Year: 2015

RT

The cost of the Affordable Care Act is turning out to be 20 percent cheaper than expected, but millions of Americans are projected to remain uninsured due to a number of issues associated with the law.

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)’s latest projections on federal health spending, the US government will spend approximately $600 billion less than previously estimated between 2011-2020. Back in 2010, the agency predicted that total federal health spending would top $11 trillion. Additionally, CBO’s report stated that the ACA’s health insurance provisions will cost 20 percent less than first anticipated.   Continue reading “Cost of Obamacare drops but millions to stay uninsured”

Mail.com

BOSTON (AP) — Frigid temperatures descended on the northern tier of the country, and while it’s not the coldest weather of the season, the biting chill followed a powerful snowstorm from the Midwest into the Northeast.

According to the National Weather Service, people from Montana to Maine are dealing with sub-zero wind chill temperatures. Temperatures plunged to as low as minus-25 degrees in parts of upstate New York early Tuesday, a day after a storm dumped more than a foot of snow from Buffalo to the Hudson Valley. The National Weather Service said it was 25 below before dawn in Glens Falls, 45 miles north of Albany, and minus-21 in Watertown, near Lake Ontario’s eastern end.   Continue reading “Frigid temperatures stretching from Montana to Maine”

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MLive – by Roberto Acosta

LAPEER COUNTY, MI — An 11-year-old girl was able to scare off a suspect — later taken into custody — during a home invasion in Lapeer County’s North Branch Township.

Deputies from the Lapeer County Sheriff’s Department responded around 3:45 p.m. Friday, Jan. 30 to a Five Lakes Road home where the girl was home alone when a vehicle pulled into the driveway.   Continue reading “11-year-old uses shotgun to scare off suspect during Lapeer County home invasion”

The American Conservative – by Sydney Schanberg

TAC publisher Ron Unz discovered an astonishing account of the role the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, had played in suppressing information about what happened to American soldiers missing in action in Vietnam. Below, we present in full Sydney Schanberg’s explosive story.

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John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn’t return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.   Continue reading “McCain and the POW Cover-Up”

Courthouse News – by VICTORIA PRIESKOP

ALBUQUERQUE (CN) – A small-town New Mexico mayor had two women in their seventies maliciously prosecuted when they questioned how she was using money for the senior center, the surviving woman claims in court.

Floy Watson and the Estate of Doris Lark sued the Village of Tijeras, Mayor Gloria Chavez, the senior center manager and a deputy village clerk, on Jan. 27 in Bernalillo County Court. Tijeras, pop. 550, is east of Albuquerque.   Continue reading “Small-Town Politics: a Big Court Headache”

LA Times – by Maura Dolan

The hearing seemed largely routine until a state prosecutor approached the lectern.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Kevin R. Vienna was there to urge three judges on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold murder convictions against Johnny Baca for two 1995 killings in Riverside County. Other courts had already determined that prosecutors had presented false evidence in Baca’s trial but upheld the verdicts anyway.   Continue reading “U.S. judges see ‘epidemic’ of prosecutorial misconduct in California”

Press TV

Press TV has conducted an interview with Ken O’Keefe, a peace activist and former US Marine from London, to discuss Washington’s major role in either generating or aggravating most of the current crises across the world and allowing groups like the ISIL Takfiri terrorists to foster and grow.

O’Keefe argued the United States can no longer deny the fact that it is funding, arming and training the terrorist groups through its proxies in the Middle East.   Continue reading “US can no longer deny its support for ISIL: Activist”

Liberty Blitzkrieg – by Michael Krieger

During the fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2014, U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF) deployed to 133 countries — roughly 70% of the nations on the planet — according to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bockholt, a public affairs officer with U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM).  This capped a three-year span in which the country’s most elite forces were active in more than 150 different countries around the world, conducting missions ranging from kill/capture night raids to training exercises.  And this year could be a record-breaker.  Only a day before the failed raid that ended Luke Somers life — just 66 days into fiscal 2015 — America’s most elite troops had already set foot in 105 nations, approximately 80% of 2014’s total. Continue reading “The Golden Age of Black Ops – In Fiscal 2015 U.S. Special Forces Have Already Deployed to 105 Nations”

Yahoo News

LAGRANGE, Ga. (AP) — A Georgia man charged in the deaths of his wife, three of her family members and a friend was arrested at a bus station in Tupelo, Mississippi, authorities said Monday.

Investigators suspect the victims had been dead for three days when deputies found them late Saturday, Troup County Sheriff James Woodruff said. A worried employer had called to report one of the victims missing from work.

The suspect, Thomas J. Lee, 26 was arrested after telling a Mississippi pastor that he was having car trouble and needed to get to Opelika, Alabama, Woodruff said. The pastor helped get Lee a bus ticket, but called police later when he realized authorities were searching for him.   Continue reading “Ga. man suspected of killing 5 arrested in Mississippi”

BATR

A half century ago the infamous and timeworn trope coming from the supporters of the Viet Nam War was all over the airwaves. “Love It or Leave It” was the standard retort from the gung-ho believers to the anti-war activists, who filled the streets with civil disobedience. An entire era of youth came under suspicion, from fathers of that “Greatest Generation” for questioning the purpose and wisdom of American leaders and the military policy that drafted dissenting objectors into coercive service.

Now with the undying “War on Terror” as the trumped up cornerstone of government survival, the same old party line of jingoism rises again to smear any opposition of the all mighty war machine.   Continue reading “Love It or Leave It”

Mail.com

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — An assistant director at a child advocacy organization followed and shot his supervisor as she waited at a bus stop so she couldn’t report him for stealing about $40,000 from the organization, police said Monday.

After the slaying last month, Randolph Sanders told a television station that he was “stunned” by the death of 56-year-old Kim Jones, a mother of two. “She was incredibly happy,” Sanders said in the interview with WPVI-TV in Philadelphia. “So this is — this is just disturbing.”   Continue reading “Cops: Man killed supervisor so she couldn’t report his theft”

Mail.com

INDIO, Calif. (AP) — A big-rig hauling frozen chicken collided with a truck carrying bees in Southern California, igniting a fireball that quickly cooked the chicken.

The California Highway Patrol says the crash on Interstate 10 near Palm Springs occurred shortly after 7 a.m. Monday. The truck with the chickens burst into flames and was incinerated, but the driver escaped with minor injuries.   Continue reading “Trucks carrying frozen chicken, bees collide in fiery crash”