The National Rifle Association has frightened Americans about the prospect of a federal registry of firearm owners, but the NRA itself has secretly created a database with information from tens of millions of Americans who do not hold a membership. The NRA has spent years secretly collecting information about gun owners from state and local offices and has built the country’s largest privately held database of current, former and prospective gun owners, according to a BuzzFeed report.
Author: mediahitman
The United States Federal Reserve has set a new record, but it’s not one exactly worth celebrating. For the first time ever, the Fed owns more than $2 trillion in US debt. According to the Fed’s latest weekly account, the central bank currently is holding roughly $2,001,093,000,000 in US Treasury securities.
By Chris Hal Satellites have shown two mysterious ‘black hole’ whirlpools in the South Atlantic ocean – ultra powerful “vortexes” which suck water down into the depths. The whirpools – never witnessed before – would suck down ships, debris and even living creatures, moving 1.3 million cubic metres of water per second. Two of the black holes – or “maelstroms” – have been sighted in three months by physicists from Zurich and Miami.
Multiple bullets fired during the capture of surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev caused severe injuries, including skull fracture, according to newly released federal court documents. The first full description of the traumas was disclosed in the transcript of the April court proceeding, unsealed on Monday. The testimony was given at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, three days after the arrest of the accused Boston bomber.
The city of San Francisco is threatening Nevada with a class-action lawsuit for allegedly giving 500 poor and homeless psychiatric patients one-way bus tickets to California. In a letter addressed to Nevada Attorney General Catherine Masto, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera threatened to file a lawsuit unless a settlement is made within 20 days. The city is asking Nevada to reimburse the $500,000 that San Francisco spent on medical care, housing, and other assistance for those patients.
Illegal immigrants have boldly demanded everything from civil rights in the U.S. to driver’s licenses and government benefits such as welfare and discounted tuition at public universities, so why stop there? Now they want American taxpayers to finance their organ transplants! This is even more brazen than the discrimination lawsuits illegal aliens have filed against law enforcement agencies—both federal and local—in the U.S. over the years.
The controversial “stop-and-frisk” tactic used by the New York Police Department could be coming to the Motor City: law enforcement agents in Detroit, Michigan plan to adopt a policing method from officers in the Big Apple. The Detroit News reported on Monday that traffic cops in the once-booming Rust Belt city are currently being trained to learn their city’s version of what has become a hot topic of contention in New York.
By Leslie Larson Al Gore dished out some harsh words for global warming skeptics, likening the deniers of the environmental issue to the perpetrators of history’s most egregious events including apartheid and slavery. Gore told Washington Post reporter Ezra Klein that “we’re winning” the conversation on racism, homophobia and prejudice. “I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, hey man, we don’t go for that anymore,” Gore said in praise of how society has changed.
By Dominic Evans Syrian activists accused President Bashar al-Assad’s forces of launching a nerve gas attack that killed at least 213 people on Wednesday, in what would, if confirmed, be by far the worst reported use of poison gas in the two-year-old civil war. Reuters was not able to verify the accounts independently and they were denied by Syrian state television, which said they were disseminated deliberately to distract a team of United Nations chemical weapons experts which arrived three days ago.
The US Air Force is now facing a shortage in the number of pilots able to operate the military’s quickly expanding drone fleet, according to a new report published by a top Washington, DC, think tank. According to Air Force Colonel Bradley Hoagland, who contributed to a recent report on the Air Force’s drone program prepared by the Brookings Institution, it is quickly hitting a wall in the number of operators for its 159 Predators, 96 Reapers and 23 Global Hawks.
Officials in Texas this week began converting 83 miles of asphalt road to unpaved lanes of gravel. Years of heavy truck travel has ravaged entire routes in south and west Texas, and going back to gravel is for now the only affordable answer. Representatives for the state’s transportation department told the Texas Tribune that construction would begin Monday on a project that involves tearing up over 80 miles of asphalt that has been severely damaged over the years due to heavy traffic brought on by even heavier machinery.
An innocent man spent nearly two decades in prison for a crime he did not commit after police in Chicago, Illinois intentionally suppressed evidence and plotted to frame him for the crime, according to a federal lawsuit filed by the exonerated man. Alprentiss Nash was cleared by DNA evidence last year after serving 17 years in prison for the 1995 murder of Leon Stroud in his home on the South Side of Chicago. One year after his release, Nash has filed sued against the city of Chicago and eight current and former police officers.
Al Jazeera America, the latest offshoot of the Middle Eastern media empire, launched Tuesday afternoon with a flurry of live news and pre-taped segments, even as it lost a sizable portion of the viewer reach it had been counting on from AT&T. The news network, whose launch had been anticipated since Al Jazeera bought an existing channel in January, went live at 3 p.m. ET. on the lineup of four major cable and satellite TV distributors.
By Timothy B. Lee In a remarkable post, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger describes how the British government raided the Guardian’s offices in order to destroy hard drives containing information provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. The British government had been pressuring the Guardian to return or destroy the Snowden documents. Rusbridger says he tried to explain that destroying hard drives would be pointless:
Paul Joseph Watson Infowars.com The Transportation Security Administration is set to purchase 3.5 million .357 SIG caliber bullets, enough for its agents to fire 9,400 rounds a day, every day of the year. According to a solicitation issued by the agency on August 16, the TSA is looking to buy “3,454,000 rounds of .347 SIG Caliber Training Ammunition”. Although TSA agents in airports are currently unarmed, last month the TSA announced its plan to hire the use of a firing range within a 20 mile radius of LaGuardia Airport in order to train TSA workers.
Who was the first president of the United States? Ask any school child and they will readily tell you “George Washington.” And of course, they would be wrong—at least technically. Washington was not inaugurated until April 30, 1789. And yet, the United States continually had functioning governments from as early as September 5, 1774 and operated as a confederated nation from as early as July 4, 1776. During that nearly fifteen year interval, Congress—first the Continental Congress and then later the Confederation Congress—was always moderated by a duly elected president.
Heeding the demands of the Secret Service, state police in Virginia recorded and collected the whereabouts of potentially millions of people in an effort to monitor attendees at political rallies in 2008 and 2009. Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Richmond Times-Dispatch in the Virginia state capital show that police agencies utilized license plate readers in order to record information about people traveling to at least three politically-charged events during the 2008 presidential election season.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday that his administration has successfully carried out the largest gun seizure in the city’s history. At a Monday morning press conference, Mayor Bloomberg and Police Department Commissioner Ray Kelly announced that authorities in New York have managed to indict and arrest 19 individuals believed responsible for running an illegal gun pipeline from North and South Carolina to NYC along the Interstate 95 corridor.