In "Stocks for the Long Run," economist Jeremy Siegel researched all the "big market moves" between 1801 and 2001. Bottom line: 75% of the time, there is no rationale for "big moves." No one can predict them. Maybe technicians and traders can pick short-term moves the next second. Maybe tomorrow. But the long-term "big market moves?" No way. Now why predict an "87%" chance of another meltdown in 2013? Because in the real world of statistical probabilities, historical facts and expert opinions danger signals are flashing wild.

In mid-2008 we summarized the predictions of 20 experts over several years. Predicted a meltdown in a few years - markets crashed two months later. Fast. In retrospect, it was inevitable, thanks in part to the hype, arrogance and incompetence of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson who failed to prepare America. The warnings are again accelerating. And so is the happy talk from Wall Street casino insiders, about rallies, housing recoveries, perpetual cheap money. Don't listen. The next crash will happen by year-end. Yes, there's a 13% chance the next Fed chairman will keep printing cheap money into 2014. But on New Years Eve our aging bull will be 4½ years old, well past Bill O'Neill's "average" 3.75 years for putting this bull out to pasture. So unless you're shorting, all bets on Wall Street casinos for 2014 are megarisk, like 2008. Like a Stephen King horror film, you feel it coming. Could happen anytime, even tomorrow, says Siegel's research, or the unpredictable logic in Nassim Taleb's "Black Swan." -

President Obama's trip this month to Africa, with the first family tagging along, is projected to cost taxpayers as much as $100 million, sparking criticism as the federal government scrimps along during sequester-related budget cuts.

Among the related costs will be fighter jets; hundreds of Secret Service agents; a Navy ship with a full trauma center; and military cargo planes to bring 56 vehicles including 14 limousines and three trucks loaded with sheets of bullet­proof glass to cover the windows of the hotels where the first family will stay. The details were reported by The Washington Post, based on a confidential planning document.

The trip to sub-Sahara Africa runs from June 26 to July 3.

The president and first lady have cancelled plans to go on a safari that would have included the additional expense of a sharp-shooting team, responsible for putting down a cheetah, lion or any other wild animal that became a threat.

Figuring out the exact cost of the overall trip is difficult because the information is classified for the purpose of national security.

However, a Government Accountability Office report shows President Clinton's 1998 trip to six African nations cost at least $42.7 million - not including Secret Service expenses.

Obama's trip could cost the federal government $60 million to $100 million based on the costs of similar African trips in recent years, a person familiar with the Obama journey but not authorized to speak for attribution told The Post.

The trip comes as agencies across the federal government try to find cost-saving measures to deal with the massive, across-the-board budget cuts known as sequester, which kicked in this year after Washington lawmakers failed to agree on a more measured approach. The Secret Service, for example, pushed to cancel public White House tours to save thousands in weekly overtime expenses.

"For the cost of this trip to Africa, you could have 1,350 weeks of White House tours," Rep. George Holding, a North Carolina Republican, said last week. "It is no secret that we need to rein in government spending, and the Obama administration has regularly and repeatedly shown a lack of judgment for when and where to make cuts. ... The American people have had enough of the frivolous and careless spending."

The White House had defended the trip cost saying the Secret Service plan determines the security cost and that first family's trip will result in long-term goodwill.

"The infrastructure that accompanies the president's travels is beyond our control," said Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. "When you travel to regions like Africa that don't get a lot of presidential attention, you tend to have very long-standing and long-running impact from the visit."

Stand-up comedian, columnist and actor Russell Brand on the BBC's Question Time debate, June 2013.

Seventeen years after the Paris-bound TWA Flight 800 blew up off the coast of Long Island, producers Tom Stalcup and Kristina Borjesson have released a new documentary - simply titled "TWA Flight 800" - that has the very real potential to re-open the investigation into the plane's destruction.

Kudos, in particular, to Stalcup. A Ph.D. physicist by background, he has dedicated the last 16 years of his life to exposing what is arguably the most flagrant government cover-up in American peacetime history.

Borjesson has likewise been involved from the beginning. As a producer at CBS in 1996 when TWA 800 was destroyed, she sacrificed her future at CBS to get at the truth. Together, they have produced a documentary that is compelling, convincing and, finally, deeply moving.

Jack Cashill and James Sanders exposed the corrupt TWA 800 investigation in their book "First Strike" - get it now at WND's Superstore

The producers made two strategic moves to force the media to look seriously at their conclusions. One was to rely heavily on the testimony of a half-dozen highly credible whistleblowers from within the investigation.

The second was to avoid politics. When James Sanders and I produced the video documentary "Silenced" on this subject 12 years ago and the book "First Strike" two years after that, we made the marketing mistake of identifying the logic of the cover-up.

That logic led to the White House. Sixteen years ago, in the home stretch of a difficult re-election campaign, Bill Clinton faced a problem very similar to one that Barack Obama would face in 2012. This is something the media did not want to know, let alone share.

An event took place that threatened the "peace and prosperity" theme of his campaign - specifically, the shoot-down of this doomed airliner with 230 people on board 12 minutes out of JFK.

Although the word was not used back then, the Clinton White House, with the help of a complicit media, rewrote the event's "narrative" to assure re-election. Again, as with Benghazi, that narrative was clumsily improvised almost on a daily basis.

Knowing the media had his back, Clinton responded much as Obama did: deny, obfuscate and kick the investigatory can down the road until after the election.

One central figure appeared in each drama: Hillary Clinton. She stood by Obama's side in the Rose Garden on Sept. 12 as he spun reality into confection.

Throughout that long night of July 17, 1996, she holed up with Bill and Sandy Berger in the White House family quarters, assessing their narrative options much as Obama did on Sept. 11, 2012.

By removing politics from the equation, Stalcup, who appeared in "Silenced," and Borjesson have attracted a fair share of major media attention.

In their well-researched recreation of the plane's final minutes, they wisely refrain from saying who pulled the trigger. But the evidence that someone fired missiles at the plane overwhelms the dispassionate observer.

In the 21st century the two hundred year-old propaganda that the American people control their government has been completely shattered. Both the Bush and Obama regimes have made it unmistakenly clear that the American people don't even influence, much less control, the government. As far as Washington is concerned, the people are nothing but chaff in the wind.

Polls demonstrate that 65% of the US population opposes US intervention in Syria. Despite this clear indication of the people's will, the Obama regime is ramping up a propaganda case for more arming of Washington's mercenaries sent to overthrow the secular Syrian government and for a "no-fly zone" over Syria, which, if Libya is the example, means US or NATO aircraft attacking the Syrian army on the ground, thus serving as the air force of Washington's imported mercenaries, euphemistically called "the Syrian rebels."

Washington declared some time ago that the "red line" that would bring Syria under Washington's military attack was the Assad government's use of chemical weapons of mass destruction against Washington's mercenaries. Once this announcement was made, everyone with a brain immediately knew that Washington would fabricate false intelligence that Assad had used chemical weapons, just as Washington presented to the United Nations the intentional lie via Secretary of State Colin Powell that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had dangerous weapons of mass destruction. Remember National Security Advisor Condi Rice's image of a "mushroom cloud over American cities?" Propagandistic lies were Washington's orders of the day.

And they still are. Now Washington has fabricated the false intelligence, and president obama has announced it with a straight face, that Syria's Assad has used sarin gas on several occasions and that between 100 and 150 "of his own people," a euphemism for the US supplied foreign mercenaries, have been killed by the weapon of mass destruction.

Think about that for a minute. As unfortunate as is any death from war, is 100-150 deaths "mass destruction?" According to low-ball estimates, the US-sponsored foreign mercenary invasion of Syria has cost 93,000 lives, of which 150 deaths amounts to 0.0016 or sixteen hundredths of one percent.

In other words, 92,850 of the deaths did not cross the "red line." But 150 did, allegedly.

Yes, I know. Washington's position makes no sense. But when has it ever made any sense?

It's standard operating procedure for the FBI to conduct an internal investigation when an agent shoots a suspect. Questions are being raised, though, after a report found that every single intentional shooting in the past 20 years was deemed 'justified.'

Between 1993 and early 2011 FBI agents fatally shot 70 people and wounded approximately 80 others. In no incident, including one that led to a $1.3 million payout for a victim wrongfully identified as a bank robber, was an agent wrong to fire their weapon. The records were obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

"The FBI takes very seriously any shooting incidents involving our agents, and as such we have an effective, time-tested process for addressing them internally," an FBI spokesman said, adding that there have been no improper intentional shootings since 2011.

The FBI investigation into the death of Ibragim Todashev a Chechen man connected to Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, is still ongoing. Todashev was fatally shot during an interview with FBI agents. Since the May 22 incident, unnamed agents have told media outlets Todashev threatened them with a knife, broomstick or metal pipe before the bureau admitted he was unarmed after all.

Tim Murphy, a former deputy director of the FBI, told the Times that agents are generally older with more experience than the average police officer. He said officials plan to go into a situation with an "overwhelming presence," which may help cut down on the number of shots fired.

An alternative search engine DuckDuckGo has enjoyed a record surge in traffic as NSA scandals spark fears and frighten away Internet users from the more popular Google or Yahoo!.

Over the previous week DuckDuckGo, a private search engine, which claims not to collect users' searches or create any personal user profile, has increased its traffic by 26 per cent and passed 3.1 million of direct queries.

During the weeks before he was killed in a car crash in Los Angeles, reporter Michael Hastings was researching a story about a privacy lawsuit brought by Florida socialite Jill Kelley against the Department of Defense and the FBI.

Hastings, 33, was scheduled to meet with a representative of Kelley next week in Los Angeles to discuss the case, according to a person close to Kelley. Hastings wrote for Rolling Stone and the website BuzzFeed.

Kelley alleges that military officials and the FBI leaked her name to the media to discredit her after she reported receiving a stream of emails that were traced to Paula Broadwell, a biographer of former CIA director David H. Petraeus, according to a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., on June 3.

"Overall Repression on Media in Turkey"

Hayat TV (Life TV), a Turkish channel broadcasting extensive live coverage of the ongoing protests in Taksim Square and Gezi Park, Istanbul, has been ordered to shut down. Regulators have ordered the broadcast to cease at 12:00 p.m. on Friday, June 14 due to a licensing issue; however, Hayat TV asserts this is a pretext to force closure of their broadcast of the protests.

In an open letter published today by blog EUObserver.com (which reports on events in the Arab world), Mustafa Kara, TV Broadcast Coordinator for Hayat TV, asks readers to "support freedom of press" and spread news of the closure (which the station hopes to reverse).

The letter reads in its entirety:

Hayat TV, a progressive Turkish TV channel of the working people, the youth, women and the intellectuals is facing closure. We believe this is a blow to people's freedom of information.

The decision for the closure was made by the broadcasting regulator RTÜK, Radio & Television High Commission with the pretext that Hayat TV has no licence.

This is not true.

Hayat TV has been broadcasting since 21 March 2007 by ofcom license via TURKSAT satellite. But a recent change in broadcasting rules via TURKSAT requires broadcasters to obtain a RTÜK license to be able to broadcast via satellite.

Our application for a RTÜK license has been submitted and pending for a decision. We have taken all the necessary steps and RTÜK agreed that we could carry on broadcasting as it is until a RTÜK license is granted.

However, RTÜK is now making an arbitrary decision to close down our channel because of, we believe, our broadcast of recent protests in Istanbul and across Turkey. RTÜK says they investigated "the complaints received for our coverage of the Gezi Park protests" and made a decision for the closure.

We believe this closure is part of the overall repression on the media in Turkey during the more than two-week-long Gezi Park protests. Four other TV channels have been given a fine by RTUK because of their coverage of the recent events.

RTUK sent a letter to TURKSAT to put an end to Hayat TV broadcast at 12:00 p.m. on Friday, 14th June 2013. We believe this arbitrary and unlawful decision should be reversed. We call on all democratically minded people to show solidarity with Hayat TV.

Mustafa Kara

Hayat TV Broadcast Coordinator

Suppression of media within Turkey (TV channels there initially continued to broadcast a documentary on penguins and a cooking show instead of early coverage of the protests) left many Turkish citizens in the dark about the events as they developed, hearing of them instead through social media and word of mouth. Outrage against this and other government handling of Taksim has fueled the ongoing protests. And with Turkish authorities warning earlier today that they'll raid Taksim Square within 24 hours, it does appear curious timing to restrict live broadcasts of the events.

Obama and other NSA defenders insist there are robust limitations on surveillance but the documents show otherwise

Since we began began publishing stories about the NSA's massive domestic spying apparatus, various NSA defenders - beginning with President Obama - have sought to assure the public that this is all done under robust judicial oversight. "When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls," he proclaimed on June 7 when responding to our story about the bulk collection of telephone records, adding that the program is "fully overseen" by "the Fisa court, a court specially put together to evaluate classified programs to make sure that the executive branch, or government generally, is not abusing them". Obama told Charlie Rose last night:

"What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a US person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls ... by law and by rule, and unless they ... go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause, the same way it's always been, the same way when we were growing up and we were watching movies, you want to go set up a wiretap, you got to go to a judge, show probable cause."

The GOP chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers, told CNN that the NSA "is not listening to Americans' phone calls. If it did, it is illegal. It is breaking the law." Talking points issued by the House GOP in defense of the NSA claimed that surveillance law only "allows the Government to acquire foreign intelligence information concerning non-U.S.-persons (foreign, non-Americans) located outside the United States."

The NSA's media defenders have similarly stressed that the NSA's eavesdropping and internet snooping requires warrants when it involves Americans. The Washington Post's Charles Lane told his readers: "the government needs a court-issued warrant, based on probable cause, to listen in on phone calls." The Post's David Ignatius told Post readers that NSA internet surveillance "is overseen by judges who sit on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court" and is "lawful and controlled". Tom Friedman told New York Times readers that before NSA analysts can invade the content of calls and emails, they "have to go to a judge to get a warrant to actually look at the content under guidelines set by Congress."