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Eye 1

Best of the Web: U.S. stands alone in opposing UN resolution combating glorification of Nazism

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Iran, Israel, Syria United, For Almost A Decade, in Support of United Nations Anti-Nazi Resolution; United States, For Almost a Decade, Opposed To This Resolution

On November 15, 2013, the United Nations Third Committee adopted Resolution A/c.3/68/L.65/Rev.1, on the Elimination of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.
The Resolution is entitled:

COMBATING GLORIFICATION OF NAZISM AND OTHER PRACTICES THAT CONTRIBUTE TO FUELLING CONTEMPORARY FORMS OF RACISM, RACIAL DISCRIMINATION, XENOPHOBIA AND RELATED INTOLERANCE.'

This resolution is unique within the United Nations because it has united Iran, Israel and Syria, together with 123 other member States, in support of this resolution, repeatedly, year after year for almost a decade, while this same resolution, combating the resurgence of Nazism, has been consistently opposed by the United States, almost in isolation, during the same years.

Cell Phone

U.S. Supreme Court to weigh cell phone searches by police

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© Reuters/Jonathan Ernst
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether police can search an arrested criminal suspect's cell phone without a warrant in two cases that showcase how the courts are wrestling to keep up with rapid technological advances.

Taking up cases from California and Massachusetts arising from criminal prosecutions that used evidence obtained without a warrant, the high court will wade into how to apply older court precedent, which allows police to search items carried by a defendant at the time of arrest, to cell phones.

Cell phones have evolved from devices used exclusively to make calls into gadgets that now contain a bounty of personal information about the owner.

The legal question before the justices is whether a search for such information after a defendant is arrested violates the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which bans unreasonable searches. The outcome would determine whether prosecutors in such circumstances could submit evidence gleaned from cell phones in court.

Digital rights activists have sounded the alarm about the amount of personal data the government can now easily access, not just in the criminal context, but also in relation to national security surveillance programs.

President Barack Obama on Friday announced plans to rein in the vast collection of Americans' phone data in a series of limited reforms prompted by disclosures by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about the sweep of U.S. eavesdropping activities.

Stanford Law School professor Jeffrey Fisher, who represents one of the defendants, said in court papers that it was important for the high court to decide the issue.

Attention

Best of the Web: Obama's lies, NSA spies, and the Sons of Liberty: Will you choose dangerous freedom or peaceful slavery?

"All governments are run by liars." - Independent journalist I.F. "Izzy" Stone
Psychopaths
© SOTT

President Obama has managed, with singular assistance from Congress and the courts, to mangle the Constitution through repeated abuses, attacks and evasions.

This is nothing new, as I've documented in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State. However, with his recent speech on the National Security Agency - a heady cocktail of lies, obfuscations, contradictions and Orwellian doublespeak - Obama has also managed to pervert and propagandize our nation's history, starting with Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty, likening their efforts to secure our freedoms to NSA phone surveillance.

Frankly, George Orwell's Winston Smith, rewriting news stories for Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth, couldn't have done a better job of revising history to suit the party line.

While it didn't bode well for what was to follow, here's how Obama opened his speech:
"At the dawn of our Republic, a small, secret surveillance committee borne out of the 'The Sons of Liberty' was established in Boston. And the group's members included Paul Revere. At night, they would patrol the streets, reporting back any signs that the British were preparing raids against America's early Patriots. Throughout American history, intelligence has helped secure our country and our freedoms."
Obama's inference is clear: rather than condemning the NSA for encroaching on our privacy rights, we should be commending them for helping to "secure our country and our freedoms." Never mind that the Sons of Liberty were actually working against the British government, to undermine what they perceived as a repressive regime guilty of perpetrating a host of abuses against the colonists.

After such a 1984-esque send-up, it doesn't even really matter what else Obama had to say in his speech about NSA reforms and the like. Rest assured, it was largely a pack of lies. Mind you, Obama said it eloquently enough and interspersed it with all the appropriately glib patriotic remarks about individual freedom and the need to defend the Constitution and securing the life of our nation while preserving our liberties. After all, Obama has proven to be very good at saying one thing and doing another, whether it's insisting that "you can keep your health care plan," that he'll close Guantanamo, or that his administration's controversial drone strikes only target terrorists and not civilians.

Gold Coins

Bitcoin hoard worth $27m seized from online black market

  • Digital currency worth $27m seized from online black market
  • Much larger sum still in dispute with website's alleged founder
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© Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty ImageThe value of the digital currency bitcoin has fluctuated wildly based on the value of online transactions.
US prosecutors in Manhattan are sitting on a multimillion-dollar bitcoin gold mine. And it could get much bigger.

Federal authorities hauled in 29,655 units of the digital currency - worth $27m or £16.5m at current exchange rates - through an official forfeiture by Bitcoin this week. The bitcoins had belonged to Silk Road, an anonymous online black market that authorities say was a conduit for purchases of drugs and computer hacking services - even a place where assassins may have advertised. It was shuttered after an FBI raid in September, when agents took control of its server and arrested the man they say was its founder in San Francisco.

No one stepped forward to claim these bitcoins, which were found in electronic "wallets" used to store the digital currency. An additional 144,336 bitcoins, worth more than $128m today, were also discovered but the government's claim on them is being disputed by Ross William Ulbricht, 29, who US authorities say was the founder and main operator of Silk Road. They had been stashed on his laptop.

Treasure Chest

U.S. tech firms attempt to halt corporate tax avoidance reforms

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© Richard Gardner/Rex FeaturesMargaret Hodge, who chairs the public accounts committee, has been strongly critical of Google’s stance on tax.
Lobbyists representing leading US technology companies urge thinktank advising G20 not to close international tax loopholes

Silicon Valley has launched a last-ditch attempt to derail plans devised by the G20 group of countries to close down international loopholes that are exploited by the likes of Google, Amazon and Apple to pay less tax in the UK and elsewhere.

The Digital Economy Group, a lobbying group dominated by the leading US digital firms, has written to the OECD, the Paris-based thinktank tasked by G20 leaders with drawing up reforms, saying it is not true that communications advances have allowed multinational groups to game national tax systems.

Suggesting that any leakage of tax revenues flowing from the complex corporate structures of digital groups is merely coincidental, the Digital Economy Group says: "Enterprises that employ digital communications models do not organise their business operations differently as a legal or tax matter."

Their denial of tax engineering follows a string of tax scandals in Europe and the US in the past two years. In the UK, Google bore the brunt of criticism from Margaret Hodge, who chairs the public accounts committee, after it emerged that Google - which the Guardian understands is a member of the DEG - had been allowed to pay £3.4m in tax to HMRC in 2012 despite UK revenues of £3.2bn.

Vader

U.S. Special Forces now operate in 134 countries - 70% of the planet's inhabited surface

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American murderers-for-hire freely roam most of the planet, carrying out hits for their corporate paymasters.
They operate in the green glow of night vision in Southwest Asia and stalk through the jungles of South America. They snatch men from their homes in the Maghreb and shoot it out with heavily armed militants in the Horn of Africa. They feel the salty spray while skimming over the tops of waves from the turquoise Caribbean to the deep blue Pacific. They conduct missions in the oppressive heat of Middle Eastern deserts and the deep freeze of Scandinavia. All over the planet, the Obama administration is waging a secret war whose full extent has never been fully revealed -- until now.

Since September 11, 2001, U.S. Special Operations forces have grown in every conceivable way, from their numbers to their budget. Most telling, however, has been the exponential rise in special ops deployments globally. This presence -- now in nearly 70% of the world's nations -- provides new evidence of the size and scope of a secret war being waged from Latin America to the backlands of Afghanistan, from training missions with African allies to information operations launched in cyberspace.

In the waning days of the Bush presidency, Special Operations forces were reportedly deployed in about 60 countries around the world. By 2010, that number had swelled to 75, according to Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post. In 2011, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told TomDispatch that the total would reach 120. Today, that figure has risen higher still.

Snakes in Suits

Do as we say, not as we do! Countries pushing the man-made global warming propaganda are all 'outsourcing' their CO2 emissions to China

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© How Hwee Young/EPAJinhuarun chemical plant in Zekou Town, Qianjiang City of Hubei Province, China. A draft UN report says the west is increasingly outsourcing its carbon pollution to China and other rising economies
Greenhouse gas output of China and elsewhere is increased by making goods that are then used in the US and Europe

The world's richest countries are increasingly outsourcing their carbon pollution to China and other rising economies, according to a draft UN report.

Outsourcing of emissions comes in the form of electronic devices such as smartphones, cheap clothes and other goods manufactured in China and other rising economies but consumed in the US and Europe.

A draft of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained by the Guardian, says emissions of carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases warming the planet grew twice as fast in the first decade of the 21st century as they did during the previous three decades.

Much of that rise was due to the burning of coal, the report says. And much of that coal was used to power factories in China and other rising economies that produce goods for US and European consumers, the draft adds.

Since 2000, annual carbon dioxide emissions for China and the other rising economies have more than doubled to nearly 14 gigatonnes a year, according to the draft report. But about 2 GT a year of that was produced making goods for export.

The picture is similar for other rising economies producing goods for export, the report finds.

Snakes in Suits

Oligarchs vs. masses: 85 richest people on Earth as wealthy as half world's population

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© Arnd Wiegmann/REUTERSThe InterContinental Davos luxury hotel in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos. Oxfam report found people in countries around the world believe that the rich have too much influence over the direction their country is heading
As World Economic Forum starts in Davos, development charity claims that growing inequality has been driven by a 'power grab' by wealthy elites

The world's wealthiest people aren't known for travelling by bus, but if they fancied a change of scene then the richest 85 people on the globe - who between them control as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population put together - could squeeze onto a single double-decker.

The extent to which so much global wealth has become corralled by a virtual handful of the so-called 'global elite' is exposed in a new report from Oxfam on Monday. It warned that those richest 85 people across the globe share a combined wealth of £1tn, as much as the poorest 3.5 billion of the world's population.

Target

Why are dozens of high ranking officers being purged from the U.S. military?

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© Mariordo Camila Ferreira and Mario DuranAerial view of The Pentagon
Since Barack Obama has been in the White House, high ranking military officers have been removed from their positions at a rate that is absolutely unprecedented. Things have gotten so bad that a number of retired generals are publicly speaking out about the "purge" of the U.S. military that they believe is taking place. As you will see below, dozens of highly decorated military leaders have been dismissed from their positions over the past few years. So why is this happening? When I was growing up, my father was an officer in the U.S. Navy. And what is going on right now is absolutely crazy - especially during a time of peace. Is there a deliberate attempt to "reshape" the military and remove those that don't adhere to the proper "viewpoints"? Does someone out there feel a need to get officers that won't "cooperate" out of the way? Throughout world history, whatever comes next after a "military purge" is never good. If this continues, what is the U.S. military going to look like in a few years?

Light Sabers

Do as we say, not as we do! While U.S. preaches neo-liberal 'free trade', China condemns its protectionist measures

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© Reuters/Kevin LamarqueU.S. President Barack Obama signs the ''omnibus'' spending bill in Washington January 17, 2014.

China's Commerce Ministry has condemned a $1.1-trillion spending bill passed by the U.S. Congress last week over clauses that limit technological purchases from the Asian giant, saying they clash with the principles of fair trade.

The bill, signed by President Barack Obama on Friday, included a cyber-espionage review process for federal purchases of technology from China, a measure incorporated last year amid growing U.S. concern over Chinese cyber attacks.

In a weekend statement, China's Commerce Ministry said the move "went against the principles of fair trade" as it sought to curb purchases of Chinese technology and export of satellites and parts to China.

"China is resolutely opposed," the ministry said in comments attributed to an unnamed official in its U.S. trade division.