“SIX, the company that owns and operates the Swiss stock exchange, on Friday announced plans to launch a fully regulated cryptocurrency exchange, showing continued institutional interest in the space.”
“The stated purpose of the bill was ‘to authorize funds for Federal-aid highways, highway safety programs, and transit programs, and for other purposes.'”
Read more: https://thepointsguy.com/news/irs-blocking-americans-from-getting-passports/
“There were two big temptations to the American Republic of the 1950s; subsequent generations gave in to both of them.”
Read more: https://bonnerandpartners.com/ike-was-right/
“People with the implants can wave their hand near a machine to unlock their office or gym, rather than taking out a key card. Many microchip users are not concerned with hacking or surveillance at this point.”
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/swedish-people-embed-microchips-under-skin-to-replace-id-cards-2018-5
“f war breaks out in Korea, it will not be anything like the U.S. wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Panama, or Grenada. It will instead be a pivotal and devastating event in U.S. history and world history. As tens of thousands of millennials are suddenly being trained to kill and die in a faraway land in Asia, it will finally sink into them as to why they were made to register for the draft when they became 18.”
Read more: https://www.fff.org/2018/02/09/korea-crisis-matters/
“When Bettie Jones’s brother displays zero confidence in an investigation into the killing of his sister, he is not being cynical. He is shrewdly observing a government that executed a young man and sought to hide that fact from citizens. He is intelligently assessing a local government which, for two decades,ran a torture ring. What we have made of our police departments America, what we have ordered them to do, is a direct challenge to any usable definition of democracy. A state that allows its agents to kill, to beat, to tase, without any real sanction, has ceased to govern and has commenced to simply rule.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/illegitimacy-and-american-policing/422094/
“European banks are sitting on bad debts of €1tn – the equivalent to the GDP of Spain – which is holding back their profitability and ability to lend to high street customers and businesses. The €1tn (£706bn) of so-called non-performing loans amount to almost 6% of the total loans and advances of Europe’s banks and 10% when lending to other financial institutions are excluded. The equivalent figure for the US banking industry is around 3%. As well as bad debts, the EBA pointed to the cost inefficiencies and the cost of so-called conduct issues, such as fines, compensation and legal costs, which absorb almost 4% of banks’ operating income.”
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/nov/24/european-banks-one-trillion-euros-bad-debt
“Vint Cerf, a ‘father of the internet’, says he is worried that all the images and documents we have been saving on computers will eventually be lost. Currently a Google vice-president, he believes this could occur as hardware and software become obsolete. He fears that future generations will have little or no record of the 21st Century as we enter what he describes as a ‘digital Dark Age’. Vint Cerf is promoting an idea to preserve every piece of software and hardware so that it never becomes obsolete – just like what happens in a museum – but in digital form, in servers in the cloud. If his idea works, the memories we hold so dear could be accessible for generations to come.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31450389
“James Elmer Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen are not the first Americans to employ waterboarding and other ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ against our enemies. But they are almost certainly the only ones to get rich doing it. They did so by employing what is widely dismissed as ‘voodoo science’ based on misapplied principles in a program that CIA records suggest produced little, if any, intelligence of significant value. And they might have gotten even richer. The Senate Intelligence Committee report says they secured a contract with the CIA in 2006 valued ‘in excess of $180 million.’ The CIA canceled the deal three years later, but by then the duo had received $81 million.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/12/the-beach-houses-that-torture-built.html
“The unprecedented increase in ‘quantitative and qualitative monetary stimulus’ announced Friday, October 31, by Bank of Japan governor Kuroda Haruhiko is one of the most risky, if not reckless, and possibly disastrous actions in the history of world central banking. Japan is now conducting ‘a laboratory experiment’ and ‘Governor Kuroda’s monetary experiment has in effect morphed into a strategy of devaluation plus financial repression.’ [..] ‘it is well known that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who keeps a stock monitor in his offices, sees rising stock prices as critical to voter confidence in Abenomics and hence his own approval ratings.'”