DAILY NEWS: The FBI picked up the case, and asked Bolaris to testify before a grand jury. Last month, the feds busted 17 members of the Eastern European ring, which relied on “bar girls” from overseas who targeted wealthy out-of-towners at South Beach bars. The FBI said the women hunted late at night for men who wore expensive watches and shoes, and typically lured their prey to private clubs run by other members of the ring. The clubs – including the Caviar Bar – were just fronts, and were not open to the public. The men were often drugged or […]
SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Goldman Sachs Of Sh*t
[Illustration by thadkellstadt] BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Has there ever been a more contemptible crew of con artists in the history of mankind?! Clearly Goldman Sachs has molded financial flimflam into an art form even John Myatt couldn’t envision. From deceptive foreign debt transactions to spurious mortgage-backed securities sales, this unprincipled pack of predators has left a trail of half-eaten carcasses stretching from the pillars of the Parthenon to the cul-de-sacs of suburban California — all the while reaping reprehensible profits for themselves and more than earning the dubious distinction of being Wall Street’s most cunning capitalistic carnivores. In the case of Greece, as […]
SIDEWALKING: Stop The World I Melt With You
The Ben Franklin Bridge, April 2011 BY RAY SKWIRE
Osama Bin Laden’s Greatest Crime Was Not Bringing Down WTC, It Was Murdering The Fourth Amendment
NEW YORKER: While most of the N.S.A. was reeling on September 11th, inside SARC the horror unfolded “almost like an ‘I-told-you-so’ moment,” according to J. Kirk Wiebe, an intelligence analyst who worked there. “We knew we weren’t keeping up.” SARC was led by a crypto-mathematician named Bill Binney, whom Wiebe describes as “one of the best analysts in history.” Binney and a team of some twenty others believed that they had pinpointed the N.S.A.’s biggest problem—data overload—and then solved it. But the agency’s management hadn’t agreed. Binney, who is six feet three, is a bespectacled sixty-seven-year-old man with wisps of […]
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: Study Calls Bullshit On The Private Prison Industrial Complex
NEW YORK TIMES: The conviction that private prisons save money helped drive more than 30 states to turn to them for housing inmates. But Arizona shows that popular wisdom might be wrong: Data there suggest that privately operated prisons can cost more to operate than state-run prisons — even though they often steer clear of the sickest, costliest inmates. The state’s experience has particular relevance now, as many politicians have promised to ease budget problems by trimming state agencies. Florida and Ohio are planning major shifts toward private prisons, and Arizona is expected to sign deals doubling its private-inmate population. […]
ARTSY: The Great Depression In Full Color
DAILY MAIL: It was an era that defined a generation. The Great Depression marked the bitter and abrupt end to the post-World War 1 bubble that left America giddy with promise in the 1920s. Near the end of the 1930s the country was beginning to recover from the crash, but many in small towns and rural areas were still poverty-stricken. These rare photographs are some of the few documenting those iconic years in colour. The photographs and captions are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color. The […]
With Enemies Like Gingrich, Who Needs Friends?
THE GUARDIAN: Newt Gingrich has just launched his campaign to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 – only for Gingrich’s train to be derailed as soon as it left the station. So far Gingrich has been revealed to have owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to upmarket jeweler Tiffany, rashly attacked the Republican party’s signature policy before making an abject apology, been humbled by a conservative icon and humiliated by an ordinary voter in the crucial state of Iowa. Oh, Gingrich also had a box of glitter tipped over his head at a book signing. And it’s only Wednesday. […]
SHOCKING: Book Claims Roswell UFO Crash Was Actually Saucer Sent By Stalin, Piloted By Nazi Mutants
BLOOMBERG: Citing interviews with a single unnamed former engineer from government contractor EG&G — now part of URS Corp. (URS) — Jacobsen purports to lift the veil on what really crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 and what happened to the wreckage when it got to Nevada. The craft, she writes, wasn’t an alien spaceship, as many have since theorized, nor was it a weather balloon, as the U.S. military alleged in its clumsy cover story. It was, according to Jacobsen, a Nazi-inspired Soviet spy plane with Cyrillic letters embossed on the hull, crewed by malformed adolescents, two of […]
EARLY WORD: The New Stone Age
RELATED: PhillyNORML’s volunteers have been instrumental in recent efforts to reform local marijuana laws. Pennsylvanians for Medical Marijuana (PA4MMJ) is supporting the Governor Raymond P. Shafer Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana Act. State Representative Mark B. Cohen introduced the bill in the Pennsylvania General Assembly during 2009. State Senator Daylin Leach re-introduced it as SB 1003 for the 2011 session. This bill would create legal protections for citizens with serious medical conditions to safely access or grow cannabis for therapeutic use. It also creates a statewide system if Compassion Centers for patient access. April 2010 saw the news break about PhillyNORML’s efforts working with city officials to […]
SAD BUT TRUE: 30,000-Plus Voted For Milton Street
INQUIRER: In unofficial returns with 96 percent of the precincts reporting, Nutter captured 76 percent of the vote to Street’s 24 percent. MORE RELATED: Former state legislator T. Milton Street lost his primary-election challenge to Mayor Nutter, shifting the focus to former Mayor John Street, who switched his voter registration from Democrat to independent just in time to make a run in the fall. Street has said that he is “keeping a variety of options available as a matter of good politics.” That could mean another run for mayor or for one of the two City Council at-large seats set […]
BLOTTO #14: Tommy, Can You Hear Me?
BY LANCE DOILY To be honest, after Tommy drove his Town Car into the Passaic River to get the rolling shitshow he called a life over with, it was hard to find something nice to say about the guy. His greatest achievement in life was working himself up the drug dealer ladder to the point where he was next in line to be the main coke supplier to the ‘81 Phillies, but a falling out with Greg Luzinski over a batch heavily cut with talcum powder queered the deal. It was pretty much all down hill after that. By the […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Seventy-five miles north of Las Vegas sits a land parcel in the middle of the desert. Called Area 51, the parcel is just outside of the abandoned Nevada Test and Training Range, where more than 100 atmospheric bomb tests were conducted in the 1950s. Officially, the U.S. government has never acknowledged the existence of Area 51. Unofficially, it has become a place associated with conspiracy theories, alien landings and tiny spaceships. Journalist Annie Jacobsen tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that the site has remained classified for many years — not because of aliens or spaceships, but because the […]
THANK GOD FOR ATHEISTS: Otherwise Your Dog Or Cat Would Starve To Death After The Rapture
DAILY NEWS: The Second Coming of Jesus Christ – if and when it happens – raises all types of questions for believers who expect to “meet the Lord in the air” during the Rapture, as the Bible states. Such as: Who’s going to feed the dog? Bart Centre has you covered. For only $135. Centre, a retired retail executive for a major national chain, has found a way to profit from what he sees as the misguided beliefs of God-fearing Bible thumpers. “I’m not looking to make a statement here,” said Centre, 62, an atheist author and founder of Eternal […]