appeared out of nowhere and attacked. Putin saved the day – and at least one television crew – when he intercepted its approach with a swift shot from a tranquilliser gun.
That, at least, was the story presented by state-run television, in lengthy, fawning reports that aired repeatedly after the incident in 2008.
But now, four years later, environmentalists and bloggers are presenting evidence that the tiger Putin shot was no wild tiger at all – and that the animal died as a result of the stunt.
The scandal is the latest to show the cracks in the president-elect’s carefully crafted image, as his popularity continues to fall despite a recent election win that critics say was manipulated by fraud. (Read more)
Yesterday Forbes broke the news that Canadian Calvin Ayre and partners who operate the Bodog online gambling empire have been indicted in the U.S., and in a blog post Calvin Ayre confirmed that their bodog.com domain had been seized by homeland security. As reported in Forbes (hat tip to The Domains for the cite),
According to the six-page indictment filed by Rosenstein, Ayre worked with Philip, Ferguson and Maloney to supervise an illegal gambling business from June 2005 to January 2012 in violation of Maryland law. The indictment focuses on the movement of funds from accounts outside the U.S., in Switzerland, England, Malta, and Canada, and the hiring of media resellers and advertisers to promote Internet gambling.
“Sports betting is illegal in Maryland, and federal law prohibits bookmakers from flouting that law simply because they are located outside the country,” Rosenstein said in a statement. “Many of the harms that underlie gambling prohibitions are exacerbated when the enterprises operate over the Internet without regulation.”
That is a truly scary quote but we’ll emphasize that: “The indictment focuses on the movement of funds outside the U.S.” and that you can’t just “flout US law” by not being in the US. What also needs to be understood is that the domain bodog.com was registered to via a non-US Registrar, namely Vancouver’s domainclip. (Read more)
If the pope called for the destruction of all the mosques in Europe, the uproar would be cataclysmic. Pundits would lambaste the church, the White House would rush out a statement of deep concern, and rioters in the Middle East would kill each other in their grief. But when the most influential leader in the Muslim world issues a fatwa to destroy Christian churches, the silence is deafening.
On March 12, Sheik Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, declared that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region.” (Read more)
Al-Qaeda Chief Osama Bin Laden, who was killed on May 02 last year in US Special Forces operation in Abbottabad, was not buried at sea but his body was shifted to the military mortuary in Dover, claimed a report on Monday.
The Strat for analysts did not believe that Osama bin Laden was buried at sea, according to Stratfor emails leaked by WikiLeaks. According to leaked secret files of Statfor, a US security agency, Osama was not buried at sea in an Islamic ceremony but his body was shifted to the military mortuary in Dover, DE, on a CIA plane.
Then it was shifted to the medical institute of US armed forces in Maryland for examination. At 5:26 a.m. on May 2, the morning after Barack Obama announced the successful raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound, Stratfor CEO George Friedman sent an email that said: “Reportedly, we took the body with us. Thank goodness.” (Read more)
I’m in favor of private security, but mercenaries hired by governments is not privatization of security, it’s corporatization.
Top companies:
G4S
Unity Resources Group
Erinys
Asia Security Group (Afghan)
DynCorps
Triple Canopy
Aegis Defense Services
Defion Internacional (Latin America)
Academi (formerly Blackwater, then Xe)
Lawmakers on Friday were handed the official score card on President Obama’s proposed budget for 2013.
The Congressional Budget Office concluded that the president’s budget would add less to the country’s debt than if lawmakers simply extend a number of favored policies, such as the Bush-era tax cuts. It would also shrink annual deficits to the point where they no longer are growing faster than the economy. (Read more)
New archaeological evidence suggests that America was first discovered by Stone Age people from Europe – 10,000 years before the Siberian-originating ancestors of the American Indians set foot in the New World.
A remarkable series of several dozen European-style stone tools, dating back between 19,000 and 26,000 years, have been discovered at six locations along the US east coast. Three of the sites are on the Delmarva Peninsular in Maryland, discovered by archaeologist Dr Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware. One is in Pennsylvania and another in Virginia. A sixth was discovered by scallop-dredging fishermen on the seabed 60 miles from the Virginian coast on what, in prehistoric times, would have been dry land.
The new discoveries are among the most important archaeological breakthroughs for several decades – and are set to add substantially to our understanding of humanity’s spread around the globe.
The similarity between other later east coast US and European Stone Age stone tool technologies has been noted before. But all the US European-style tools, unearthed before the discovery or dating of the recently found or dated US east coast sites, were from around 15,000 years ago – long after Stone Age Europeans (the Solutrean cultures of France and Iberia) had ceased making such artefacts. Most archaeologists had therefore rejected any possibility of a connection. But the newly-discovered and recently-dated early Maryland and other US east coast Stone Age tools are from between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago – and are therefore contemporary with the virtually identical western European material. (Read more)