All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

- George Orwell

In the aftermath of September 11, there was a big push to create a national surveillance system in the name of national security. Cameras were installed at traffic lights, ostensibly to catch people running red lights and stop signs, but those cameras came with a nifty side benefit: they recorded everyone within reach of the lens in their comings and goings. Cameras were installed at street corners, ostensibly to provide security against crime, but again, you were recorded wherever you went. Bank machines all come with security cameras, and those added to the ever-broadening web of national surveillance. Finally, almost every cell phone now comes with software that, so long as the thing is turned on, can track your every step by triangulating your position via GPS and the cell towers your phone signal bounces off of.  read more »

Amidst all the bad news coming out of Wall Street and the economy, here’s something good: California has backed out of the talks for the long-awaited foreclosure settlement, now making it far from likely that the so-called “Attorneys General” deal will happen anytime soon.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris sent a letter to state and federal regulators explaining that she pulled out because the proposed settlement amount for banks guilty of bad securitization practices leading up to the mortgage crisis – said to be in the $20 billion range – was too small. From Business Week:  read more »

As the ongoing occupation of Wall Street by hundreds of protesters enters its third week — and as protests spread to other cities such as Boston and Los Angeles — demonstrators have endorsed a new slogan: “We are the 99 percent.” This slogan refers an economic struggle between 99 percent of Americans and the richest one percent of Americans, who are increasingly accumulating a greater share of the national wealth to the detriment of the middle class.

It may shock you exactly how wealthy this top 1 percent of Americans is. ThinkProgress has assembled five facts about this class of super-rich Americans:  read more »

Ronald Reagan was anointed The Great Communicator on August 2nd, 1981. This was a surprise for a lot of people who had been watching the president's performance on the news every night, but not a complete shock. It was yet another moment of cultural whiplash in a year chock-full of them.

Lou Cannon of The Washington Post was the first to refer to Reagan as the "Great Communicator" in print, giving Orwellian punctuation to a summer when American culture turned itself inside out, when economic supply and demand traded places, music became a visual medium, "B" movies became "A" movies and Jeff Koons became famous. Cannon's piece was the kind of myth-making gesture that Reagan himself specialized in, the kind that, when repeated enough, could become a whole new truth, whether it was true or not. It represented a kind of triumph, not merely of one political party over another, but of style over substance, self-aggrandizement over self reflection, "reality" over reality. It was a declaration that the laws of political physics no longer applied.  read more »

Rupert Murdoch has had a profound influence on the state of journalism today. It's a kind of tribute, in some sense, that the general coverage of his current troubles has reflected the detrimental effect of his influence over the years. Right now, the media, by and large, are focusing on tawdry "police blotter" acts of the very sort that have historically informed Murdoch's own tabloid sensibility, while the bigger picture gets short shrift.

To be sure, the activities and actions of Murdoch's that dominate the public conversation at the moment are deeply troubling, leaving aside their alleged criminality. Still, what is really pernicious about Murdoch is not his subordinates' reported hacking of phones, payments of hush money, etc, or the possibility that Murdoch may have known about, tolerated, enabled, or even encouraged such acts.  read more »

Maize Fields In an effort to rid the country of Monsanto's GMO products, Hungary has stepped up the pace. This looks like its going to be another slap in the face for Monsanto. A new regulation was introduced this March which stipulates that seeds are supposed to be checked for GMO before they are introduced to the market. Unfortunately, some GMO seeds made it to the farmers without them knowing it.  read more »

(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)NEW YORK — The global war on drugs has failed and governments should explore legalizing marijuana and other controlled substances, according to a commission that includes former heads of state, a former U.N. secretary-general and a business mogul.

A new report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy argues that the decades-old "global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world." The 24-page paper will be released Thursday.  read more »

(Photo: Speedy314; Edited: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)
Radioactive material from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan has fallen in rain on major cities across the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The agency has also detected radioactive materials in milk, air and drinking water. The EPA and other government agencies continue to insist that they expected to see some level of radiation on US soil after the Daiichi disaster, and the current radiation levels are not a cause of public health concern. Truthout has identified gaps in the government's data, however, and nuclear watchdogs are concerned that public officials are not telling Americans the whole story.

Consider Boise, Idaho, where the amount of radioactive iodine-131 in rainwater jumped from 242 picocuries per liter (pCi/L) on March 22 to 390 pCi/L on March 27, according to the EPA. Iodine-131 levels found in rainwater sampled from about a dozen other cities range from 8 to 125 pCi/L.  read more »

"Dragon Storm" Saturn: Photo courtesy NASA
China's Xinhua News Agency, the official press agency of the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) announced Thursday that the National Radio Astronomy Observatory has been monitoring signals from a previously unknown "dark" satellite in orbit around Saturn for the past 90 days. According to government officials, the signals appear to be the first verified transmission from an alien civilization.

China's leading astrobiologist, Dr. Xi Chang, a graduate of MIT, told Xinhua that "the sigal repeats itself continuosly in 2 minute long sequences and appears to be the four bases of the genetic code A,G, U and C that ribosomes must convert mRNA sequences into proteins and the twenty different amino acids that proteins are comprised of."  read more »

A worker inside the LHC tunnel working on the large magnets that guide particles around the LHC loop. CREDIT: © CERN
In a 'long shot' theory, physicists propose that the world's largest atom smasher could be used as a time machine to send a special kind of matter backward in time.

The scientists outline a way to use the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17-mile long (27-km) particle accelerator buried underground near Geneva, to send a hypothetical particle called the Higgs singlet to the past.

There are a lot of "ifs" to the conjecture, including the major question of whether or not the Higgs singlet even exists and could be created in the machine.  read more »

PC Latest news, Special Report, World news

Japanese company Genepax presents its eco-friendly car that runs on nothing but water. The car has an energy generator that extracts hydrogen from water that is poured into the car’s tank. The generator then releases electrons that produce electric power to run the car. The electric powered car can run on any type of water (you can even use tea and soda…etc). The car can run for an hour at about 50 miles per hour on just a liter of water; about 2 cans of soda worth. Genepax, the company that invented the technology, aims to collaborate with Japanese manufacturers to mass produce it.  read more »

©Radar Communication
Regardless of how much closer Obama's budget brings our economy into a balance of payments not seen since 2001, we will continue to run deficits for the next decade, and the national debt will keep growing every year that happens.

While most of the country's $14 trillion debt is held by private banks in the U.S., the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Board estimate that, as of December, about $4.4 trillion of it was held by foreign governments that purchase our treasury securities much as an investor buys shares in a company and comes to own his or her little chunk of the organization.

Looking at the list of our top international creditors, a few overall characteristics show some interesting trends: Three of the top 10 spots are held by China and its constituent parts, and while two of our biggest creditors are fellow English-speaking democracies, a considerable share of our debt is held by oil exporters that tend to be decidedly less friendly in other areas of international relations.  read more »

This report was originally filed Feb. 15, 2011, but has been republished today due to a general lack of US media coverage

Argentina and the United States are engaged in a diplomatic spat after Buenos Aires authorities seized what they say are undeclared weapons and drugs on a US military aircraft last week.

The Argentine government on Monday said it planned to lodge a formal protest with Washington, while the US State Department said it was "puzzled and disturbed" by the seizure of what it claimed was routine equipment for training the Argentine federal police.  read more »

Last year large numbers of people gathered in the Conscious Convergence event on July 17-18, 2010, setting an intention to manifest unity consciousness as the Ninth, and highest, of the Mayan waves brings the universe to its highest state of existence. This event served as a base camp for intention setting and ascension towards Unity consciousness; We celebrated in joy in the most varied forms, ranging from the temples of Bali to the Mayan elders in Guatemala and from the Sami in the North to the Bushmen in the Kalahari. We could for the first time ever see our planet emerging as a sacred space encircled by a global medicine wheel.*  read more »

I first came in contact with Mickey Huff, associate professor of history at Diablo Valley College, when one of my articles was selected by Project Censored, for which he serves as director. For the uninitiated, here's how Huff describes Project Censored: "Project Censored's principal objective is training students in media literacy and First Amendment issues for the future advocacy and protection of free press rights in the United States. Project Censored has trained some 2,000 students in investigative research in the past three decades. Through a partnership of faculty, students, and the community, Project Censored  read more »

Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Icelandic MP and former WikiLeaks volunteerBirgitta Jonsdottir brands efforts by US justice department to access her private information 'completely unacceptable'

Dominic Rushe in New York
The Guardian, Sat 8 Jan 2011 00.32 GMT

A member of parliament in Iceland who is also a former WikiLeaks volunteer says the US justice department has ordered Twitter to hand over her private messages.  read more »

WILTON, CT—Michael Chandler looks out the windows of his sun room, past the swimming pool and guest cottage, to the wide backyard where his two children are playing with their pet dalmatian, Scotty. At a time when Americans everywhere are sharing the struggle of a once-in-a-generation recession, Chandler can't help but wonder how he and his family fell through the cracks.  read more »

The ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes spent his life battling the assault on democracy by tyrants. It is disheartening to be reminded that he lost. But he understood that the hardest struggle for humankind is often stating and understanding the obvious. Aristophanes, who had the temerity to portray the ruling Greek tyrant, Cleon, as a dog, is the perfect playwright to turn to in trying to grasp the danger posed to us by movements from the tea party to militias to the Christian right, as well as the bankrupt and corrupt power elite that no longer concerns itself with the needs of its citizens. He saw the same corruption 2,400 years ago.  read more »

WASHINGTON—Some sort of tax cut or earnings or money or something was reported in economic news this week in further evidence that a lot of financial- related things have been going on lately.  read more »

Larry Herman never expected to live this long. He made no financial provisions for old age. At 69, he and his best friend Lynda, 65, escaped subsidized senior housing in Savannah, Ga., by going back to work. They got away from wheelchairs, walkers and the sadness of people waiting to die.  read more »