Graeme Jennings/Examiner An Occupier in the McPherson Square camp has taken at least $5,500 from an Occupy credit union account, Occupiers said this week. Occupy DC used the account to deposit money from donors. The man, who goes by his Twitter handle, @papersplx, and the nickname “JT,” said on Twitter that there was about $20,000 [...]

Veterans’ health care costs to rise sharply over the next 40 years   by Christopher Hinton Via GlobalResearch.ca December 15, 2011 MarketWatch WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The nine-year-old Iraq war came to an official end on Thursday, but paying for it will continue for decades until U.S. taxpayers have shelled out an estimated $4 trillion. Over [...]

A 21st-century land rush is on. Driven by fear and lured by promises of high profits, foreign investors are scooping up vast tracts of farmland in some of the world’s hungriest countries to grow crops for export.

Broad areas around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant could soon be declared uninhabitable, perhaps for decades, after a government survey found radioactive contamination that far exceeded safe levels, several major media outlets said Monday.

The Mexican government is releasing state-held secrets about the end of the Mayan calendar  to the makers of a documentary, "Revelations of the Mayans 2012 and Beyond," TheWrap has learned.

Several researchers have released a study that says there is a good chance aliens will come and wipe us out if they think we’re irresponsible, expanding too quickly, or a number of other reasons, reports the IB Times.

Altogether, there are now almost 46 million people in the United States on food stamps, roughly 15 percent of the population. That's an increase of 74 percent since 2007, just before the financial crisis and a deep recession led to mass job losses.

The Jones County, Mississippi, slogan is "A Great Place to Live." While this may or may not be true, and I've never been there, it's clearly not a great place to vote. At least if voting in a way that is verifiably accurate for the citizenry is something one might care about. A remarkable statement by the county's Circuit Clerk, and a unanimous decision in support of it by the County's Board of Supervisors this week, has made that as clear as can be. You may recall that just last week, e-voting system failures --- such as e-voting machines that wouldn't start up at all and votes that were counted twice --- led to chaos and uncertain results in Mississippi's state primaries, leading one official to declare days afterward, as they were all struggling to sort out results of several close elections: "At this point there is no election...Everyone is baffled."

The patch of skin has proved to be bulletproof as long as the bullet isn’t traveling too quickly

Already the projections are in—not for who is going to win the election in 2012---but for how much it is likely to cost.

That such behavior by our corporate masters no longer raise an eyebrow, let alone elicit action by authorities charged with stopping criminal miscreants destroying other people's lives, is an unmistakable sign that the much-vaunted "free market" system, staring into an abyss of its own creation, has entered a terminal phase. 

When congressional cost-cutters meet later this year to decide on trimming the federal budget, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could represent juicy targets. But how much do the wars actually cost U.S. taxpayers?

South Korean prosecutors have charged four Deutsche Bank employees with illegally manipulating Seoul's stock market last year to earn more than $40 million on a single day, a report said on Sunday. Yonhap news agency said the German bank's Seoul securities unit and the four workers -- including three foreigners -- were accused of amassing 44.8 billion won ($41.3 million) through illegal trading on the spot and futures markets.

ED Note: Yeah yeah… If we hadn’t bailed out the Rockefellers and the Morgans etc… We would all be begging in the streets, instead of, well… Begging for jobs and credit. How can you prove a negative? You can’t. Just trust “them” that we borrowed our way out of the apocalypse right? What isn’t mentioned [...]

THE US is deploying a new generation of high-speed stealth warships to the disputed waters of the South China Sea, in a move that is bound to raise tensions with Beijing. The vessels, which cost $US440 million ($422m) each, will be deployed in the shipping lanes between Hong Kong and Singapore, where four nations are [...]

A former Wikileaks spokesman claims to have deleted thousands of unpublished files that had been passed to the whistleblowing site. Daniel Domscheit-Berg told the German Newspaper Der Spiegel that the documents included a copy of the complete US no-fly list. He said he had “shredded” them to avoid their sources being compromised. Mr Domscheit-Berg previously [...]

Federal law enforcement agents in San Diego arrested 60 people in connection with an Iraqi criminal ring with ties to Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa drug cartel. The gang is accused of selling drugs, machine guns and improvised bombs (IEDs) out of a social club for Iraqi immigrants in El Cajon, Calif., a city of more than 90,000 [...]

David Cameron has said he wants to roll out his national citizen service scheme more widely than originally planned because the recent riots have highlighted the importance of teaching young people about responsibility and self-discipline. The prime minister said he wanted the scheme to be available to every teenager after GCSEs so that young people could learn "that real fulfilment comes not from trashing things or being selfish but by building things and working with others".