Freedomshift

"You've got an organized crime syndicate" Emails and VA memos obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast provide what is among the most comprehensive accounts yet of how high-level VA hospital employees conspired to game the system. It shows not only how they manipulated hospital wait lists but why—to cover up the weeks and months veterans spent waiting for needed medical care. If those lag times had been revealed, it would have threatened the executives’ bonus pay. Read more: here

Directive No. 3025.18, “Defense Support of Civil Authorities,” was issued Dec. 29, 2010, and states that U.S. commanders “are provided emergency authority under this directive.” “Federal military forces shall not be used to quell civil disturbances unless specifically authorized by the president in accordance with applicable law or permitted under emergency authority,” the directive states. “In these circumstances, those federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the president is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances” under two conditions. The conditions include military support needed “to prevent significant loss of life or wanton destruction of property and are necessary to restore governmental function and public order.” A second ...

A new study released by the Boston-based Pioneer Institute finds that new technology development that has been encouraged through the use of federal grants has served to threaten children’s privacy by allowing the collection of data on every child. Authors of the study Emmett McGroarty, Joy Pullmann, and Jane Robbins make the case that by means of the nationalized Common Core standards, which states were lured into adopting through competitive grants in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RttT) stimulus program in 2009, the federal government has used grant funds to induce states to build identical, increasingly sophisticated student data systems. McGroarty, executive director of the Education Project at the American Principles Project (APP), said the study, entitled “ Cogs in the Machine: Big Data, Common Core, and National Testing ,” exposes “an idea that dates back to the Progressive era.” Read more: Here

It was almost inevitable: a week after we wrote " From Rothschild To Koch Industries: Meet The People Who "Fix" The Price Of Gold " and days after " Barclays' Head Of Gold Trading, And Gold "Fixer", Is Leaving The Bank ", earlier today the UK Financial Conduct Authority finally formalized what most in the "tin-foil" hat community had known for years, when it announced that it fined Barclays £26 million for manipulating "the setting of the price of gold in order to avoid paying out on a client order." Furthermore, the FCA confirmed that those inexplicable gold raids which come as if out of nowhere, and slam gold with a vicious force so strong sometime they halt the entire market, had a very specific source: Barclays , whose trader Daniel James Plunkett, born 1976 , "sent out a burst of orders aimed at moving the price of the yellow metal." Read more: here

“We Are No Longer a Nation Ruled By Laws” Pulitzer prize winning reporter Chris Hedges – along with journalist Naomi Wolf, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, activist Tangerine Bolen and others – sued the government to join the NDAA’s allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans. The trial judge in the case asked the government attorneys 5 times whether journalists like Hedges could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and then writing about bad guys. The government refused to promise that journalists like Hedges won’t be thrown in a dungeon for the rest of their lives without any right to talk to a judge. The trial judge ruled that the indefinite detention bill was unconstitutional, holding: Read more: here

The FBI has released about 175 pages of heavily blacked-out documents from the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre investigation. Of the 175 pages released in response to a Courant Freedom of Information request, 64 were completely redacted and most of the other 111 pages were heavily redacted. The Courant submitted the request in January after state police released a report on the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting that left 20 first-graders and six women dead at the Newtown school. The names of all witnesses interviewed by federal agents have been removed and there are no references to attempts by federal authorities in Washington, D.C. , to recover information from a computer disk that shooter Adam Lanza destroyed. Read more: here