Syria’s incumbent leader Bashar al-Assad has been announced as the winner of the country’s presidential election.
On Wednesday, Syrian People’s Assembly speaker Jihad al-Laham announced that Assad won 88.7 percent of the vote, or 10,319,723 of 11,634,412 votes cast in Tuesday’s election, the official SANA news agency reported. Continue reading “Assad wins Syrian presidential election”
Nearly one year to the day since the National Security Agency’s secret spy programs were first exposed through leaked documents, the man responsible or those disclosures has come out and endorsed a new anti-surveillance campaign.
Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden — the source of a trove of classified documents that since last June have revealed the inner workings of the United States intelligence community’s vast surveillance apparatus — issued a statement on Wednesday this week in support of the ‘Reset the Net’ campaign scheduled for Thursday, exactly one year after the first news stories stemming from his cache of leaked documents were published. Continue reading “Snowden publically supports Reset the Net campaign”
More than 77,000 foreign banks, investment funds and other financial institutions have agreed to share information about U.S. account holders with the IRS as part of a crackdown on offshore tax evasion, the Treasury Department announced Monday.
The list includes 515 Russian financial institutions. Russian banks had to apply directly to the IRS because the U.S. broke off negotiations with the Russian government over an information-sharing agreement because of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Continue reading “77,000 Foreign Banks to Share Tax Info with IRS”
Albany, NY – Opponents of New York’s new gun laws are demanding answers about how Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the New York state Legislature can rush bills into law with little time for anyone to even read the bill.
The NY Safe Act was passed with no hearings, no testimony, no time for opponents to make a case to their legislators.
I’m not a soldier, and nor am I a proponent of violent solutions to any problem when violence can be avoided. I don’t like the idea of combat, and nor am I looking forward to it, but I consider myself a member of the militia because once you grasp the big picture of our precarious reality, you’ll realize that there’s no place else to go. My joining the militia movement began with the realization that it’s all we have left, and knowing that in times like this, being a member of the militia also happens to be the civic duty of all Americans.
Demonstrators are beaten and gassed, the elections process is a farce, the courts will only run you in circles or imprison you, and any cop you meet might easily kill you on a whim, and get away with it. We have absolutely no effective way of petitioning our government for a redress of grievances, and “our government” happens to be doing all they can to destroy our nation.Continue reading “Who’s in “The Militia”?”
Between 2007 and 2009, 350 Filipino teachers arrived in Louisiana, excited for the opportunity to teach math and science in public schools throughout the state. They’d been recruited through a company called Universal Placement International Inc., which professes on its website to “successfully place teachers in different schools thru out [sic] the United States.” As a lawsuit later revealed, however, their journey through the American public school system was fraught with abuse.
Bashar Assad has won a landslide victory in the Syrian presidential poll with 88.7 percent of the vote, according to the parliament speaker. It will secure him a third term in office amidst a bloody civil war, which stemmed from protests against his rule.
“I declare the victory of Dr Bashar Hafez Assad as president of the Syrian Arab Republic with an absolute majority of the votes cast in the election,” parliament speaker Mohammad Laham said in a televised address from his office in the Syrian parliament. Continue reading “Bashar Assad wins Syria presidential election with 88.7% of vote”
TAOS, N.M. (KRQE) – Teachers are fired up over their new evaluations. The scores were released earlier this month, but many teachers say their grades don’t hold any water. It’s why a group of teachers in Taos are striking a match in protest.
Some Taos teachers say their profession is being stomped on, citing a laundry list of issues surrounding teacher evaluations. They argue the scores should factor in growth, they say they’re not even testing students on the curriculum they’re teaching and the test scores they’re basing much of the evaluations on are from last year. It’s why they decided to take a stand. Continue reading “Taos teachers burn their evaluations”
I know something about bribery. When I was a teenager, my dad was in the construction business in Chicago. So, as soon as I got my driver’s license (at 16), I was sent out delivering bribes. That’s just the way things were done, and my dad let me drive a fancy car (with an FM radio!) to make the deliveries.
I delivered leather coats to wives, envelopes to government offices, other envelopes to politicians at their fundraisers, booze to lots of people, and in one case, the answers to the state driver’s exam to a guy in… um… a different line of work. Continue reading “Bribery in America”
Google has released code of its new open source End-to-End encryption extension to be tested for bugs and back doors by security experts. While it claims to be an effective privacy guard, it leaves the main question of whether it’s NSA-proof open.
A 5.7 magnitude earthquake rocked southeastern Alaska, about 73km from Haines, near Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve.
The earthquake hit on Wednesday at 11:58 GMT southwest of Haines, which has a population of over 2,500 people. The epicenter was 10km deep, according to United States Geological Survey. Continue reading “5.7 magnitude earthquake hits Alaska”
Baseball-sized hail has pounded homes and cars across Nebraska, as powerful thunderstorms swept the Midwest, wreaking extensive damage, severe flooding and even reportedly tornado touchdowns in some areas.