19 Jun 2013

Recent US Supreme Court decision significantly undermines your right to remain silent

By Madison Ruppert: The Supreme Court’s decision in Salinas v. Texas on Monday significantly undermines the traditional understanding of the right to remain silent, even to the point of encouraging the kind of questioning that can extract false confessions, according to a report.
In yet another disturbing recent Supreme Court decision, the court ruled 5-4 that the prosecution can use an individual’s silence in response to a question, if they responded to other questions, as evidence of their guilt at trial.
At trial, prosecutors described what they claimed was an uncomfortable reaction on the part of Genovevo Salinas, an individual who was questioned by police after the murder of two brothers in a  Houston, Texas home.
There were no witnesses to the shooting, just shotgun shells left at the scene.
Salinas had been at the house the night before the shooting, agreed to give police his shotgun for testing when he was asked to come to the station to talk.
The police said he stopped talking, shuffled his feet, bit his lip and began to tighten up after they asked if the shells from the scene of the murder would match his shotgun.
Prosecutors brought this up at trial even though Salinas didn’t testify.
SCOTUS Blog explains the decision:

No, I’m not going to the world cup.

Carla Dauden: This video was recorded right before the recent protests started, but with all of this going on, it becomes even more evident that the World Cup and the Olympics should not be our priority. The world has to know about what's really going on.

Kim Dotcom: All Megaupload servers 'wiped out without warning in data massacre'


Kim Dotcom (Reuters / Nigel Marple)
RT: Kim Dotcom has accused the US government and Leaseweb, one of the hosting providers of former file-sharing site Megaupload, of deleting millions of personal files "without warning."

Kim Dotcom @KimDotcom
has NOT warned us about deleting servers. They informed us TODAY that servers were deleted on February 1st, 2013.
The information stored on the dormant servers – “petabytes of pictures, backups, personal & business property” – was what Dotcom called evidence in the case US authorities launched against him in January 2012.  Dotcom is wanted in the US on criminal charges for facilitating copyright fraud on a massive scale.

“This is the largest data massacre in the history of the Internet,” Dotcom wrote on Twitter.

Africa's missing fortunes

UK Banned Press TV: South African officials are investigating at least one billion dollars of Libyan assets are hidden in South African accounts, but this is a fraction of what has disappeared since the death of Gaddafi.

Forget giving your children Mandarin lessons, teach them code instead - The NSA, Code Literacy, and You

photoStacy Herbert Summary: If we’re going to live 75% of our lives online, it makes sense that one should teach your children the language really spoken online. Not the simple, consumer friendly interface which already knows your language and so makes it easy for you, but what the ‘internet’ looks like behind that interface. I first got a glimpse of this when I watched Richard Stallman access the internet (though, no doubt, he’d correct me right now for using the incorrect terminology there) without a single consumer friendly interface. It was all Greek to me. Lines of code which were certainly indecipherable to me but enabled as he stressed NEVER identifying himself when he goes online. Anyway, may be too late for me to learn the language, but the young should be taught how to maintain their liberty.
The NSA, Code Literacy, and You
Whatever we might think of Edward Snowden’s release of classified documents detailing the NSA’s snooping on America’s - well, everyone’s - communications, at least we all now know what’s going on.
Sure, most of us on the coding side of the screen already knew the deal. I haven’t found a programmer who was surprised by the news that our emails, text messages, and phone calls are being logged and stored. If anything, most of them are surprised that the general public seems so shocked. What were people thinking? That Google just gives us services like Gmail for free? We pay for this stuff - not with cash, but with our data.

Kyle Bass: "The Next 18 Months Will Redefine Economic Orthodoxy For The West"

Kyle Bass covers three critical topics in this excellent in-depth interview before turning to a very wide-ranging and interesting Q&A session. The topics he focuses on are Central bank expansion (with a mind-numbing array of awe-full numbers to explain just where the $10 trillion of freshly created money has gone), Japan's near-term outlook ("the next 18 months in Japan will redefine the economic orthodoxy of the West"), and most importantly since, as he notes, "we are investing in things that are propped up and somewhat made up," the psychology of negative outcomes.

Obama 'Basically Fired Ben Bernanke On The Spot' - FORMER FED GOVERNOR

Ben Bernanke and Barack ObamaMatthew Boesler: Last night, President Obama said in an interview"Well, I think Ben Bernanke's done an outstanding job. Ben Bernanke's a little bit like Bob Mueller, the head of the FBI - where he's already stayed a lot longer than he wanted or he was supposed to."
That raised some eyebrows and really turned up the volume on the conversation today regarding potential successors to replace Bernanke when his term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve expires in January.
In an interview with CNBC this afternoon, former Fed Governor Larry Meyer said Obama "basically fired Ben Bernanke on the spot" last night.
"This is really remarkable," said Meyer. "I almost fell off my chair when I heard the President's remarks last night. He basically fired Ben Bernanke on the spot, and gave a fairly tepid testimonial afterward."