Category: United States

Call girl held for Google exec’s murder

A high-end prostitute injected lethal doses of heroin into a former Google executive before callously stepping over his body, downing a final swig of wine and then leaving him to die about his yacht, officials said.

Forrest Timothy Hayes was an executive with Google X, the tech giant’s experimental lab, according to USA Today and Forbes. Google X focused on the company’s “moonshot” projects such as Google Glass and driverless cars.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel reported Tuesday that surveillance video from the boat shows 51-year-old Hayes losing consciousness.

The suspect Alix Catherine Tichelman, makes no effort to help Hayes and instead Tichleman proceeds to gather her belongings, including the heroin and needles,” police said in a release.

She gathers her belongings and even gulps a glass of wine before leaving. According to investigators, she lowered a window blind while leaving to hide the dying man from view.

Hayes was a divorced father-of-five and his body was discovered on his 50-foot yacht, Escape, the next day on Nov. 23 at the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor.

“The video also shows Tichelman stepping over the victim’s body several times as she is gathering her belongings,” according to a police statement.

“At one point, she steps over the body to finish a glass of wine. Finally, she leaves the boat and reaches back in to lower a blind and conceal the victim’s body from outside view.”

The 26-year-old Jewish girl who still lives with her parents in Georgia was taken into custody last week after being lured back to Santa Cruz County in a sting.

UN urges US to welcome immigrants as refugees

United Nations officials are pushing for many of the Central Americans fleeing to the U.S. to be treated as refugees displaced by armed conflict, a designation meant to increase pressure on the United States to accept tens of thousands of people currently ineligible for asylum.

Officials with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees say they hope to see a regional agreement on that status Thursday when migration and interior department representatives from the U.S., Mexico, and Central America meet in Nicaragua. The group will discuss updating a 30-year-old declaration regarding the obligations nations have to aid refugees.

While such a resolution would lack any legal weight in the United States, the agency said it believes “the U.S. and Mexico should recognize that this is a refugee situation, which implies that they shouldn’t be automatically sent to their home countries but rather receive international protection.”

Central Americans would be among the first modern migrants considered refugees because they are fleeing violence and extortion at the hands of criminal gangs.“Unaccompanied children and families who fear for their lives and freedoms must not be forcibly returned without access to proper asylum procedures,” UNHCR official Leslie Velez said in testimony submitted to the House Judiciary Committee late last month.

Immigration experts in the U.S. and Central America say the flow of migrants from Honduras and El Salvador is likely to rise as the two countries experience gang-related violence. Honduras, a primary transit point for U.S.-bound cocaine, has the world’s highest homicide rate for a nation that is not at war.

Salvadorans heading north through Mexico who were interviewed by The Associated Press last month said there also was fear of the “Sombra Negra,” or “Black Shadow” – groups of masked men in civilian clothes who are believed responsible for extrajudicial killings of teens in gang-controlled neighborhoods. The Salvadoran government denies any involvement in death squads, but says it is investigating the reports.

Source: CBS

Since Trayvon Martin 480 Blacks have been murdered in Chicago

And no outrage whatsoever

Think about that for a moment. More than 500 murders in 2012, and approximately 150 so far this year. 75% of the victims are Black. And most of it is Black on Black violence. Gang violence. Drug related violence. Crimes of passion. Crimes of opportunity.

While Chicago may not have the highest murder rate in the nation, it has the highest gross number of murders.

Strangely the black community expresses neither outrage nor angst over the level of violence in Chicago, home to Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey.

Especially since so many of the victims are people of colour. But just try to talk about slavery from hundreds of years back and see the wild response.

Is the victim’s race less important than the race of the perp?

An extremely detailed analysis of murder in Chicago is available, but not a single black voice cares.

 

Dead phones not allowed on US-bound flights

If the battery of your mobile device fails to power up on the request of a TSA agent, you won’t be allowed to take it on board a US-bound plane, the TSA announced as part of enhanced security measures at “certain overseas airports.”

Some experts believe that amid other methods, enemies might try to disguise explosives or other dangerous object as a laptop computer, cellphone, or a tablet.

“During the security examination, officers may also ask that owners power up some devices, including cell phones. Powerless devices will not be permitted on board the aircraft. The traveler may also undergo additional screening,” TSA said in a statement.

In a statement earlier this week, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said that the new measures were the result of a re-evaluation of measures “to promote aviation security,” but offered few details on how airlines and airports will implement them. “Aviation security includes a number of measures, both seen and unseen, informed by an evolving environment,” was all that was said.

The tough new security policy has already been implemented in UK airports, where passengers are subjected to “vigorous” body searches and required to switch on their electronic devices while airport staff swab travellers’ shoes and clothes to check for traces of explosives.

Source: RT

African-Americans deserve reparations

African-Americans deserve reparations. Discuss.

The idea of reparations — that the descendants of slaves should be compensated by the national government for the wrongs and the legacy of slavery — has always been controversial.

When Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic wrote the June cover story, “The Case for Reparations,” he set a traffic record for the magazine’s website. He provoked responses from across the political and ethnic spectrum. Some of his critics did him the courtesy of reading the entire 16,000-word piece. Others, particularly in the Twittersphere, reacted viscerally to the headline and to reactions to the headline.

Through many of these responses, whether thoughtful or tossed-off, there’s been a certain thread of uneasiness; a reflexive move to find reasons why reparation couldn’t be done or why it wouldn’t be workable or fair.

To me, this reflex is as interesting as the original argument. And it suggests that before America could ever actually do reparations, America would have to first be able to imagine the necessity of reparations. The greatest obstacle to considering reparation isn’t practicality; it’s a dearth of moral imagination.

Source: CNN

BRICS morphing into anti-dollar alliance

Before the crucial visit to Beijing next week, the governor of the Russian Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina met Vladimir Putin to report on the progress of the upcoming ruble-yuan swap deal with the People’s Bank of China and the Kremlin used the meeting to let the world know about the technical details of its international anti-dollar alliance.

On June 10th, Sergey Glaziev, Putin’s economy advisor published an article outlining the need to establish an international alliance of countries willing to get rid of the dollar in international trade and refrain from using dollars in their currency reserves. The ultimate goal would be to break the Washington’s money printing machine that is feeding its military-industrial complex and giving the US ample possibilities to spread chaos across the globe, fueling the civil wars in Libya, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine. Glaziev’s critics believe that such an alliance would be difficult to establish and that creating a non-dollar-based global financial system would be extremely challenging from a technical point of view. However, in her discussion with Vladimir Putin, the head of the Russian central bank unveiled an elegant technical solution for this problem and left a clear hint regarding the members of the anti-dollar alliance that is being created by the efforts of Moscow and Beijing:

“We’ve done a lot of work on the ruble-yuan swap deal in order to facilitate trade financing. I have a meeting next week in Beijing,” she said casually and then dropped the bomb: “We are discussing with China and our BRICS parters the establishment of a system of multilateral swaps that will allow to transfer resources to one or another country, if needed. A part of the currency reserves can be directed to [the new system].” (source of the quote: Prime news agency)

It seems that the Kremlin chose the all-in-one approach for establishing its anti-dollar alliance. Currency swaps between the BRICS central banks will facilitate trade financing while completely bypassing the dollar. At the same time, the new system will also act as a de facto replacement of the IMF, because it will allow the members of the alliance to direct resources to finance the weaker countries. As an important bonus, derived from this “quasi-IMF” system, the BRICS will use a part (most likely the “dollar part”) of their currency reserves to support it, thus drastically reducing the amount of dollar-based instruments bought by some of the biggest foreign creditors of the US.
Skeptics will surely claim that a BRICS-based anti-dollar alliance will not manage to deprive the dollar of its global reserve currency status. Instead of arguing against this line of thought, it is easier to point out that Washington is doing its best to enlarge the ranks of the enemies of the dollar. Asked by Russia 24 channel to comment on Nabiullina’s statements, Andrei Kostin, the president of the state-owned VTB bank and one of the staunchest supporters of anti-dollar policies, offered an interesting perspective on the situation in Europe:

“I think the work on ruble-yuan swap line will finalized in the nearest future and the way for ruble-yuan settlement will be open. Moreover, we are not the only ones with such initiatives. We know about the statements made by Mr. Noyer, chairman of the Bank of France. As a retaliation for what Americans have done to BNP Paribas, he opined that the trade with China must be done in yuan or euro.”

If the current trend continues, soon the dollar will be abandoned by most of the significant global economies and it will be kicked out of the global trade finance. Washington’s bullying will make even former American allies chose the anti-dollar alliance instead of the existing dollar-based monetary system. The point of no return for the dollar may be much closer than it is generally thought. In fact, the greenback may have already past its point of no return on its way to irrelevance.

Source: VoR

‘Obama gay, Michelle a tranny’

Joan Rivers calls President Obama “gay” and describes Michelle Obama with a homophobic slur.

Asked by a street reporter whether a gay president or a female president will take office first, Rivers replied, “We already have it with Obama.”

“You know Michelle is a tranny,” she went on. “A transgender. We all know.”

Rivers officiated a gay wedding on Monday.

 

NOW president likens Hobby Lobby ruling to apartheid, Jim Crow

The US Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of protecting religious freedom for private business owners is on par with arguments favoring race-based segregation in South Africa and the United States in the past, according to National Organization for Women president Terry O’Neill.

“I think it’s really important to remember apartheid in South Africa was justified on religious grounds; the Southern Baptist Convention justified slavery, and later Jim Crow and segregation, on religious grounds,” O’Neill said on MSNBC on Monday. “There are some religious beliefs we no longer honor in our government, and the Supreme Court is simply wrong to honor gender bigotry that Hobby Lobby stores and Conestoga Wood are promoting.”

“It’s bigotry to keep women away from having basic health care,” she added.

Later, columnist Connie Schultz also lamented the Court’s ruling. “As a Christian, I am so offended by the notion that to be a Christian means you want to harm women,” she said. – National Review

US scientist recreates H1N1 flu virus that killed 500,000 people

A controversial researcher who in the past had replicated the deadly Spanish flu of 1918 has done it again, this time cooking up in his lab an especially resilient strain of the H1N1 virus.

Dr Yoshihiro Kawaoka, professor of virology at University of Wisconsin at Madison, has reportedly tweaked the 2009 strain of pandemic influenza responsible for some 500,000 deaths worldwide to make it resistant to the human immune system’s antibodies.

Kawaoka’s many critics have said that his latest provocative experiment has essentially rendered the world’s population defenseless against the virus.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the H1N1 virus that sparked the 2009-2010 pandemic has turned into a regular human flu virus that continues to circulate seasonally worldwide.

The same lab works on the Ebola virus.

Source: Daily Mail

‘US to become third world nation with immigrant influx’

People would flee a country that’s got … drug cartels, bribes, ignore the law

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, warns that the United States will become a third world nation if the federal government does not enforce its immigration laws.

Speaking to “The Sean Hannity Show,” the Republican lawmaker said the country will be destroyed if the U.S. continues to allow thousands of immigrants to cross the border illegally.

“You’ve got to follow the law. You cannot bring hundreds of thousands of people in this country without destroying the country,” Gohmert told Hannity. “Then there’s no place that people can dream about coming.”

Gohmert stated that it’s the government’s job to defend the U.S. “against anybody that would overwhelm the country and bring it down.”

“It’s always been such an irony, though, that people would flee a country that’s got … drug cartels, people that ignore the law, or bribe people to look the other way,” Gohmert said. “So they don’t have jobs there so they come to the United States because we’ve mostly been a nation of laws where the rule of law matters. But then once they are here, they say now we want you to ignore the rule of law, which ironically is like the country they came from.”

Source: CBS

India summons top US diplomat about spying

India summoned the top diplomat from the US for the third time about spying.

A new document supplied by Edward Snowden and made public by The Washington Post on Monday showed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party was among authorised targets for the NSA in 2010 while it was India’s main opposition.

India has complained to the United States on two other occasions, in July and November 2013, over other revelations — including the disclosure that its UN mission in New York and its Washington embassy were snooped on.

“What we have said is that we expect a response and an assurance that this won’t happen again,” a foreign ministry source told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Both times Washington has said it would look into what it can share about its espionage programme but failed to offer any details, the source said.

“We have said that we would like a response, which we haven’t received,” he said.

The new incident comes ahead of a visit to New Delhi by US Secretary of State John Kerry, who is expected to meet members of Modi’s government in the next few months.

Modi, whose party swept to power in May with the first majority in 30 years, will travel to the United States in September for the UN General Assembly and his first meeting with President Barack Obama.

Assassination by drone: US relies on laws from countries without a constitution

The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says:

No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ….

So how did the legal memorandum “justifying” assassination of U.S. citizens by drone try to sidestep the Fifth Amendment?

It relied on reasoning from two countries that don’t have any constitution.

The New York Times reports:

One might have expected a thoughtful memo that carefully weighed the pros and cons and discussed how such a strike accords with international and Constitutional law.

Instead, the memo turns out to be a slapdash pastiche of legal theories — some based on obscure interpretations of British and Israeli law — that was clearly tailored to the desired result. Perhaps the administration held out so long to avoid exposing the thin foundation on which it based such a momentous decision.

Neither England nor Israel have a constitution.

Indeed, as the BBC notes, they are in a very small group of three:

In all but a handful of democracies in the world, the nation’s constitution can be found in a single document. The exceptions are Israel, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

Nothing in the memo says that it only applies to U.S. citizens living abroad. Indeed, the government has claimed the right to assassinate or indefinitely detain any American citizen without any due process.

Actually, the U.S. has never said that it won’t assassinate Americans living on U.S. soil.

Sadly, even though Americans have a constitution, we have lost virtually all of the rights contained in that document.

Source: George Washington’s blog

Obama laughs about eating pies with ‘crack in them’

A President making a crack cocaine joke in the White House?

Some wondered if it would be possible for the US to sink any lower.

Monday at the White House while hosting a reception to observe LGBT Pride Month, President Barack Obama call his White House Pastry Chef Bill Yosses “the crust master” because the president said, “I don’t know what he does—whether he puts crack in them.”

But the president continued he had to adopt a no weekday pie rule.

Laughing and applauding, the first lady Michelle Obama added, “There’s no crack in our pies.”

Brown power: You never keep control forever

Two decades after California voters approved Proposition 187, barring public services to those in the country illegally, Gov. Jerry Brown said Thursday that the political tide has turned in the state with a growing wave of Latino voters demanding more tolerant policy from Sacramento.

The governor cited the history of various groups controlling California as a lesson.

“The Mexicans threw out the Spanish around 1815, and then, of course, the gringos threw out the Mexicans in 1846, or 1848,” Brown said. “But the point is you never keep control forever. There’s always new waves coming so you’ve got to stay ahead of the wave.”

“That’s what we call Brown power,” he joked with a play on his name.

Speaking to hundreds of Latino elected officials from throughout the country holding a conference in San Diego, Brown said the shift in power has made possible public support for changes including his signing of legislation providing driver’s licenses to immigrants in the country illegally and providing them with scholarships and the right to practice law.

“The power you represent is growing and it is growing in very important ways,” Brown told the members of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials at the Loews Coronado Bay Resort.

Brown went on to credit “the sheer power of the Latino community as it is felt in the towns and cities and counties up and down this state. That is the tide that is turning the political feelings and philosophy of state government.”

Source: LATimes