Portland, Tennessee - You're probably used to seeing TSA's signature blue uniforms at the airport, but now agents are hitting the interstates to fight terrorism with Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR).
"Where is a terrorist more apt to be found? Not these days on an airplane more likely on the interstate," said Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons.
Tuesday Tennessee was first to deploy VIPR simultaneously at five weigh stations and two bus stations across the state.
Puppet Masters
The U.S. economy grew in the third quarter at the fastest pace in a year as gains in consumer spending and business investment helped support a recovery on the brink of faltering.
Gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced, rose at a 2.5 percent annual rate, matching the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News and up from a 1.3 percent gain in the prior quarter, Commerce Department figures showed today in Washington. Household purchases, the biggest part of the economy, increased at a more-than-projected 2.4 percent pace.
Americans last quarter cut savings to boost purchases as incomes dropped by the most in two years, calling into question the sustainability of the acceleration in sales. With the lack of jobs holding back wages, the Obama administration and Federal Reserve policy makers have proposed additional measures aimed at stimulating growth and hiring.
Gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced, rose at a 2.5 percent annual rate, matching the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News and up from a 1.3 percent gain in the prior quarter, Commerce Department figures showed today in Washington. Household purchases, the biggest part of the economy, increased at a more-than-projected 2.4 percent pace.
Americans last quarter cut savings to boost purchases as incomes dropped by the most in two years, calling into question the sustainability of the acceleration in sales. With the lack of jobs holding back wages, the Obama administration and Federal Reserve policy makers have proposed additional measures aimed at stimulating growth and hiring.
European stocks rallied to the highest in 12 weeks after the region's leaders agreed to expand a bailout fund to halt the sovereign debt crisis.
BNP Paribas SA, France's biggest bank, and Deutsche Bank AG, Germany's largest, surged at least 15 percent as policy makers boosted the firepower of the European rescue fund to 1 trillion euros ($1.4 trillion). PPR SA, the French owner of the Gucci luxury-goods brand, jumped 5.4 percent after third-quarter sales surpassed analyst estimates.
The Stoxx Europe 600 Index rose 3.5 percent to 249.25 at the close in London, the highest since Aug. 3. The index has rallied 16 percent from this year's low on Sept. 22 amid growing speculation that policy makers would agree on a solution to the region's debt woes.
"Some of the fear, which has been the dominant factor in the market, has been removed," said Pierre Mouton, a fund manager who helps oversee $7.5 billion at Notz Stucki & Cie. in Geneva. "Europe came to an agreement and has a plan. This allows financial stocks to rise because there is no longer the specter of nationalization. There is a sense of relief for the banking sector."
BNP Paribas SA, France's biggest bank, and Deutsche Bank AG, Germany's largest, surged at least 15 percent as policy makers boosted the firepower of the European rescue fund to 1 trillion euros ($1.4 trillion). PPR SA, the French owner of the Gucci luxury-goods brand, jumped 5.4 percent after third-quarter sales surpassed analyst estimates.
The Stoxx Europe 600 Index rose 3.5 percent to 249.25 at the close in London, the highest since Aug. 3. The index has rallied 16 percent from this year's low on Sept. 22 amid growing speculation that policy makers would agree on a solution to the region's debt woes.
"Some of the fear, which has been the dominant factor in the market, has been removed," said Pierre Mouton, a fund manager who helps oversee $7.5 billion at Notz Stucki & Cie. in Geneva. "Europe came to an agreement and has a plan. This allows financial stocks to rise because there is no longer the specter of nationalization. There is a sense of relief for the banking sector."
© Walter Bieri/Associated Press
Google office
Google office
Google faced down demands from a US law enforcement agency to take down YouTube videos allegedly showing police brutality earlier this year, figures released for the first time show.
The technology giant's biannual transparency report shows that Google refused the demands from the unnamed authority in the first half of this year.
According to the report, Google separately declined orders by other police authorities to remove videos that allegedly defamed law enforcement officials.
© YouTube
Google revealed figures for YouTube content removal requests in its biannual transparency report
Google revealed figures for YouTube content removal requests in its biannual transparency report
The US technology giant reported a 71% rise in content removal requests from the UK government or police, compared with the final half of 2010, with almost 200 YouTube videos requested to be taken down following complaints about privacy, security or hate speech.
Google revealed the figures in its biannual transparency report, part of an effort to highlight online censorship across the world.
The report shows that private information about 1,443 British users or accounts was demanded by law enforcement agencies between January and June this year. It is the first time Google has revealed how many users the data requests relate to.
© SecurityNewsDaily
The Anonymous campaign began Oct. 14, when members of the hacktivist group found a cache of child-pornography websites while browsing a secret website called the Hidden Wiki, a guidebook to hundreds of underground websites invisible to search engines and regular Internet users. The hackers singled out Lolita City, a file-sharing site used by pedophiles, and leaked the names of the site's 1,589 active members to Pastebin on Tuesday (Oct. 18), the Examiner reported.
© SOTT.net
The prediction that the Traitor Act would help the U.S. National Security State completely take over American society has come true. Useless government agencies like the TSA, FBI, IRS, DEA and CIA have been given carte blanche to spy on Americans and crush dissent.
In the last few years, illegal TSA checkpoints have been set up across America to control the movement of people and create a false sense of security in the public mind. Their intent is to get Americans to slowly conform to the new totalitarian society in which government officials treat people like mindless cattle and monitor the individual's every move.
It is wrong to call America's totalitarian beast "a National Security State." It does not provide security and it is not even national. A more fitting term is "Supranational Emergency State." Let me explain.
America's Emergency State depends on national emergencies like the 9/11 attacks to strengthen its authority and justify its unconstitutional powers. America has been in a state of national emergency since September 23, 2001, when President Bush issued Executive Order 13224 to declare a national emergency.
© Greenberg
The Stop Online Piracy Act has received bipartisan support in the House of Representatives and is the House version of a bill introduced in the Senate in May known as the Theft of Intellectual Property Act or Protect IP Act.
The legislation has received the backing of Hollywood, the music industry, the Business Software Alliance, the National Association of Manufacturers, the US Chamber of Commerce and other groups.
But it has come under fire from digital rights and free speech organizations for allegedly paving the way for US law enforcement to unilaterally shut down websites, including foreign sites, without due process.
Fidel Castro
NATO took on that global repressive role as soon as the USSR, which had served the United States as an excuse for its creation, ceased to exist. Its criminal purpose became obvious in Serbia, a Slavic country, whose people had so heroically fought against Nazi troops in WW II.
When in March of 1999 the countries of this ill-fated organization, in its efforts to disintegrate Yugoslavia after the death of Josip Broz Tito, sent their troops in support of the Kosovar secessionists, they ran into strong resistance from that nation whose experienced forces were still intact.
© Associated Press
Marching across ... Kenyan troops crossing into Somali territory.
Marching across ... Kenyan troops crossing into Somali territory.
Al-Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage warned Kenya: "We know fighting more than you and defeated other invaders before... We shall inflict on you the same damage you inflicted on us. You have to see what happened to the other aggressors, like [Ugandan President Yoweri] Museveni and his country when they invaded us. We hit them in their country."
The intervention by Kenyan military forces was requested and welcomed by the US-backed Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in Mogadishu. Somali government spokesman Abdirahman Omar Osman said: "The governments of Kenya and Somalia are now cooperating in the fight against al Shabaab, which is an enemy of both countries."
US officials said last week that they have been pressuring Kenya to "do something" in response to a string of security incidents along the Kenya-Somalia border, while at the same time maintaining that the Kenyan invasion into Somalia caught them by surprise.
