2009
“California attorney Orly Taitz, who has filed a number of lawsuits demanding proof of Barack Obama’s eligibility to serve as president, has released a copy of what purports to be a Kenyan certification of birth and has filed a new motion in U.S. District Court for its authentication. The document lists Obama’s parents as Barack Hussein Obama and Stanley Ann Obama, formerly Stanley Ann Dunham, the birth date as Aug. 4, 1961, and the hospital of birth as Coast General Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya. No doctor is listed. But the alleged certificate bears the signature of the deputy registrar of Coast Province, Joshua Simon Oduya. It was allegedly issued as a certified copy of the original in February 1964. WND was able to obtain other birth certificates from Kenya for purposes of comparison, and the form of the documents appear to be identical.
Last week, a counterfeit document purporting to be Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate made the rounds of the Internet, but was quickly determined to be fraudulent. The new document released by Taitz bears none of the obvious traits of a hoax. Taitz told WND that the document came from an anonymous source who doesn’t want his name known because ‘he’s afraid for his life.’
Taitz’s motion, filed yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, requests the purported evidence of Obama’s birth – both the alleged birth certificate and foreign records not yet obtained – be preserved from destruction, asks for permission to legally request documents from Kenya and seeks a subpoena for deposition from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.’I filed the motion with the court asking for expedited discovery, which would allow me to start subpoenas and depositions even before Obama and the government responds,’ Taitz told WND. ‘I am asking the judge to give me the power to subpoena the documents from the Kenyan embassy and to require a deposition from Hillary Clinton so they will be forced to authenticate [the birth certificate].
‘I’m forcing the issue, where Obama will have to respond,’ she said. ‘Before, they said, ‘You don’t have anything backing your claims,” Taitz explained. ‘Now I have something. In fact, I have posted on the Internet more than Obama has. My birth certificate actually has signatures.’
Taitz’s most celebrated case involved a military officer, Maj. Stefan Cook, whose order to deploy to Afghanistan was revoked when he challenged Obama’s eligibility to hold office. That case has now been refiled in federal court in Florida, raising the specter of a class-action claim among members of the military that their orders aren’t valid because of questions surrounding Obama’s constitutional eligibility. Taitz told WND she plans to file additional paperwork with the Florida court tomorrow, adding the alleged Kenyan birth certificate to Maj. Cook’s case…”
source: worldnetdaily.com
“Three US nationals who crossed into Iran via Iraq have been arrested, the state-owned Al-Alam television has reported. ‘An informed Iranian source confirmed the arrest of three Americans after they infiltrated through the Iraqi border,’ the Arabic-language television station said on Saturday. The two men and a woman entered Iranian territory a day earlier from Iraqi Kurdistan despite repeated warnings not to do so, a Kurdish official said.
A fourth American originally with the hiking party had not joined the trek due to illness, said Beshro Ahmed, a media adviser for the general security department in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region. He named the three as Shane Bower, Sara Short and Joshua Steel, while Shaun Gabriel Maxwell stayed behind in their hotel in the autonomous Kurdish region’s second-largest city of Sulaimaniyah.”
source: aljazeera.net
“he Venezuelan government has ordered the closure of 34 radio stations, the head of the national telecommunications regulator, Conatel, has said. Diosdado Cabello, who is also minister of public works in the government of Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, said the closures were due to the stations’ inability to meet legal operating requirements, and warned that more closures may follow.
‘They will have to cease transmission once they have received the order’, Cabello said on Friday. ‘This is about legitimate authority of the government to manage the radio spectrum… We are only implementing what the law says…’”
source: aljazeera.net
“The giant star Betelgeuse churns out gas bubbles that match its own size — and that’s how it can shed an entire solar mass in 10,000 years. That according to the sharpest-ever images of Orion’s second-brightest star, released this week by the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO)…
Betelgeuse, the second brightest star in the constellation of Orion (the Hunter), is a red supergiant, one of the biggest stars known, and almost 1,000 times larger than our Sun. It is also one of the most luminous stars known, emitting more light than 100,000 Suns. Red supergiants still hold several unsolved mysteries. One of them is just how these behemoths shed such tremendous quantities of material — about the mass of the Sun — in only 10,000 years. With an age of only a few million years, Betelgeuse is already nearing the end of its life and is soon doomed to explode as a supernova. When it does, the supernova should be seen easily from Earth, even in broad daylight.”
source: universetoday.com
“To get the economy back on track, will President Barack Obama have to break his pledge not to raise taxes on 95 percent of Americans? In a ‘This Week’ exclusive, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told me, ‘We’re going to have to do what’s necessary.’ Geithner was clear that he believes a key component of economic recovery is deficit reduction. When I gave him several opportunities to rule out a middle class tax hike, he wouldn’t do it.
‘We have to bring these deficits down very dramatically,’ Geithner told me. ‘And that’s going to require some very hard choices.’ ‘We will not get this economy back on track, recovery will be not strong and sustained, unless we convince the American people that we are going to have the will to bring these deficits down once recovery is firmly established,’ he said…”
source: abcnews.com
“Don’t think for a second that cleaning out your browser cookies, hoisting that firewall, and installing identity theft software makes a dent in protecting your privacy in the new digital world.
Every time we activate our cell phone, swipe a credit card, or use EZ-Pass to sail through toll booths, we leave a record of our whereabouts and clues to our behavior for others to tap that never even existed 20 years ago. All that Web browsing you do on your Android or iPhone device, all the weather updates you may get via that connected GPS unit—these things not only tell someone somewhere what data matters to you but also reveal where you accessed it. As the Web moves off the desktop and into every niche of the physical world, with it goes all of the privacy concerns that still aren’t resolved online. Clean out those Firefox cookies if you like, but Web privacy is only the beginning. At the same time the privacy front evolves, experts in the field are also rethinking the ramifications of these mountains of data. In the future, they warn, governments and corporations may be able to violate your privacy without even having to identify who you are.
‘It has grown by orders of magnitude since the birth of the Internet and our use of cell phones,’ says Stephen Baker, BusinessWeek journalist and author of a new book on digital data gatherers, ‘The Numerati.’ From email replacing letters to downloading music from iTunes instead of purchasing CDs, our habits, tastes, and movements now are recorded in ways that can be connected…”
source: computerpoweruser.com
“THOUSANDS of the worst families in England are to be put in “sin bins” in a bid to change their bad behaviour, Ed Balls announced yesterday. The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes. They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.
Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction. Around 2,000 families have gone through these Family Intervention Projects so far. But ministers want to target 20,000 more in the next two years, with each costing between £5,000 and £20,000 – a potential total bill of £400million. Ministers hope the move will reduce the number of youngsters who get drawn into crime because of their chaotic family lives, as portrayed in Channel 4 comedy drama Shameless. Sin bin projects operate in half of council areas already but Mr Balls wants every local authority to fund them…”
source: express.co.uk
“According to CNN, the Pentagon is ‘to establish regional teams of military personnel to assist civilian authorities in the event of a significant outbreak of the H1N1 virus this fall, according to Defense Department officials.’
‘The proposal is awaiting final approval from Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
The officials would not be identified because the proposal from U.S. Northern Command’s Gen. Victor Renuart has not been approved by the secretary.
The plan calls for military task forces to work in conjunction with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. There is no final decision on how the military effort would be manned, but one source said it would likely include personnel from all branches of the military.
It has yet to be determined how many troops would be needed and whether they would come from the active duty or the National Guard and Reserve forces.
Civilian authorities would lead any relief efforts in the event of a major outbreak, the official said. The military, as they would for a natural disaster or other significant emergency situation, could provide support and fulfill any tasks that civilian authorities could not, such as air transport or testing of large numbers of viral samples from infected patients.
As a first step, Gates is being asked to sign a so-called “execution order” that would authorize the military to begin to conduct the detailed planning to execute the proposed plan.
Orders to deploy actual forces would be reviewed later, depending on how much of a health threat the flu poses this fall, the officials said.’ (CNN, Military planning for possible H1N1 outbreak, July 2009)
The implications are far-reaching. The decision points towards the establishment of a police State. The Pentagon is already planning on the number of troops to be deployed in the case of a pandemic. A nationwide vaccination program is is already planned for the Fall. The pharmaceutical indsutry is slated to deliver 160 million vaccine doses by the Fall…”
source: infowars.com
“Engineers at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, MA, are developing a guidance, navigation, and control system for lunar landings that includes an onboard hazard-detection system able to spot craters, slopes, and rocks that could be dangerous to landing craft. In the Apollo missions of 40 years ago, astronauts steered the lander to a safe spot by looking out the window; the lander itself “had no eyes,” says Eldon Hall, a retired Draper engineer and one of the original electronics designers for Apollo’s navigation computer.
That meant there were some close calls with Apollo, says Tye Brady, the technical director for lunar landing at Draper, who demonstrated his team’s automated-landing and hazard-avoidance technology at last week’s celebration of the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11…”
source: technologyreview.com
“Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano traveled to New York to deliver a speech to the boss today. She told the Council on Foreign Relations there will be no departure from the Bush administration in regard to homeland security. It will be the same agenda with a few minor changes — for instance, the color-coded threat advisory will be chucked.
‘Napolitano sang the praises of counter-terrorism intelligence being shared between federal, state and local agencies through arrangements known as fusion centers,’ writes Frank James for NPR. Napolitano said she plans ‘to make them a top priority for this department to support them, build them, improve them and work with them.’
Translation: the feds will continue the full-steam ahead effort to federalize state and local law enforcement, an effort that began in earnest under Bill Clinton and picked up critical momentum during the reign of George W. Bush. ‘Napolitano sounded just like her predecessors Ridge and Michael Chertoff,’ James continues. ‘And she talked about educating the populace about how to be the eyes and ears of counter-terrorism and also how to respond to the aftermath of man-made or natural disasters,’ or for that matter government contrived false flag operations. Napolitano told the internationalist cabal in New York that the American people suffer from ‘complacency’ and this is a ‘threat in the United States.’ In order to combat complacency, the government has to do more to ‘educate’ the public on the threat posed by terrorists and other miscreants. In other words, Napolitano admitted the incessant warnings of impending doom — from dirty bombs in major cities to bad guys taking out nuclear plants — have not worked…”
source: infowars.com
“Ever since the exit of George W. Bush from the White House, his admirers in India have been a worried lot. They have been wondering nervously about the fate of the “strategic partnership” and the future of dangerous regional rivalries promoted during his days. They are happier after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to the country. They seem less concerned on both counts.
What has dispelled their gloom is a document signed during her visit: an end-use monitoring (EUM) agreement on US military supplies to India. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government has not tabled the text of the agreement in Parliament or shared it with the public so far. But a fair idea of its content is available from disjointed statements, official and quasi-official, made in the course of discussions.
The agreement is based on section 40 (a) of the US Arms Export Control Act, which asks the US administration to ensure, ‘to the extent practicable, (that) such program shall be designed to provide reasonable assurances that the recipient is complying with the requirements imposed by the United States Government with respect to the use, transfers, and security of defense articles and monitoring of U.S. arms transfers, and security of defense articles and services’…”
source: truthout.org
“…The Internet remains one of the most powerful means ever created to give voice to repressed people around the world. Unfortunately, new technologies have also given authoritarian regimes new means to identify and retaliate against those who speak out despite censorship and surveillance. Below are six basic ideas for those attempting to speak without falling
victim to authoritarian surveillance and censorship, and four ideas for the rest of us who want to help support them…
1. Understand Risk Assessment
2. Beware of Malware
3. Choose the Least-Risky Communications Channels
4. Use Encryption to Prevent Surveillance and Censorship of your Web Usage
5. Be Careful of What and Where You Publish
6. Should I use a Tor Bridge…”
source: eff.org
“As the CEO of MeetUp, Scott Heiferman usually spends his days meeting with staff and brainstorming product strategy. But today the 37-year-old New Yorker, wearing a combat helmet and armored vest over a black business suit, is crammed into a battered C-130 transport plane headed for Iraq. Military and diplomatic personnel aboard are warily eyeing him and the others in his party, all similarly attired, as the C-130 begins its steep, corkscrew descent into the Baghdad airport. And Heiferman is thinking, ‘What am I doing here?’
It’s only been a few weeks since he got an email from a State Department policy planner named Jared Cohen inviting him to join the first tech delegation to post-invasion Iraq. Now he’s strapped in with eight other Silicon Valley executives, mostly in their thirties, from Google, Twitter, YouTube, Blue State Digital, WordPress, Howcast, and AT&T. When Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey got his invitation, ‘I just said yes,’ he recalls. YouTube’s director of product management, Hunter Walk, had to go down to his basement to find a suit to wear, because Cohen insisted that the group dress like diplomats to show respect for their hosts. Others worked their spouses for approval, repeating Cohen’s assurances that the security situation in Baghdad was much improved. Howcast CEO Jason Liebman’s mother thinks he’s on a trip to LA…”
source: wired.com