“The hammering on the wall of America’s premier storage vault for nuclear-weapons grade uranium in pitch-darkness six weeks ago was loud enough to be heard by security guards. But they assumed incorrectly that workmen were making an after-hours repair, and blithely ignored it.

Minutes earlier, a perimeter camera had caught an image of intruders — not workmen — breaching an eight-foot high security fence around the sensitive facility outside Knoxville, Tenn. But the guard operating the camera had missed it. A different camera stationed over another fence — also breached by the intruders — was out of service, a defect the protective force had ignored for 6 months.

In theory, the pounding might have been the work of a squad of terrorists preparing to plant a powerful explosive in the wall of the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility (HEUMF), a half-billion dollar vault that stores the makings of more than 10,000 nuclear bombs. Instead, it was a group of three peace activists, including an 82-year old nun, armed only with flashlights, binoculars, bolt cutters, bread, flowers, a Bible, and several hammers.

The casual and relatively swift penetration of the site’s defenses on July 28 by the activists has provoked their felony indictment on federal charges. But it has also provoked new troubles for nuclear weapons contractors that have until recently had large influence in Washington, and for the National Nuclear Security Administration, the increasingly embattled steward of America’s dwindling but still fearsome arsenal of nuclear weaponry.

“This incident raises important questions about the security of Category I nuclear materials across the complex,” NNSA Administrator Thomas D’Agostino, a Bush administration holdover, said on Aug. 28. He promised to hold “our team” accountable for making the reforms necessary to assure such materials are adequately protected. Since the break-in, five senior officials at security contractor WSI-Oak Ridge and the main contractor responsible for HEUMF operations — Babcock & Wilcox Technical Services Y-12, LLC — have been reassigned by the contractors or have retired….”

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“A federal judge ruled Thursday that Walmart can be added to a lawsuit alleging widespread wage theft at a Southern California warehouse.

Lawyers for contract workers at the Schneider Logistics warehouse in Mira Loma, Calif. – whose sole customer is Walmart – had moved to add the retailer to the case in November.

Monday’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder will force Walmart to defend itself against allegations that Schneider, at Walmart’s behest, cheated as many as 1,800 low-wage workers out of millions of dollars.

Walmart fought becoming a late addition to the case, but Snyder wrote that the plaintiffs had a “good faith explanation that they did not seek to name Walmart as a defendant until this stage of the litigation because they only recently uncovered evidence in discovery that justifies a lawsuit against Walmart.”

The lawsuit, filed in October 2011, claims that Schneider and two staffing agencies, Premier Warehousing Ventures LLC and Impact Logistics Inc., failed to keep proper payroll records, falsified time sheets and misled workers about the amount of money they had earned….”

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“One CEO says he’s willing to go to outrageous lengths to protect his right to use a gun.

James Yeager, CEO of Tactical Response, a Tennessee company that trains people in weapon and tactical skills, claimed in a video posted on YouTube and Facebook thathe would “start killing people” if President Barack Obama decides to take executive action to pass further gun control policies, Raw Story reports.

In a frenetic address to the camera, Yeager puts a call out to other gun rights advocates to “load your damn mags” and “get ready to fight” in what he claims will turn into a “civil war” if gun control measures in the country get any stricter.

SEE FULL VIDEO BELOW — WARNING ADULT LANGUAGE…”

Full article and video 

“While the world and their cat believes that Mario Draghi saved the world last year – and continues to do so with his open-ended promise to do “whatever it takes” whatever that means (and the market’s “positive contagion”). However, the reality, away from a sovereign-bond implied view of the world – with short-dated Spanish bonds now at 26-month low yields (whereby these bonds are sucked up wholesale by an ever more concentrated and self-satisfying group of European banks) is far different. As these two charts show, not only does Draghi’s decision not to lower rates (when inflation and unemployment – both more ‘real-world economy’-impacting items) indicate Taylor-Rule-esque that rates need cutting; but while banks get all they want (and more) from his over-flowing cup or collateralization and repo, credit extension in Europe continues to slide ever more negatively. Yes, Draghi saved the banks (for now) but, just as the scariest chart shows, Europe is very far from saved;….”

Full article and charts

Full horror story 

“Ubuntu is a new open-sourced operating system for smartphones that seeks to be a free alternative to Android and iOS.

We got a personal demonstration of how the new Linux-based smartphone will work when it launches late this year….”

Full article and video

Source

“The fiscal cliff deal reached in Washington proved to be a winner for the oil and gas industry on two counts.

First and foremost, the industry didn’t lose a dime of its billion-dollar subsidies. There was talk earlier in the year of maybe eliminating some of the lucrative tax breaks as a way to help reduce the budget deficit. Taxpayers for Common Sense estimates that oil companies will receive $78 billion in tax breaks and subsidies between 2012 and 2017. In March 2012 a majority of senators did vote in favor of the Repeal Big Oil Tax Subsidies Act, which would have eliminated $2.4 billion in deductions gained by the five biggest oil companies, but the bill needed 60 votes to pass.

By the end of the fiscal cliff negotiations, Republicans and Democrats left all of the subsidies in place.

“Trimming just a handful of these breaks for the big five companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—would’ve raised $24 billion over the next decade” for the U.S. Treasury, noted Andy Kroll at Mother Jones.

But the good news didn’t stop there for ExxonMobil and others. Once Congress and President Barack Obama agreed on a plan, oil prices on the stock market rose to their highest levels in nearly three months, making those in the petroleum business even richer.

In 2011, ExxonMobil made more than $73 billion, but paid only $1.5 billion in federal income taxes.”

“Democrats say they want to raise as much as $1 trillion in new revenues through tax reform later this year to balance Republican demands to slash mandatory spending.

Democratic leaders have had little time to craft a new position for their party since passing a tax deal Tuesday that will raise $620 billion in revenue over the next 10 years.

The emerging consensus, however, is that the next installment of deficit reduction should reach $2 trillion and about half of it should come from higher taxes….”

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“Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.

Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.

In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.

In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month.

The proposed increases compare with about 4 percent for families with employer-based policies….”

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“Global central bank chiefs gave lenders four more years to meet international liquidity requirements and watered down the measures in a bid to stave off another credit crunch.

Banks won the delay to fully meet the so-called liquidity coverage ratio, or LCR, following a deal struck by regulatory chiefs meeting yesterday in Basel, Switzerland. They’ll be able to pick from a longer list of approved assets including equities and securitized mortgage debt as they seek to build up buffers of liquidity for use in a financial crisis.

“This was a compromise between competing views from around the world,” Bank of England Governor Mervyn King said at a briefing following yesterday’s meeting. King chairs the Group of Governors and Heads of Supervision, or GHOS, which decides on global bank rules. “For the first time in regulatory history we have a truly global minimum standard for bank liquidity.”

Banks and top officials such as European Central Bank President Mario Draghi pushed for changes to the LCR, arguing that it would choke interbank lending and make it harder for authorities to implement monetary policies. Lenders have warned that the measure might force them to cut back loans to businesses and households.

“The new liquidity standard will in no way hinder the ability of the global banking system to finance a global recovery,” King said. “It’s a realistic approach. It certainly did not emanate from an attempt to weaken the standard.”

Shares Rise…”

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“NEW YORK (AP) — PNC Bank has warned customers that its websites are getting hit with high traffic consistent with computer attacks.

In an e-mail to nearly 5 million customers, PNC says the traffic is meant to cause delays for legitimate online banking customers. It says other banks are experiencing similar traffic spikes but did not identify them.

The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer said in a story Thursday that in recent weeks, “websites of several of the largest banks have been hit sporadically by so-called ‘distributed denial-of-service attacks.’ The attacks flood the websites with so much traffic that it makes it difficult for customers to log into their online accounts or get information.” ”

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“A federal judge issued a 75-page ruling on Wednesday that declares that the US Justice Department does not have a legal obligation to explain the rationale behind killing Americans with targeted drone strikes.

United States District Court Judge Colleen McMahon wrote in her finding this week that the Obama administration was largely in the right by rejecting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times for materials pertaining to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to execute three US citizens abroad in late 2011 [pdf].

Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, both US nationals with alleged ties to al-Qaeda, were killed on September 30 of that year using drone aircraft; days later, al-Awlaki’s teenage son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was executed in the same manner. Although the Obama administration has remained largely quiet about the killings in the year since, a handful of statements made from senior White House officials, including Pres. Barack Obama himself, have provided some but little insight into the Executive Branch’s insistence that the killings were all justified and constitutionally-sound. Attempts from the ACLU and the Times via FOIA requests to find out more have been unfruitful, though, which spawned a federal lawsuit that has only now been decided in court.

Siding with the defendants in what can easily be considered as cloaked in skepticism, Judge McMahon writes that the Obama White House has been correct in refusing the FOIA requests filed by the plaintiffs….”

Full article

“If you think the big banks learned painful lessons about risk-taking during the financial crisis, think again: They’re still taking the same risks, and we don’t even know how big those risks are.

In the latest edition of The Atlantic, Frank Partnoy and Jesse Eisinger have a 9400-word opus on the untold horrors lurking on big-bank balance sheets. The elevator summary: Boy, banks sure do a lot of dodgy trading, and they hide their potential losses from investors.

This may not come as shocking news. But it’s one of those things that we can’t hear often enough, with the momentum for reform cooling every day we get further away from the crisis. Big banks still have the capacity to blow up the financial system, and our inability to trust them makes another disaster even more likely.

Particularly useful is Partnoy and Eisinger’s deep dive into the latest annual report of a supposedly staid, conservative bank, Wells Fargo. The authors discover that the bank is not simply lending money and giving away toasters, like banks used to do. Based on the authors’ accounting, it looks like nearly $20 billion of Wells Fargo’s $81 billion in revenue in 2011 came from one kind of trading or another.

And the bank doesn’t offer much, if any, detail about the potential risks of that trading. How much money could Wells Fargo lose on its trades, which include hard-to-trade and hard-to-value derivatives? In the worst case, could the losses threaten the $148 billion in capital reserves Wells Fargo claims to have? Nobody knows, because Wells Fargo doesn’t tell us, and they’re not required to.

Meanwhile, even more risk is being shoved under the carpet, into entities that don’t show up on bank balance sheets, but for which the banks are nevertheless ultimately on the hook. These are the sorts of accounting tricks used by Enron and by the banks before the crisis, and they’re still in use….”

Full article

FISCAL CLIFF DEAL: $1 IN SPENDING CUTS FOR EVERY $41 IN

TAX INCREASES….WAY TO GO!

Full article

We can help the banksters out of trouble; why not America? We should have a stimulus package the relives consumer debt via the free money the banks continue to receive from the tax payers.

There should be no red tape for the following folks!

Full article

“Secretary of State nominee John Kerry, with 20 years of concern about climate change, is expected to push the issue to center stage as a slow-motion crisis in need of a global solution.

When he sought to defeat President George W. Bush in 2004, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts made a point of challenging the Bush administration’s backtracking on the issue and rejection of climate science. In contrast, he told the nation, he “believes in science.”

Kerry has been pushing for action on global warming since he attended the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. He has since attended multiple United Nations climate-change negotiations, including helping Obama with some preliminary discussions with India and China at the U.N. talks in Copenhagen in 2009.

He co-authored unsuccessful legislation in the Senate to set up a cap-and-trade system to reduce U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases. He and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, co-wrote a book, “This Moment on Earth: Today’s New Environmentalists and Their Vision for the Future.”

A clue to his current thinking came in August when he spoke on the Senate floor, saying that planetary warming was “as dangerous as any sort of the real crises that we talk about.”

“Today we had a hearing in the Foreign Relations Committee on the subject of Syria, and we all know what’s happening with respect to Iran, and nuclear weapons and the possibility even of a war,” Kerry said.  “Well, this issue actually is of as significant a level of importance, because it affects life itself on the planet, because it affects ecosystems on which the oceans and the land depend for the relationship of the warmth of our earth and the amount of moisture that there is and all of the interactions that occur as a consequence of our climate.”

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What one will do to feed at uncle Sam’s trough….

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“All major American ports along the East Coast and Texas could shutdown Sunday if a dock worker’s union fails to agree to a new contract, the New York Post’s Josh Margolin reports.

That outcome seems likely, he says.

Port managers, after a meeting yesterday morning, told The Post they believe there will be no last-minute agreement between the dock-workers union and the shipping companies to avert a walkout….”

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“HOUSTON (CBS Houston/AP) — A strong storm system that moved across Texas on Christmas Day spawned at least three tornadoes, severe thunderstorms and brisk winds that knocked down trees, killing one person near Houston.

More than 60,000 customers in the Houston area were without power — down from a previous estimate of more than 70,000 — as the National Weather Service’s tornado and thunderstorm warnings continued through Tuesday the storms moved west to east, gaining strength as they approached Louisiana.

Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy Thomas Gilliland said a 25-year-old man died after winds knocked a tree onto his Ford F-150 pickup truck around 9:40 a.m. The incident occurred in northwest Harris County, he said.

At least two tornadoes touched down in East Texas in Trinity and Houston counties, said Greg Carbin, a warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center. Initial reports said no one had been injured, but at least one building in Crockett had been damaged.

“They don’t look like they were all that significant, but there’s already some reports of tornado activity,” Carbin said.”

Full article

Live updates 

“U.S. intelligence officials found with “moderate confidence” that one or more foreign governments had directed companies to acquire critical American technologies in a “coordinated strategy”.

The conclusion in a report by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (Cfius), which vets sensitive acquisitions of U.S. assets by foreign companies, is a sign of growing alarm in the Obama administration about the motives of foreign state actors in buying U.S. companies.

It said evidence of such “suspect behavior” could include patterns of actual or attempted takeovers and the provision of “narrowly targeted incentives by foreign governments”, such as grants, loans or tax breaks, to companies acquiring U.S. targets.

The Treasury, which chairs Cfius, would not provide more details about any countries suspected by intelligence officials of coordinating with their companies. But it said a classified report delivered to Congress offered information supporting the conclusion.

“It is a shot across the bow. They’re saying ‘we know you are doing this and we are on the lookout for you’. Just know some of these are not going to get approved,” said Jamie Garelick, the former deputy attorney-general under the Clinton administration.”

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