Puppet MastersS


Heart - Black

Psychopathic Israel troops 'kill Palestinian teen' in West Bank

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© EPA
Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian teenager in the southern West Bank on Wednesday, a Palestinian security source said. The dead teenager was named as Youssef Shawamra. His family said he was 15.

"Yussef Sami Shawamreh, 15, was killed by the Israeli army near the separation barrier, close to al-Ramadin village," the source said, indicating that the body was still with the army.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said that three Palestinian suspects were seen tampering with a security fence near the West Bank city of Hebron, and did not heed the soldiers' call on them to stop and move back.

Treasure Chest

Koch brothers' tangled political network uses obscure LLCs to hide their conservative propaganda spending from the public

koch brothers
© Huffington Post
Obscure limited liability companies have ultimate say over the Koch network's nonprofits, which spend hundreds of millions of dollars to advance conservative causes.

Libertarian billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch were among the first to grasp the political potential of social welfare groups and trade associations - nonprofits that can spend money to influence elections but don't have to name their donors.

The Kochs and their allies have built up a complex network of such organizations, which spent more than $383 million in the run-up to the 2012 election alone. [Click link for interactive graphic]

Documents released in recent months show the Kochs have added wrinkles to their network that even experts well versed in tax law and campaign finance say they've never seen before - wrinkles that could make it harder to discern who controls each nonprofit in the web and how it disperses its money.

A review of 2012 tax returns filed by Koch network groups shows that most have been set up as nonprofit trusts rather than not-for-profit corporations, an unusual step that reduces their public reporting requirements.

It sounds complicated and arcane because it is. Some of the nation's top nonprofit experts said they could only speculate on the reasons for the network's increasingly elaborate setup.

"My guess is that we're looking at various forms of disguise - to disguise control, to disguise the flow of funds from one entity to another," said Gregory Colvin, a tax lawyer and campaign-finance specialist in San Francisco who reviewed all the documents for ProPublica.

Four other leading nonprofit experts and three conservative operatives with knowledge of the Koch network said the most likely reason that the Kochs and their inner circle are using this arrangement was to exert control over the groups without saying publicly who was in charge. In particular, they said, the Kochs likely wanted to prevent any of the groups that they help fund from going against their wishes - as happened with the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank the Kochs had long supported before they got into a dispute with its president, Ed Crane.

After a top Cato official ridiculed Charles Koch in a 2010 New Yorker article, the brothers pushed to put allies on the think tank's board. The following year, they pressed Cato to provide "intellectual ammunition" for their oldest politically active nonprofit, Americans for Prosperity, Cato officials later alleged. The dispute was settled in 2012, with the departure of Crane and the installation of a traditional board. (Cato previously was controlled by four private shareholders, including the Kochs, an unusual setup for a nonprofit.)

Robert Levy, Cato's board chairman, told ProPublica that while he didn't disagree with the Kochs' aims, Cato's leaders were uncomfortable with serving as advocates for their political agenda.

Airplane

Why experts are baffled by the disappearance of the Malaysian Airways flight MH370: 5 unanswered questions

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370
© Sovannara/RexAround 100 people including Buddhist monks light incense sticks and candles during a prayer service in Cambodia for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
More than a week after the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, an ever-increasing number of questions remain unanswered or partly explained.

1. Why did no passengers or cabin crew make mobile calls if they realised the plane was off course?

Experts say calls can be made even at high altitude. "It is theoretically possible," said Dan Warren, senior director of technology at the GSM Association. "It would depend on the spectrum range you're in with your phone. It also depends on the power output of the cell itself.

It would also depend on the landmass and network they were flying over, and the roaming agreement of the various network operators. There's not really a clear cut answer.""

If a plane were to fly over the sea, he added, mobile contact would soon stop: "It wouldn't take very long to lose any kind of phone signal. It would depend on altitude and the direction you were flying in."

Some planes have systems to enable passengers to make calls using a satellite link, but it is not thought to have been fitted in the Boeing 777.

2. What role could have been played by reinforced cockpit doors?

Since 9/11 airliners have been fitted with strengthened flight deck doors, intended to prevent intruders from taking control. If whoever took control of the plane barricaded themselves in there would be little others on the plane could do, said Professor David Allerton of the University of Sheffield. "They're designed to be impregnable, so six terrorists can't kick it down. They're steel reinforced, with a solid locking mechanism. The assumption is you'd always have two or three people on the flight deck and they wouldn't all go mad."

The doors are often opened, for example, to pass food to the pilots. Last week photographs emerged of the co-pilot of flight MH370 entertaining teenage tourists in an aircraft cockpit during a previous flight.

Vader

Ex-U.S. intelligence officer Scott Rickard says U.S. foreign aid agencies paid for Kiev street violence

The EU is a hurry to sign the long-awaited association treaty with Ukraine, while the new leaders in Kiev are turning to Washington for support. Whose interests were at stake during the Ukrainian revolution? Should the promises of the West be trusted by the new authorities? Sophie talks to former US intelligence officer Scott Rickard to find out the answers to these questions.


Cow

The debate over Idaho's new Ag-Gag Law is headed for the courts

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© Flickr/UGA College of A
Not even a month after Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter signed it, Idaho's freshly minted ag-gag law is already facing a legal challenge. A coalition of animal rights, environmental, labor, and civil rights groups, along with journalist Will Potter, is suing the state, claiming that Senate Bill 1337 violates the First Amendment.

"These ag-gag laws are turning my sources into criminals, they are placing journalists like me in the legal crosshairs, and they are chilling a vibrant national discussion about animal protection, food safety, the environment, and workers' rights," Potter wrote on his website, Green Is the New Red, this morning.

His announcement of the Idaho suit echoes what he told me last summer, when he became a plaintiff in a similar lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Utah's farm protection law.

Comment: Prime example of the following: ALEC - State by State: Ag-Gag Laws silence whistleblowers

Shocking: Reporting factory farm abuses to be considered "Act of Terrorism" if new laws pass
Ag-Gag laws passed 20 years ago were focused more on deterring people from destroying property, or from either stealing animals or setting them free. Today's ALEC-inspired bills take direct aim at anyone who tries to expose horrific acts of animal cruelty, dangerous animal-handling practices that might lead to food safety issues, or blatant disregard for environmental laws designed to protect waterways from animal waste runoff. In the past, most of those exposes have resulted from undercover investigations of exactly the type Big Ag wants to make illegal.
Wave of "ag gag" bills threaten food safety and freedom of the press
In the modern era, effective enforcement of food safety and the humane treatment of animals has long relied on undercover video investigations by reporters and citizens. The footage and images gained can serve as proof of criminal wrongdoing or lay ugly practices bare. Such images can vindicate whistleblowers who otherwise risk retaliation when speaking up. Now this practice, which has time and time again exposed hidden dangers -- including downer cows linked to Mad Cow disease in the food supply -- is under threat by a series of state bills dubbed "ag gag" bills.
"Big Farma" still trying to hide their dirty secrets


Rose

Why I am a Bennite - A Eulogy to the Rt Hon Tony Benn by George Galloway MP

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I was a "Bennite" (which became a considerable term of abuse in the 1980s) since the 1960s. I was brought up in a Labour household in which the premiership of Harold Wilson was the sun and in his constellation Mr Benn was the brightest of the many stars clustered around that Labour cabinet. There were so many stars - James Callaghan Roy Jenkins Barbara Castle Tony Crosland Richard Crossman Dennis Healey George Brown - but even in that company, the young, fresh-faced, bursting with ideas Wedgwood-Benn (as he was then known) stood out.

For us he seemed to exemplify the "white-hot heat" of the "technological revolution" - Mr Wilson's wheeze for disguising his socialist purpose from a hostile media and the "Gnomes of Zurich" who, even then with their financial power had the means of destroying any real Labour government. Mr Benn was brimful of innovative unorthodoxy, and seemed just what the doctor ordered.

From his heroic ( and successful) fight to remain in the Commons upon the death of his father Viscount Stansgate - a Viscountcy which Mr Benn was to be forced to inherit - through to the Hovercraft, Concorde, TSR2, nuclear power, special edition postage stamps, tape-recording (we'd scarcely heard of it) his own interviews and speeches, he was every inch the "young Lochinvar". Dashing, romantic, eloquent, unafraid.


Airplane

Isolating Venezuela: Air Canada suspends Venezuela flights over 'civil unrest'

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Steven Harper, Canada's Bush
Air Canada has suspended flights to and from Venezuela, citing concerns over security.

The airline said it would consider resuming operations once the situation in Venezuela had stabilised.

It operated three return flights between Toronto and Caracas per week.

Twenty-nine people - from both sides of the political divide - have been killed in six weeks of protests against high inflation, crime and the shortage of many staples in Venezuela.

"Due to ongoing civil unrest in Venezuela, Air Canada can no longer ensure the safety of its operation and has suspended flights to Caracas until further notice," says the Canadian airline in a statement.

Comment: So, which is it? Is it the civil unrest, or the 'debt' the Venezuelan government allegedly owes these private corporations that has led to them cancelling flights?

Incidentally, not a single international airline cancelled a single flight to Kiev, despite parts of that city being burned to the ground by a hired mob.

So what gives here? Is the 'civil unrest' merely another pretext with which the Western corporate elites continue their efforts to physically isolate Venezuela?


Light Saber

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro: 'A certain transnational elite seeks to encircle Russia in order to weaken and eventually destroy it'

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© AFP Photo / Leo RamirezVenezuelan President Nicolas Maduro
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has accused both the US and the EU of "double standards" over Crimea and recalled the Kosovo and Falkland Islands referendums as evidence. Maduro says the West is seeking to "eventually destroy" Russia.

"There is a certain transnational elite that has been cherishing this dream for 300 years," Nicolas Maduro said.

The Venezuelan leader criticized "the anti-Russian policy of the US and some European countries," saying the crisis in Ukraine comes as a response to that.

"What has happened in Crimea is a response to the format that made Ukrainian democracy collapse. And there is only one reason for this: the anti-Russian policy of the US and some European countries. They seek to encircle Russia in order to weaken and eventually destroy it," he said.

His statement comes amid deteriorating relations between Russia and both the US and the EU. The latter imposed first sanctions against Russian officials as the Crimean Peninsula sought to separate from Ukraine. The West threatened that more sanctions would follow after the March-16 referendum in Crimea, in which over 96 percent of its citizens voted to join Russia. The treaty was signed between the two sides on Tuesday.

Dollar

Proxy war: Drowning in debt, Ukraine regime takes first billion$ from West... to build a new army

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"Now boys, forget any ideas you had about actually doing anything useful for Ukrainians, first order of business is to fire the generals and build an army that's actually loyal to you. Here's the number of my contact at Academi (aka Blackwater) for starters..."
Ukraine's government mobilized reservists and approved an emergency military buildup a day after the disputed province of Crimea voted to secede from the country and become part of Russia.

But with its armed forces woefully ill-trained and poorly equipped after years of underfunding, a frustrated Ukraine continued to focus on diplomacy first.

Political leaders here hurled harsh words at Moscow and refused to give up Crimea as lost. But even as the government in Kiev took steps to shore up national defenses, it renewed calls for a diplomatic solution. Amid concerns about possible further Russian intervention in Ukraine's restive east and south, Kiev hoped for the best - ­progress in efforts to resolve the crisis - while also preparing for the worst.

Parliament approved a presidential decree mobilizing some of the country's 40,000 reservists and agreed to divert $600 million from other parts of Ukraine's budget to buy weapons, repair equipment and boost training over the next three months - a major commitment for a cash-strapped country.

Wall Street

Federal Reserves's Yellen outlines stimulus end, U.S. stocks drop

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© APFederal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen
U.S. stocks fell for the first time in three days as Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said the central bank's stimulus program could end this fall and benchmark interest rates could rise six months later.

Walt Disney Co., General Electric Co. and Boeing Co. lost at least 1.4 percent to lead the Dow (INDU) Jones Industrial Average lower. Consolidated Edison Inc. led utilities to the biggest decline among 10 groups in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index. Newmont Mining Corp. lost 3 percent as gold tumbled the most in six weeks after the Fed's decision to reduce asset purchases.

The S&P 500 slipped 0.6 percent to 1,860.77 at 4 p.m. in New York. The Dow slid 114.02 points, or 0.7 percent, to 16,222.17. About 6.7 billion shares changed hands in the U.S., in line with the three-month average.

"The pace of tightening, once the Fed starts tightening, is a little bit faster than thought before and I think that's why we're getting this market reaction,"John Canally, an economic strategist at LPL Financial Corp., said in a phone interview from Boston. His firm oversees about $438.4 billion. "Being reminded that the Fed will eventually raise rates is getting traders' attention."