The head of the International Monetary Fund on Thursday signalled that the IMF would not agree to let Greece delay a scheduled bailout payment, saying the Fund needed to protect its sterling reputation as a global lender.

Greece is fast running out of cash and its euro zone and IMF lenders have frozen bailout aid until the new leftist-led government in Athens reaches agreement on a package of reforms.

That has raised fears the Greek government will not be able to make its next payments to the IMF, which total some $1 billion (0.67 billion pounds) over the next month.

Point-of-Sale (PoS) terminals have become an attractive target for hackers over the past year, reflected in the increasing number of RAM-scraping programs that steal payment card information from the memory of such systems.

Last month security researchers from Cisco Systems issued a warning about a new PoS threat dubbed PoSeidon and on Wednesday security blogger Brian Krebs reported that the program has already infected PoS terminals at restaurants, bars and hotels in the U.S.

Security researchers from Trustwave now warn that during a recent investigation with the U.S. Secret Service, they’ve uncovered yet another RAM-scraping PoS threat they’ve named Punkey.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the United States Army have almost certainly been buying questionable remote access hacking tools for years from an Italian company called Hacking Team, via an obscure American reseller called Cicom USA.

Hacking Team openly advertises what it calls its "Remote Control System," (RCS) a piece of malware remotely installed on a target’s computer or smartphone. As the company touts: "Evidence collection on monitored devices is stealth and transmission of collected data from the device to the RCS server is encrypted and untraceable."

A flaw in the wildly popular online game Minecraft makes it easy for just about anyone to crash the server hosting the game, according to a computer programmer who has released proof-of-concept code that exploits the vulnerability.

"I thought a lot before writing this post," Pakistan-based developer Ammar Askar wrote in a blog post published Thursday, 21 months, he said, after privately reporting the bug to Minecraft developer Mojang. "On the one hand I don't want to expose thousands of servers to a major vulnerability, yet on the other hand Mojang has failed to act on it."

Whistleblowers beware: At least 29 US government agencies' websites that allow the online reporting of abuse, waste, and fraud are not encrypted with HTTPS, according to a survey by the American Civil Liberties Union unveiled Thursday.

"When individuals use these official whistleblowing channels to report waste, fraud, or abuse, the information they submit is transmitted insecurely over the Internet, where it can be intercepted by others. This not only puts the identity of whistleblowers at risk, but also the confidentiality of the information they provide to inspectors general," the rights group said in a letter to Tony Scott, chief information officer for the Office of Management & Budget.

The British military is accused of failing to protect its soldier’s mental health

Efforts to legalize marijuana suffered a defeat in court Wednesday when a judge upheld the constitutionality of a 1970 federal law that classifies cannabis as a dangerous drug akin to LSD and heroin. U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller, announcing her decision at a hearing in Sacramento, said she could not lightly overturn a law passed by Congress.

Serbia will arrest the vice-premier and foreign minister of the self-proclaimed Republic of Kosovo, Hashim Thaci, on war crimes charges if he arrives in Belgrade, Serbian Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic told journalists on Thursday.
"If Thaci arrives in Belgrade, police will act according to the law and will bring him to justice," he said.
Kosovo’s Deputy Foreign Minister Petrit Selimi said earlier that Thaci was planning to visit Belgrade to attend a conference organized by the Ambassadors of Peace non-governmental public organization.
Serbian War Crimes Prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic said that the arrest warrant for Thaci was still valid and that Kosovo’s foreign minister could be arrested in Belgrade.
Serbia considers Thaci, a leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, to be a war criminal.

Separate Western groups are taking revenge on Azerbaijan and Turkey for not joining the union against Russia, Azerbaijani president’s public-political adviser Ali Gasanov said on Thursday, commenting on the adoption of a resolution on Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire adopted by the European Parliament.
According to Gasanov, such resolutions appear as a result of "attempts by certain circles to secure their own interests." "These circles are also taking revenge on Turkey and Azerbaijan for their refusal to join the anti-Russian union that is currently being formed," Gasanov said.

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com

Bankruptcies are mounting in some of the biggest firms, even as the appearance of normalcy remains. But cash injections will likely keep the largest corporate-corpses going on and on.

How much trouble does this signal for an already troubling economy?

Wolf Street reported on how the oil bust is surfacing in the form of bankruptcies – along with a string of major bankruptcies in other sectors including casinos, securities, electronics (Radio Shack, the once huge chain) and at least one health care provider in the top 15 pending bankruptcies for the year:

[I]t’s not just in Houston or in the oil patch. It’s in retail, healthcare, mining, finance…. Bankruptcies are suddenly booming, after years of drought.

Just one of many bloodbaths unleashed by the First World War, the Armenian Genocide of 1915 has long been a source of diplomatic conflict with the modern state of Turkey. The Turkish state, which sees itself, apparently, as the successor state of the Ottoman Empire which perpetrated the genocide, is known to go nuts whenever anyone uses the word “genocide” in reference to the massacres.

Remains of more human bodies have been found at the site of last year's crash of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine, the chief of the international investigating mission, Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg, said on Thursday.
In addition, the search experts were approached by several local residents who handed personal belongings of the jet's passengers to them.
Aaldersberg clarified that the belongings were items of jewelry.
Dutch forensic specialists have established identities of 296 out of the 298 persons who died in the July 17, 2014, crash. The searchers hope to find the remains of another two persons now.

Lawrence Davidson highlights the wilful distortions, prejudice and hypocrisy underlying a Zionist advertisement campaign targeting a historical Palestinian leader and Muslims in general, now underway in the Philadelphia area in the USA.

New data gathered by a nonprofit details thousands of Americans killed at the hands of police.

We can't have a strong country without strong infrastructure.

Earlier this week, Josh and Vanessa Ellis and their 8-month-old son Hudson were killed after debris from a highway overpass in Bonney Lake, Washington fell onto their pickup truck as they were driving through.

Chief editor Khmelnytsky media Olga Moroz was found in the apartment with traces of violent death.
This was reported to news Agency "Telekritika" with reference to the Management of the Ministry of internal Affairs of Ukraine in Khmelnytsky region.
"Killed Olga Moroz - chief editor of "Netechinskiy vestnik", the body was found in her apartment with traces of violent death," he reported, "Telekritika" .
According to preliminary information, the victim kept a journalistic investigation on illegal deforestation.
Netishyn is a city in Khmelnytskyi oblast, with a population of 35 thousand people.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said during a live Q&A program that it was acceptable to lift the ban on selling the S-300 anti-aircraft missile system to Iran because Tehran is “demonstrating a lot of flexibility and an obvious desire to reach a compromise on their nuclear program.” “In effect, all participants in the process have announced that an agreement has been reached.

Neocons have turned the Middle East into a quagmire, Afghanistan into a war without end, and disgraced the U.S. in Latin America and Africa. As a result of the Neocons' bellicose rhetoric, and policies of militarily encircling China and Russia, they have set off another arms race and Cold War 2.0.

After getting a patent for giving robots personalities last month, Google now wants to unleash an army of Rodney Dangerfield bots on the world. In a patent awarded today, the company outlines a system for “allocating tasks to a plurality of robotic devices.” This sounds innocuous enough—it could mean linking a series of factory robots together, or perhaps a gaggle of Roombas to clean a large house—but the potential is much greater.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative, the agency responsible for negotiating two massive upcoming trade deals, is being led by former lobbyists for corporations that stand to benefit from the deals, according to disclosure forms obtained by The Intercept. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a proposed free trade accord between the U.S. and 11 Pacific Rim countries; the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a similar agreement between the U.S. and the E.U.

Amnesty International and others won an historic victory today as the legal body that oversees the practices of the UK secret services acknowledged that the USA and the UK’s intelligence sharing on communications surveillance violated human rights law.

Michael Chertoff , co-author of the Patriot Act, a set of laws that provided the US government with broad surveillance powers in the wake of 9/11, is unashamedly proud of what he built.

It turns out that one of congress' top recipients of political contributions from banks is obsessed with conspiracy theories and often demonizes the internet as a haven for extremism. Yesterday CA Rep. Ed Royce 'accused people on YouTube of using "raw violence" to advance conspiracy theories.' Digging a little deeper, a search of Royce's website reveals the 63 year-old's ongoing obsession with 9/11 "conspiracy theories," combatting anti-semitism, and the holocaust. He even repeatedly alleges that his father, a WWII vet, "documented on film the ovens with bodies stacked like cord wood" at Dachau.

The World Bank has repeatedly violated its own policies on protecting the rights of indigenous people by funding projects that forced nearly 3.4 million slum-dwellers, farmers and villagers from their homes and jobs over the past decade, according to documents seen by the Guardian.

Iran’s defense minister says the Saudi aggression against Yemen has been authorized by the United States and the Israeli regime, calling for an immediate end to the deadly assaults.

Addressing the Fourth Moscow International Security Conference on Thursday, Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan said the Saudi government unleashed deadly air raids against Yemen once it received the green light from the United States and Israel, and was promised military cooperation by some regional states.

He added that not only will the Saudi regime fail to achieve its “illegitimate” purposes in Yemen, but will also suffer a heavy defeat and precipitate its downfall, said Dehqan, adding a fate similar to that of former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, awaits Riyadh’s ruler.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has defended Moscow’s recent decision to deliver S-300 air defense system to Iran, saying the system is meant for deterrence amid the developments in war-torn Yemen.

He made the remarks during his annual televised question-and-answer session with the nation at Gostiny Dvor (Merchant Yard) exhibition hall in the Russian capital city of Moscow on Thursday.

“This is a defensive weapons system. More than that, considering the situation that is building up in the region, especially regarding the incidents in Yemen, we think that the delivery of this kind of weapon is a preventive factor,” Putin said.

The comments come as Yemen has been the scene of deadly aerial assaults by Saudi Arabia since March 26. The attacks have so far killed some 2,600 people, according to Yemeni sources.

U.S. consumers are coming into awareness about how their food affects their health and want superior products, which sadly, aren't always available here....yet.

Conservative Party candidates are bankrolled by hedge fund donations siphoned to Westminster from lucrative tax havens including the Cayman Islands, new analysis suggests.

Secret-spilling group WikiLeaks has taken the trove of documents stolen during last year’s colossal Sony Pictures Entertainment hack and made them searchable through a new database to show “the inner workings of an influential multinational corporation.”

Stephen Lendman
RINF Alternative News

They want unconditional surrender. They want what they won't get.

Blaming victims is one of Washington's dirtiest games. Naked aggression is called liberation. Humanitarian intervention is claimed.

Mass slaughter and destruction are considered democracy-building measures. Plundering countries for profit is called economic development.

If the Federal Government and its lackeys win, the Iron Bell of tyranny will ring, and those reverberations will be felt throughout the United States.

Stephen Lendman
RINF Alternative News

Israel commemorates Yom HaShoah/Holocaust Remembrance Day annually. Vad Vashem is its official holocaust memorial.

Netanyahu exploited the occasion this year like earlier. He denigrated the memory of millions of Jewish and non-Jewish WW II victims.

An expat Englishman, who runs a farm not far from Moscow, has grilled the Russian president and asked where Putin gets his statistics.

A little anecdote about an occurrence sometime in September 1960 sheds light on the development of U.S. perceptions that Israel was being less than honest about Dimona. That month, Addy Cohen, then the young director of the Foreign Aid Office at the Israeli Finance Ministry, hosted U.S. ambassador to Israel Ogden Reid and some of his senior staff for a tour of the Dead Sea Works—a large Israeli potash plant in Sdom, on the Dead Sea coast of Israel. The Israeli Air Force provided a Sikorsky S-58 helicopter to fly the American group from Tel Aviv to Sdom. As they were returning on the helicopter, near the new town of Dimona, Reid pointed to a huge industrial site under heavy construction and asked what it was.
Note: It wasn't hidden at all the whole world knew it!!

By now, you may have heard the story about how two TSA agents at Denver International Airport were fired recently after it was revealed that they had worked out a scam by which one agent was able to grope and fondle the genitals of male passengers he found attractive. The plan involved him signalling to a colleague who was working the scanning computer.

"I'm tired of you people. What do you want?"
That's how Chris Christie talks to educators, in this case an elementary school teacher who also runs an after school program. Christie is convinced teachers are overpaid, and as long as he's been governor, he seems to be on a crusade to bully New Jersey's educators, calling them "overpaid," "greedy" and accused their "me first" salaries of killing jobs.

“One of the police officers said, ‘Ma’am, if you want to pray, go to church.’”

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, speaking in Austin, bemoaned widening income differences between the country’s very rich and the rest of us.
And in his remarks at a South Austin union hall, the Vermont independent mulling a run for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination also warned about American failures to save money. "Here’s something not talked about, something that can make us all very, very nervous," Sanders said. "Half of all Americans have less than $10,000 in their savings account.

ed note–again, at the risk of over-repeating myself, let us just imagine…

Candidate X, kicking off campaign, attacks Obama on Ireland…

or…

Candidate X, kicking off campaign, attacks Obama on Italy…

or…

Candidate X, kicking off campaign, attacks Obama on Iceland…

or…

Candidate X, kicking off campaign, attacks Obama on India…

or…

Candidate X, kicking off campaign, attacks Obama on Indonesia…

etc, etc, etc…

Did he kick off his campaign expressing his loyalty to the American people whom he is supposed to be working?

ANYONE kissing the ass of a foreign power in such a way would be pilloried for doing so…

Unless of course that ass belongs to the Jewish state.

Bloggers, conspiracy theorists and people who challenge establishment narratives on the Internet were all likened to ISIS terrorists during a chilling Congressional hearing which took place yesterday.

Hundreds of Los Angeles workers and community members gathered Wednesday in the neighborhood surrounding the University Park campus to rally for an increase in the minimum wage from $9 to $15.25 with enforcement provisions and paid sick leave.

Part of a national effort, the demonstration, organized by the coalition Raise the Wage LA, was called “Fight for $15 on 4/15” and began in downtown Los Angeles early Wednesday morning.

Fairfax County police say one of their officers has been arrested for child pornography. Officer William “Bud” Walker was arrested Wednesday afternoon at police headquarters and charged with two counts of child pornography possession.

If you don’t believe progressive educators in the public school system are doing their best to indoctrinate your children with all kinds of wacky ideas, you either have an identity crisis, believing yourself to be an ostrich and burying your head in the sand, or you’re one of “them.”

“The cost of doing business.” That’s what corporations call it when they claim a deduction from their taxes for the damage they’ve done to people and the planet. It’s a cost of doing business all right; a cost to us, of doing business with them the way we currently do it, and it’s just one of the reasons so many people are calling for a whole new system.

As Techdirt has reported previously, the UK government is so reflexively secretive that it even refuses to confirm or deny information that it has previously confirmed. The Intercept reports on another absurd case of completely trivial requests for information being turned down because "terrorism". It's refusing to reveal either the job title or salary of Cressida Dick, a top government official in some apparently mysterious role.

Cal Poly Pomona vows to respect your free speech rights, provided you inform the administration 10 days in advance, are granted permission to speak and are willing to wear a speech permit while remaining in the properly-designated area. That's just not how free speech works. Tomas is hoping his lawsuit will result in the school's policies being found unconstitutional. Even if Tomas can't get the constitutionality declaration and permanent injunction he's requesting (along with damages and costs), maybe his efforts will push the school to reconsider its policies.

Seventeen new genetically modified food products will be authorised for import to Europe before the end of May in a significant acceleration of biotech trade, the Guardian has learned.

An announcement could be made as early as next week, sources said, when a meeting of EU commissioners has been pencilled in to review adoption of new rules for approving GM imports.

Europe currently imports around 58 GM products from abroad, mostly US maize, cotton, soy bean and sugar beet.

Touchscreen voting machines used in numerous elections between 2002 and 2014 used “abcde” and “admin” as passwords and could easily have been hacked from the parking lot outside the polling place, according to a state report.

Bolivia’s President Evo Morales has blamed U.S. President Barack Obama for the failure of the recent OAS (Organization of American States) Summit of the Americas to issue a final declaration, and he says that a major sticking point for Mr. Obama was Obama’s opposition to a provision in the proposed declaration that would have said that health care is “a human right.” Mr. Obama insisted that it’s instead a privilege, access to which must be based primarily upon an individual’s ability-to-pay, as is the case in the United States.

A federal judge handed General Motors a multi-billion-dollar reprieve Wednesday, ruling that the company could not be sued in hundreds of death and injury claims related to the defective ignition switches that are estimated to have killed more than 80 people.

Whenever Chicago Police commander Jon Burge needed a confession, he would walk into the interrogation room and set down a little black box, his alleged victims would later tell prosecutors. The box had two wires and a crank. Burge, they alleged, would attach one wire to the suspect’s handcuffed ankles and the other to his manacled hands. Then, they said, Burge would place a plastic bag over the suspect’s head. Finally, he would crank his little black box and listen to the screams of pain as electricity coursed through the suspect’s body.

Following hours of hearing several hundred parents voice their opposition to the controversial SB277, the bill that would remove the personal and religious exemptions and would require mandatory vaccines for children attending public or private schools, was going to fail the Senate Committee Hearing. The State Capitol was flooded with a line of parents that filled the halls and extended out the building doors and into the grounds surrounding the building. One by one people filed in and gave their name, city of residence, and stated their opposition to the proposed bill. The Senate Education Committee held it’s hearing concerning the portion of the bill that would exclude children whose parents have chosen not to vaccinate them from schooling.

Iran the new Nazis says Netanyahu during Holocaust rememberance

This is a factual list of facilities available to prisoners at the alleged Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in Poland.

Most of these facilities can still be seen in the camp today, including the cinema, swimming pool, hospital, library and post office. (and brothel building right at the main gate)

The software system for maintaining the F-35 fighter jet gives false-positive readings 80 percent of the time, the House Armed Services subcommittee has learned – a problem that could lead to even more delays with the jet’s development.

A Holocaust survivor's acclaimed memoir about meeting his future wife across the wire fence of a concentration camp has been exposed as a fraud.
Note: Don't ask what is false about the holocau$t ask what is true...not very much!

A Holocaust survivor memoir that has received prestigious literary awards and lavish praise has been exposed as a hoax.
Jewish groups and major American newspapers have warmly praised Fragments. The New York Times called it "stunning," and the Los Angeles Times lauded it as a "classic first-hand account of the Holocaust." It received the 1996 National Jewish Book Award for Autobiography and Memoir, while in Britain it was awarded the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize, and in France the Prix Memoire de la Shoah.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC -- a federal government agency -- was so impressed that it sent Wilkomirski on a six-city United States fund-raising tour last fall.

Putin defends Iran missile decision during call-in show

President Vladimir Putin sternly urged the West to respect Russia's interests in global affairs and defended his move to sanction the delivery of a long-range air defense missile system to Iran during a marathon TV call-in show with the nation Thursday.

Putin scathingly criticized Washington for refusing to see Moscow as an equal partner and warned that Russia-West ties, in shambles over the Ukrainian crisis, could only be normalized when the U.S. and its allies show readiness for compromise.

He also described the killing of top Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov as "tragic and shameful" and commended police for quickly tracking down the perpetrators, but said he wasn't certain if Russian law-enforcement agencies would be able to track down those who organized it.

There is serious money to be made in outer space, where the Department of Defense is planning to spend billions of dollars with private industry to ensure the protection of government satellites and the computer systems that work with them. Pentagon officials recently told members of Congress that they want to spend $5.5 billion by 2020 on ways to improve the security, presumably both physical and digital, of government satellites, which are primarily defense oriented. The money also will go towards shielding ground stations and computer networks that collect data provided by satellites.

In her book, Defonseca, now 76, recounted trekking through the forests of Europe after her parents were arrested by the Nazis, at one point living with wolves and fatally stabbing a Nazi soldier — all while she was between the ages of 7 and 11.

Artificial flavourings in e-cigarettes are largely the same as those used in the manufacture of certain foods and confectionery.

As a result they are often represented as being safe by e-cigarette manufacturers.

But, the US Flavour Extracts Manufacturers Association notes, the measure of safety is related to exposure through eating, rather than inhalation.