“A confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be “senior operational leaders” of al-Qaida or “an associated force” — even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.

The 16-page memo, a copy of which was obtained by NBC News, provides new details about the legal reasoning behind one of the Obama administration’s most secretive and controversial polices: its dramatically increased use of drone strikes against al-Qaida suspects abroad, including those aimed at American citizens, such as the  September 2011 strike in Yemen that killed alleged al-Qaida operatives Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. Both were U.S. citizens who had never been indicted by the U.S. government nor charged with any crimes.

The secrecy surrounding such strikes is fast emerging as a central issue in this week’s hearing of White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, a key architect of the drone campaign, to be CIA director.  Brennan was the first administration official to publicly acknowledge drone strikes in a speech last year, calling them “consistent with the inherent right of self-defense.” In a separate talk at the Northwestern University Law School in March, Attorney General Eric Holder specifically endorsed the constitutionality of targeted killings of Americans, saying they could be justified if government officials determine the target poses  “an imminent threat of violent attack.” …”

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“A recently discovered new form of Android malware called DroidCleaner can not only infect your smartphone, but also targets your PC to spy on you.

Researchers at the security firm Kaspersky Labs have uncovered new malware which poses as a “cleaner” app — or an app used to free memory on Google’s OS — in the Google Play app store. Once an Android user downloads the app, the malware infects the users smartphone and can also be uploaded to the users PC if they plug the device into their Windows computer in the USB drive mode.

(Read More: Broad Powers Seen for Obama in Cyberstrikes )

While the malware that attacks the smartphone is more sophisticated than the malware that infects the PC, according to Kaspersky, the primary function of the malware that installs on the computer is pretty invasive….”

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“Burger King has admitted that some of its burgers sold in the U.K. and Ireland were, in fact, tainted with horsemeat.

This is just the latest chapter in an ongoing scandal in the U.K. and Ireland involvingbeef burger patties tainted with meat from horses and pigs. U.K. supermarket chain Tesco and other companies have also been affected. It’s suspected that a meat distributor in Poland, which worked with all the companies in question, used meats other than beef as filler in cheap burgers.

Burger King had originally stressed that its patties are made with 100 percent beef, although it later dropped Silvercrest, the food processing plant that received meat from the Polish distributor.

The Guardian has a statement from Burger King….”

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Source

“Equifax, one of the nation’s largest credit reporting agencies, has been selling the personal information of Americans to debt collectors and other businesses, according to an NBC News investigation.

The Work Number, a company owned by Equifax, maintains “what may be the most powerful and thorough private database of Americans’ personal information ever created,” Bob Sullivan of NBC News reported.

The database contains 190 million employment records, salary records and health insurance details involving more than 30% of all U.S. adults. And much of this data, including how much people have been paid, is sold to third parties, including bill collectors and banks.

“It’s the biggest privacy breach in our time, and it’s legal and no one knows it’s going on,” Robert Mather, who runs a small employment background company named Pre-Employ.com, told the network news web site. “It’s like a secret CIA.”

Equifax obtains its information from thousands of businesses and the federal government. Because the information it holds is considered a credit report, federal law allows Americans to obtain their own records for free once a year.”

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“(CNSNews.com) – In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year.

Under Obamacare, Americans will be required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the IRS.

The IRS’s assumption that the cheapest plan for family will cost $20,000 per year is found in examples the IRS gives to help people understand how to calculate the penalty they will need to pay the government if they do not buy a mandated health plan.

The examples point to families of four and families of five, both of which the IRS expects in its assumptions to pay a minimum of $20,000 per year for a bronze plan.

“The annual national average bronze plan premium for a family of 5 (2 adults, 3 children) is $20,000,” the regulation says.

Bronze will be the lowest tier health-insurance plan available under Obamacare–after Silver, Gold, and Platinum. Under the law, the penalty for not buying health insurance is supposed to be capped at either the annual average Bronze premium, 2.5 percent of taxable income, or $2,085.00 per family in 2016.

In the new final rules published Wednesday, IRS set in law the rules for implementing the penalty Americans must pay if they fail to obey Obamacare’s mandate to buy insurance.

To help illustrate these rules, the IRS presented examples of different situations families might find themselves in.

In the examples, the IRS assumes that families of five who are uninsured would need to pay an average of $20,000 per year to purchase a Bronze plan in 2016.

Using the conditions laid out in the regulations, the IRS calculates that a family earning $120,000 per year that did not buy insurance would need to pay a “penalty” (a word the IRS still uses despite the Supreme Court ruling that it is in fact a “tax”) of $2,400 in 2016.

For those wondering how clear the IRS’s clarifications of this new “penalty” rule are, here is one of the actual examples the IRS gives:

“Example 3. Family without minimum essential coverage….”

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“London – All personal information stored by British internet users on major “cloud” computing services including Google Drive can be spied upon routinely without their knowledge by US authorities under newly-approved legislation, it can be disclosed.

Cloud computing has exploded in recent years as a flexible, cheap way for individuals, companies and government bodies to remotely store documents and data. According to some estimates, 35 per cent of UK firms use some sort of cloud system – with Google Drive, Apple iCloud and Amazon Cloud Drive the major players.

But it has now emerged that all documents uploaded on to cloud systems based in the US or falling under Washington’s jurisdiction can be accessed and analysed without a warrant by American security agencies.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, allows US government agencies open access to any electronic information stored by non-American citizens by US-based companies. Quietly introduced during the dying days of President George W Bush’s administration in 2008, it was renewed over Christmas 2012.

But only now are privacy campaigners and legal experts waking up to the extent of the intrustion. Caspar Bowden, who was chief privacy adviser to Microsoft Europe for nine years until 2011, said: “What this legislation means is that the US has been able to mine any foreign data in US Clouds since 2008, and nobody noticed.”

Significantly, bodies such as the National Security Agency, the FBI and the CIA can gain access to any information that potentially concerns US foreign policy for purely political reasons – with no need for any suspicion that national security is at stake – meaning that religious groups, campaigning organisations and journalists could be targeted.

The information can be intercepted and stored in bulk as it enters the US via undersea cables crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

Mr Bowden, who now works as an independent advocate for privacy rights and co-authored a report for the European Parliament warning of the threat to clouds posed by FISA, criticised the UK Information Commissioner’s Office for giving free rein to the US authorities.

The body which polices data protection laws in the UK effectively ruled that companies were right to pass information over to foreign government requests as the disclosure was made “in accordance with a legal requirement”, such as FISA.

Mr Bowden said: “Every time we make a bridge of trust, or commit an indiscretion, using a social network or webmail, think how a foreign country could use that information for its own purposes to influence policy and politics. Drafts of documents prepared online, who is in contact with each other, all of this can be captured and analysed using data-mining algorithms much more advanced than those offered by public search engines.” …”

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“The finances of the US’s multi-employer pension schemes have deteriorated so quickly over the past year that the body that insures them will almost certainly run out of cash in 20 years, according to a new report.

The chances of the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation – the publicly created but privately funded body that insures the nation’s occupational pension schemes – going bust went from 1 in 3 at the end of 2011 to more than 9 in 10 by the end of 2012, a report prepared for the PBGC and released on Tuesday said….”

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Don’t need another reason why it’s so good to be rich? We’re giving it to you anyway.

“State and local governments on average tax the bottom 20 percent of households by income at double the overall tax rate of the top 1 percent, according to a new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. That’s largely because they tend to rely heavily on sales taxes, which burden the poor more than the rich.

Some states put a much bigger tax burden on the poor than others. Take Texas, for example, where there is no personal income tax at all. There, the poorest 20 percent pay four times the tax rate of the top 1 percent, according to the report….”

Full article and list of states with unequal tax burdens

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“For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.

After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in.

The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on October 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing….”

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“Kevin Price is one emergency away from not being able to cover his basic needs, but he doesn’t fit the stereotype of someone living on the financial edge.

Price lives in a three-bedroom house with his wife and two children in a suburb of Wilmington, Del. The family owns two cars, the kids participate in high school sports, and they all attend church services regularly. Price works full-time, as does his wife, and thanks to her job, the family has access to health insurance. But after covering rent, the cost of insurance for Price, his wife and their two children and other basic expenses, the couple had just $223 left in the bank in January.

Of his precarious financial situation, Price, 44, said, “It’s like Muzak in the back of your head. It’s a constant little annoyance.”

Price and his family aren’t alone in dealing with this constant threat. Nearly 44 percent of American households don’t have enough savings to cover their basic expenses for three months in the event of a financial emergency like losing a job or paying for unexpected medical care, according to a recent report from the Corporation for Enterprise Development. That figure has changed little from last year, the Assets and Opportunity Scorecard found.

“These are households and individuals that are living paycheck-to-paycheck. And without savings, you’re one misstep away from financial disaster,” Justin King, federal policy liaison for the New America Foundation, told The Huffington Post.

The Great Recession and its aftermath brought the plight of Americans facing financial insecurity to the forefront, Andrea Levere, president of the CFED, told The Huffington Post.

“It’s really a mainstream issue,” Levere said. “The good piece about this recession is that this issue isn’t just about ‘those poor people,’ it’s about half of us.” ..”

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“The mainstream media and the federal government will soon have the blood of the world on it’s hands.

Radiation from the Fukushima Nuclear Plant disaster in Japan is now actively in the ecosystem all along the North American west coast… even the sea weed is now radiated.  The Vancouver Sun reported one year ago that the seaweed tested from waters off the coast of British Columbia were 4 times the amount considered safe.  No further test results were released after the initial report.

The governments of the United States and Canada are not conducting tests for radioactivity – at least not to the knowledge of the public.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has agreed to continue purchasing seafood from Japan, despite the fact that the food is not being tested for radioactive contamination.  Last November, independent testing in Japan showed 65 per cent of the catches tested positive for cesium (a radioactive material).  Instead of refusing to purchase the poisoned fish, food safety agencies in both the United States and Canada have simply raised the “acceptable level of radiation.”  We can’t go offending the Japanese after promising to buy their tainted goods, now can we?

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“Common bugs in networking systems are placing PCs, printers and storage devices at risk, according to security researchers.

According to the security team at Rapid7, technology used worldwide in both routers and standard networking equipment is making it possible for hackers to potentially infiltrate approximately 40 million to 50 million devices worldwide.

The vulnerability lies in the standard known as Universal Plug and Play (UPnP). This standard set of networking protocols allows devices such as PCs, printers and Wi-Fi access points to communicate and discover each other’s presence. After discovery, devices can be connected through a network in order to share files, printing capability and the Internet.

In a white paper released today, researchers from the security software maker say that while UPnP might make network setup cheaper and more efficient, it harbors a severe security risk.

The paper focuses on programming flaws in common UPnP discovery protocol (SSDP) implementations which can be exploited to crash the service and execute arbitrary code, the exposure of the UPnP control interface (SOAP) on private networks, and programming flaws in both UPnP HTTP and SOAP overall….”

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“Separate movements are afoot across the United States to ban the taking of food photos, whether it’s haute cuisine at five-star restaurants or animals being abused on factory farms.

To date, lawmakers in six states have adopted so-called “Ag-Gag” laws that make it a crime to take videos or still photos on industrial farms that reveal illegal or unethical practices towards livestock.

The legislation adopted in North Dakota, Montana, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Utah was suggested by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative organization known for promoting corporate agendas.

Preventing customers in restaurants from taking photos of their meals also has expanded of late, although the crackdown is not centrally organized like the Ag-Gag laws….”

 

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“(MoneyWatch) When it comes to buying basic liability coverage — the type of coverage required by law in 49 states — you’ll pay more if you’re single, poor and less educated. It doesn’t matter how well you drive.

In fact, drivers who had at-fault accidents, but had a spouse, a college degree, continuous insurance coverage and home ownership paid less — sometimes dramatically less — than a single receptionist with a high school education and a perfect driving record, according to a new survey by Consumer Federation of America.

“State insurance regulators should require auto insurers to explain why they believe factors such as education and income are better predictors of losses than are at-fault accidents,” said J. Robert Hunter, CFA’s director of insurance….”

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“WASHINGTON — A watchdog says the U.S. Treasury Department disregarded its own guidelines and allowed large pay increases for executives at three firms that had received taxpayer-funded bailouts during the financial crisis.

The Special Inspector General for Troubled Asset Relief Program says Treasury approved 18 raises for executives at American International Group Inc., General Motors Corp. and Ally Financial Inc. Of those requests, 14 were for $100,000 or more. One raise, for the CEO of a division at AIG, was for $1 million.

The three firms received a combined nearly $250 billion from the bailout fund. Only AIG has fully repaid its $182 billion bailout.

The report says Treasury approved raises that exceeded pay limits and in some cases failed to link compensation to performance.”

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” In documents filed with the federal district court in Manhattan this morning, Chevron Corp. (NYSE: CVX) for the first time included evidence of bribery in the $18 billion judgment against the company levied by an Ecuadoran court nearly two years ago. Chevron today presented a declaration from a former Ecuadorian judge who says he and another former judge effectively allowed the plaintiffs’ attorneys to write the 188-page judgement against Chevron in exchange for $500,000…”

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“Retirement is becoming a more distant dream for a rising number of older Americans, largely because they need the money but also because they are healthy enough to keep working.

The share of Americans 65 and older in the labor force went from 12.1 percent in 1990 to 16.1 percent in 2010, and the increase was larger for women, according to new analysis of Census data released Thursday.

“As with all age groups, the increase in labor force participation of women has been a driving factor for this overall trend,” said Braedyn Kromer, an analyst in the Census Bureau’s Labor Force Statistics Branch.

The percentage of 65-plus women who are working jumped more than 4 percentage points to 12.5 percent. Men in the same category rose 3.2 percentage points to 20.8 percent. For workers younger than 65, women increased 1.9 percentage points to 69.8 percent, while younger men’s participation dropped 5.2 points to 78.2 percent.

“The data reflect a national economy relying increasingly on older Americans — especially women — working part time,” says retired RAND Corp. demographer Peter Morrison….”

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Cheers on your weekend!

Click here for the documentary

More on the subject….

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msHJLwYWX30 450 300]

Link for iPhone users: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msHJLwYWX30

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpYeekQkAdc 450 300]

Link for iPhone users: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpYeekQkAdc

 

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“Last week, following documentation from Deutsche Bank (and Nomura), it became clear that Italy’s Monte Paschi (BMPS) bank (the oldest in the world) has engaged in derivatives with the German and Japanese banks in order to save itself during the financial crisis. The derivatives, according to Bloomberg, were done off-market and allowed the booking of large upfront gains which covered losses optically that the bank faced as European liquidity dried up completely – the offsetting ‘losses’ are now coming due. Today, amid growing outcry over the ‘deal’, the former head of BMPS hasresigned. Bloomberg reports that Giuseppe Mussari, now Italy’s top banking lobbyist, was the Chairman of BMPS during the derivative deal period. BMPS shares were halted after plunging dramatically as investors are still unclear of the extent of losses it faces on derivatives. If that was not enough chicanery, there is a twist in that none other than Mario Draghi, as Director of the Bank of Italy, would have had to vet Mussari (and his banks’ regulated books) during this period – as BMPS accumulated what is obviously undocumented derivatives positions to intentionally obscure losses. Once again, years later, it seems the truth comes out – and of course we would expect no-one to go to jail – and the lying in Europe (then and now) continues unabated – as the reality of financial system health remains hidden from view.

 

Via Bloomberg,

Former Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA Chairman Giuseppe Mussari quit as Italy’s top banking lobbyist as scrutiny of the lender’s use of derivatives deepens….”

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“DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) – Business leaders in Davos have plenty to worry about, from the euro zone to global geopolitical upheavals, but at heart their problem is simple: how to find new revenue in a low-growth world.

Half a decade on from the financial crisis, investors want to see earnings driven by more than just cost cutting. Their focus now is on a return to sales growth, which presents the world’s largest corporations with a $5 trillion challenge.

That is the amount of extra revenue the 1,200 top global companies need to find each year simply to meet analysts’ expectations, according to consulting firm Accenture.

“The trouble is that stock markets’ expectations of the ability of companies to grow far exceeds the underlying macroeconomic growth rates,” said Mark Spelman, Accenture’s global head of strategy.

“So companies need to get beyond just thinking about emerging markets and rising middle classes and start to look at those segments where you are seeing significant consumer change, because there is a lot of latent growth in those segments.”

Increasingly, companies are seeking specific pockets of opportunity for sales growth. They remain cautious about major new investments, however, with confidence among managers in the near-term outlook for their businesses still weak….”

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