USA

Woman working 4 jobs to make ends meet dies while napping in car between shifts
A New Jersey woman who worked four jobs, who sometimes "wouldn't sleep for five days," according to a co-worker, died Monday while napping between shifts in her car on the side of the road. Maria Fernandes died in her 2001 Kia Sportage after inhaling carbon monoxide and fumes from an overturned gas container she kept in the car, according to the New York Daily News. [...]
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America’s War Hawks Back in Flight | Consortiumnews
With America’s government-and-media war hawks back in full flight – preparing to swoop down on Syria as well as Iraq – wiser heads might reflect on the chaos that previous adventures have caused, as Danny Schechter recalls. Sound the bugle! Get the press to march along; we are going to war. Again! Enemies R ‘Us! [...]
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‘Reduce or stop it’: China vows to respond to US ‘close surveillance’ patrols
Beijing is calling on Washington to scale back, or cancel, aerial surveillance of the Chinese mainland, since such a practice represents a security risk and a deterrent to better bilateral relations - otherwise it is ready to take measures. Relations between China and the United States have been increasingly tense since the US shifted its foreign policy focus – together with a beefed up naval [...]
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Cars in the US might soon be mandated to broadcast speed and location data
The United States Department of Transportation is taking the next step towards creating a "vehicle-to-vehicle" communications system that will allow light autos on the road to receive and broadcast critical information to one another. Last week, the DOT’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, published an “advance notice of proposed rulemaking” in the Federal Register [...]
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F-15 military jet crashes in Virginia
An F-15 military jet crashed in western Virginia early Wednesday, according to local media reports. In Deerfield, Virginia, multiple news outlets have reported already that an aircraft crashed shortly after 9:00 a.m. local time in a wooded part of the region near Staunton, VA, around 180 miles west of Washington, DC. By 10:30, the Staunton News Leader had confirmed that a spokesperson for the N [...]
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Dozens of police departments suspended for losing US military-grade weaponry
Close to 200 state and local police departments in the United States have been suspended for losing military-level equipment transferred to them by the Pentagon, a new investigation found. According to the media outlet Fusion, its independent investigation into the Pentagon’s “1033 program,” which equips state and local police departments across the US with excess military equipment, turn [...]
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Hillary Clinton is a war hawk – Sen. Rand Paul
The US Senator from Kentucky has warned that if Hillary Clinton, the former US Secretary of State, becomes the next American president, she could get the United States bogged down in yet another conflict in the Middle East. Following in the footsteps of his Libertarian father, Ron Paul, who spent much of his lengthy political career demanding a more isolationist US foreign policy, Rand Paul tol [...]
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NSA search engine allows law enforcement to scour data on citizens
The United States National Security Agency has built a massive information sharing system intended to allow intelligence community analysts from across the US government access hundreds of billions of records detailing the lives of people the world over. This “Google-like” search engine, according to journalist Ryan Gallagher at The Intercept, was developed by the NSA as early as 2007, but [...]
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China may unveil homegrown OS rivals to Windows, Google and Apple
Following revelations of America's National Security Agency's global internet surveillance system, combined with a desire to enhance domestic production, China is beating a path towards unveiling its own operating systems in October. The Chinese-made substitutes would first be introduced on desktop devices, later expanding to include smartphones and other hand-held devices, Ni Guangnan heads an [...]
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Facebook given deadline in “largest privacy class action in Europe”
Facebook has been given four weeks to respond to a class action, launched against it by an Austrian activist and supported by 60,000 users. The suit claims Facebook violated users' privacy, by cooperating with the NSA's PRISM program. The class action initiated by Max Schrems, an Austrian lawyer, data privacy activist and founder of Europe vs. Facebook group has passed its first review in the V [...]
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Bank of America agrees to record $17bn settlement over mortgage fraud
America's second largest lender has reached a $16.65 billion settlement with US federal authorities for selling toxic mortgages misleading investors, the Justice Department said Thursday. “This historic resolution - the largest such settlement on record - goes far beyond ‘the cost of doing business,’” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement posted on the US Justice Department w [...]
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‘I Could Have Stopped Them’: Ex-CIA Lawyer Defends Waterboarding Decision
In an interview, former top CIA lawyer John Rizzo says the US' waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation methods" for terror suspects had "deep trouble" written all over them. But he doesn't regret his decision to approve the measures. After the terror attacks in the US on Sept. 11, 2001, John Rizzo, 66, was responsible for approving the Central Intelligence Agency's "enhanced interrogati [...]
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Masters of the Internet: GCHQ scanned entire countries for vulnerabilities
GCHQ is scanning servers in multiple foreign countries for vulnerable ports, according to German newspaper Heise. Using a tool called Hacienda, the intelligence agency seeks to "master the internet" for sources of espionage. Spanish for estate, Hacienda can port scan all of the servers in a country to provide information on user endpoints and scan for potential vulnerabilities. The ability to p [...]
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Fresh Tensions Flare In Ferguson, Mo., With More Tear Gas, Looting
A 24-hour period of calm broke early Saturday when police returned to the streets in riot gear and some protesters looted stores and broke car windows. Other demonstrators helped restore calm. The reports that a festive atmosphere reigned for most of Friday night, as hundreds of people lined a busy Ferguson street, the site where a police officer fatally shot an unarmed black teenager nearly a [...]
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Ferguson cops beat innocent man, then charged him with bleeding on their uniforms
The officer-involved shooting death of teenager Michael Brown this week and the subsequent protests across the United States have rekindled interest in another case of alleged excessive force blamed on the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department. Nearly four years to the day before Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson opened fire and killed Brown, 18, a complaint filed in federal court accused th [...]
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“We are giving all of our privacy for just the possibility of a little bit of safety”
Intelligence agencies like the NSA and GCHQ seek to scoop up literally every single form of digital and non-digital communication and data in the world all the time, political cartoonist and author Ted Rall told RT. It is very clear that the general mood in Europe as well as in the UK and in the USA is in favor of more privacy in the wake of Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations. [...]
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St. Louis police will no longer be involved in policing of Ferguson, MO | InvestmentWatch
The governor of Missouri will reportedly relieve St. Louis County law enforcement from policing the ongoing demonstrations in the town of Ferguson, paving the way for possible state or federal intervention. Rep Wm. Lacy Clay (D-Missouri told Bloomberg News on Thursday morning that Gov. Jay Nixon, also a Democrat, had confirmed to him that county police will be pulled from their duties in Ferguson [...]
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‘Blindsided’: Israel uses US DoD, Congress ties to sideline White House on Gaza – report
Israel derailed the Obama administration's attempts to mediate the Gaza crisis by striking an arms deal with the Pentagon and using leverage on the Congress, the WSJ reported. The relations are now at a low and the quarrel is personal. The strain between the White House and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet has left the US in a position of an observer rather than active mediat [...]
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Huffington Post Reporter Arrested In Ferguson
The Huffington Post's Ryan J. Reilly and the Washington Post's Wesley Lowery were arrested Wednesday evening while covering the protests in Ferguson, Missouri after the death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, who was shot by a police officer last week. The journalists were released unharmed, but their detentions highlighted the town's ramped up police presence, which has left numerous resid [...]
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