By Brett LoGiurato Early Thursday morning, Potomac Research Group analyst Greg Valliere predicted that if the debt-ceiling deadline grew closer, President Barack Obama would play his “trump card” in the debate. He would remind seniors that if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling, seniors wouldn’t get their Social Security checks. “GOP strategists like Karl Rove surely know that it’s just a matter of time before President Obama throws a game-changer
Author: mediahitman
Hold your nose and don’t spit out your coffee: Doctors have found a way to put healthy people’s poop into pills that can cure serious gut infections – a less yucky way to do “fecal transplants.” Canadian researchers tried this on 27 patients and cured them all after strong antibiotics failed to help. It’s a gross topic but a serious problem. Half a million Americans get Clostridium difficile, or C-diff, infections each year, and about 14,000 die. The germ causes nausea, cramping and diarrhea so bad it is often disabling.
The dramatic arrest inside a San Francisco public library of a man accused of running an underground drug website has become the talk of the neighborhood. Witnesses described what played out in the Glen Park branch library Tuesday like a scene from a television police show as undercover FBI agents quietly surrounded 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht, confiscated his laptop and placed him in handcuffs.
A top US State Department official urged members of Congress Thursday to hold onto fresh sanctions against Iran until President Barack Obama’s administration can assess the new conciliatory tone from the Iranian government. “Let me assure you that we will continue to vigorously enforce the sanctions that are in place as we explore a negotiated resolution, and will be especially focused on sanctions evasion and efforts by the Iranians to relieve the pressure,”
By Steve Liesman Administration officials now live in fear of a 19th-century law that could get them fired, penalized or even imprisoned if they make the wrong choices while the government is shut down. The law is the Antideficiency Act, passed by Congress in 1870 (and amended several times), which prohibits the government from incurring any monetary obligation for which Congress has not appropriated funds.
By Jeff Poor Conservative talker Mark Levin has a stern warning for President Barack Obama and his administration: Don’t mess with the World War II veterans. Levin, author of “The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic,” told his audience on his Wednesday radio show should there be any action taken against those veterans for visiting the World War II Memorial on the National Mall, even with the government shutdown, he would bring 500,000 people to march on the Washington, D.C. in response.
By Diane Petryk-Bloom Imagine. While some of us are working to curtail fracking, assure GMO labeling, promote various green and buy-local initiatives, protect Internet freedom, bolster labor rights, enforce banking regulations, behind our backs our president, Barack Obama, is working to make all those efforts moot. I am not making this up, even if you haven’t heard of it yet.
Adventurers have stumbled across a cave so enormous that it has its own weather system, complete with wispy clouds and lingering fog inside vast caverns. A team of expert cavers and photographers have been exploring the vast cave system in the Chongquing province of China and have taken the first-ever photographs of the natural wonder.
The objective of the United States National Security Agency is to eliminate privacy around the world, the American writer who helped expose the NSA’s far-reaching surveillance powers said on Tuesday. Glenn Greenwald of the UK’s Guardian answered questions about the ongoing NSA leaks and his source, the now notorious former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, during an online question-and-answer session held Tuesday on the website Reddit.
Former NSA agent, Edward Snowden, has called on an EU Parliament committee to provide protection for whistleblowers and “create better channels” for them to inform. The committee is currently holding an inquiry into the ‘Prism scandal’.
Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, who spent over four years in prison for insider trading, now says his conviction was based on his company’s refusal to cooperate with NSA requests to spy on its customers. Nacchio says he feels “vindicated” by ongoing revelations provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the NSA does, in fact, access massive amounts of metadata and communique information of both foreigners and Americans.
By Lachlan Markay The National Park Service has ordered the closure of a Virginia park that sits on federal land, even though the government provides no resources for its maintenance or operation. The Claude Moore Colonial Farm announced on Wednesday that NPS has ordered it to suspend operations until Congress agrees to a deal to fund the federal government. According to Anna Eberly, managing director of the farm, NPS sent law enforcement agents to the park on Tuesday evening to remove staff and volunteers from the property.
By Fiona Harvey The oceans are more acidic now than they have been for at least 300m years, due to carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, and a mass extinction of key species may already be almost inevitable as a result, leading marine scientists warned on Thursday. An international audit of the health of the oceans has found that overfishing and pollution are also contributing to the crisis, in a deadly combination of destructive forces that are imperilling marine life, on which billions of people depend for their nutrition and livelihood.
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Despite a government shutdown resulting in closed national monuments and parks, a group of Mississippi Gulf Coast Honor Flight Veterans pushed over barricades and toured the World War II memorial in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday morning. They were joined by family, friends and members of Congress – including Reps. Steven Palazzo (R-Miss.), Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Steve King (R-Iowa) – who helped the elderly veterans pass through temporary gates to access the memorial.
The NASA’s Cassini spacecraft made a remarkable discovery when it found a plastic ingredient –propylene – on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. This marks the first time the material has been detected on another world. “This is the first definitive detection of the plastic ingredient on any moon or planet, other than Earth,” NASA said in a press release.
New peer-reviewed research finds that 30 minutes’ exposure to LTE [4G] cellphone radiation affects brain activity on both sides of the brain. PRLog – Press Release The first study on the short-term effects of Long Term Evolution (LTE), the fourth generation cell phone technology, has been published online in the peer-reviewed journal, Clinical Neurophysiology. (1)