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By Reuters | Posted March 19, 2009

A UN panel will next week recommend that the world ditch the dollar as its reserve currency in favor of a shared basket of currencies, a member of the panel said on Wednesday, adding to pressure on the dollar.

Currency specialist Avinash Persaud, a member of the panel of experts, told a Reuters Funds Summit in Luxembourg that the proposal was to create something like the old Ecu, or European currency unit, that was a hard-traded, weighted basket.

Persaud, chairman of consultants Intelligence Capital and a former currency chief at JPMorgan, said the recommendation would be one of a number delivered to the United Nations on March 25 by the UN Commission of Experts on International Financial Reform.

“It is a good moment to move to a shared reserve currency,” he said. Read more…

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By Associated Press | Posted March 19, 2009

San Juan, Puerto Rico | Many detainees locked up at Guantanamo were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush administration official said Thursday. “There are still innocent people there,” Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. “Some have been there six or seven years.”

Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an Internet posting on Tuesday, told the Associated Press he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a “mosaic” of intelligence.

“It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance,” Wilkerson wrote in the blog. He said intelligence analysts hoped to gather “sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.”

Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said vetting on the battlefield during the early stages of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan was incompetent with no meaningful attempt to discriminate “who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.” Read more…

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By Common Dreams | Posted March 13, 2009

A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have yet to do: end hunger.

“To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer. ” City of Belo Horizonte, Brazil

In writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life’s essentials? Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise here in the United States-one in 10 of us is now turning to food stamps-these questions take on new urgency. Read more…

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By OpEdNews | Posted March 15, 2009

This is going to be short and not so sweet.

I just read through an 8-page document that you MUST access and read through the following links:

Last Pillar of tyranny here now: Thought crime - criminalization of belief in Liberty. Police Trained Nationwide That Informed Americans Are Domestic Terrorists. The government that opposes the defenders of liberty admits that it is building tyranny. If the government wants to defend against terrorists why do they not close our borders? Law enforcement across the country are being educated that informed Americans who know their rights are dangerous and that cops are their enemy.

As you read through these screen prints you will find that the government is concerned, but not about those Islamic Terrorists they said we were out to get after 911. No, in fact you will find nothing about “them.” What you will find out is that they are concerned about American Citizens that believe the government is turning a blind eye to illegal immigration; those that want to end the Federal Reserve and even people that watch the film Zietgiest. Read more…

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By CBS 2 Chicago | Posted March 12, 2009

Sellers Required to Provide Thumbprint Before Deal is Approved

Chicago, IL | Real estate certainly has its risks and fraud is a growing problem, but now there’s a new law that’s supposed to protect buyers. As CBS 2’s Mike Puccinelli reports the new law will also place an unusual burden on the seller.

Fingerprinting is something we often associate with crime. So the fact that Cook County home sellers will soon have to provide a thumb print left some people shocked.

The new law, which is set to go into effect June 1, 2009, will force anyone selling property in Cook County to provide a thumbprint from their right hand. Read more…

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By Associated Press | Posted March 14, 2009

Columbia, MO | A new document meant to help Missouri law enforcement agencies identify militia members or domestic terrorists has drawn criticism for some of the warning signs mentioned.

The Feb. 20 report called “The Modern Militia Movement” mentions such red flags as political bumper stickers for third-party candidates, such as U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, who ran for president last year; talk of conspiracy theories, such as the plan for a superhighway linking Canada to Mexico; and possession of subversive literature.

“It seems like they want to stifle political thought,” said Roger Webb, president of the University of Missouri campus Libertarians. “There are a lot of third parties out there, and none of them express any violence. In fact, if you join the Libertarian Party, one of the things you sign in your membership application is that you don’t support violence as a means to any ends.” Read more…

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From Signs of the Times | By VentureBeat | Posted March 16, 2009

Joining Google’s Android, Calendar, Docs, Mail, Maps, Reader and a few dozen other products today is a new application, PowerMeter. It’s not launched yet, but when it is, it’ll help you keep track of your home power usage by tapping into information sent from your devices to your electrical meter, and from there on to the “smart grid”.

What Google is showing of PowerMeter looks a bit like a line graph, with the X-axis representing time and the Y-axis showing both the amount of power used and which device used it. The theory is that if people can see how they’re wasting electricity, they’ll change their behavior. As its motto for PowerMeter, Google is using a Lord Kelvin quote: “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.”

To achieve that measurement aim, the company will need the smart grid to be more developed. Utilities still need to install communicative smart meters countrywide. The manufacturers of everything from your television to your dishwasher need to design those devices to talk, or a startup has to figure out how to do the same. Google will reportedly be working with other companies, who will handle the hardware side of development.

But the process should go fairly quickly. President Obama is pushing the smart grid, and there’s a big chunk of money set aside for it in the stimulus bill. General Electric just ran a Super Bowl ad about the smart grid, so it has entered the popular lexicon. Industry insiders estimate that smart grid devices should be widespread by next year. Then Google will be there, providing an interface with your devices. Read more…

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