It appears a good chunk of the money being spent to rebuild Iraq went to private security companies protecting the people doing the rebuilding. The exact cost still isn't known, but auditors think the U.S. has paid private security companies well over $6 billion to guard diplomats, troops, Iraqi officials and reconstruction workers in Iraq.
The special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction says that's about 12 percent of the $50 billion Americans have spent for reconstruction.
Auditors: Private security in Iraq cost over $6B
Snopes.com Lies, Continues the 9/11 Cover Up
Snopes.com has become the end all be truth arbitrator these days. I don't know how this happened. They are wrong about a great many things. But for some reason people still cite them as "proof" that I am wrong about one thing or another, as if Snopes.com is God; a know all being that can not tell a lie. Well, when it comes to 9/11 Snopes.com is a false God.
How Parked Cars Could Power the Future
Imagine running a parking meter backwards and actually being paid to park your car. Along those lines, electric vehicles might one day make money for their owners by providing electrical storage for the nation's power grid.
The concept, called vehicle to grid (V2G), is based on the fact that your car is typically not being used 90 percent of the time. "What if it could work for you while it sits there?" said Jeff Stein from the University of Michigan.
Voting machines could bring Election Day glitches
Touch-screen machines can occasionally fail or register votes for unintended candidates. Optical-scan systems can have trouble reading paper ballots that are too long or marked with the wrong ink. At least one study suggests that electronic voting machines can be easily hacked.
TVNL Comment: This has been known since the Bush administration stole the 2000 election. How do the people of this nation allow their leaders to get away with this? This is the kind of things that cause revolutions!
Military Has Key Role to Play in Tackling Climate Change
Military leaders and climate experts from around the world will convene next week in Paris, France for "The Importance of Military Organizations in Protecting the Climate: 2008," on 3-5 November 2008.
This workshop intends to provide a forum for leadership announcements and updates; apply lessons from ozone layer protection to climate protection; highlight challenges and progress made by developed and developing countries; summarize emerging and available climate protection technologies suitable for military and civilian applications; and present case studies of military and commercial leadership to protect the climate.
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This workshop intends to provide a forum for leadership announcements and updates; apply lessons from ozone layer protection to climate protection; highlight challenges and progress made by developed and developing countries; summarize emerging and available climate protection technologies suitable for military and civilian applications; and present case studies of military and commercial leadership to protect the climate.
U.S. Perpetuates Mass Killings In Iraq
The United States is directly responsible for over one million Iraqi deaths since the invasion five and half years ago. In a January 2008 report, a British polling group Opinion Research Business (ORB) reports that, “survey work confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003.
The magnitude of these deaths is undeniable. The continuing occupation by US forces guarantees a mass death rate in excess of 10,000 people per month with half that number dying at the hands of US forces— a carnage so severe and so concentrated at to equate it with the most heinous mass killings in world history.
Global Starvation Ignored by American Policy Elites
Over 30,000 people a day (85% children under 5) die of malnutrition, curable diseases, and starvation. The numbers of unnecessary deaths has exceeded three hundred million people over the past forty years.
These are the people who David Rothkopf in his book Superclass calls the unlucky. “If you happen to be born in the wrong place, like sub-Saharan Africa, …that is bad luck,” Rothkopf writes. Rothkopf goes on to describe how the top 10% of the adults worldwide own 84% of the wealth and the bottom half owns barely 1%. Included in the top 10% of wealth holders are the one thousand global billionaires. But is such a contrast of wealth inequality really the result of luck, or are there policies, supported by political elites, that protect the few at the expense of the many?
Federal court blocks ACLU from Guantanamo torture documents
The American Civil Liberties Union has condemned a Wednesday decision by a federal judge that prevents its access to unredacted records from the Bush administration related to the detention of 14 suspected "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo Bay.
How We Fuelled the Deadliest War in the World -- and It's Starting Again
The deadliest war since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe is starting again -- and you are almost certainly carrying a blood-soaked chunk of the slaughter in your pocket. When we glance at the holocaust in the Congo, with 5.4 million dead, the clichés of Africa reporting tumble out: this is a "tribal conflict" in "the Heart of Darkness." It isn't. The United Nations investigation found it was a war led by "armies of business" to seize the metals that make our twenty-first century society zing and bling. The war in Congo is a war about you.
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