Source: Washington Post The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation. The administration wants to add just four words — “electronic communication transactional records” — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to [...]

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is scheduled to address a throng of rich and powerful men on Friday under the towering redwoods at the Bohemian Grove as the annual encampment along the Russian River in Monte Rio enters its final weekend. Plutocrats and powerbrokers, including former presidents, annually flock to the 2,700-acre wooded retreat where neither women, other than grove employees, nor outsiders of either gender are permitted. // No one other than Bohemian Club members and their guests will hear the governor’s speech, which is — [...]

When we consider the rogue’s gallery of devilish, over-sized, greedy and disproportionately powerful corporations, we generally come up with outfits like Microsoft, Bechtel, AIG, Halliburton, Goldman-Sachs, Exxon-Mobil and the United States Senate. Yet somehow, Monsanto, arguably the most devilish, over-sized, greedy and disproportionately powerful corporation in the world has been able to more or less skulk between the raindrops — only a household name in households where documentaries like Food Inc. are regarded as light Friday evening entertainment. My house, for example. But for the [...]

Source: The Huffington Post At the time I wrote Sinister Sites: Astana, Kazakhstan, Khan Shatyr was still in construction. The world’s largest tent is now built finished and the result is astonishing. “The world’s biggest tensile structure, the Khan Shatyr Entertainment Center, opened in Astana, Kazakhstan earlier this month to a lot of fanfare.  This Norman Foster designed structure is not only the largest tent in the world — but has plenty of impressive green features from copious natural daylighting to interior gardens and living systems.  Measuring 150 meters [...]

After weeks of punching my laptop and with great help from Egersis, Vigilant Citizen 2.0 is released! The site got a little design make-over and some new exciting features have been added: New “Latest News” section updated daily with important news relating to the site’s content. Easier site navigation Latest comments are displayed first and you can now reply to individual comments. They are also broken-up in pages of 50, so no more 1,605 comments on the same page. New “Print This Post” button which [...]

“Many of the freedoms we enjoy here in the U.S. are quickly eroding as the nation transforms from the land of the free into the land of the enslaved, but what I’m about to share with you takes the assault on our freedoms to a whole new level. You may not be aware of this, but many Western states, including Utah, Washington and Colorado, have long outlawed individuals from collecting rainwater on their own properties because, according to officials, that rain belongs to someone else. [...]

You may have heard the rumor that swirled briefly last month about an Internet “kill switch” that could power down the Web in the case of a critical cyber attack. Those rumors turned out to be largely overblown, but it turns out there are now seven individuals out there holding keys to the Internet. In the aftermath of a cataclysmic cyber attack, these members of a “chain of trust” will be responsible for rebooting the Web. Read more here

Two police forces have begun trialling the sophisticated programme, which echoes of the Tom Cruise film Minority Report, where psychics are used to stop criminals before they commit a crime.

Ebay is offering a well-thumbed volume of “Dying of Money: Lessons of the Great German and American Inflations” at a starting bid of $699 (shipping free.. thanks a lot). The crucial passage comes in Chapter 17 entitled “Velocity”. Each big inflation — whether the early 1920s in Germany, or the Korean and Vietnam wars in the US — starts with a passive expansion of the quantity money. This sits inert for a surprisingly long time. Asset prices may go up, but latent price inflation is [...]

The White House accused online whistleblower WikiLeaks of endangering the lives of American, British and other coalition troops after it posted around 90,000 leaked US military records today. The documents amount to a blow-by-blow account of six years of the Afghanistan war, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings as well as covert operations against Taliban figures. Read More Here