[Quote]:

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and a host of US megacorps are lobbying hard for a massive tax break – and they’re gaining powerful friends in business, government, and labor in support of that effort.

"This is about creating jobs, expanding US businesses and strengthening American companies," representative Kevin Brady (Rep-TX) told The New York Times, lauding his bill that would lower the amount of tax US companies pay on profits made overseas then brought back to the US, from 35 per cent to 5.25 per cent.

When profits made overseas are brought back to the US, it’s called repatriation. When a tax break such as the one outlined by Brady’s Freedom to Invest Act is instituted, it’s called a repatriation holiday.

Since this will encourage companies to make more profit outside US borders, I fail to see how this would create jobs within the US. That leaves “expanding US businesses and strengthening American companies”. At the tax payers expense, of course.

[Quote]:

A bungled FBI raid on a data centre has taken out an unknown number of Web sites.

Apparently targeting a particular – but unnamed – customer of DigitalOne, the G-men seized three enclosures of equipment, according to the New York Times.

Among the collateral damage is New York publisher the Cubed Network, and the Pinboard bookmarking site, which is now operating from a backup server. Pinboard has been unable to confirm whether or not its machines were among those lifted by the FBI, only that its main database server is offline and that it’s running with reduced capabilities.

And while the FBI hasn’t commented on the NYT story, it appears there’s a lock-out at the server farm, with DigitalOne complaining that it is unable to check which servers were taken, can’t restart its own servers, and isn’t sure when its support system will be back online.

Why would anybody want to host their site within US borders?

[Quote]:

Here’s a website — Windows Phone Tattletale — dedicated to documenting poor retail treatment of Windows Phone 7 devices. This sort of dismissive treatment can be devastating to a platform. This was the problem facing the Mac during the ’90s.

[Quote]:

Using data from the National Priorities Project, ThinkProgress calculated ten investments America could’ve afforded if it didn’t spend $113 billion — the allotment made in Fiscal Year 2011 — on the war in Afghanistan. Each one of these policy options represents an equivalent $113 billion cost:

– Provide 57.5 Million Children With Low-Income Health Care For 2011

– Provide 23 Million People With Low-Income Health Coverage In 2011

– Give 20.2 Million $5,500 Pell Grants To Students In 2011

– Provide 14.35 million Military Veterans With VA Medical Care In 2011

– Give 14.7 million Children Head Start Funding In 2011

– Give 14.26 Million Scholarships To University Students In 2011

– Employ 1.93 million Firefighters In 2011

– Hire 1.75 Million Elementary School Teachers In 2011

– Hire 1.65 Million Police Officers In 2011

– Equip 67.8 Million Households With The Ability To Use Wind Power In 2011

– Equip 25.39 Million Households With The Ability To Use Solar Photovoltaic Energy In 2011

[Quote]:

That’s right James Verone says he has no medical insurance. He has a growth of some sort on his chest, two ruptured disks and a problem with his left foot. He is 59 years old and with no job and a depleted bank account. He thought jail was the best place he could go for medical care and a roof over his head. Verone is hoping for a three-year sentence.

Only in the USA.

[Quote]:

Americans must decide if, in the name of homeland security, they are willing to allow TSA operatives to storm public places in their communities with no warning, pat them down, and search their bags. And they better decide quickly.

Quote

For a time Wednesday evening, Thomas Ball’s death outside the Cheshire County Court House transformed a familiar spot in the heart of Keene into a landscape of grim-faced first responders, sobbing witnesses, emergency vehicles parked at odd angles and passers-by who held cell phones tight to their ears.

Twenty-four hours later, little evidence remained that Ball, at 5:30 p.m., took his life by setting himself on fire.

…

According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, self-harm is the fourth-leading cause of death for American adults under age 65.

…

An average of 85 U.S. veterans take their lives each day, according to Paige…“We as a nation need to wake up to suicide,”…

[Quote]:

At first glance the picture, snapped during Vancouver’s hockey riots, seemed to show a young couple lying on the road and kissing, oblivious to the chaos around them. Now it appears that the real force behind the arresting image was not romance, but a charge by riot police who knocked Scott Jones and his girlfriend, Alex Thomas, to the ground.

The picture taken by Canadian photographer Richard Lam became a global sensation – appearing in the media, shared on Facebook and tweeted around the world – and looked set to take its place as one of the world’s most iconic kiss photographs.

“How’s that for making love, not war,” astonished dad Brett Jones declared on his Facebook page, announcing that his son, Scott, was the Romeo depicted in the picture.

But others wondered if it was a fake, and the photographer himself had doubts about what the picture really showed. A second shot emerged showing more people around the couple and adding to the mystery.

A witness, identifying himself as William, wrote to the Vancouver Sun to give his take. He said he was on top of a carpark looking down on the place where the picture was taken. “What happened was the police line rushed the crowd and this couple trying to stay together couldn’t react in time and were run over my two riot police officers.

[New Scientist]:

An RFID in a cake could tell you how many calories it contains.

For tracking, radio frequency identification (RFID) chips are the greatest thing since sliced bread. But what if the RFID chip was actually in the sliced bread?

A student at the Royal College of Art in London, Hannes Harms, has come up with a design for an edible RFID chip, part of a system he calls NutriSmart. The chip could send information about the food you eat to a personal computer or, conceivably, a mobile phone via a Bluetooth connection.

The idea is that it could send nutritional data and ingredients for people who have allergies, or calorie-counting for those on diets, or maybe even telling your fridge when the food has gone off. It could even be used to market organic food, with a chip holding data about the origin of that tuna steak you just bought.

[Quote]:

Why do we still go to war? We seem unable to stop. We find any excuse for this post-imperial fidget and yet we keep getting trapped. Germans do not do it, or Spanish or Swedes. Britain’s borders and British people have not been under serious threat for a generation. Yet time and again our leaders crave battle. Why?

Last week we got a glimpse of an answer and it was not nice. The outgoing US defence secretary, Robert Gates, berated Europe’s “failure of political will” in not maintaining defence spending. He said Nato had declined into a “two-tier alliance” between those willing to wage war and those “who specialise in ‘soft’ humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks”. Peace, he implied, is for wimps. Real men buy bombs, and drop them.

[Quote]:

Aaron DeOliveira points us to this wonderful bit of historical trivia, involving John Lennon’s 1971 response to an article in the NY Times that accused the Beatles of “ripping off” certain black musicians who the band covered. However, John Lennon saw it quite differently.

[Quote]:

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said “dark forces” are waging a “war of attrition” against efforts to strengthen regulation of the financial system.

“You’re seeing some people run a war of attrition against the reform act,” Geithner said at an event today in Washington, without identifying the people. “They’re trying to starve the agencies of funding so they can’t enforce protections for investors.”

Geithner also said opponents of the Obama administration are trying to block presidential appointments to regulatory agencies “as a way to get leverage over the outcome, and they’re trying to slow down so that they can weaken over time the thrust” of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law. “We’re not going to let that happen.”

[Quote]:

We might all remember the Clinton Era mantra about a “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” targeting the first couple in the 1990′s. Of course Hitlery was correct. There likely was a conspiracy to take down these haters of Freedom, and marauders of this once great ‘Republic’. In the Oughts (2000′s) there was a “Vast Left Wing Conspiracy” run by George Soros, the Ford Foundation, The National Endowment for Democracy, or the Brookings Institute to attack and dethrone George Jr., who was also a hater of liberty, and raper of the Constitution.

And I was with all that.

Its funny though…. When we the peeps “conspire” to expose the ‘Hypocrisy of Tyranny’ we are criminals, Racists, or even ‘terrorists’. When we point out the vast phony left vs right paradigm, and Hegelian dialectics ruining our country and the world, what are we called? You got it…. “Conspiracy Theorists”! Crazy, nutter, wacko, twoofer tards living in our mother’s basements, who believe in things like the Bilderbergers, and who should be drugged and or committed to psych gulags, stripped of our 1st and 2nd amendment rights… re-educated.

[Quote]:

The prefectural government found on Tuesday radioactive cesium exceeding the limit of 300 becquerels per kilogram in grass collected from pastures in four areas, including Tono and Otsuchi. The areas are located about 150 to 200 kilometers north of the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

[Quote]:

A map of citizen measured radiation levels shows radioactivity is distributed in a complex pattern reflecting the mountainous terrain and the shifting winds across a broad area of Japan north of Tokyo which is in the center of the of bottom of the map.

[Quote]:

The political class, meanwhile, benefits from Article 62 of the constitution, which means parliamentarians accused of crimes have to be tried by fellow parliamentarians. Payment of taxes is erratic, with some individuals hit hard with demands, while others escape almost entirely. Domestic Greek interest groups are not without blame. From 2001 to 2009, trade unions seized their opportunity for annual pay rises without links to productivity. With easy access to borrowing hard currency, and a big incentive to buy votes, both the left-wing Pasok and its right-wing counterpart New Democracy duly indulged. As long as they had access to easy loans, they could buy enough social peace to deflect attention from scandals and mismanagement. Now the money has run out.

Cronyism has meant that much government wealth stayed within ministerial families. The assiduous Leandros Rakintzis, head of a public spending watchdog trying to rein in the excesses, has uncovered shocking cases. In one example, a retired former culture ministry employee was found to have had €9m in his bank account that he was unable to justify according to his income.

Ordinary private sector workers, on the other hand, benefited from none of this orgy of borrowing or debt; they have lost most and are being asked to pick up the bill. They have some of the lowest wages and longest hours in Europe; they pay high taxes yet they receive limited public services. A recent study by Patrick Artus, chief economist of French bank Natixis, showed that they worked much longer hours than workers in Germany, countering a recently expressed view by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Living standards for most Greeks have collapsed. Regulated and controlled markets with no competition combined now with higher taxes have led to some of the highest petrol and supermarket prices in the continent. Greece has the third highest prices at the pump, behind only Denmark and the Netherlands. Lack of full competition in supermarkets mean that the typical shopping basket is about 25 per cent more than the European average.

This all adds to the sense of betrayal. The misconduct of the elite means that, just as the pain of IMF-dictated austerity is intensifying, there is little or no sense of social solidarity. As in Spain, youth unemployment is high, further eroding a sense of hope. Violent crime, once rare in Athens, is on the rise.

[Quote]:

Nearly 80 per cent of President Barack Obama’s top campaign donors have been rewarded with senior United States government jobs, according to a new study.

[Quote]:

While on our way home from photographing Formula Drift Palm Beach, Larry Chen and I found ourselves stranded over night in Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) as our flights home were canceled. The following is a brief summary of the events that took place that night.

[Quote]:

How we filmed ourselves alone in an empty Dallas airportWhat do I usually do when I pass the time when I’m bored? I usually shoot skits. I have all this camera gear so I thought "why don’t we shoot one here?"

[Quote]:

A burqa-clad woman yesterday rather brilliantly exposed a fatal flaw in France’s ban on the traditional Muslim garb when she attended court to face a charge of "covering her face in a public place", and then simply refused to take off her burqa for the hearing.

The 31-year-old mum, identified only by her first name Hind, was arrested in Meaux back in May after travelling from Paris for an anti-ban protest. She and fellow defendant Najet were summoned to appear before the local court, and the former took the chance to mount a protest scuppering the proceedings.

While Najet stayed at home since she "knew she would be stopped from entering", as the Telegraph puts it, Hind rolled up to be told by police commissioner Philippe Tireloque: "For the hearing to go ahead, you must remove the veil. Justice must be administered in a calm atmosphere."

Hind replied: "I’ll keep my veil on at all times. It’s non-negotiable. The law forbids me from expressing myself, and indeed from defending myself. It forces me to dress a certain way, when all I want to do is live according to my religion."

Since cops are under "strict orders" not to remove burqas, the authorities had no choice but to cancel the hearing and send Hind on her way.

I don’t get it – if I would to try such a stunt, I would be held in contempt of court and thrown into jail. But because this is a “religious issue” she gets away with it?

[Quote]:

“Apple cannot continue to lock down its iOS platform and restrict the types of software developed for it, says security firm Kaspersky’s CTO Nikolay Grebennikov,” Stuart Sumner reports for Computing.

Sumner reports, “He said: ‘Apple simply can’t continue with its current closed approach, and in my opinion, to remain competitive it should be looking to open up its platform within a year. The Android platform, which is growing its market share, is much more open than the Apple iOS and it’s easier to create new applications for Android, including security software,’ said Grebennikov.”

[..]

Why didn’t he just come right out and say, “We wish Apple would make its platform insecure like Google, so that we can sell ‘security’ to hundreds of millions of iOS users?”

[Quote]:

Gay marriage moved just one vote shy Tuesday of becoming law in New York as the state’s top Catholic raised holy hell trying to stop it.

Sen. Roy McDonald (R-Saratoga) – in a dramatic reversal from his earlier opposition – became the second GOPer in as many days to give his blessing to same-sex nuptials, bringing Senate support to 31 votes.

[..]

“You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn’t black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing,” McDonald, 64, told reporters.

“You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that. Well, f— it, I don’t care what you think. I’m trying to do the right thing.

“I’m tired of Republican-Democrat politics. They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background. I’m trying to do the right thing, and that’s where I’m going with this.”

[Quote]:

Former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, below, told police he had diplomatic immunity shortly after he was detained in New York on accusations he tried to rape a hotel maid, court papers showed.

[Quote]:

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The United States dismissed new Al-Qaeda supremo Ayman al-Zawahiri as a pale imitation of Osama bin Laden and warned the Egyptian to expect a similar fate to his slain predecessor.

US officials painted the 59-year-old long-time number two as an “armchair general” with no combat experience, saying he not only lacked charisma and leadership skills but was also a divisive figure who could fracture Al-Qaeda.

Top US military officer Admiral Mike Mullen told Zawahiri to expect the same treatment meted out to bin Laden, who was killed by US commandos in the dead of night in a May 2 raid on his hideout in Pakistan.

“As we did both seek to capture and kill — and succeed in killing — bin Laden, we certainly will do the same thing with Zawahiri,” said Mullen, who is chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

He will be dead 10 years from now..

[Quote]:

The National Security Agency is working with Internet service providers to deploy a new generation of tools to scan e-mail and other digital traffic with the goal of thwarting cyberattacks against defense firms by foreign adversaries, senior defense and industry officials say.

The novel program, which began last month on a voluntary, trial basis, relies on sophisticated NSA data sets to identify malicious programs slipped into the vast stream of Internet data flowing to the nation’s largest defense firms. Such attacks, including one last month against Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin, are nearly constant as rival nations and terrorist groups seek access to U.S. military secrets.