US Military Acquires X-Ray Guns – 23 June 2014

Photo from as-e.com

The company behind the backscatter imaging technology rampant in American airports is back with a new invention: a handheld X-ray “gun” capable of seeing through various types of material.

According to national security website Defense One, the device has been dubbed the “Mini Z” portable scanner and it’s capable of capturing transparent images and sending them to other devices, such as laptops or tablets. The scanner’s manufacturer, American Science and Engineering (AS&E), is currently offering the device to the US military, law enforcement agencies and border patrol officials.

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New York Court Releases Government Memo Justifying Drone Killing Of American Citizen – 23 June 2014

Nearly three years after an American drone strike in Yemen killed United States citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki, the official Department of Justice memorandum that justified the attack has finally been released.

A redacted version of the July 16, 2010 memo from the DOJ’s office of Legal Counsel to Attorney General Eric Holder was published on Monday this week, for the first time revealing the exact legal justification that the White House secretly relied on to authorize the done strike that killed Al-Awlaki, a suspected New Mexico-born Al-Qaeda official.

The 41-page memorandum was published along with the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruling from Tuesday in which it was ordered that the controversial document finally be disclosed. The memo itself was originally authored by David J. Barron, the acting assistant attorney general at the time it was given to Mr. Holder two months before a US drone fired a Hellfire missile to kill Al-Awlaki in the town of Al-Jawf Governorate, Yemen.

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It’s Time For A Final Break With ‘Free Trade’ – 23 June 2014

Author: Mark Bergfeld is a writer and activist based in Cologne, Germany and London, UK. He tweets @mdbergfeld

 

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) might just push people on both sides of the Atlantic over the edge.

The ideology of “free trade” reminds me of my ex-girlfriend telling me not to make promises I cannot keep. From Adam Smith to Bill Clinton, elites have contended that “free trade” means less war and more jobs. To be more precise, “free trade” is freedom. In its most recent history, its promise of growth and prosperity has remained unfulfilled, however.

Economic growth remains sluggish despite trade barriers being at an all-time low. While I continued to make promises, world leaders continue trying to stretch the boundaries of the possible once again.

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Austria Weighs EU Exceptions To Speed Up South Stream Project – 23 June 2014

The South Stream gas pipeline project is too important for the EU to be “put on ice”, the head of Austrian energy group OMV, Gerhard Roiss, stressed, even speaking of possible European law exceptions for Gazprom in order to speed up negotiations.

In an interview with the WirtschaftsBlatt newspaper, Roiss said that it’s unrealistic to suggest that Austria, which receives a third of its gas from Gazprom, and Europe as a whole, would be able to cope without Russian supplies.

“If we can obtain large amounts of gas from a particular region, then we need to give investors the chance to build gas highways,” he explained. “Negotiations for South Stream should therefore be accelerated, but not put on ice.”

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ActivistPost – How the U.S. Gov’t Uses Foreign “Aid” to Force Countries to Buy GMO Seeds – 23 June 2014

By Aaron Dykes and Melissa Melton

The U.S. government, a revolving door for Big Agra’s biotech, is indeed bullying El Salvador into using genetically modified seeds just as current headlines suggest.

“‘I would like to tell the U.S. Ambassador to stop pressuring the Government (of El Salvador) to buy ‘improved’ GM seeds,’ said [President of the El Salvadoran Center for Appropriate Technologies (CESTA)] Navarro, which is only of benefit to U.S. multinationals and is to the detriment of local seed production,” reported Sustainable Pulse.

Read the full story at: www.activistpost.com / link to original article

ZeroHedge – Germany Gives Up On Trying To Repatriate Its Gold, Will Leave It In The Fed’s “Safe Hands” – 23 June 2014

 Several months after it was revealed that Germany was able to only recover a miserable 5 tons of its gold in all of 2013 (under 10% of the 84 tons it was scheduled to repatriate), Germany appears to have given up entirely in its attempt to recover gold which simply is not there, and as Michael Krieger reports, citing Bloomberg, has decided to keep “it” (by “it” we don’t mean the gold since that clearly has not been at the Fed for decades, but merely the paper promises of ownership: for more see China’s gold rehypothecation scandal and how the unwind works) at the NY Fed after all. That is to say, in the “safe hands” of former Goldmanite Bill Dudley.

Read the full story at: www.zerohedge.com / link to original article

John Ward – Poles Apart – 23 June 2014

The Western EU could learn a great deal from Poland’s migrant workers

I’m on the record over many years now as saying that, every time I have engaged with Polish workers in the UK, I have found them smart, helpful, diligent, linguistically talented, honest and generous. Above all, their work ethic exceeds anything I’ve yet found….but without any sense of them becoming slaves.

How, I wonder, did Poles gain this cultural advantage: the education system there? Family influences? Or was it 75 years of being under the Soviet jackboot that led them to aspire so much to individual excellence and aspiration now? I am not as yet qualified to offer a definitive answer to those queries. All I can do here is record how and why they succeed wherever they go.

ZeroHedge – John Kerry “Shocked And Humiliated” On First Day Of Middle-East Tour – 23 June 2014

John Kerry came, saw and as usual made a horse ass out of himself.

From last night:

Secretary of State John Kerry voiced strong U.S. support for Egypt’s new president and signaled that Washington will continue the flow of military aid in an American welcome of the post-coup government.

Mr. Kerry said that the U.S. had recently released $575 million in assistance for Egypt’s military and that he was confident 10 Apache helicopters would be delivered to Egypt soon.

Read the full story at : www.zerohedge.com / link to original article

NaturalNews – The Collapse Calendar Reveals When Failures Likely To Occur In Banking, Agriculture, Nuclear Power, Pandemic Disease And More – 23 June 2014

(NaturalNews) In the movie Knowing, starring Nicholas Cage, the main character is faced with the burden of comprehending a written code revealing the exact dates and GPS coordinates of large-scale catastrophic events. The movie is outstanding and well worth watching, by the way, but could it ever be true?

Not at such precision, I would submit, but we can know when certain catastrophes are likely to occur based on an understanding of human behavior, historical patterns and modern-day trends. In fact, much of modern-day human behavior is pushing us directly into a long list of catastrophic, systemic failures which are mathematically inevitable. This article aims to help sort out the likely calendar years of likely emergence for such events, which include things like the irrigation aquifers running dry, the world’s oil supply running dry, nuclear energy disasters, a global banking collapse and more.

Breaking : Military Jet Collides With Private Jet In Germany – 23 June 2014

A small light aircraft has crashed with a German military plane in the skies over the town of Olsberg, northwest Germany, a police spokeswoman reported. There were two people on board the small Learjet aircraft

The Air Force jet was able to successfully land at its base in Nörvenich near Cologne.

www.rt.com / link to original article