Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos (L) and his wife Maria Clemencia with President Obama at the height of the Secret Service Sex Scandal.

The US Secret Service, embroiled in a deepening sex scandal, said Saturday it had suspended 11 agents assigned to President Barack Obama’s trip to Colombia amid reports they had used prostitutes.

Five US military personnel are also being investigated for misconduct said to have taken place at the same hotel where the Secret Service staff were staying in the Caribbean resort city of Cartagena, and have been confined to barracks.

US Secret Service Assistant Director Paul Morrissey said the allegations were made on Thursday against

the Secret Service personnel, who included both special agents and Uniformed Division Officers, though none of them was assigned to Obama’s personal security detail.

“The nature of the allegations, coupled with a zero tolerance policy on personal misconduct, resulted in the Secret Service taking the decisive action to relieve these individuals of their assignment, return them to their place of duty and replace them with additional Secret Service personnel,” he said in a statement.

But Morrissey stressed that “these actions have had no impact on the Secret Service’s ability to execute a comprehensive security plan for the president’s visit to Cartagena.”

The personnel involved were taken to the service’s Washington headquarters for interviews on Saturday as the agency’s internal affairs division investigates the matter.

“As a result, all 11 employees have been placed on administrative leave. This is standard procedure and allows us the opportunity to conduct a full, thorough and fair investigation into the allegations,” Morrissey said.

He said the incident, which threatened to overshadow the Summit of the Americas, “is not reflective of the behavior of our personnel as they travel every day throughout the country and the world performing their duties in a dedicated, professional manner.”

“We regret any distraction from the Summit of the Americas this situation has caused,” he added.

(Source: news.ninemsn.com.au)

The complete set of cards from the Illuminati Card Game was issued by Steve Jackson Games. This game was released in 1995 and seems to predict a lot of events that have already happened, such as 9/11.  Coincidence, or were the illuminati treating us with their usual contempt and hiding their agenda in plain view? 

Fukushima






Hackers such as Anon, the case for tougher internet regulation.








No comment needed.



Well, well, well





Greenpeace and the Japanese Whalers




Katrina




‘Nuff said.





Swine Flu, Bird Flu, whatever the next pandemic is.






The gun buy-back in Australia in the late 90’s. Eroding gun rights of US Citizens in many states.





Hillary Clinton’s ascent into politics and the Whitehouse





The use of weather as a weapon. HAARP.




‘Nuff said




The rise of the Police State.







Blackwater




Arab Spring








Iran




Gulf oil spill




911 Pentagon missile attack




The use of political correctness to control what we say, and tell us how we should think.



Iraq





‘Nuff said







The rapid, recent increase in the number of survivalists and doomsdayers.





911 WTC Bombings




Indonesian Tsunami, or another reference to Fukushima?




Greece, Britain, USA………..





Occupy Wall Street






Is this the next prophecy from the game that will come true?






 

The little cameras in your home are multiplying. There are the ones you bought, perhaps your SLR or digital camera, but also those that just kind of show up in your current phone, your old phone, your laptop, your game console, and soon your TV and set-top box.

Varun Arora wants you to turn them all on.

The founder and CEO of GotoCamera in Singapore sees every such camera as an opportunity. The startup, which is attending this year’s DEMO Asia conference in Singapore, provides software and online storage for capturing or streaming video, and says it now has 100,000 users.

Arora hopes that eventually he can convince his users to switch on the various cameras in their homes and let his company’s algorithms analyze what they show, then sell the results as marketing data, in a sort of visual version of what Google and other firms do with search results and free email services.

“But video is another level of privacy for users,” he said.

For now, his company makes money by charging manufacturers for offering its services with their products, or from users that upgrade to extra storage. Currently most such cameras are USB-driven, but a new wave of cheap Wi-Fi models are on the way, and manufacturers like Samsung and Panasonic are putting them into TVs and other devices, mainly for motion control and video conferencing.

“USB is a sunset industry” for cameras, Arora said. He showed off a tiny wireless camera from partner Trek 2000 International, about the size of a roll of film. It sells online for about US$65, and other manufacturers will soon launch for less than $50. Unlike USB models, Wi-Fi cameras don’t need to be plugged into a computer or network, and usually just require a power source, which makes them ideal for security and monitoring.

As the prices of such devices fall, manufacturers will be squeezed, and GotoCamera proposes to provide a portion of the online fees it receives back to them, a rare ongoing revenue stream he compares to disposable blades for shaving razors, that must be continually purchased.

“What we say to them is, ‘Please accept that you’re a commodity, and let us bring the Gillette model to you,’” Arora said.

Currently only about one percent of users subscribe to the company’s paid service, which costs US$40 per year for a gigabyte of storage versus 50 MB for the free version, but Arora thinks that can climb to 50 percent as more people buy cameras specifically for security or monitoring.

GotoCamera, which was founded in 2008, now has five staff and is actively looking for more developers. It has partnered with camera makers like Creative and is in talks with ISPs (Internet service providers) and set-top box makers, and Arora said it will break even next year.

One of the principal producers of DEMO Asia is IDG Enterprise, a subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), which also owns the IDG News Service.

(Source: networkworld.com)

Hundreds of angry protesters have booed French President Nicolas Sarkozy, forcing him to take shelter in a bar as he campaigned in the Basque country ahead of April’s presidential election.

Some in the crowd then threw eggs at the bar guarded by riot police in the south-western town of Bayonne.

Mr Sarkozy described the protesters - Basque nationalists and supporters of his rival Socialist candidate Francois Hollande - as “hooligans”.

He left the bar after about an hour.

The Basque region straddles south-western France and northern Spain.

Sarkozy ‘saddened’

Mr Sarkozy was met in Bayonne by a hostile crowd, who jeered him and shouted insults.

Some chanted “Nicolas kampora”, which in the Basque language meant “Nicolas get out”.

Mr Sarkozy was also showered with campaign leaflets calling for greater Basque autonomy.

Riot police had to be deployed around the Bar du Palais, where the president took refuge.

Visibly angry, Mr Sarkozy later denounced “the violence of a minority and their unacceptable behaviour”.

“Here, we’re in France, on the territory of the French republic, and the president of the republic will go everywhere. And if that doesn’t please a minority of troublemakers, too bad for them”, he said.

He also said he was “saddened to see Hollande’s Socialist militants associating with [Basque] separatists in violent protests to terrorise ordinary people who want just one thing: to meet and talk with me”.

A senior member of Mr Hollande’s campaign team later said that while the party leader condemned any violence, no Socialist was involved in the Bayonne incident, the AFP news agency reports.

Opinion polls show that Mr Sarkozy is lagging behind Mr Hollande, although the current president is narrowing the gap.

(Source: BBC)

Even with cranes, helicopters, tractors and trucks at our disposal, it would be tough to construct the Great Pyramid of Giza today. Its construction 4,500 years ago is so astounding in some people’s eyes that they invoke mystical or even alien involvement. But the current theory of the building of the Great Pyramid — the notion that it was assembled from the inside out, via a spiraling internal ramp — is probably still the best construction plan.

Following that plan, we could replicate the Wonder of the Ancient World for a cool $5 billion.

First, let’s look at the blueprint: The pyramid is 756 feet long on each side, 481 feet high, and composed of 2.3 million stones weighing nearly 3 tons each for a total mass of 6.5 million tons. Legend has it that the structure was erected in just 20 years’ time, meaning that a block had to have been moved into place about every 5 minutes of each day and night. That pace would have required the (slave) labor of thousands. While traditional theories hold that the pyramid was built via a long external ramp, such a ramp would have had to wind around for more than a mile to be shallow enough to drag stones up, and it would have had a stone volume twice that of the pyramid itself.

A new, more economical theory gaining traction among architects and Egyptologists holds that the bottom third of the pyramid’s height wasconstructed by stones dragged up an external ramp. But above that — for the remaining 33 percent or so of the pyramidal volume — the Egyptians worked their way up through the inside of the structure, building around a gently sloping internal ramp and fitting stone blocks into place as they ascended. Furthermore, the workers could have re-used the stones quarried for the external ramp to build the pyramid’s upper echelons, so that nothing went to waste.

Jean-Pierre Houdin, the French architect who developed the internal ramp theory, has collaborated with a team at Dassault Systems, a 3D graphics firm, to create a virtual model of the construction process. A team of scholars at Laval University in Quebec is now planning an infrared imaging investigation, which could soon reveal the spiraling ramp within the Great Pyramid; if found, it will be the final proof of Houdin’s theory. But whether or not the theory bears out, Houdin says an inside-out construction would still be the best way to build the Great Pyramid.

“I am quite sure we could do the same today, and it would be the most economical method,” Houdin told Life’s Little Mysteries.

There would be two main differences between pyramid-building now and then. First, “Instead of people pulling the sleds that carry the stones up the ramps, you would use something with an engine,” he said. Secondly, “for the [topmost] 10 or 15 meters, you would use a small crane.”

Just as cranes are lifted onto the tops of skyscrapers today, a helicopter would apposition a crane onto a flat top of the pyramid. Stones and other construction materials dragged up to that level via the internal ramp would then be set in place by the crane. (It wouldn’t be feasible to build the entire structure with cranes, Houdin said, because they wouldn’t be able to reach far enough to lift materials from the base to the center of the top of the pyramid.) [Why is the Great Pyramid So Sloppy?]

While the pyramid was originally built by 4,000 workers over the course of 20 years using strength, sleds and ropes, building the pyramid today using stone-carrying vehicles, cranes and helicopters would probably take 1,500 to 2,000 workers around five years, and it would cost on the order of $5 billion, Houdin said, based on manpower and cost of constructing the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River during the Great Depression. The dam contains a volume of concrete roughly equal to the stone in the pyramid. By comparison, the 1,776-foot-tall One World Trade Center being constructed in downtown Manhattan will cost an estimated $4 billion.

There are no plans to build a full-scale Great Pyramid, but a campaign for a scaled-down model is underway. The Earth Pyramid Project, based in the United Kingdom, is raising funds to erect a pyramidal structure in an as-yet-undecided location, built of stones quarried all around the world. It will contain a time capsule, to be opened 1,000 years from now. Funded by governments and organizations around the globe, the Earth Pyramid will not only provide a window into contemporary culture for future societies, it will also serve as an opportunity to test Houdin’s construction theory of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

(Source: livescience.com)

New ‘thinking cap’ technologies that control weaponry ‘a step closer’

New technologies that tap into the brain and allow weapons to one day be fired through mind control could soon become a reality, British scientists claim.

(Source: telegraph.co.uk)

Tuesday afternoon, the international police organization Interpol announced the arrest of 25 alleged members of Anonymous by officials in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Spain. Shortly after the announcement, Interpol’s website was hit by a distributed denial-of-service attack. At the time this story was posted, the website remained unavailable.

Interpol announced that the arrests were made as part of “Operation Unmask”, an international effort launched in mid-February to grab the perpetrators of attacks on websites in Colombia and Chile, including the Colombian Defense Ministry and presidential websites, a Chilean electricity company, and Chile’s national library. Officials also seized 250 pieces of equipment, including computers and mobile phones, during a search of 40 locations in 15 cities.

The Guardian reports Interpol’s acting executive director of police services Bernd Rossbach said, “This operation shows that crime in the virtual world does have real consequences for those involved, and that the Internet cannot be seen as a safe haven for criminal activity.”

According to a report by the Associated Press, prosecutor Marcos Mercado, a specialist in computer crime, will be handling the case. The prosecutor said the suspects are charged with altering websites, and if convicted could serve between 541 days to five years in prison.

Mid-afternoon on Tuesday, the twitter account @AnonOps tweeted “TANGO DOWN II 404 Interpol, #Anonymous is not a criminal organization” apparently signaling that the police organization’s site had been taken down. As of 10 PM CT, the site remains targeted by Anonymous members in Spain and Latin America, according to the group’s Internet Relay Chat server.

(Source: Ars Technica)

For years Monsanto has been trying to take out American family farms and dominate the agricultural industry with their genetically modified seeds. Between 1997 and 2010, 144 lawsuits were filed by Monsanto against American family farmers, with an additional 700 being settled out of court. Recently, farmers made a firm decision to institute massive resistance against the biotech corporation by launching their own landmark lawsuit against Monsanto for contaminating crop fields with GMOs. The landmark case has now been thrown out by a New York federal court.

Judge Throws out Organic Farmers’ Case Against Monsanto

In a lawsuit originally filed in March of 2011, the Public Patent Foundation represented various individuals and organizations threatened by Monsanto and their GMO crops. Family farmers, farming organizations, and seed businesses all took a stand in a case known as the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA) et al v. Monsanto. Seeing as Monsanto is stampeding over much of the farmland with their questionable and dangerous genetic manipulations, it isn’t surprising to see a case safeguarding farmers from Monsanto’s own lawsuits while also disputing the company’s patents on GMO seeds.

Unfortunately, the case seems to be unfolding in Monsanto’s favor. In fact, a New York court yesterday dismissed the lawsuit. The Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association was hoping that the judge would disallow the use of Monsanto’s seeds as they drift into organic fields, but instead the judge found the plaintiffs’ allegations to be “unsubstantiated … given that not one single plaintiff claims to have been so threatened.” In addition, the ruling said the plaintiffs overstated the magnitude of Monsanto’s patent enforcement.

“Beyond whatever happens with this suit, there are some very legitimate issues behind it,” Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, tells The Salt. “There is already a significant burden to organic food production, and there is more coming. It raises the question: Is it possible for organic agriculture to survive in the face of GM crops?”

Following current trends, genetically modified foods will makeup the majority of the future food supply if a change is not made. Statistics show how GMO crops and ingredients have skyrocketed in even the past few years.