A British company said on Wednesday that it caused earthquakes in April and May by using hydraulic fracturing to release natural gas from shale rock.

Cuadrilla Resources said in a report that the 1.9 and 2.8 Richter scale tremors were due to an unusual combination of geology and operations and were unlikely to happen again.

"Cuadrilla's water injection operations take place very far below the earth's surface which significantly reduces the likelihood of a seismic event of less than 3 on the Richter scale having any impact at all on the surface," the company said.

Cuadrilla is the only company currently extracting shale gas using hydraulic fracturing. This method is a controversial technique by which a mix of water, sand and chemicals are pumped inside underground rock formations to free the gas.

Fracturing operations were suspended after the May 27 earthquake found just outside of Blackpool, which is the same area being used for the drilling.

The use of fracturing has increased in recent years, and residents and environmental activists have raised concerns about the impact the method has on water quality.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with working hard and making a lot of money, but there is something wrong with being completely arrogant and smug about it. Today, many among the elite are savagely mocking the poor, and that is a huge mistake. You shouldn't kick people when they are down. There are tens of millions of Americans that are deeply frustrated about losing their homes, losing their jobs or barely being able to survive in this economy. These frustrations have been one of the primary reasons for the rise of the Tea Party movement and the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

What these movements have in common is that people in both movements are sick and tired of the status quo and they want something to be done about our broken system. There are huge numbers of families out there right now that have just about reached the end of their ropes. Instead of showing compassion, many of the ultra-wealthy have decided that it is funny to mock the poor and those that are suffering.

So how are all of these protesters going to respond to the "let them eat cake" attitude of the Wall Street elite? The protesters are being told that nothing that they can do will change anything and that they should be grateful for what Wall Street and the ultra-wealthy have done for them. They are essentially being told that they should just shut up and go home. So will we see these protest movements become discouraged and die down, or will the patronizing attitudes of so many among the elite just inflame them even further?

The decision by Greece to hold a referendum on the eurozone rescue deal was a bombshell for President Nicolas Sarkozy that not only upended final preparations for the Group of 20 meeting in Cannes but also threatened to damage his re-election strategy.

Mr Sarkozy had worked long and hard to secure the rescue deal, finally agreed in Brussels in the dead of night less than a week ago, to smooth the way to the summit of the world's leading economic powers in Cannes starting on Thursday.

The plan was for the G20 to reinforce the eurozone plan and allow Mr Sarkozy, the summit host, to present a united response to the sovereign debt crisis and a positive message of support for the faltering global economy.

That in turn was meant to be a platform from which the French president could launch his campaign for next April's presidential election.

"Listen, and understand. Facebook is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are commodified and sold."
-- Kyle Reese, in a deleted scene from The Social Network.

It's no secret that Facebook's privacy policies are wholly lax and subject to wiggle room. Names, contact information, browsing habits, and private purchases have been logged and shared -- even when users have logged out of their accounts. But a new report from the Hamburg Data Protection agency -- a privacy watchdog group within Germany -- has uncovered a new level of privacy-invading depravity that Facebook has sunk to.

The social network is allegedly tracking users even after they've canceled their accounts!

For up to two years!!!

Homeland Security has been working closely with hotels on many levels as private partners in the war on terror, as part of the expanding If You See Something, Say Something program. Manuals such as the 84-page, Protective Measures Guide for the U.S. Lodging Industry (pdf) have been sent out to teach owners and staff how to properly spot potential terrorists. Typical suspicious behavior includes paying with cash and "insisting on privacy" among a plethora of other dangers.

As if wasn't bad enough that hotel guests are secretly being assessed by untrained intelligence assets of Homeland Security, now guests are to be subjected to psy-op recruitment techniques via their TV sets in major hotels such as "Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton, Holiday Inn and other hotels in the USA," according to an article published in the travel section of USA TODAY.

It is only a 15-second public service announcement, but follows similar PSA programming that aims to create fearful masses willing to call authorities over the flimsiest of suspicious activities, such as the innocuous example below.

Governments around the world are increasingly taking control of civilian communications - especially cellular telephone networks - usually for nefarious purposes.

We have seen just this occur in the Middle East on multiple occasions during the so-called Arab Spring and now these control systems are being implemented in full force in the West as well.

This is not just dangerous because having government creep into the private lives of citizens usually turns out poorly but because this type of technology enables horrific atrocities.

One type of system is produced by Datong in the United Kingdom which has already been purchased by the largest police force in all of Britain, the London Metropolitan Police.

The London Police paid $230,000 for so called "ICT hardware" in 2008 and 2009 which creates a fake cellular phone network in order to not only intercept the communications and unique identification numbers from phones, but also to remotely turn off telephones.

This incredibly dangerous technology that seems like something out of a spy thriller is highly portable and is about the size of a suitcase.

This means that at a protest in which a brutal government crackdown is about to occur, all that the police would need to do is turn on their suitcase device and suddenly no one is able to record the incident on their phone or call for help.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has failed in his appeal against extradition from the UK to Sweden over allegations of rape and sexual assault.

Two judges at the High Court in London decided that a previous ruling in favour of extradition must be upheld.

Swedish authorities want him to answer accusations of raping one woman and sexually molesting and coercing another in Stockholm last year.

Mr Assange's lawyers say they will appeal at the Supreme Court.

They have 14 days to bring the case to the highest court in the land, on the grounds that it raises issues of general public importance.

However, Mr Assange's legal team will first need to seek permission from the High Court to launch the appeal.

An Israeli company selling instruments of torture and repression has been given refuge at a Paris arms fair, six years after it was expelled from a similar event in London.

Electroshock shields were one of the items offered by TAR Ideal Concepts at the Milipol exhibition in the French capital earlier this month, a source who attended this bazaar informed me. Those shields are explicitly designed to inflict pain on people who come into contact with them.

TAR's participation went unnoticed by the mainstream media. That was in contrast to the 2005 UK Defense System and Equipment International (DSEI) exhibition. On that occasion, the Israeli firm was instructed to pack up its stand because its brochures solicited orders for stun guns, batons and leg cuffs. TAR founder Tomer Avnon complained at the time that it was hypocritical to single out his firm. "Don't forget we were among booths offering everything from sniper rifles to silencers, cluster bombs and all sorts of nasty stuff," he told The Jerusalem Post.

Citigroup is lucky that Muammar el-Qaddafi was killed when he was. The Libyan leader's death diverted attention from a lethal article involving Citigroup that deserved more attention because it helps to explain why many average Americans have expressed support for the Occupy Wall Street movement. The news was that Citigroup had to pay a $285 million fine to settle a case in which, with one hand, Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers - securities that it knew were likely to go bust - and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities - that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust.

It doesn't get any more immoral than this. As the Securities and Exchange Commission civil complaint noted, in 2007, Citigroup exercised "significant influence" over choosing $500 million of the $1 billion worth of assets in the deal, and the global bank deliberately chose collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.'s, built from mortgage loans almost sure to fail. According to The Wall Street Journal, the S.E.C. complaint quoted one unnamed C.D.O. trader outside Citigroup as describing the portfolio as resembling something your dog leaves on your neighbor's lawn. "The deal became largely worthless within months of its creation," The Journal added. "As a result, about 15 hedge funds, investment managers and other firms that invested in the deal lost hundreds of millions of dollars, while Citigroup made $160 million in fees and trading profits."

Citigroup, which is under new and better management now, settled the case without admitting or denying any wrongdoing. James Stewart, a business columnist for The Times, noted that Citigroup's flimflam made "Goldman Sachs mortgage traders look like Boy Scouts. In settling its fraud charges for $550 million last year, Goldman was accused by the S.E.C. of being the middleman in a similar deal, allowing the hedge fund manager John Paulson to help choose the mortgages and then bet against them without disclosing this to the other parties. Citigroup dispensed with a Paulson figure altogether, grabbing those lucrative roles for itself." (Last Thursday, the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the case demanded that the S.E.C. explain how such serious securities fraud could end with the defendant neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing.)

London - Soaring food costs are forcing some children to eat hay and leaves because their parents cannot afford to put food on the table, according to Save the Children.

The aid agency said its research showed that recent price hikes had put 400,000 children at risk.

It called for world leaders meeting at the G20 summit in Cannes this week to keep their funding promises for agriculture in order to ensure children are protected from rising food costs.

Barely a fifth of the $22 billion pledged in 2009 to help the world's poorest farmers over a three-year period has been disbursed, according to the latest available figures.

Eleven of the 13 countries behind this promise - made at the G8 summit in Italy - will be among those meeting in the French city of Cannes from Nov. 3-4.

But the aid agency said it feared the euro zone crisis could squeeze the global food crisis off the G20's agenda.