Month: December 2014

Mail.com

PITTSBURGH (AP) — The parks director of a Pennsylvania township who helped subdue a gunman charged with killing three people at a municipal meeting last year is among 19 people being honored with medals and cash from the Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Heroes Fund Commission.

Bernard Kozen was the 56-year-old parks director of Ross Township when he tackled, disarmed and subdued 60-year-old Rockne Newell on Aug. 5, 2013. Newell is awaiting trial and faces the possible death penalty for allegedly killing three people in a dispute over his property.   Continue reading “Man who helped subdue gunman among Carnegie Heroes”

WND – by Leo Hohmann

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents have had their authority to detain illegal aliens reduced, some have been disarmed, and now they are seeing cuts in their paychecks.

All of this is taking a toll on morale, said one of the agents in an exclusive interview with WND.   Continue reading “U.S. border agent: ‘Morale never been lower’”

Fox News

DETROIT –  Bankruptcy behind it, Detroit’s atmosphere swirls with the promise of better days. Charles Floyd Jones can only hope that the city’s good fortune trickles down to him and the 10 other residents of a tent city that’s sprouted in the shadow of a resurgent downtown where rental occupancy is close to full and restaurants and shops are doing brisk business.

Jones and others in this makeshift community of seven tents — believed to be the only tent city in Detroit — say they have nowhere else to go.   Continue reading “Homeless in tent city live on edge of life, outskirts of resurgent downtown Detroit”

Zero Hedge – by Tyler Durden

For the past 150 years, crude oil prices have varied between around $10 per barrel and around $120 per barrel. For many decades, oil prices were relatively “stable” but a funny thing happened in the early 70s and everything changed – whether coincidental or causative the linkages between the oil crisis and Nixon’s Gold-Standard-busting of Bretton Woods are clear in the chart below. Goldman expects continued high oil price volatility with risks skewed to the downside as the market searches for a new equilibrium… and a period of macroeconomic adjustment to structurally lower oil prices. Is oil adjusting to a new ‘gold-standard-esque’ normal?   Continue reading “A Funny Thing Happened To Oil Prices When Nixon Killed The Gold Standard”

The Free Thought Project – by Justin Gardner

As the wasteful, immoral war on drugs continues in police states around the world, authorities are always looking for ways to track the use of “illicit” drugs. It’s the intelligence aspect of their war, and some of the methods literally reek. Introducing “sewage epidemiology,” coming soon to a community near you.

Sewage epidemiology is a rapidly expanding field that can provide information on illicit drug usage in communities, based on the measured concentrations in samples from wastewater treatment plants.

Continue reading “The War on Drugs Just Got Even More Vile: Police to Begin Inspecting Your Poop, Seriously”

Sputnik News 

MOSCOW, December 20 (Sputnik), Ekaterina Blinova – A weakened ruble and dropping oil prices will not undermine Russia’s economy or trigger riots in the streets of Moscow, believes Marin Katusa, author of the New York Times bestseller, “The Colder War,” and the Chief Energy Investment Strategist at Casey Research.

“Russia is not some Zimbabwe-to-be. It’s sitting on a surplus of foreign assets and very healthy foreign exchange reserves of around $375 billion. Moreover, it has a strong debt-to-GDP ratio of just 13% and a large (and steadily growing) stockpile of gold… Russia will arrest the ruble’s slide and keep pumping oil,” writes Marin Katusa in his article “Why Russia will halt the ruble’s slide and keep pumping oil.”   Continue reading “Russia to Halt Ruble Slide, Increase Energy Ties With China: US Expert”

Zero Hedge – by Tyler Durden

As even Reuters observes this morning when discussing the ongoing crude rout, “the market slide has triggered conspiracy theories, ranging from the Saudis seeking to curb the U.S. oil boom, to Riyadh looking to undermine Iran and Russia for their support of Syria.” It appears said theories will continue raging for a long time, because as Saudi Arabia’s oil minister who has been extensively in the news in the past couple (that means “two” as per Janet Yellen) of month explained, the biggest OPEC oil producer said on Sunday it would not cut output to prop up oil markets even if non-OPEC nations did so, in one of the toughest signals yet that the world’s top petroleum exporter plans to ride out the market’s biggest slump in years, and that the price of crude is not going up any time soon.   Continue reading “Saudi Arabia Refuses To Cut Oil Output Even If Non-OPEC Members Do”

Liberty Unyielding – by J.E. Dyer

For the third time in 22 months, Russian strategic bombers have flown out across the Pacific to circumnavigate Guam, where the U.S. maintains one of our most important bases in the Pacific theater.

The latest incident occurred on 13 December.  It occurred in concert with a series of Russian bomber flights against Northern Europe and into the Alaska air defense identification zone (ADIZ), which started on 7 December.  The Russian aircraft penetrated the Guam ADIZ during the 13 December flight.  (The Guam ADIZ is defined as a radius of 250 nautical miles, or 290 statute miles/460 km, around Guam.)   Continue reading “Incredibly, U.S. forces fail to intercept Russian bombers circumnavigating Guam”

It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf.

– Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 1, December 19, 1776

ROAR Mag – by Santiago Carrion

On Wednesday, the Associated Whistleblowing Press published a new leak revealing US attempts to undermine privacy rights, net neutrality and internet freedoms through top-secret negotiations over the little-known Trade in Services Agreement (TISA). Even a quick glance at the leaked document is already extremely revealing. At the top of its front page, in capital letters, the word CONFIDENTIAL is highlighted — and further down the full extent of the treaty’s secret nature is revealed: “Declassify on five years from entry into force of the TISA agreement.”   Continue reading “New TISA leak: secret trade deal threatens privacy rights”

Business Insider

Bruce Rauner, a Republican, liked to talk tough about unions and public-sector pensions when he was campaigning for governor in Illinois.

“The system is full of fraud and self-dealing and abuses, such as folks who have a pay rise in the last years of their career [so their pension is higher] or folks who moved in and out of certain jobs, so they could get a pension,” he said in August 2013.

With two or three pensions, some are making as much as half a million dollars in retirement pay, he claimed. This, he thundered, is a rip-off of taxpayers and other workers.   Continue reading “Public Pensions Are America’s Greece”

Dollar Collapse – by John Rubino

The Greek financial/political crisis is becoming an annual event. For a sense of just how long this unfortunate little country has been struggling to survive under the relative sound money regime of the eurozone, here’s a Greek Crisis Timeline that CNN published in 2011. Even back then the pattern of near-collapse followed by temporary respite had been repeating for seven years.

The most recent lull seemed longer than usual, so long in fact that many people probably assumed that Greece had been “fixed” and was now a more-or-less fully-functioning member of the eurozone, ready to settle back into its enviable lifestyle of hosting tourists, drinking ouzo and avoiding taxes.   Continue reading “Really, Greece Again?”

AOL – by Tom Hays

NEW YORK (AP) — The gunman who fatally ambushed two police officers in their squad car had a long criminal record, a hatred for police and the government and an apparent history of mental instability that included an attempt to hang himself a year ago, authorities said Sunday.

Moments before opening fire, Ismaaiyl Brinsley approached people on the street and asked them to follow him on Instagram, then told them, “Watch what I’m going to do,” Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said.   Continue reading “Killer of 2 NYC officers had long criminal history”

New York Daily News – by TINA MOORE, ALFRED NG, OREN YANIV, BILL HUTCHINSON

Seconds before a cop-hating maniac ambushed and gunned down two NYPD officers in cold blood, he boasted, “Watch what I’m going to do!”

Ismaaiyl Brinsley’s twisted advertisment of his execution-style assassinations of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu was revealed Sunday as detectives probed the motive for Saturday’s shocking slayings in Brooklyn.   Continue reading “Cop shooter bragged to Brooklyn bystanders just before fatally shooting NYPD Officers”

Delaware Online – by Xerxes Wilson, The News Journal

A Dover man wielding a BB gun was fatally shot by police Sunday morning, according to the Dover Police Department.

Shortly before 11 p.m. Saturday, Dover police received information from a crisis center noting James Long, 52 of Dover, had indicated suicidal thoughts and a plan to commit “suicide by cop,” according to authorities.

The threats were not specific and resembled statements made by Long in the past, according to Dover Police Spokesman Cpl. Mark Hoffman.   Continue reading “Dover man wielding BB gun killed by police”