Today in Texas, former prosecutor and judge Ken Anderson pled guilty to intentionally failing to disclose evidence in a case that sent an innocent man, Michael Morton, to prison for the murder of his wife. When trying the case as a prosecutor, Anderson possessed evidence that may have cleared Morton, including statements from the crime's only eyewitness that Morton wasn't the culprit. Anderson sat on this evidence, and then watched Morton get convicted. While Morton remained in prison for the next 25 years, Anderson's career flourished, and he eventually became a judge.

In today's deal, Anderson pled to criminal contempt, and will have to give up his law license, perform 500 hours of community service, and spend 10 days in jail. Anderson had already resigned in September from his position on the Texas bench.

Google translate: At the disposal of "Izvestia" has documents Counterintelligence Department Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia, confirming that the Georgian organization "Caucasian fund" to cooperate with the US non-profit organization "Jamestown" (the board of directors of NGOs previously entered one of the ideologists of US foreign policy, Zbigniew Brzezinski), was engaged in recruiting residents North Caucasus to work in the interests of the United States and Georgia.

According to the reports of Colonel Chief Directorate Counterintelligence Department Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia Gregory Chanturia to the Minister of Internal Affairs Irakli Garibashvili, "Caucasian fund" in cooperation with the Foundation "Jamestown" in the summer of 2012 conducted workshops and seminars for young people of the Caucasus, including its Russian part. Some of them attended Tsarnaev Tamerlane, who was in Russia from January to July 2012.

Newly released documents obtained via NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have revealed that the CIA attempted for a decade to gain access to data on Apple’s i devices as part of the intelligence establishment’s continued mass spying program.

“Studying both ‘physical’ and “non-invasive” techniques, U.S. government-sponsored research has been aimed at discovering ways to decrypt and ultimately penetrate Apple’s encrypted firmware,” The Intercept report by Glenn Greenwald states.

The CIA set its sights on accessing user data on iPhones and iPads all over the globe, according to the documents, as well as attempting to introduce backdoors to the devices, in order to monitor them at will.

So now that it’s proven that New Zealand does exactly that which Prime Minister Key vowed would cause him to resign if it were proven, is he preparing his resignation speech? No: that’s something a political official with a minimal amount of integrity would do. Instead – even as he now refuses to say what he has repeatedly said before: that GCSB does not engage in mass surveillance – he’s simply retracting his pledge as though it were a minor irritant, something to be casually tossed aside:

Something remarkable is taking place in Russia, and it’s quite different from what we might expect. Rather than feel humiliated and depressed Russia is undergoing what I would call a kind of renaissance, a rebirth as a nation. This despite or in fact because the West, led by the so-called neo-conservatives in Washington, is trying everything including war on her doorstep in Ukraine, to collapse the Russian economy, humiliate Putin and paint Russians generally as bad. In the process, Russia is discovering positive attributes about her culture, her people, her land that had long been forgotten or suppressed.

An ancient stone tool, carved from a piece of agate, was recently uncovered in the high desert of Oregon. Most significantly, the tool was unearthed from beneath an undisturbed layer of ash linked to a Mount St. Helens eruption 15,800 years ago.

"When we had the volcanic ash identified, we were stunned because that would make this stone tool one of the oldest artifacts in North America," excavation leader Patrick O'Grady, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon, said in a press release. "Given those circumstances and the laws of stratigraphy, this object should be older than the ash."

As there is no money in solving murders or preventing rapes, police departments in America have focused their duties on traffic citations and the drug war. Both of these venues are highly profitable for departments.

City and state governments have become so addicted to these revenue streams that we are now seeing full-on military raids on people in fruitless attempts to find drugs and money. Along with the drug raids, we are seeing police officers forced to collect a certain amount of revenue through traffic enforcement, or risk losing their jobs.

Over the weekend, 4 more state troopers from Tennessee exposed their department for enforcing a quota system. There would be many more according to the troopers, but their fellow cops are afraid to speak up for fear of retaliation.

The Apple Watch may be pretty... but you are going to need up to 8 of them to make it through a full day. While Tim Cook proclaimed 18 hours of "all-day battery-life" - itself not particularly impressive compared to competing products, hidden deep in Apple Watch's product page is a little admission that battery life (in use) could be as low as 3 hours...

Health and Human Services has extended the comment period for The National Adult Immunization Plan (NAIP) that was published in the Federal Register on February 6, 2015, Volume 80, Number 25, pages 6721-6722, from March 9th to Monday, March 23rd, 2015.

Comments can be sent via the U.S. Postal Service or electronically by Internet email to the following addresses:

• Electronic responses are preferred and may be addressed to: Rebecca.Fish@hhs.gov.

• Written responses should be addressed to: National Vaccine Program Office, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 200 Independence Avenue SW., Room 733G, Washington, DC 20201.

In case you’re not familiar with SSL and its successor TLS, what you should know is that they're the most important security protocols on the Internet. In a world full of untrusted networks, SSL and TLS are what makes modern communication possible.

Or rather, that’s the theory. In practice, SSL and TLS have been a more like a work in progress. In part this is because they were developed during an era when modern cryptographic best practices weren't nailed down yet. But more to the point: it's because even when the crypto is right, many software implementations still get things wrong.

With all that in mind, there’s a third aspect of SSL/TLS that doesn't get nearly as much attention. That is: the SSL protocol itself was deliberately designed to be broken.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

Mayoral candidate Jesus "Chuy" Garcia got the endorsement of the Rev. Jesse Jackson on Monday as both the challenger and Mayor Rahm Emanuel compete for the crucial African-American vote ahead of next month's runoff election.

Hillary Clinton’s expected presidential campaign is being built around women’s issues, but women who have gotten in the way of her family’s political goals in the past have often been subjected to her wrath.

As Clinton has appeared at multiple events for women over the past several weeks, her record as an advocate for women has come under increased scrutiny.

The group’s Valentine’s Day meeting in Bryan had barely started at a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall — each woman in the audience had been handed a rose — when several local, state and federal law enforcement officials burst through the door. No one was arrested in the raid, which included F.B.I. agents, but dozens of the group’s supporters were detained. Some were fingerprinted, and cellphones and briefcases were confiscated from others.

The authorities said the raid was part of an investigation into a batch of letters the Republic of Texas had sent to a judge and a lawyer in Kerrville, Tex. They noted that those with ties to the group have taken their nationalist beliefs to violent extremes in the past, including a seven-day standoff with the authorities in 1997 that ended with a gun battle in which one group member was killed. The group’s leaders said that officials behind the recent raid had overreacted with a show of force and that the letters were lawful.

An undisclosed number of former Caesars Entertainment Corp. employees have lost their retirement income because of the casino company’s bankruptcy restructuring of its largest operating division.

The retired employees were notified by the company through a form letter/memorandum that was sent Jan. 15, the same day Caesars Entertainment Operating Co. filed a pre-packaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan in Chicago that is expected to eliminate $10 billion of debt.

It's always the e-mails.

Warren Trepp was getting ready to take his friends, then-Rep. Jim Gibbons and his wife, Dawn, on an expensive cruise in 2005, a cruise Trepp had paid for, when his wife sent him a reminder e-mail:

"I know you are busy," Jal Trepp wrote, according to documents in possession of the Justice Department. "Please don't forget to bring the money you promised Jim and Dawn on the trip."

An alarmed Trepp responded: "Don't you ever send this kind of message to me! Erase this message from your computer now!"

Stick a fork in the now proven wrong theory that plunging gas prices would boost consumer spending. Why? Because 4 months after the full impact of tumbling gas price was said to become apparent, consumer spending is not only not picking up, it is in fact slowing down more, especially in those places where there was snow in the winter, and gasp, where oil price actually fell the most!

Ridiculous? No. This is what the latest Bank of America card data survey reveals.

In 2009, all children under five were invited to be vaccinated in a nationwide scheme.

Fortunately, the much-feared 2009-2010 outbreak never reached the pandemic scale expected. But Claire is convinced that the vaccine against it has left Mathilda with severe narcolepsy.

First section: this attempted to make a big deal of the fact that the world has warmed by around 0.85 degrees since 1880. But as Booker notes, this isn’t really the issue of contention.

What she left out was that there has been nothing unprecedented about our recent warming. As the world has generally warmed since emerging from the Little Ice Age 200 years ago, two earlier warming phases from natural causes, between 1860 and 1880 and from 1910 to 1940, were just as great as that of the last 30 years – before CO2 levels rose as they have done recently.

Second section: this sought to tell us that just as we can use models accurately to predict the future performance of premier league football clubs, so too we can rely on them to predict climate.

What he omitted to explain was that, in the past 17 years, the IPCC’s computer model predictions have turned out to be comprehensively wrong.

For most Americans, the fact that the United States has filed with the United Nations a document pledging to submit to UN military authority and to dismantle our own military capability in the process would seem unbelievable. The “progressives” have set us down that path and while it won’t happen overnight, they fully intend for it to happen.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has disavowed his 2009 speech supporting an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a two-state solution.

In a statement released by his right-wing Likud party on Sunday, the prime minister explicitly said that Tel Aviv would never withdraw from any part of the occupied territories, rejecting a key goal of the international community as he seeks to challenge hardliners in national elections on March 17.

“Israel will never make concessions, no withdrawals,” he said, “any territory ceded by Israel would fall in the hands of Islamic extremism, and terror groups, supported by Iran.”

To start with: the ‘new Cold War,’ against Russia, is something of a misnomer, because it differs from the original version, against the U.S.S.R., in that it’s already a hot war, which started in Ukraine as being the key proxy-state for the American Government’s chief foreign-policy aim, of defeating Russia; and it’s a war that is very bloody, and widely lied-about in both the U.S. and Europe, but that is discussed in Russia as if it were somehow the result of mere errors by Western powers, when in fact all of the Western leaders knew from the get-go that this was intended to be a lynching of Russia by Uncle Sam, and when the EU have been going along with this aim because the U.S. aristocracy supposedly have the interests of European aristocrats in mind and not only their own: it’s ’the Western Alliance,’ after all.

That the US military knowingly tested new weapons on US citizens (possibly in the thousands), wildlife or even its own soldiers is nothing new. Publicly available documents reveal how the US military has even released nerve gas in public areas, as well as farms, to see the effects on civilians and animals. This occurred during the 1960s, when the United States secretly tested both chemical and biological weapons on US soil, including releasing deadly nerve agents in Alaska and spraying bacteria over Hawaii.

On 23rd March Matt Campbell of Sussex, United Kingdom, will go to court against the BBC and will claim that the BBC is in violation of UK anti-terrorist legislation in the way that they have covered up evidence relating to 9/11 and evidence relating to the murder of his brother Geoff. Geoff Campbell was killed while inside the North Tower of the World Trade Centre on September 11th, 2001. Mr Campbell will claim that he has reasonable cause to believe that the BBC has been wilfully complicit in the deliberate cover up of vital and incontrovertible evidence relating to how his brother Geoff was killed and that as such the BBC is guilty of complicity with terrorism.

Downing Street has finally come clean over the TV debates. They've admitted that David Cameron only ever had one target audience: his backbenchers. And everyone else including Joe Public and the media can just go swivel. No way is he getting out of bed for them because he's scared.

The gap between richest and poorest has dramatically widened in the past decade as wealthy households paid off their debts and piled up savings following the financial crisis, a report warns today.

By contrast, the worst-off families are far less financially secure than before the recession triggered by the near- collapse of several major banks. They have an average of less than a week’s pay set aside and are more often in the red.

It’s the damning new book that lifts the lid on Tony and Cherie Blair’s lust for money. Yesterday, in our exclusive serialisation, we told how revelations about his relationship with a tycoon’s wife put a strain on the Blair marriage. Today we reveal how the couple are happy to sell their services to some of the world’s most repulsive tyrants . . .

A reporter posing as a Universal Credit adviser trainee was told not to tell claimants about a vital cash fund for clothes, bus fares or other expenses to help them into work.

The undercover journalist spent seven weeks working at the Department for Work and Pensions' (DWP) Bolton Universal Credit contact centre.

He was told by trainers not to bring up same-day advance payments for those struggling to make ends meet while they wait five weeks for the their first Universal Credit payment. These are among a number of extra changes benefits claimants can ask for - find out the full range here.

The reporter, working for Channel 4 Dispatches programme, was also told not to tell claimants about the Flexible Support Fund unless they specifically asked about it.

If Greeks are forced to choose between a restoration of their dignity or continued Troika humiliation, they will choose dignity, says the Greek prime minister

Rona Fairhead, the head of the BBC Trust, should consider resigning or be sacked as a result of revelations about her role at HSBC, Margaret Hodge has said.

Ms Fairhead was paid more than £500,000 by HSBC last year for non-executive roles, working the equivalent of one day a week.

She has faced criticism for her role as a non-executive director at HSBC after allegations that the bank's Swiss arm helped wealthy clients dodge millions in tax.

U.S. stocks are trading sharply lower as investors continue to grapple with the prospect of coming Federal Reserve rate hikes, the downside to a strong U.S. dollar and renewed weakness in the hard-hit oil patch.

Palestinian Authority security services have arrested some 50 members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the West Bank over the last two days, acting out of apparent fear that a terror attack in the coming days would give the Israeli election to Likud.

The campaign against RE/MAX, an American real estate firm that sells apartments in the settlements Israel is building in the occupied West Bank, is growing.

Last week, activists from around the US travelled to Las Vegas, Nevada to demonstrate at and disrupt RE/MAX’s annual convention held at the Mandalay Bay Casino and Hotel.

What’s with this world? It doesn’t matter what new technology surfaces, “How can we weaponize it?” is the overarching meme of the “powers that shouldn’t be” of self-appointed overlords.

It’s insane to the max.

How is it that the ruler (Benjamin Netanyahu) of a puny country (Israel) of 8.2 million (6.2 million Jews) with the 37th biggest economy (GDP in current prices) in the world dictates war policy and secures the willing submission of the legislature of the largest economy and most powerful military empire in the world?

What significance does Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress have, beyond the fact that he uses it as a platform to attack the elected President of the US, to denounce US peace negotiations and to demand that Congress adopt policies designed to precipitate a war with Iran?

Roughly 92% of voters opposed the initiative, known as “Energy Rather than VAT,” while 8% supported the measure, according to preliminary results from 13 of the country’s 26 cantons.

As early as the 1950s, Dupont knew just how dangerous C8 could be to human beings. In the name of profit, white collar criminals decided to ignore the facts.

DuPont dumped C8 chemicals into two local aquifers, whereupon West Virginia residents have been drinking the poisoned water for years.

DuPont knew since the 1980s that the chemical-water was causing birth defects, and could have acted then, but still chose to do nothing. 3M, one company who was using Teflon, even told DuPont that they didn’t want to use their product anymore due to the dangers it posed to public health.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that “troubling questions” are raised if reports are accurate that the White House is offering Arab states a “nuclear umbrella” to protect them from Iran.

U.S. Navy sailors exposed to radioactive fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster have been falling ill, even as the Defense Department insists that they were not exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. Many of the sailors have now joined in a class action lawsuit against Fukushima operators and builders Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), Toshiba, Hitachi, Ebasco and General Electric.

Even if they wanted to -- which many do not -- the sailors would be unable to sue the Navy. According to a Supreme Court ruling from the 1950s known as the Feres Doctrine, soldiers cannot sue the government for injuries resulting directly from their military service

So 47 Republican Senators from the, well, Senate of the United States bravely sent a letter to the leaders of Iran, explaining to them how our government works with respect to treaties and other foreign policy decisions. The letter is related to ongoing talks between the Obama administration and the Iranians over its nuclear program, and, no surprise here, it contains basic misinformation about the process of ratifying a treaty.

India has reportedly sealed a $25 billion arms deal with Russia for the development and purchase of 127 fifth-generation stealth fighter aircraft.

Iran's foreign minister says a letter from U.S. Republican lawmakers warning that any nuclear deal could be scrapped once President Barack Obama leaves office suggests the United States is "not trustworthy."

One of the tea party groups targeted by the IRS asked Congress Monday to demand the private emails of some agency employees, while a top committee chairman issued a request for instant-chat messages from the EPA, as the Clinton emails scandal begins to envelop other parts of the Obama administration.

The White House, meanwhile, tried to keep the burgeoning scandal at arm’s length, with spokesman Josh Earnest acknowledging President Obama and Mrs. Clinton did email, but insisting the White House followed all record-keeping laws, and the president didn’t know Mrs. Clinton was exclusively using a private email until reports surfaced last week.

The U.S. has a $210 trillion “fiscal gap” and “may well be in worse fiscal shape than any developed country, including Greece,” Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff told members of the Senate Budget Committee in written and oral testimony on Feb. 25.

“The first point I want to get across is that our nation is broke,” Kotlikoff testified. “Our nation’s broke, and it’s not broke in 75 years or 50 years or 25 years or 10 years. It’s broke today.

As the HPV vaccine controversy continues to smolder, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given the green light to a new version of the controversial vaccine – this one containing an alarmingly high level of aluminum, a known neurotoxin. In its hurry to approve the vaccine, the FDA also bypassed a critical safety step.

In its letter of approval to Merck, the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) committee approved the Gardasil 9 vaccine, stating it felt no need to refer the pharmaceutical giant’s application to the Vaccines and Related Biological application to the Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), charged with reviewing and evaluating data on the effectiveness, appropriate use, and safety of vaccines.

No, this is not a joke. Mainstream outlets are actually suggesting that climate change is responsible, albeit indirectly, for the creation of ISIS and the scores of Western-backed terrorists flooding Syria as well as the now international military involvement in the war.

This is merely the latest silly narrative being promoted by the likes of Slate, Wired, The Telegraph, NBC, and The Guardian among many others.Slate, by no means, is the sole purveyor of such abjectly stupid claims nor are the other media outlets listed above. Still, one need only read the Slate article to see how the “climate change is the real reason for the Syrian war” claim is being presented.

Slate, by no means, is the sole purveyor of such abjectly stupid claims nor are the other media outlets listed above. Still, one need only read the Slate article to see how the “climate change is the real reason for the Syrian war” claim is being presented.

Let it not be said that I have anything against particular sexual acts, I don't. It's more a matter of who is doing them and WHY; measuring in the cost to everyone else at the same time. Then Binnie goes and waves Elie the Weasel around at everyone. Elie is one of the most persistent and outrageous liars ever to waltz about on the world's state in the last hundred years. He's been exposed over and over again, he's even been exposed by other frauds.

You're wondering why it is taking so long for all of this to get done; for the world to change or sink under the weight of collective crimes... it is, so it can all be seen and seen and seen, so that even the densest among us can finally have their eyes opened.

Now what? Two months after McDonald's launched a massive revamped "I'm Lovin' It" ad campaign from Leo Burnett Chicago, the situation at the burger behemoth has grown even more dire.

McDonald's today reported that comparable restaurant sales in the United States February plummeted 4 percent year over year. McDonald's attributed the huge falloff not to weather — even though parts of the country had a pretty miserable February — but rather to "ongoing aggressive competitive activity."

n the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all—security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished foremost was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.

The latest example is Congressional violation of the Logan Act. Specifically, the Logan Act – enacted in 1799 – states:

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

The Logan Act was named for Dr. George Logan, a Pennsylvania state legislator (and later US Senator) who engaged in semi-negotiations with France in 1798 during the Quasi-War.

“After making, what I thought were positive changes, I started noticing I was getting bad headaches, and a tightness of my neck and back muscles. They started off as just something that would happen now and then, but increased to almost every night. I tried everything, and nothing worked!

“Finally, I took a step back and thought about each thing I had done differently in the last 6 months. Then it hit me! In trying to lower my sugar intake, I had swapped sugar in my tea and coffee for Equal. Could that be responsible for my headaches?

“I hit the net and feverishly started researching. I was horrified by what I saw, and found thousands of other cases like mine. So now I use a totally natural product called stevia…”

Many Americans are reluctant to speak out against a U.S. war. There are individual reasons for this: a sense of patriotism, the desire to support our troops, fear of reprisals, a lack of understanding about the political process, etc. Unfortunately, when we do not speak up, our elected officials do not receive sufficient feedback that we (their constituents) oppose a particular war. To demonstrate that advocating for peaceful solutions to international problems is an honorable and socially acceptable activity, the US Peace Memorial Foundation, Inc.:

Wim Grommen has been claiming for years that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a sham, because it is manipulated to push up the market.

Investment manager and writer Barry Ritholtz notes today:

The venerable Dow … remains deeply flawed in its methodology, driven rather arbitrarily by the price weightings of its constituents rather than their market values.

As 21WIRE informed its readers back in January, the legacy of the Charlie Hebdo debacle will not benefit freedom of speech or freedom of the press, rather, it will be used in order to restrict it further.

Since the Hebdo feel-good rally in Paris, the fervor has died down, while French officials have been busy locking up its citizens for various ‘speech violations’, and other thought crimes.

On Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) reiterated something that Republican leadership has been emphasizing since re-taking control of both houses of Congress:

"I made it very clear after the November election that we're certainly not going to shut down the government or default on the national debt. We'll figure some way to handle that. And hopefully, it might carry some other important legislation that we can agree on in connection with it," McConnell said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

She is suspected of cutting the child in the neck with a circular saw, according to a police department source who added that it is believed the woman wanted to stop the child from crying. Family members said the woman, who had been caring for the child, had been taking antidepressant medication, according to the police source.

The Essex Region Conservation Authority is warning residents of the risk of flooding this week because there is so much snow on the ground.

The revelations that US ally Abdelhakim Belhadj is now leading ISIS in Libya should come as no surprise to those who have followed US policy in that country, and throughout the region. It illustrates for the umpteenth time that Washington has provided aid and comfort to precisely those forces it claims to be fighting around the world.

The United States is waging a finance war against Moscow in a bid to weaken Russia to a point of economic and social destruction, the Austrian Contra magazine said, adding that this campaign goes against international law, WTO rules and bilateral agreements.

Remarkably, if the Quinnipiac University numbers can be believed, a majority of Americans want to send U.S. combat troops to Iraq and Syria to battle ISIS.

Latvia has confirmed more than 120 armored units, including tanks, have been delivered by the US. According to the Latvian Ministry of Defense, these include M1A2 Abrams tanks and M2A3 Bradley armored vehicles.

The move to deploy yet more tanks and armored vehicles was welcomed by Latvian Minister of Defense Raymond Vejonis.“The presence of our allies (US and NATO) in Latvia is a confirmation of solidarity and security in the region,” Vejonis said in a statement on Twitter.

It was supposed to be a carefully planned anniversary to mark one of the most important and widely praised moments in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s political career — and to remind the country, ahead of a likely 2016 presidential campaign, about her long record as a champion for the rights of women and girls.

Instead, as Mrs. Clinton commemorates her 1995 women’s rights speech in Beijing in back-to-back events in New York, she finds herself under attack for her family foundation’s acceptance of millions of dollars in donations from Middle Eastern countries known for violence against women and for denying them many basic freedoms.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Sukant Chandan, a filmmaker and political commentator from London, to discuss atrocities being committed by the ISIL militant group across the Middle East region.

The political commentator maintains that the US, Britain and France along with their regional allies have been in league with the ISIL in unleashing death squads to topple the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

With planes skidding off runways, snowdrifts as tall as houses and subzero temperatures for weeks on end, the US has suffered one of the most brutal winters on record.

Thousands of flights have been cancelled, highways and railways have been paralyzed by the cold and swaths of the northeast resemble a vast frozen tundra.

But if you thought your winter was bad spare a thought for the people of Plum Island, a tiny barrier island off the coast of Massachusetts buried under nearly 10ft of snow.

Its shivering residents have faced a daily battle to dig their homes free from mountains of ice while raw waste has spilled back into their homes because the sewers are frozen.

The only road off the island is so exposed that drivers have had to form long convoys before being escorted across in 'whiteout' conditions by the National Guard.

Zero Hedge reported: “HSBC admitted it has not informed customers of the change in policy, which was implemented in November for their own good: “We ask our customers about the purpose of large cash withdrawals when they are unusual… the reason being we have an obligation to protect our customers, and to minimise the opportunity for financial crime.” As one customer responded: “you shouldn’t have to explain to your bank why you want that money. It’s not theirs, it’s yours.”

Now there’s more trouble. Now we’re told that HSBC is “closing” its gold vaults.

Question: Was there anything in them to begin with?

Monsanto is now instantly recognized as the company dominating the global food supply with its more than 7000 current worldwide patents. But today’s Monsanto is not a corporate newcomer. Although its literature heralds the company as having a clear and principled code of conduct and a pledge to demonstrate integrity, respect, ethical behavior, and honesty in everything they do, the truth is that this company has a legacy of contamination and cover-up that dates back more than a century.

Lunatics running things in Washington make anything possible. Obama looks like Bush on steroids.

Neocons infest his administration and Congress. Permanent war on humanity more than ever is official US policy.

Ukraine is ground zero. Ongoing conflict risks the unthinkable - direct US confrontation with Russia risking nuclear war.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev warned Ukraine's conflict could "unavoidably lead to a nuclear war.."

Nuclear arms expert Steven Starr warned about things headed recklessly toward this possibility.

In yet another example of the growing trend of the process of acclimatization of the general public to an open military presence on American streets as well as greater cooperation between the US Military and civilian law enforcement, South Carolina was recently the scene of a statewide “emergency preparedness” drill that incorporated both of these aspects in a visible form.

A group of 47 Republican senators has written an open letter to Iran's leaders warning them that any nuclear deal they sign with President Barack Obama's administration won’t last after Obama leaves office.

Organized by freshman Senator Tom Cotton and signed by the chamber's entire party leadership as well as potential 2016 presidential contenders Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, the letter is meant not just to discourage the Iranian regime from signing a deal but also to pressure the White House into giving Congress some authority over the process.

Kelp off Southern California was contaminated with short-lived radioisotopes a month after Japan’s Fukushima accident, a sign that the spilled radiation reached the state’s urban coastline, according to a new scientific study.

Scientists from California State University, Long Beach tested giant kelp collected in the ocean off Orange County and other locations after the March, 2011 accident, and detected radioactive iodine, which was released from the damaged nuclear reactor.

The largest concentration was about 250-fold higher than levels found in kelp before the accident.

Kiev’s military 25 times opened fire at positions of militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), the self-proclaimed republic’s defence ministry reported on Sunday.

"Within last 24 hours, we registered about 25 times of opened fire, where nine were made at night," the Donetsk news agency quoted the ministry’s report.

The military say, the Ukrainian forces used tank artillery and 122mm mortars.

When Victoria Nuland, the neoconservative éminence grise of the Obama administration, uttered her now infamous "F—k the EU!" in a phone call with US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, it was a supremely embarrassing moment for Washington. Aside from the scandal of a top US official in referring to our European allies in such vulgar terms, not to mention the ease with which Russian intelligence tapped into presumably secure phone lines, the revelation of growing hostility between the US and the EU was akin to having the ugly domestic disputes of a supposedly happily married couple made public.

Uncle Sam – a wife-abuser? Could this formerly private dispute wind up in Divorce Court?

Having spent the last several months hyping their intended military training operation in Ukraine, US military officials in Europe are now confirming the plan is indefinitely on hold.

“The US government would like to see the Minsk agreement fulfilled,” a Pentagon statement said by way of an explanation, adding that the military “is prepared to carry out the mission if and when our government decides to move forward.”

Just call it Goretopia: While Hillary Rodham Clinton addresses multiple political challenges, the press continues to spiral off into speculation. Who is the Democratic standard bearer should she decide against running for president?

In the last 24 hours, Al Gore has made the list.

The authorities seem pretty confident that they got the right men. They are:

Zaur Dadaev – the supposed killer who, according to unconfirmed reports, was the deputy commander of the Chechen special operations battalion “Vostok”.
Shagit Gubashev
Anzor Gubashev
Khamzat Bakhaev
Tamerlan Eskerkhanov
Shagid Gubashev
Ramzan Bakhaev

The last two have not, as of this moment, been charged with anything.

This is a big group of people and it appears that the security services have caught if not the full network or gang, then at least most of it.

Researchers have said that an extreme drought in Syria, occurring between 2006-2009, was ‘most likely‘ caused by climate change and contributed to 2011?s violent uprising. A trend of rising temperatures in the region supposedly ‘matched computer simulations of how the region responds to increases in greenhouse-gas emissions’.

The White House on Monday slapped sanctions on seven Venezuelan officials, freezing their U.S. assets and banning them from entering the United States.

The measures were announced as President Barack Obama issued an executive order declaring a national emergency related to threats posed by Venezuela's political turmoil.

The State Department has faced a lot of questions about former Secretary Hillary Clinton's secret email account, but the most fundamental one is: Do you have them all? Officials at State have said repeatedly that Clinton has turned over 55,000 pages of emails from her time at the department. But each time spokeswoman Marie Harf has been asked whether that material — 55,000 pages, not 55,000 emails — represents all of Clinton's State Department emails, she ends up citing Clinton's staff, who have told department officials that Clinton has turned over everything that is "responsive" to the department's request for documents. Clinton, of course, decided what is "responsive" and what is not.

The White House was alerted in August 2014 to the potential problem of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email account during her tenure as secretary of state, Politico reported Friday.

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that Clinton exclusively used a personal email to conduct State Department business, potentially in violation of federal regulations. A subsequent report by the Associated Press detailed how the email was hosted by a server located at her family's home in Chappaqua, New York. While some have pointed out that rules against using personal email for official business were not relayed to officials until 2014, the potential 2016 presidential candidate has faced criticism over the perceived lack of transparency. Clinton has since asked the State Department to make the private emails publicly available.

The United States on Monday declared Venezuela a national security threat and ordered sanctions against seven officials in the worst diplomatic dispute with the oil-rich country since socialist President Nicolas Maduro took office in 2013.

President Barack Obama issued and signed the executive order, which senior administration officials said did not target the energy sector or Venezuela's broader economy. The move raises tensions between Washington and the OPEC member just as U.S. relations with Cuba, another longtime U.S. foe in Latin America, are set to be normalized.

Declaring a country a national security threat is the first step in starting a sanctions regime. The same process has been followed with countries such as Iran and Syria, U.S. officials said.

The city of Beit Shemesh is experiencing further religious radicalization: Visitors of the Leumit Health Services’ Woman’s Health Center in the Ramat Beit Shemesh Bet neighborhood were amazed to discover that the word “woman” had been erased from the sign with black paint.

Paris university shuts down Israeli apartheid event featuring Max Blumenthal

“We came here to say we’re devoted and committed to continue the battle till the last illegal resident from Africa will (go) back to his home in Africa,” said Marzel.

When asked about allegations of “racism” being leveled by leftist sources against the struggle with illegal immigration, he remarked “if saving the state of Israel from millions of Africans coming in and destroying the state of Israel is racism, that is the problem of (those) saying it. I’m fighting for the existence of my country.”

A terrorist is someone
who opposes the dictates of imperialism;
an extremist is someone who defends
his country against foreign invasion.

A radical is someone
who takes democracy seriously;
an anarchist is someone who gets beaten
and arrested at a street rally.

An Islamofascist is someone
who gets the goat of a Christofascist;
An anti-Semite is someone who condemns
the genocide of the Palestinian people.

A political fanatic is someone
who challenges the mainstream consensus;
a traitor is someone who refuses to fight
in wars of criminal aggression.