By Steve Hargreaves Serial entrepreneur and billionaire Elon Musk is set to unveil design plans for the Hyperloop Monday — a superfast transport system that could have the potential to reduce travel time between New York and Los Angeles to 45 minutes. Musk, a co-founder of PayPal and the man behind commercial space transport firm Space-X and electric car maker Tesla, has been talking about the idea for months.
Author: mediahitman
US prisons are operating at 40 percent above capacity, with half of all inmates locked up for drug-related crimes. Attorney General Eric Holder has proposed changes to the criminal justice system that would reduce sentences for non-violent crimes. In an announcement scheduled for delivery on Monday, Holder outlined a plan to free up prisons and keep non-violent drug offenders from ending up in jail cells. Under a major policy shift, federal prosecutors will no longer push for “mandatory minimum” sentences for low-level drug offenders
Ten workers at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant were exposed to radiation from contaminated mist, TEPCO says. Workers in the building were prohibited from using tap water, which comes from the same tainted source 10 km from the facility. Exposure levels detected by radiation monitors worn by workers were found to be as much as 10 becquerels per square centimeter – 2.5 higher than the safe radiation exposure level
A mysterious surge of brain activity observed in dying rats may explain reports of near-death-experiences (NDEs), researchers claim. Even after the animals’ hearts stopped beating and no blood was reaching their brains, they appeared to show signs of conscious perception. The study is the first to take a systematic look at the neurophysiological state of the dying brain after a cardiac arrest.
A Georgia teenager in dire need of a new heart was denied a transplant after doctors determined that his history of poor grades and prior issues with the law did not provide “evidence” that he would attend doctor’s appointments or take his medication. Physicians told Anthony Stokes’ family that although he likely has less than six months to live due to an enlarged heart condition, the 15-year-old will not be placed on a transplant list due to concerns that he would not attend necessary medical appointments or take his medication. “They said they don’t have any evidence that he would…
By JOHN SCHWARTZ Officials were trying to determine the extent of the damage after a building in a resort community near Walt Disney World partially collapsed into a sinkhole early Monday. The building was stable by midafternoon, and two adjacent buildings were evacuated as a precaution, The Associated Press reported. Officials were on the scene at the Summer Bay Resort complex in Clermont, Fla., to inspect the structures and damage.
techdirt.com The use of Web blocks — usually “for the children” — is becoming depressingly common these days. So much so, that many people have probably come to accept them as a fact of online life. After all, the logic presumably goes, we can’t do much about it, and anyway surely it’s a good thing to try to filter out the bad stuff?
By Aaron Blake North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) on Monday signed into law one of the nation’s most wide-ranging Voter ID laws. The move is likely to touch off a major court battle over voting rights, and the Justice Department is weighing a challenge to the new law, which is the first to pass since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act.
The father of NSA leaker Edward Snowden has obtained a Russian visa and, along with his attorney, plans to visit his son in Moscow “very soon.” The exact date of the trip has not been disclosed. “We now have a date for visiting Moscow. We have visas, we have a date which we won’t disclose right now because of the frenzy,” Lon Snowden’s attorney, Bruce Fein, said on Sunday. “It’s very soon,” he told ABC’s This Week, where he appeared together with his client.
Russia, alongside the EU, China and Iran, are on top of the NSA’s spying priority list, according to a document leaked by fugitive Edward Snowden and published by Der Spiegel weekly. In the classified document, dated April 2013, countries are assigned levels of interest for NSA surveillance from 1 (the highest) to 5 (the lowest).
David E. Gumpert, Guest Waking Times This would seem to embody the USDA’s advisory, “Know your farmer, know your food,” right? Not exactly. For the USDA and its sister food regulator, the FDA, there’s a problem: many of the farmers are distributing the food via private contracts like herd shares and leasing arrangements, which fall outside the regulatory system of state and local retail licenses and inspections that govern public food sales.
So the paranoid hippie pot dealer you knew in college was right all along: The feds really were after him. In the latest post-Snowden bombshell about the extent and consequences of government spying, we learned from Reuters reporters this week that a secret branch of the DEA called the Special Operations Division – so secret that nearly everything about it is classified
Another burst of sunlight permeated the National Security Agency’s black box of domestic surveillance last week. According to the New York Times, the NSA is searching the content of virtually every email that comes into or goes out of the United States without a warrant. To accomplish this astonishing invasion of Americans’ privacy, the NSA reportedly is making a copy of nearly every international email.
Kurt Nimmo Infowars.com Former NSA and CIA boss Michael Hayden went on Face the Nation Sunday and told America the NSA’s Fourth Amendment busting surveillance program is “lawful, effective, and appropriate.” He made it clear Obama did not say during a Friday news conference he would implement “operational changes” to the NSA program. The former Air Force General, now a consultant
by Lee Stranahan At the Otay crossing near the San Diego border last Monday, about 200 people coming from Mexico gained entry to the United States all using the same key phrase; they claimed they had a ‘credible fear’ of drug cartels. According to KSAZ FoxPheonix:
Kim Dotcom’s Mega.co.nz is working on a highly-secure email service to run on a non-US-based server. It comes as the US squeezes email providers that offer encryption and Mega’s CEO calls Lavabit’s shutdown an “honorable act of Privacy Seppuku.” Mega’s Chief Executive Vikram Kumar, who is heading the development of the company’s own end-to-end encryption technology to protect the privacy of the future email’s users
ecret ServiceSteven Musil CNET The U.S. Secret Service on Monday released the first 104 pages of agency documents related to its investigation of Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who committed suicide earlier this year while under federal prosecution. The heavily redacted documents, which were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Wired, focus mostly on the specific charges against Swartz and his arraignment as well as computer equipment seized during the execution of a search warrant on his Cambridge, Mass.
A disabled United States Army veteran says he was kicked off of a New Jersey boardwalk and issued a citation because a local police officer didn’t approve of his service dog. Jared Goering, an Army vet with 19 years of service under his belt including tours of both Afghanistan and Iraq, says the incident occurred Thursday evening while strolling down a boardwalk adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean in Wildwood, NJ.