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Entrusted with a government credit card, an Internal Revenue Service worker allegedly used the plastic for a years-long Amazon.com shopping spree that netted her hundreds of items, including a chocolate fondue fountain; Bollywood movies; Pampers; Harlequin romance novels; Omaha Steaks; Apple Bottoms skinny jeans; mango body wash; and a Ginsu knife set. According to a court filing, Oseni was given a Citibank MasterCard for the “purchase of office supplies for her business unit.” However, a probe by the Treasury Department’s inspector general determined that Oseni has made scores of unauthorized purchases since being provided the IRS credit card in mid-2009....

At a 2008 shareholders meeting, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos explained why he opposed requiring businesses like his to collect state and local taxes on their interstate sales. "We're not actually benefiting from any services that those states provide locally," Bezos said, "so it's not fair that we should be obligated to be their tax collection agent." Last year, Paul Misener, Amazon's vice president for global public policy, testified in favor of a bill allowing states to demand sales tax from online merchants, saying Congress should "level the playing field for all sellers." As that switcheroo suggests, there are...

(CNSNews.com) – Although no group has claimed responsibility for Monday’s deadly bomb blasts at the Boston Marathon, a leading al-Qaeda ideologue last year recommended that jihadists in America include sporting events in their list of prospective terror targets.

The exploration team used Remotely Operated Vehicles to find the engines, which sat on the ocean floor, more than 14,000 feet below sea level. Bezos described the experience as "otherworldly," noting the engines' burial site was eerily similar to space: a feeling of microgravity and a seemingly endless black horizon. After decades of exposure to the ocean's harsh conditions, the engines are corroded, and many are missing the original serial numbers. This will make the identification process more difficult. Bezos will work with NASA to restore two of the F-1 engines' hardware and prevent further corrosion. They will eventually go...

An Amazon Kindle user has had her account wiped and all her paid-for books deleted by Amazon without warning or explanation. The Norwegian woman, identified only as Linn on media commentator Martin Bekkelund's blog, approached Amazon when she realised her Kindle had been wiped. She was informed by a customer relations executive that her account had been closed, all open orders had been cancelled and all her content had been removed, but has been unable to find out why. The move, which will shock ebook fans, highlights the power digital rights management (DRM) offers blue-chip companies. DRM is used by...

OSLO (Reuters) - The once-green Sahara turned to desert over thousands of years rather than in an abrupt shift as previously believed, according to a study on Thursday that may help understanding of future climate changes. And there are now signs of a tiny shift back towards greener conditions in parts of the Sahara, apparently because of OSLO (Reuters) - The once-green Sahara turned to desert over thousands of years rather than in an abrupt shift as previously believed, according to a study on Thursday that may help understanding of future climate changes. And there are now signs of a...

World's poorest must change lifestyles as Earth dries up.Many of the world's dry regions, currently home to some 2.1 billion people, are in danger of becoming useless for growing food, according to the latest in a series of reports on the world's ecosystems. It blames climate change and human activities. The report's authors estimate that 10-20% of these 'drylands' have already lost some plant life or economic use, and they say the situation is getting worse. Hundreds of thousands of people will be in need of new homes and lifestyles over the next 30 years, they estimate. The report, titled...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) The world is turning to dust, with lands the size of Rhode Island becoming desert wasteland every year and the problem threatening to send millions of people fleeing to greener countries, the United Nations says. One-third of the Earth's surface is at risk, driving people into cities and destroying agriculture in vast swaths of Africa. Thirty-one percent of Spain is threatened, while China has lost 36,000 square miles to desert an area the size of Indiana since the 1950s. This week the United Nations marks the 10th anniversary of the Convention to Combat Desertification, a plan aimed...

Kazakh dam condemns most of the shrunken Aral Sea to oblivion Desperate step after water row with Uzbeks Paul Brown, environment correspondent Wednesday October 29, 2003 The Guardian (UK) A seven-mile dam is being built across a small northern section of the shrunken Aral Sea in Central Asia, which is described as the world's worst environmental disaster. The saline inland sea, divided between the former Soviet states of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, has been drying out for 25 years, since the USSR began a vast irrigation scheme drawing water from its two tributary rivers to grow cotton and rice in the...

...the Garamantes - a mysterious desert people of Greco-Roman date (broadly 500 BC AD 500)... Inhabiting a region that had already been for several thousand years a hyper-arid desert environment, with negligible rainfall, elevated summer temperatures and blistering expanses of barren sand and rock... have long been an enigma. They were depicted by Roman sources as ungovernable nomadic barbarians, who raided the settled agricultural zone and cities of the Mediterranean littoral. Following up earlier work by Daniels, the current project allows a different picture of the Garamantes to be drawn. Archaeological evidence shows them to have been a complex and...

Britain's airspace was closed under false pretences, with satellite images revealing there was no doomsday volcanic ash cloud over the entire country. Skies fell quiet for six days, leaving as many as 500,000 Britons stranded overseas and costing airlines hundreds of millions of pounds. Estimates put the number of Britons still stuck abroad at 35,000. However, new evidence shows there was no all-encompassing cloud and, where dust was present, it was often so thin that it posed no risk. The satellite images demonstrate that the skies were largely clear, which will not surprise the millions who enjoyed the fine, hot...

Wet spells in the Sahara may have opened the door for early human migration. According to new evidence, water-dependent trees and shrubs grew there between 120,000 and 45,000 years ago. This suggests that changes in the weather helped early humans cross the desert on their way out of Africa... While about 40 per cent of hydrocarbons in today's dust come from water-dependent plants, this rose to 60 per cent, first between 120,000 and 110,000 ago and again from 50,000 to 45,000 years ago. So the region seemed to be in the grip of unusually wet spells at the time. That...

A plan to build a 6,000km-long wall across the Sahara Desert to stop the spread of the desert has been outlined. The barrier - formed by solidifying sand dunes - would stretch from Mauritania in the west of Africa to Djibouti in the east. The plan was put forward by architect Magnus Larsson at the TED Global conference in Oxford. A 2007 UN study described desertification as "the greatest environmental challenge of our times".

On top of the world! Sensational collection of satellite images captures Earth's natural wonders from space CHER THORNHILL 25th July 2009 For decades, man has gazed up at the stars and marvelled at the wonders of the universe. But, as this amazing selection of images shows, there are many mind-blowing sights to behold from the other direction. [Pics in URL] Pictures taken by astronauts and Nasa satellites give a fascinating bird's-eye view of Earth's natural wonders - including hurricanes, volcanoes and other powerful weather formations - from space. A mosaic of Nasa satellite images gives the most detailed true-colour image...

DESERTIFICATION threatens to drive millions of people from their homes in coming decades while vast dust storms can damage the health of people continents away, an international report said today. "Desertification has emerged as a global problem affecting everyone," said Zafar Adeel, assistant director of the UN University's water academy and a lead author of a report drawing on the work of 1360 scientists in 95 nations. Two billion people live in drylands vulnerable to desertification, ranging from northern Africa to swathes of central Asia, he said. And storms can lift dust from the Sahara Desert, for instance, and cause...

Could dandruff be altering the world’s climate? Along with fur, algae, pollen, fungi, bacteria, viruses and various other “bio-aerosols” wafting around in the atmosphere, it may well be. A global study has found that tiny fragments of biological detritus are a major component of the atmosphere, controlling the weather and forming a previously hidden microbial metropolis in the skies. Besides their climatic influence, they may even be spreading diseases across the globe. Scientists have known for some time that aerosols of soot, dust and ash can influence climate by reflecting or absorbing the Sun’s rays and by providing the condensation...

As little as 30 years ago the talk wasn’t about global warming, it was about an imminent ice age. Is an ice age likely? Even possible? Consider this: There have been more than 20 glacial advances, or ice ages, in just the last two million years. And we know from geological evidence that each glaciation lasted anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 years—no one knows why the disparity—separated by warm periods that last some 10,000 to 15,000 years. What we can be reasonably sure of is that we’re now in one of the warm periods, and this one is already 13,000...

Out Of AfricaDust, the Thermostat How tiny airborne particles manipulate global climate Sid Perkins On April 15, 1998, Mongolia's Gobi Desert lay between an area of low atmospheric pressure on the eastern end of the country and a zone of high pressure to the west. As swift winds rushed across the desert floor, they lofted sand and dust into the heart of a storm system racing southward into China. During the next 2 days, a yellow, muddy, acidic rain fell in a wide swath that covered Beijing and the Korean peninsula. On April 16, 1998, a strong storm system passing ...

Online retailer Amazon has released a new television advert featuring a same-sex couple. The online retailer has history of supporting gay equality and the latest example of this is an advert released by the company which features a same-sex advert. The advert is for Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite. In 2012 Amazon was one of a number of companies who supported Referendum 74 in the state of Washington. The Referendum in the American state was on the introduction of same-sex marriage. Amazon and other companies such as Google, Starbucks, Nike and Microsoft took out full page adverts in newspapers giving their backing...

More than 200 of the biggest businesses in America, including Google and Microsoft, said on Wednesday that they will file a brief in support of gay marriage with the Supreme Court. Yahoo News reported that those companies include Microsoft Corp, Google Inc, Starbucks Corp, Pfizer Inc, Amazon.com, Citigroup Inc. and Thomson Reuters Corp, among others. Facebook, Morgan Stanley and Intel have already announced their support for gay marriage. The Supreme Court will take a look at two separate cases on March 26 and March 27 that will examine Proposition 8, the California law that banned gay marriage in 2008, as...

Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center (http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/) Date: Posted 9/9/2002 NASA Scientists Determined To Unearth Origin Of The Iturralde Crater NASA scientists will venture into an isolated part of the Bolivian Amazon to try and uncover the origin of a 5 mile (8 kilometer) diameter crater there known as the Iturralde Crater. Traveling to this inhospitable forest setting, the Iturralde Crater Expedition 2002 will seek to determine if the unusual circular crater was created by a meteor or comet. Organized by Dr. Peter Wasilewski of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., the Iturralde Crater Expedition 2002 will be led by...

U.S. states could collect millions of dollars in online sales taxes, with members of both parties in Congress sponsoring legislation Thursday that would resolve states' decades-long struggle to tax businesses beyond their borders. "Small businesses and states alike are suffering from the inability to collect due — not new — taxes from purchases made online," said Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., adding the legislation is a "bipartisan, bicameral, common-sense solution that promotes states' rights and levels the playing field for our Main Street businesses." Legislation on the Amazon tax, named for the colossal Internet retailer, has languished for years. ..... <...

The euro may well be on the road to a chaotic collapse, taking some of the world’s biggest banks with it. A currency war may break out between Japan, the U.S. and Europe. Printing money has run out of steam, but there is still little sign of the global economy returning to the kind of growth rates it saw before the credit crunch. But in the long term what they should perhaps be most worried about is losing their monopoly on issuing money. A new breed of virtual currencies are starting to emerge — and some of the giants of...

Hundreds of people showed up Saturday morning for a gun buyback in Seattle. One man even brought a rocket launcher. He said it had already been used and could not do any harm. Mason Vranish said he bought it from a man for $100, but within seconds police took it off his hands. “Their reason was even though it was single time use item it is still military property concern that a soldier had stolen it from the base or whatever and it wasn't theirs to own... so it somehow ended up in the civilian market illegally,” said Vranish. Officers...

Most television will be streamed over the Internet in the coming years, said Anthony Wood, CEO of Roku, maker of the streaming TV device of the same name. The question is how Internet-delivered content will get to your TV and who will deliver it, Wood told CNBC's Squawk on the Street. Right now, set-top devices like Roku and Apple TV and Internet-enabled Smart TVs are best positioned to take advantage of the sea change, said Wood. "Those are the two ways that most people are going to be watching television that's distributed over the Internet," said Wood. In the set-top...

SNIPPET: "Social media is no longer simply a fun way to share updates on the harmless idiosyncrasies of our lives. It can undermine national security, and there ought to be a more robust discussion between the Bay Area technology world and Washington on what to do about it. Cyber-terrorism, especially the potential for electronic tampering with U.S. industrial or military installations, is a paramount national security threat that Washington is working to forestall. We're all working to protect our accounts from hackers. But the cyber-threat getting far less public attention involves the social media networks we use every day and the...

Greetings from Amazon.com. Unfortunately we are currently unable to process your order. The financial institution issuing your credit card has refused our request to verify the billing address associated with the card presented for your order. Please note that your Amazon.com account and order have been placed on hold pending resolution of this matter. We appreciate your patience with our security measures. We do request that you contact the issuing institution to see if you can make arrangements for them to accommodate our request. Alternatively, you may fax us a copy of your credit card billing statement to 206-266-1838, confirming...

Go to Amazon.com, search for binders. Click on almost any link and scroll to the Customer Reviews sections.

Amazon, the world's largest online store, is reportedly negotiating to acquire Texas Instruments, a leading designer of custom chips for mobile and embedded markets. The move will help Amazon to better compete on the market of media tablets and possibly expand its hardware offerings in general.Israeli financial newspaper Calcalist reported on Monday that Amazon is in advanced talks to buy Texas Instruments, the company that supplies OMAP system-on-chips for Kindle Fire media tablets. The report said any deal for the smartphone chip business of Texas Instruments Inc (TI) would probably be worth billions of dollars and could make Amazon...

As we have been saying for over a year now, there are two key issues (one of which follows logically from the other) that central bankers are banging their heads against: the increasing scarcity of money good-assets, i.e., credible collateral, that can be pledged in exchange for debt at both the private and public level, and the collapsing cash flows at the corporate and household level (both incidentally direct artifacts of ubiquitous central planning and central banker intervention). This, among various other reasons chief among which is the parallel collapse in CapEx and R&D spending at the corporate level, is...

Wal-Mart is reportedly planning to stop sales of Amazon Kindle products in its stores, Reuters reported, apart from its existing inventory and pending orders. According to Reuters, the decision was outlined in a memo obtained by the wire service that said the change is in line with the company’s merchandising strategy. It follows a similar decision from retailer Target, which announced in May that it would no longer sell Kindle devices. ~snip~ While Wal-Mart is the world’s largest retailer, it competes fiercely with Amazon, which is ambitiously expanding the number of goods and services that it delivers straight to its...

After years of being a member of Amazon.com, I just CLOSED MY AMAZON.COM ACCOUNT after they agreed to begin collecting sales taxes for this blood sucking state. I'll continue online shopping from OUT OF STATE VENDORS and PAY ZERO state tax and get free shipping. I get what I want and Amazon.com and Calistan LOSE!

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Online retailer Amazon.com has tried to become all things to all consumers, but in California, it is about to take on a role it has fought against for years: tax collector. The change, which takes effect this weekend, comes after years of bitter back and forth between the world’s largest online mall and the California Legislature over whether Internet retailers should have to impose sales taxes on customers. The two sides reached a deal in 2011 that included a one-year grace period set to end Saturday.

The new mobile device is thinner than the Kindle Touch, and features a battery life of up to eight weeks, and is priced at $179. The Kindle Paperwhite is 9mm thin, or about a third of an inch, and weighs 7.5 ounces.

Amazon has launched its own Election Heat Map 2012, a tool that shows whether Americans are buying more conservative books than liberal, and by how much. Paul Ryan fans, prepare to get excited. f America voted the way that it bought books, then Willard Mitt Romney would be a very, very happy man indeed. With everyone in America beginning to get Election Fever ahead of the race getting started in earnest with next week’s Republican National Convention – Well, that or Election Burnout; it really depends on how closely you’ve been paying attention to the race so far – it...

If the following "heatmap" of readership political bent by state from Amazon is any indication of the votership inclination in the coming election, then Mitt Romney, more natural disasters notwithstanding, has nothing to worry about. Then again in the world of oxymorons, there are few quite as potent as "America Reads" (with the exception of the occasional money-losing Kindle for the aspirationally cool reader).

A map created by Amazon tracking the bestselling political books in the US state by state shows that conservative titles are outselling liberal books virtually everywhere – suggesting that if Americans' voting choices are linked to their book-buying habits, the Democrats are in for a tough ride this November. Amazon.com's election heat map, which is updated daily, lays out readers' book preferences in every state, colouring a state blue or red depending on if it has higher liberal or conservative book sales. At present, across the whole country, 56% of purchases are "red" books – titles such as Obama's America:...

The US State Department is now turning back on a contract they forged with Amazon 2 months ago – a deal which would have earned the Seattle company $16.5 Million and the US government a load of Kindle Touches to hand out to US embassies the world over. Today, the State Department canceled this contract in an announcement on their website.“US Department of State solicitation (Request for Proposals) SAQMMA12R0272 for Amazon e-Readers, Content Management, and Logistics is cancelled and the Justification and Approval (J&A) to award contract SAQMMA12D0131 on a sole-source basis is withdrawn. The Department of State intends to...

Since when does serving up junk food give someone a license to preach? Politics and all things fried, fatty and fast are becoming intertwined to the point of absurdity. We’ve got the Papa John’s pizza guys weighing in on the health-care debate, while the burger slingers out west at In-N-Out can’t serve up a cheeseburger without a Bible verse. The craziness of fast-food commentary on social issues became obvious to me when I stumbled into a totally earnest discussion at a party last week by a bunch of Washingtonians who personally support the right to same-sex marriage, but are also...

All Seth Horvitz wanted was a Westinghouse 39-inch LED television. Instead, he got a high-caliber, semi-automatic assault rifle. The Washington resident, who had ordered the television through a third-party vendor on Amazon.com, first realized that something wasn't quite right when a long, narrow box showed up at his apartment Tuesday, DCist reported.

My video about our trip to Peru. I hope you enjoy the video as much as we did the trip! :) Made using iMovie and iPhoto, by the way!

We just learned that Amazon or Amazon's president is donating $2.5 million to support gay marriage activists' efforts. Because of this, I cannot do business with them any more. Just prior to their announcement, I purchased my wife the Kindle Fire... Q, can you get books and such from other sources for the Kindle? Somebody out there with conservative leanings, some money and business knowhow needs to start a business like Amazon but with at least a neutral political stance if not more conservative. After the Chick-fil-A thing, ya gotta know that business would do very well, and I'd be...

OLYMPIA, Washington, July 31, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The fight for traditional marriage in Washington state is heating up with the announcement that billionaire Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, and his wife, MacKenzie, have pledged $2.5 million to homosexual lobbyists. The donation comes after opponents of the state’s new gay “marriage” law stopped the legislation in its tracks by collecting and filing over 240,000 signatures in support of a referendum on the November ballot. The contribution makes the Amazon couple the largest financial backer of homosexual “rights� in the state, according to the NY Times, far outstripping the $100k donation...

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, have given $2.5 million to fund efforts in the state of Washington to legalize same-sex marriage, effectively doubling the current electoral war chest of proponents. The gift was announced by Washington United for Marriage, the coalition working to pass Referendum 74 in November. It's believed to be the largest individual gift “to secure or protect the freedom to marry,” the group said in a statement released on its website. Washington is one of four states where the issue of same-sex marriage will be on the ballot this year.

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon.com, and his wife, MacKenzie, have agreed to donate $2.5 million to help pass a same-sex marriage referendum in Washington State, instantly becoming among the largest financial backers of gay marriage rights in the country. With the gift, the couple have doubled the money available to the proponents of Referendum 74, which would legalize same-sex marriage in the state by affirming a law that passed the Legislature this year. Courts or lawmakers have declared gay marriage legal in six other states, but backers of such measures have never succeeded at the ballot box. Proponents...

SAO PAULO (AP) -- Greenpeace on Wednesday accused JBS, the world's largest meatpacker, of not honoring a 2009 agreement in which the Brazilian company pledged to protect the Amazon rainforest by not buying cattle from suppliers who raise beef on illegally deforested land. JBS denied the claim and said it would take legal action against Greenpeace, saying the environmental group's report could potentially cause a loss in sales. JBS didn't indicate what sort of damages it might seek. Greenpeace said it based its accusations on observations made by its own field investigators and on information obtained in reports from Ibama,...

Just as it did in public statements, Apple's taking a strong stance in its defense against alleged price-fixing actions in concert with major ebook publishers. In US District Court filing yesterday, Apple claimed that "the Government's Complaint against Apple is fundamentally flawed as a matter of fact and law," going on to say that "Apple has not 'conspired' with anyone, was not aware of any alleged 'conspiracy' by others, and never 'fixed prices.'" Apple even acusses the government of "[siding] with monopoly, rather than competition."All in all, it's quite the strenuous defense. Unsurprisingly, Apple claims its entry into the eBook...

Amazon may have just upended Congress — to the chagrin of those pushing for a federal online sales tax bill. The online retail company last week inked deals with Texas and Nevada to begin collecting sales taxes on purchases. The company has brokered seven such agreements in recent months while bills to standardize collection of Internet sales taxes nationwide are mired in politics on Capitol Hill. That puts lobbyists and others who have been fighting for a federal bill in a quandary: If the biggest states begin to see sales tax revenue from Amazon’s collections, is it still worth the...

Brazil will boost its military presence in the Amazon region to protect its huge natural resources from any external threat, Defense Minister Celso Amorim told the Senate. "The commitment to the defense of the Amazon is fundamental. Navy, Air Force, all services will boost their presence in the Amazon in the next few years," he said without giving further details. Amorim said Brazil did not feel threatened by any neighboring country but added: "We cannot rule out that some power from outside the region" may covet the natural resources of the Amazon, the planet's largest rainforest and its main source...

House Bill 3659, colloquially referred to as the "Amazon Tax," was passed in March of last year which broadened the scope of which companies would be required to collect use tax from its customers. ......... Now according to Crain's, Cook County Circuit Judge Robert Lopez Cepero ruled that the state overstepped its bounds with the law, and that it doesn't pass constitutional muster.