'Obama silent on racial police killings of unarmed black people'

Press TV: Obama and Holder have abandoned African Americans and other minorities to the endemic of racial shootings by US police. In the background of this another unarmed black teenager butchered by police in the US. Plain clothed cops shot 16 year old Kimani Gray in Brooklyn New York for, they claim, "acting suspiciously". The murder enraged the community into street protests that have so far lasted for three days and where at least two protesters have been arrested. Press TV has interviewed Dr. Randy Short, human rights activist, Washington about this issue. Source

Banksters Smoke Bellybutton Lint - Max Keiser with Steve Keen

Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the Wall Street clients who have no yachts and the American workers taking on second and third jobs. They also discuss the trillions in debt incurred just to keep the economy going nowhere. In the second half of the show, Max Keiser talks to Steve Keen, author of Debunking Economics, about central bankers smoking their own belly button lint with Ben Bernanke behaving like an Easter Islander trying to rescue the past. Professor Keen says we need to get back to a capitalism where we borrow to build a factory not to build a derivative to rip someone off. And, finally, they discuss Keen's Kickstarter project called Minsky, reforming economics with visual monetary modeling. Source

Is The End Of The ‘Coercive Euro Association’ Taking Shape In Germany?

By Wolf Richter: Anti-euro movements were pushed aside or squashed by political establishments across the Eurozone. There is, for example, Marine Le Pen, of the right-wing FN in France—“Let the euro die a natural death,” is her mantra. Though she finished third in the presidential election, her party has next to zero influence in parliament. Austria has Frank Stronach, who is trying to get an anti-euro party off the ground, without much effect. Germany has the Free Voters, an anti-bailout party that has been successful in Bavaria but not on the national scene.
Then Italy happened. Two anti-austerity parties with no love for the euro, one headed by Silvio Berlusconi the other by Beppe Grillo, captured over half the vote—and locked up the political system. Newcomer Grillo had thrown the status quo into chaos, for better or worse. Suddenly, everyone saw that anger and frustration could accomplish something.
It stoked a fire in Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s euro bailout policies—“There is no alternative,” is her mantra—hit increasing resistance, particularly in her own coalition, but wayward voices were gagged.
“Time has come,” Konrad Adam called out as a greeting to the crowd Monday night and reaped enthusiastic applause. Despite the snowy weather, over 1,200 people had shown up at the Stadthalle in Oberursel, a small town near Frankfurt, for the first public meeting of the just-founded association, Alternative for Germany (AfD), that isn’t even a political party yet, and that wants to be on the ballot for the federal elections on September 22.

Financial crisis revealed and resolved in the world of Bitcoin + Is Bitcoin Money? - Max Keiser

By Adam B. Levine: Monday, March 11th saw calamity strike at the core of the Bitcoin system – over the last 3 years the number of users has increased exponentially, and the value along with it.  In the past we’ve seen large public thefts, but Monday’s event was fundamentally different. Bitcoin is basically one big public distributed ledger (known as The Blockchain) where the ownership of every Bitcoin ever created is tracked, accounted for, and verified automatically by various participants in the system.  Transactions can be detected within a few seconds, but merchants generally take the hour or so to gather 6 confirmations to ensure the payment cannot be reversed.
Other participants, upon receiving news of the ownership transfer (payment), check the payer’s account to ensure that they haven’t already spent them publicly.  A confirmation is the return message saying “Yes, this all seems to be in order, the value is truly available to be transferred to the intended recipient and we’ve updated our ownership records to reflect that.”
With that background in mind, on Monday the blockchain split in two without warning.

Why’d it happen?
Call it growing pains – Berkeley Database (BDB) was used for versions of the Bitcoin software .7 and below and as luck would have it, will accept a maximum number of changes per block.  The protocol’s self adjusting difficulty seeks to issue a block every 10 minutes.  As Bitcoin usage has increased, so have the number of transactions contained in the average block.
So what happened?

Urgent - 36 hours to ban 'Bayer chemical ' bee killers‏

avaaz: Dear friends across the UK,

In less than 36 hours, European countries will vote on plans to ban bee killing pesticides, but Bayer and other chemical giants are out in full force trying to protect their profits from needed safety regulation. Our government is buckling under the pressure -- let’s counteract the corporate bullying with a flood of messages to our Environment Secretary Owen Paterson to save the bees! Send a message now:

In less than 36 hours, the European Union will vote on whether to ban toxic pesticides that are killing bees around the world and threatening our food supply. The big corporations profiting from this vile stuff are lobbying furiously to defeat the ban and we've just heard that key governments are about to cave -- unless they feel the sting of public opinion!

Bees are disappearing around the world at alarming rates. Because bees pollinate our crops, experts are warning that these mass deaths pose a catastrophic threat to our food supply. Thankfully, numerous studies have now identified the likely culprit: a certain class of noxious pesticides. An official EU report found that banning them could solve the problem, but pesticide giant Bayer is trying to convince our leaders to ignore the science to protect their profits.

Over 2.5 million of us have signed the petition that made this vote possible -- and now it's time to tell our politicians that they must side with science to save the bees this week. Let’s flood the inbox of our Environment Secretary, drown out the corporate lobby, and make sure our government saves the bees and our food -- click to send a message then share this urgent campaign with your friends:

UK GOVT. PEDOPHILES REVEALED IN FULL: Connections from the Rocks Lane of yesteryear to the Coalition Cabinet today

None on the right are pedophiles. So why are they shown here?

Eurosites start to speak plainly about the Elm House scandal

Eight Monday Club Members in the frame

The Slog: Prominent Conservative donors and former Ministers, MI5 agents and senior diplomats, policemen and local government officials: they’re all on the Elm House list, and they all offer clues about Plod’s foot-dragging over the case. The Slog analyses the names, the connections, and the motives.
Over the last ten days, a body of French and Dutch speaking websites have been posting articles about ‘The emerging paedophile scandal in England, and its ramifications for the Netherlands’. Since the McAlpine episode (and the BBC incompetence surrounding it) UK and Eurozone based child molesters have looked on well-satisfied at the peer’s Threat Campaign and its consequent effect. In the UK media – even in its blogosphere – this has been to damp down, and in many cases extinguish completely, all information about the activities of a vicious Establishment paedophile ring during the 1970s and 1980s. Dead perpetrators, it seems, are fair game: so Cyril Smith, Anthony Blunt and Jimmy Savile are out there. The simple reason is that you cannot in law libel or slander a dead person. One could think of this as a sort of cowardly necrophilia on the part of the British MSM: but as The Slog predicted at the time, the main result of McAlpine’s entirely savvy fear-offensive has been to place the guilty men under even closer protection.
The Rocks Lane scandal (which has seen only sporadic media coverage since Labour MP Tom Watson’s silence-inducing Commons question last October) is in reality a large-scale but relatively straightforward case of paedophile networking, local government bribery, Home Office cover-ups, and international child trafficking.

The Lungs of Éire to be Ripped Out by Thieving Banksters

AlJazeeraEnglish: Ireland is considering a controversial new scheme to sell off parts of its forests, as a part of efforts to meet demands from the International Monetary Fund to reduce its debts. Ireland is not the only eurozone member to try to sell off its environment to make some money. Greece has put some of its islands up for sale. But the move would make Ireland the only country in the developed world without a publicly owned forest. Al Jazeera's Laurence Lee reports from Wicklow, Ireland. Source

World Bank: Genocidal concentration camp Israel's economic policies designed to eradicate Palestinians

Press TV: In an economic monitoring report issued ahead of a meeting of international donors in Brussels on March 19, the World Bank has said the Palestinians' economy is suffering from lack of competitiveness due to Israel's long-term, harsh economic restrictions. According to the report, productivity at the agriculture sector has halved and the manufacturing sector has largely stagnated. It also notes that the "share of exports in the Palestinian economy has been in steady decline since 1994, dropping to 7 percent in 2011, one of the lowest rates in the world".  Source

Monsieur Unpopular: Hollande's Spectacular Fall from Grace

By Mathieu von Rohr: Never before has a French president fallen in public sentiment as quickly as François Hollande. Only 10 months after entering into office, his popularity rating is plummeting. An event aimed at getting closer to the people this week didn't help. On a recent trip by French President François Hollande to the eastern city of Dijon, everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong. The visit earlier this week was intended to improve the president's miserable approval ratings and "renew direct contact with the French." Instead, Hollande found himself so clearly confronted with the wrath of the people as never before. He was visibly overwhelmed.

"Monsieur Hollande, where have your promises gone?" one young man hollered out to the president as he arrived in the working-class quarter of Les Grésilles. Two bodyguards immediately and violently carried the man out of the crowd. The image of the scene was too disastrous for the television news crews to pass up. Hollande's predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, once told a heckler to "get lost, you poor jerk!" He never lived the phrase down.
Before Hollande arrived, the police had already dispersed a group of unionists who were holding up a picture of early French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, "to remind him that he's a Socialist." French newspaper Le Monde reported another resident was silenced after calling out to Hollande, "We're still waiting for your change, François!"

Global Orwellian Gulag: FinFisher surveillance software used to spy on people around the world

By Madison Ruppert: The FinFisher surveillance software is being used around the world to target people, including many activists, for detailed and invasive monitoring, according to a report released today by researchers at the Citizen Lab of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.
I previously reported on FinFisher when the FBI issued a warning to Android users about the threat posed by the software, which is incidentally heavily marketed directly to the US government.
The UK has been asked to investigate Gamma International, the firm behind the software, though nothing has come of that yet.
One of the most interesting aspects of the March 13 report is the discovery of command and control servers for FinSpy backdoors, part of the company’s “remote monitoring solution,” in 25 countries, including Western nations.
The countries include, “Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brunei, Canada, Czech Republic, Estonia, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Latvia, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Netherlands, Qatar, Serbia, Singapore, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, [and] Vietnam,” according to the report.
FinSpy capabilities include: covert communication with headquarters, full Skype monitoring (calls, chats, file transfers, video and contact list), recording of email, chat and Voice-over-IP (VoIP), live surveillance through webcam and microphone,

UK Bankruptcy Tzar On Verge Of Bankruptcy

Submitted by Tyler Durden: Despite around $135 million in bailouts, the UK government's Insolvency Service disputes its own insolvency. The FT reports that one British MP summed it up - "it is fair to say that if this was a company it would be in deep trouble." The group, which polices bankrupt companies, liquidates failed businesses and disqualifies unfit directors, would be bankrupt were it not for the government's cash injection. Dependent on fees and recoveries from bankrupt companies, the agency over-estimated its ability to recover assets from collapsed businesses. It dismisses the insolvency claims against itself however, noting the service is "living within its means" and expects to be deficit-free by 2015 (though it is unclear how unless they expect recoveries to rise dramatically or bankruptcies to increase significantly) as it is forced to provide services even when there is no prospect of recovering fees from bankrupt people or companies. Their rate of prosecution has dropped from 40% to 21% and even the creditor community has lost faith arguing that the agency's model was "unreliable in the current economic climate" and required urgent reform.

Via The FT,

The UK government’s Insolvency Service is all but insolvent.

Experts suggest the group, which polices bankrupt companies, liquidates failed businesses and disqualifies unfit directors, would be broke had it not received an emergency injection of cash from the government.

Gold - The Next Libor Scandal!

Simon Goodley: US regulator considering an inquiry into London's gold and silver markets to check if prices are open to manipulation

London's financial sector was last night bracing itself for another official investigation into alleged price-fixing following reports that a US regulator is considering launching an inquiry into the City's gold and silver markets.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is discussing whether the daily setting of gold and silver prices in London is open to manipulation, according to the Wall Street Journal, which stated that the CFTC is examining whether prices are derived sufficiently transparently.
The system of setting gold prices in London is unusual and involves a twice-daily teleconference involving five banks – Barclays, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Bank of Nova Scotia and Société Générale – while silver is set by the latter three. The price fixings are then used to determine prices worldwide.
The news of the potential investigation comes after analysis of a similarly unusual system - the process used to determine the London interbank offered rate, known as Libor – uncovered manipulation and triggered multi-billion dollar fines against a group of banks.
Barclays was hit with a £290m fine last year, which resulted in the departure of its chief executive Bob Diamond and chairman Marcus Agius. Royal Bank of Scotland is paying fines of £390m for its role in Libor-rigging.
The fixing of the gold price in London dates back to September 1919, when the process involved NM Rothschild & Sons, Mocatta & Goldsmid, Samuel Montagu & Co, Pixley & Abell and Sharps & Wilkins.