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Opposition activists have posted several videos they say show Syria is currently using chemical weapons. For the past week, Western governments have expressed concern that the regime is covertly mixing chemicals used for nerve agents. U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague and U.S. President Barack Obama have both indicated that Syria would be crossing a line if it used chemical weapons and foreign intervention in the civil war may follow. Hague said at a security conference in Bahrain that the use of chemical weapons would mark a “major change” in the 20-month conflict that has killed tens of thousands, according to...

Bad mortgage loans, obscured through complex and unregulated investment instruments, cost taxpayers billions WASHINGTON—The U.S. economy is slowly making a recovering from a near-collapse and the worst recession since the Great Depression. But what brought on the subprime mortgage crisis that led to huge financial losses, a decline in wealth for much of the country, a GDP drop of 5 percent for the period from Dec. 2007 to June 2009, and an official unemployment rate that peaked at 10.0 percent in Oct. 2009? “Very few people understand [what happened],” said University of Maryland Professor Michael Greenberger at the Center for...

To most of us, "debtors' prison" sounds like an archaic institution, something straight out of a Dickens novel. But the idea of jailing people who can't pay what they owe is alive and well in 21st-century America. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, debt collectors in Missouri, Illinois, Alabama and other states are using a legal loophole to justify jailing poor citizens who legitimately cannot pay their debts. Here's how clever payday lenders work the system in Missouri -- where, it should be noted, jailing someone for unpaid debts is illegal under the state constitution. First, explains...

America is becoming a very cold place. If you don't have money, you don't really matter much in our society. The ads on television aren't for you - they are directed at people that actually have good jobs and that can afford to buy the nice little "extras" in life. The politicians aren't really interested in you either - they figure that they can buy your vote with all of the money that they are getting from the wealthy people. When you don't have money, even friends and relatives start to distance themselves from you. Perhaps they are afraid that...

The Obama administration is moving to shut down nine Border Patrol stations across four states, triggering a backlash from local law enforcement, members of Congress and Border Patrol agents themselves. * * * [One] soon-to-be-shuttered station in Amarillo, Texas, is right in the middle of the I-40 corridor; another in Riverside, Calif., is outside Los AngelesU.S. Customs and Border Protection says it's closing the stations in order to reassign agents to high-priority areas closer to the border. * * *

In an attempt to lower crime and raise government revenue, Uruguay is planning on legalizing marijuana. Currently, it is legal to possess less than 25 grams of cannabis, but it is illegal to grow or sell it. If the proposal passes, Uruguay’s government would oversee the growth and distribution of the $75 million business. Buyers would be required to register with the government. “It’s a fight on both fronts: against consumption and drug trafficking,” said defense minister Eleuterio Fernandez Huidobro. “We think the prohibition of certain drugs is creating more problems for society than the drugs themselves.” Congress must approve...

Europe plunged deeper into crisis last night as Spain lurched closer to needing a full-blown bailout to save it from collapse. The government in Madrid was forced to pay prohibitively high interest rates to borrow money on another bruising day for the single currency bloc. It raised fears that Spain is on the verge of becoming the biggest victim of the euro crisis so far – following the bailouts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Please read the rest at the source

Alarming report reveals malware in silicon chips A recent study found that a U.S. military chip manufactured in China—widely used in systems for weapons, nuclear power plants, and public transport—contains a built-in backdoor that allows the Chinese regime access to critical U.S. systems. “In other words, this backdoor access could be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon to attack potentially millions of systems. The scale and range of possible attacks has huge implications for national security and public infrastructure,” writes security researcher Sergei Skorobogatov on his blog. Skorobogatov is from U.K.-based Hardware Security Group at the University of Cambridge, the...

Excerpt: * * * Radiation is pouring out of Fukushima and that radiation is hitting the streets of Los Angles quite hard. In April 2012 environmental journalist and LA Weekly contributor Michael Collins, an independent who has tested over 1500 samples since the Fukushima earthquake of 2011, was shocked to find that radiation levels in the falling rain over L.A. measured five times above normal. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XXe8K1fRqI&feature=player_embedded#t=0s * * *“The California Highway Patrol considers anything over three times background, 300% of background above, a trigger level to a hazardous materials situation,” reported the EnviroReporter. * * * Since the last testing...

With indications that the Dow will open more than 170 points lower, the NYSE has invoked Rule 48. Specifically, the NYSE and NYSE MKT cash equities exchanges will invoke Rule 48 for this morning's opening. Mandatory opening indications are therefore not required. Overview of Rule 48:. Rule 48 provides the Exchange with the ability to suspend the requirement to disseminate price indications and obtain Floor Official approval prior to the opening when extremely high market-wide volatility could cause Floor-wide delays in opening of securities on the Exchange. Rule 48 is intended to be invoked only in those situations where the...

How did breast cancer survivor Lisa Lindsay end up behind bars? She didn't pay a medical bill -- one the Herrin, Ill., teaching assistant was told she didn't owe. "She got a $280 medical bill in error and was told she didn't have to pay it," The Associated Press reports. "But the bill was turned over to a collection agency, and eventually state troopers showed up at her home and took her to jail in handcuffs." Although the U.S. abolished debtors' prisons in the 1830s, more than a third of U.S. states allow the police to haul people in who...

The skies were filled with bombers and fighter planes. Their engines hummed steadily, in the otherwise quiet skies above Germany. The target of the March 24, 1945, mission was the Daimler-Benz tank assembly plant—one of the most heavily guarded targets of the Third Reich. As they approached Berlin, the reality of one of the most dangerous air missions of World War II became apparent. They were up against the world’s first operational fighter jets—the German ME 262. Amid the horrors of World War II, these were the monsters of the skies. They could fly 150 mph faster than the fastest...

U.S. officials had once thought there was little chance that terrorists could get their hands on many of the portable surface-to-air missiles that can bring down a commercial jet liner. But now that calculation is out the window, with officials at a recent secret White House meeting reporting that thousands of them have gone missing in Libya. "Matching up a terrorist with a shoulder-fired missile, that's our worst nightmare," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D.-California, a member of the Senate's Commerce, Energy and Transportation Committee. The nightmare has been made real with the discovery in Libya that an estimated 20,000 portable,...

The recent financial slump has caused economists to take stock of the possibility of a “double dip” recession. Most of them, however, won’t admit that the economic contraction that began in late 2007 is still underway and, worse still, has a few more years to run, according to the Kress cycles. * * * The 120-year cycle, along with its various component cycles, will bottom in late 2014. The final “hard down” phase of this mega-cycle began in 2008 with the peak of the 12-year cycle. Currently only the six-year cycle – one of the smallest cycles in the 120-year...

Movement to renounce the Chinese Communist Party reaches major milestoneWhen poorly constructed elementary school buildings collapsed in Wenchuan, China, after a massive earthquake in 2008, parents wanted answers. Rather than launching an investigation or tallying the student deaths, however, agents of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) infiltrated the parent groups, broke them up, arrested the recalcitrants, and jailed a man trying to help them. A similar dynamic happened after the poisoned milk powder scandal broke in 2008. The man who lobbied on behalf of the parents, and whose child was also a victim, ended up in jail. Meanwhile, millions of...

Rep. Ron Paul on Monday introduced legislation that would lower the federal government's debt by canceling the roughly $1.6 trillion in debt held by the Federal Reserve. Paul has argued for the last few weeks that the idea represents a quick way to make the growing fiscal crisis more manageable. Under his bill, H.R. 2768, the $1.6 trillion that the Treasury owes to the Federal Reserve would disappear. The Federal Reserve began buying Treasury bonds in earnest late last year as part of its effort to keep long-term interest rates down. But Paul has argued that Fed purchases of Treasury...

During a 2½ year period starting at the end of 2007, the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in secret bailouts to banks and other companies around the world, according to a government audit of some of the U.S. central bank’s operations. Much of the Fed's largesse was lavished on banks in Europe (such as Barclays, left)  and Asia, the audit revealed. More than $3 trillion, for example, went to financial institutions in just five European countries. Trillions more flowed toward some of the biggest banks in America. Institutions from Brazil and Mexico to South Korea and Canada also...

America’s 200-year-old patent system is about to be reformed, and the changes will cut out the very heart of innovation in this country, warn many independent inventors, small business owners, and manufacturers, angel investors and venture capitalists. “We are playing Russian roulette with the basis of the American economy, which is innovation,” said Kevin Kearns, president of the U.S. Business and Industry Council (USBIC). Critics say the reforms will devastate opportunities for the disruptive innovators of the future—the start-ups and independents who could invent the next iPhone challenger, for example. It will also promote the domination of patents, and patent...

China’s "carrier killer," the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile that can destroy American ships, had a unique origin: its base technology was pilfered from U.S. military trash during the 1990s, according to recent revelations by a Chinese military analyst. Further, a key part of the rocket system for that missile was obtained from U.S. engineering firm Martin Marietta, also in the 1990s. Richard Fisher, who has kept close tabs on the transfer of military technology to China, says that a “U.S. source” recently told him what he had suspected all along: that from the tons of military scrap China bought from...

A nuclear expert has warned that it might be 100 years before melting fuel rods can be safely removed from Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant.The warning came as levels of radioactive iodine flushed into the sea near the plant spiked to a new high and the Wall Street Journal said it had obtained disaster response blueprints which said the plant's operators were woefully unprepared for the scale of the disaster. Water is still being poured into the damaged reactors to cool melting fuel rods. But one expert says the radiation leaks will be ongoing and it could take 50 to 100...