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Actual U.S. unemployment is 37.2%, not "6.7%", record number of households on food stamps in 2013


RT
Wed, 22 Jan 2014 12:04 UTC
girl pays for her mother's groceries using Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) tokens
© Andrew Burton/Getty Images/AFP
A girl pays for her mother's groceries using Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) tokens, more commonly known as Food Stamps, at the GrowNYC Greenmarket in Union Square on September 18, 2013 in New York City.
As the White House proclaims a recovery is occurring, and the stock market has a head of steam, millions of Americans and their dependents are being left out of the recovery, according to a set of economic indicators.

Perhaps the most worrying yet least reported aspect of the so-called US recovery involves the national labor picture. Although the official US unemployment rate is 6.7 percent, this figure obscures the reality, according to an influential Wall Street adviser.

In a leaked memo to clients, David John Marotta calculates the actual unemployment rate of Americans out of work at an astronomic 37.2 percent, as opposed to the 6.7 percent claimed by the Federal Reserve.

"The unemployment rate only describes people who are currently working or looking for work," he said.

"Unemployment in its truest definition, meaning the portion of people who do not have any job, is 37.2 percent. This number obviously includes some people who are not or never plan to seek employment. But it does describe how many people are not able to, do not want to or cannot find a way to work," he and colleague Megan Russell reveal in their client report, which was leaked to the Washington Examiner.
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Nuke

Fukushima radiation more than 10 times the normal level is detected on California beaches

Michael Snyder
The Truth Wins
Wed, 22 Jan 2014 20:32 UTC
Multiple independent tests have confirmed that levels of nuclear radiation are being detected on California beaches that are more than 10 times the normal level. Many believe that this is the result of highly radioactive water from Fukushima that has crossed the Pacific Ocean and is now washing up on California beaches. Others are blaming the radiation spikes on "natural sources", but they can never seem to identify what those natural sources actually are.

If this radiation is from Fukushima, it is only going to get worse over time. Every single day, another 300 tons of highly radioactive water gets released into the Pacific Ocean at Fukushima. Some of these radioactive elements have half-lives of about 30 years, so the total amount of radioactive material in the Pacific is continually growing and it will be with us for a very long time. As this highly radioactive water hits the west coast of the United States, a lot of that nuclear material will end up being deposited on our beaches. As you will see below, there is evidence that this is already happening.

Scientists all over the world have told us to expect a radioactive ocean plume from Fukushima to hit our shores at some point in 2014. For example, check out what researchers at the University of South Wales are saying...
The first radioactive ocean plume released by the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster will finally be reaching the shores of the United States some time in 2014, according to a new study from the University of New South Wales - a full three or so years after the date of the disaster.
The following graphic comes from that study...

Fukushima Radiation
© The Truth Wins
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Arrow Down

Man receives the creepiest letter ever from OfficeMax

Annalee Newitz
io9
Wed, 22 Jan 2014 19:45 UTC
Creepy Letter
© io9
It sounds like something out of a horror movie. Mike Seay, whose daughter died last year in a car accident, received a piece of junk mail from Office Max addressed to "Mike Seay, Daughter Killed In Car Crash." How did OfficeMax have this information? The more he investigated, the more the story became science fiction.

As the Los Angeles Times' Matt Pearce reports:
Seay appears to be the victim of some marketing gone horribly wrong.

"I'm not a big OfficeMax customer. And I wouldn't have gone there and said anything to anybody there about it [the car crash]. That's not their business," Seay, 46, told the Los Angeles Times in a phone interview Sunday.

In a statement, OfficeMax said the mailing "is a result of a mailing list rented through a third-party provider" and offered its apologies to Seay. A spokeswoman told The Times on Sunday that the company was still gathering information about what had happened.
So apparently some kind of bug caused a machine to print the wrong information in the address box as the letter made its way through OfficeMax's junk mail assembly line.
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Alarm Clock

Ukraine's Prosecutor General warn protesters to halt "mass rioting", a crime against the state

Oleksandr Savochenko and Stuart Williams
Yahoo! News
Mon, 20 Jan 2014 16:47 UTC
Image
© AP/Sergei Grits
A police officer beats a protester during clashes in central Kiev, Ukraine, Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2014. Police in Ukraine's capital on Wednesday tore down protester barricades and chased demonstrators away from the site of violent clashes, hours after two protesters died after being shot, the first violent deaths in protests that are likely to drastically escalate the political crisis that has gripped Ukraine since late November.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych on Monday warned bloody clashes between protesters and police threatened all of Ukraine as new fighting rocked the capital Kiev.

The clashes, the worst in Kiev in recent times, marked a spiralling of tensions after two months of demonstrations against Yanukovych's refusal to sign a pact for closer integration with the EU.

Amid growing fears the police could act to violently disperse the protest, Ukraine's Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka warned protesters to halt "mass rioting", describing it as a crime against the state.

In a second day of clashes after 200 were injured in Sunday's fighting, thousands of Ukrainians braved temperatures of minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) to take part in the standoff with police.

In the epicentre of the clashes outside the entrance to the iconic Dynamo Kiev football stadium in central Kiev, both sides hunkered down behind barricades.

The protesters lobbed stones dug up from the cobbled road, flung Molotov cocktails and threw fireworks over a 20-metre (65-foot) no-man's land at police lines.

Police responded by throwing stun grenades and occasionally using rubber bullets and tear gas.

"I am convinced that such phenomena are a threat not only to the public in Kiev but all of Ukraine," Yanukovych said in an address to the nation broadcast on state TV.

"I urge dialogue, compromise and calm in our native land," he said in his first public comments on the violence.

Showing increasing impatience with the events, he added: "I ask you not to follow those who urge violence, who are seeking to provoke a split between the state and society."
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Eye 2

Mafia hitmen break 'code of honour' execute three-year-old boy

Don Mackay
Mirror
Mon, 20 Jan 2014 18:47 UTC
Image
© Nicola Campolongo
The remains of Nicola Campolongo were found in a burnt-out car - alongside him were the corpses of grandfather Salvatore Iannicelli and his lover Ibtissa Touss

Barbaric Mafia hitmen have hit a new low by breaking their own "code of honour" and murdering a boy aged three. The charred remains of toddler Nicola Campolongo were found in a burnt-out car on a farm. Alongside him were the corpses of grandfather Salvatore Iannicelli and the 52-year-old's Moroccan lover Ibtissa Touss, 27.

A 50 cent coin, left on the roof of the torched car was the assassins' message that the appalling slaughter in Cosenza was over debts owed by Mr Iannicelli. One of the world's most feared and powerful Mafia groups is believed to be behind the atrocity. The Ndrangheta, based in Calabria, southern Italy, have global connections and handle 80% of Europe's cocaine imports. Their combined interests bring in an estimated £40billion - 3.5% of the Italian economy.
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Red Flag

Fewer Women attend World Economic Forum at Davos

Jane Martinson & Aisha Gani
Guardian
Fri, 17 Jan 2014 18:41 UTC
Image
© Laurent Gillieron/AP
If you want to know who runs the world, you could do worse than check out the delegates at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The baffling news is that proportion of women attending has actually fallen.

If we want to know more about the kind of people who run the world, we could study those who run countries, corporations or colleges. Or we could just skip that and look at the delegate list for the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, the annual schmoozefest of the world's most powerful people, to find that men rule the world.


This may not surprise any of us, but the fact that their power is only becoming more entrenched does seem a bit surprising, not least because Davos's organisers have publicly tried to invite more women.


Two years ago WEF introduced a quota system to encourage female participation, which demanded that its 100 most important (ie generous) partners send one woman to the annual meeting for every four men. And yet somehow, since then, the proportion of women has fallen from 17% in 2011 to 15% of the 2,500 delegates for this year. So much for that ploy.


When the quota was introduced, it did seem as though progress was being made. For a start, there were a few more sessions about "women as the way forward" featuring Indra Nooyi and Sheryl Sandberg and lots of glamorous events with the likes of Nobel prizewinner Lleymah Gbowee.


But it was a different matter for the companies themselves, who avoided the quota altogether by sending four rather than five delegates. That's right - they would rather send fewer people to the top table than mix the all-male bias up a little. Add to that all the delegates who were exempt from the quota - businesses, universities, media outfits and charities who still haven't achieved gender parity - and the fact that the proportion of women has actually fallen seems less surprising.

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Smoking

Chicago follows NYC in banning indoor electronic cigarette smoking

John Byrne
Chicago Tribune
Wed, 15 Jan 2014 16:00 UTC
Image
E-cigarettes will join regular smokes and other tobacco products as forbidden in most indoor public places in Chicago after aldermen today passed a measure backed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to restrict where electronic cigarettes can be used and how they can be sold.

The ordinance, which passed 45-4 after opponents took one last chance to voice their displeasure, will prohibit people from using e-cigarettes in restaurants, bars and most other indoor public places in the city. The measure also will require retailers to sell e-cigarettes from behind the counter so it's harder for minors to get their hands on them.

Emanuel has made tobacco regulations a recent focus, working to frame the discussion over cigarette sales as a question of how willing elected officials are to protect children from getting lured into addiction at a young age.

At the last City Council meeting, aldermen voted to restrict sales of menthol cigarettes near Chicago schools. Emanuel delivered a short speech from the dais positioning himself as a bulwark against the evils of Big Tobacco. Emanuel also increased the city's cigarette tax as part of his 2014 budget.

On Wednesday, the mayor used the passage of the e-cigarette regulations as a chance to again lay out his anti-tobacco bona fides, saying Chicago can't wait for the Food and Drug Administration to take a position on the safety of the products.

Comment: The main goal of tobacco smoking bans is "to change societal behavior" by stigmatizing smoking, making it less convenient and less socially acceptable. By raising the stakes, it helped transform a complaint into a right, so that people annoyed by tobacco smoke now felt justified in demanding that it be eliminated everywhere they might want to go, including other people's property.

In short, they have conditioned the majority of the people on the planet to behave like Nazis and think it is normal.

See also:

The devious plan of anti-smoking campaigns to control people and stop them from using their brain

Let's All Light Up!

5 Health Benefits of Smoking

Nicotine Lessens Symptoms Of Depression In Nonsmokers

Nicotine helps Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Patients

Brain Researchers: Smoking increases intelligence

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Snowflake Cold

Winter storm heightens desperation of D.C. homeless families


Washington Post
Wed, 22 Jan 2014 11:22 UTC
Image

An urgent need for shelter: With a winter storm approaching, some homeless families in the District undertook a desperate search for emergency shelter.
At 7 a.m. Tuesday morning, as temperatures hovered around freezing and the skies threatened snow, Melissa Castro and Daniel Young bundled up their two babies, crammed most of their belongings into three duffel bags and stood outside a dark D.C. government building.

For more than an hour, Castro and Young waited with about two dozen other families with young children for the daily opening of the Virginia Williams Family Resource Center, the one place in the city where caseworkers assess which impoverished families are truly homeless and, thus, will get a coveted spot in a full-to-bursting family shelter system.
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Chart Bar

Who's still living with their parents?

Jason Karaian
Quartz
Wed, 22 Jan 2014 09:33 UTC
Over the past 10 years, the rise in the ranks of young Brits who moved in with their parents could more than fill a city the size of Liverpool.

According to new data from the UK's Office for National Statistics, around 950,000 more people aged 20-34 were living with their parents in 2013 than a decade earlier. In total, just over a quarter of that age group - some 3.3 million people - lived with their parents last year. The population of 20- to 34-year-olds was stable over this period, so the rise is entirely due to people who chose to move in with Mum and Dad (or never left in the first place).

Living with Parents_1
© ONS
On its face, this is hard to square with the steady stream of good news about the British economy. The latest jobs report, released today, showed the biggest three-month drop in unemployment since 1997. Yesterday, the IMF boosted its outlook for UK economic growth more than for any other advanced economy it tracks. But wage growth is sluggish and well below the rate of inflation, particularly the runaway rise in house prices. This makes it easier to understand the apparent surge in young people living under their parents' roofs.
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Handcuffs

Police state: Dieudonné M'bala M'bala, the creator of Nicolas Anelka's controversial 'Quenelle', is arrested in France

John Lichfield
The Independent
Wed, 22 Jan 2014 12:25 UTC
Dieudonne
© Unknown
The anti-semitic French comedian Dieudonné M'bala M'bala was arrested today on suspicion of firing a rubber bullet at two bailiffs who tried to serve a writ on him for non-payment of fines or taxes.

Dieudonné, the inventor of the allegedly anti-semitic quenelle arm gesture which has brought an FA threat of suspension to the Premier League footballer Nicolas Anelka, was being questioned by gendarmes in Eure-et-Loir, west of Paris.

The comedian, 47, whose touring stage show was banned earlier this month for fomenting hatred against Jews, allegedly refused to accept a writ from a bailiff who appeared at his home in Saint-Lubin-de-la-Hay near Dreux on Monday night. One of the bailiff says that as he was leaving an unknown person fired a "flash ball" - a rubber bullet used by police for riot control - at his car.


Comment: The Independent already in the very first sentence calls Dieudonné anti-semitic, which is what the Zionists wishes the public to believe. Being against the policies of the Zionists is not to be anti-semitic.


Comment:
French state enlists support of Jewish Defense League to crush dissent
The Move to Muzzle Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala
France may ban black comedian and half its citizens for "anti-Semitic" jibes and gestures
Is a new revolution quietly brewing in France?
Nicolas Anelka faces minimum five-match ban over 'quenelle'

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