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There It Is! Area 51 Revealed In Declassified CIA Report
Landsat geocover 2000 pseudocolour imagery of Area 51 at Groom Lake, Nevada, USA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Mark Memmott
Cue The X-Files theme:
A newly declassified CIA report written in 1992 not only mentions Nevada’s Area 51, it places it on a map. What’s more, it acknowledges that the place where many sci-fi stories have said space aliens’ bodies are being kept is a real-life government facility. Alas, while the report — a history of the U-2 spy plane program — mentions UFOs, it doesn’t say that ET or any of his fellow space travelers are being kept at the site northwest of Las Vegas.
And the UFOs, according to the report, were really U-2s flying at 60,000 feet or so.
(Side note: No, we’re not saying we believe the government’s been hiding evidence of aliens. We’ve got our tongue firmly in our cheek on that point.)
We know all this about Area 51 now because the National Security Archive — “journalists and scholars [who] check rising government secrecy” — used the Freedom of Information Act to get the report declassified.
Read More There It Is! Area 51 Revealed In Declassified CIA Report : The Two-Way : NPR.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged Area 51, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, FOIA, Las Vegas, National Security Archive, Nevada
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Police To Hand Out Doritos Instead Of Arrests At Pot Party
Doritos (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)
By Zack Beauchamp
On Craigslist, “420 friendly” means a potential housemate welcomes marijuana use in their place. Nowadays, Seattle could use the label to describe the whole city: at an annual hemp and marijuana festival, the Seattle PD will be handing out Doritos to revelers.
Washington State’s voters decriminalized marijuana use by ballot referendum last November. The new law has allowed police to come up with a more creative approach to policing Hempfest, a long-running pro-cannabis extravaganza, than one that has to at least nominally worry about arresting the errant toker.
Read More Police To Hand Out Doritos Instead Of Arrests At Pot Party | ThinkProgress.
NYC Comptroller Calls For Legalized Marijuana Use In NY
By Jodie Gummow
Close up shot of some high quality marijuana. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
John Liu, New York City’s chief accountant who is also running for mayor, is calling for legalizing medicinal marijuana and allowing for adults to possess up to an ounce of pot which would pump more than $400 million into the city’s coffers:
“It is economically and socially just to tax it. We can eliminate some of the criminal nature that surrounds the drug and obtain revenue from it,” he told AP.
The announcement comes days after Federal Judge Shira A. Scheindlin condemned the city’s police department’s use of stop and frisk as racially-biased – after 600,000 unlawful arrests for marijuana possession since 1997 were documented.
Liu’s report outlines the problems associated with marijuana arrests in New York City — including racial disparities and the financial and human costs of prohibition, particularly the impact that a permanent criminal record has on young people.
While the majority of people who enter the criminal justice system for possession of marijuana rarely go on to commit violent crimes, the arrests have extensive adverse consequences for those arrested, including lessening their opportunities for employment, education, housing, and loans, according to a Drug Policy Alliance.
Read More NYC Comptroller Calls For Legalized Marijuana Use In NY | Alternet.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged Cannabis, Drug Policy Alliance, John Liu, legalization, marijuana, New York
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GOP Congressman Gets Fact Checked By His Own Constituents On Obamacare: ‘Stop Lying!’
Portrait of US Congressman Daniel Webster. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Sy Mukherjee
Things got heated for Rep. Daniel Webster (R-FL) during a town hall question-and-answer session in White Haven, Florida on Thursday. His constituents called him out over his multiple votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act and his misleading claims that the law’s consumer protections are being dismantled by the Obama administration.
Webster was responding to several constituents’ questions about the consequences that repealing Obamacare — which House Republicans, including Webster, have voted to do on 40 separate occasions — would have for the people in his district. Attendees asked Webster if he had any plans to replace consumer protections included in Obamacare, such as guaranteed insurance coverage for Americans with pre-existing medical conditions and free preventative health screenings for seniors:
QUESTIONER: What happens to us when Obamacare is repealed? What happens to people with pre-existing conditions that can’t get health care? What happens to those of us who finally have access to health insurance for the first time in nine or ten years? What happens to us? And you want to make this local, I’ll make this local. I’m a constituent, right now I can’t get health care. I’m waiting for this [insurance marketplace] to open and I’d like to know why we keep repealing [Obamacare]?
The congressman defended his repeal votes by saying the law would drive up Americans’ health care costs by requiring insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions. He then claimed that President Barack Obama himself thinks his signature law is unworkable. As evidence, Webster implied that the law’s protections — such as its cap on consumers’ annual out-of-pocket medical costs — were being dismantled by the Obama administration. That prompted an outcry from the audience, as people booed and countered Webster’s claims.
A Powerful Legal Tool, and Its Potential for Abuse
By Joaquin Sapien
The 20-year-old document – labeled the Hotel Custody log by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office – is not easy to decipher. It contains a list of New York City hotels beside columns labeled “Date In” and “Date Out.” There are names of individual prosecutors and the units they worked for at the district attorney’s office.
A spokesman for the district attorney’s office, asked to explain the document, refused to say anything. And a judge recently placed the document under seal at the request of lawyers for the city.
Ruddy Quezada and his lawyers, however, are pretty sure they have figured the document out, and that it – in particular the third line from the bottom – holds a key to Quezada’s freedom after more than 20 years behind bars for a murder he insists he didn’t commit.
Quezada’s lawyers assert that the document is a record of witnesses in criminal trials held in hotel rooms by the district attorney in the winter of 1993. Some of the witnesses were prisoners released to testify and held overnight in custody. Others were witnesses who were fearful for their safety.
But some on the list were held under what are known in the criminal justice system as material witness orders, men and women who were deemed “uncooperative,” arrested by detectives and not freed until they agreed to testify.
Most specifically, Quezada’s lawyers say that on March 11, 1993, a man named Sixto Salcedo was checked into the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza. Salcedo, they say, was released the following day, after he agreed to do what prosecutors wanted: testify that he had seen Ruddy Quezada shoot dead a man named Jose Rosado on the streets of Brooklyn.
Salcedo did testify, and Quezada was convicted. But a lot has happened since – Salcedo has recanted his testimony, another man has confessed to the murder, and Quezada has asked a federal judge to free him from prison. And much of what happens next could turn on what took place at the Crowne Plaza that night 20 years ago.
via A Powerful Legal Tool, and Its Potential for Abuse – ProPublica.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged abuse, Brooklyn, District attorney, law, New York City, Prosecutorial misconduct
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Teen texts terrorism threat to Emirates Airlines at Kennedy Airport
Airbus A380 of Emirates Airline at John F. Kennedy International Airport. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Thomas Tracy
Port Authority cops locked up a 19-year-old nincompoop who texted a terror threat to Emirates Airlines at Kennedy Airport, officials said Thursday.
Michael Perez of the Bronx sent the threatening message Wednesday afternoon to the manager of the carrier’s security firm, officials said.
“Blow up Emirates Up,” Perez redundantly wrote, they said.
The security manager quickly referred the threat to Port Authority investigators, who tracked down and arrested Perez within five hours – even though he had masked his phone number, sources said.
“He used some sort of filtering device, but the number that came up was only one degree removed from his actual number,” according to a Port Authority source, who said Perez may have worked briefly with the security company.
When detectives showed up at Perez’s home, they realized he didn’t have any weapons or bomb-making materials, sources said.
5 Companies That Make Money By Keeping Americans Terrified of Terror Attacks
Michael Chertoff (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Alex Kane
Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency, has invaded America’s television sets in recent weeks to warn about Edward Snowden’s leaks and the continuing terrorist threat to America.
But what often goes unmentioned, as the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out, is that Hayden has a financial stake in keeping Americans scared and on a permanent war footing against Islamist militants. And the private firm he works for, called the Chertoff Group, is not the only one making money by scaring Americans.
Post-9/11 America has witnessed a boom in private firms dedicated to the hyped-up threat of terrorism. The drive to privatize America’s national security apparatus accelerated in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, and it’s gotten to the point where 70 percent of the national intelligence budget is now spent on private contractors, as author Tim Shorrock reported. The private intelligence contractors have profited to the tune of at least $6 billion a year. In 2010, the Washington Post revealed that there are 1,931 private firms across the country dedicated to fighting terrorism.
What it all adds up to is a massive industry profiting off government-induced fear of terrorism, even though Americans are more likely to be killed by a car crash or their own furniture than a terror attack.
Here are five private companies cashing in on keeping you afraid.
1. The Chertoff Group
On August 11, former NSA head Michael Hayden, the man at the center of the Bush administration’s 2005 surveillance scandal, was defending his former agency on CBS News in the wake of the latest NSA spying scandal. Commenting on President Obama’s half-hearted promises to reform some NSA practices, Hayden told host Bob Schieffer that “the President is trying to take some steps to make the American people more comfortable about what it is we’re doing. That’s going to be hard because, frankly, Bob, some steps to make Americans more comfortable will actually make Americans less safe.”
Read More 5 Companies That Make Money By Keeping Americans Terrified of Terror Attacks | Alternet.
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Posted in Soul Brother Presents
Tagged Enlightenment, friendship, inspiration, message
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Zendaya – Replay
This is good. Better when remixed!
soulbrotherspeaks.com 