North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has died at the age of 69, state-run television has announced. Mr Kim, who has led the communist nation since the death of his father in 1994, died on a train while visiting an area outside the capital, the announcement said. He suffered a stroke in 2008 and was absent [...]

A new report on the 2008 financial crisis reveals some shocking numbers that dramatically exceed the $700 billion TARP bailout. The report by Bloomberg Markets Magazine details trillions of dollars in secret federal loans made to the big banks during the 2008 financial crisis, a process that helped them rake in billions of dollars in [...]

Violent video games can alter the brain in just one week and make players more aggressive, according to researchers. A study has found that key areas in the brain suffer reduced activity, and leave it physically altered. Read Full Article

Trustees of the California Medical Assn., which represents more than 35,000 physicians statewide, adopted the position at their annual meeting in Anaheim late Friday. It is the first major medical association in the nation to urge legalization of the drug, according to a group spokeswoman, who said the larger membership was notified Saturday. Dr. Donald [...]

More than five years after the American military denied claims that its troops had executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians in cold blood, new evidence has emerged in a WikiLeaks diplomatic cable casting serious doubt on the US version of events. A UN complaint contained in the latest batch of cables published by the whistle-blowing [...]

Global Orbit Decay By: Willie McDonald *cdnld30@gmail.com* The events below were discovered by scientific organizations such as NASA, not by me! These events were discovered in the 20th century, and are occurring simultaneously, and are slowly worsening. Many of these events below have been occurring for less than a millennium (LTM). I believe they are [...]

The U.S. government believes it is highly likely that Iran Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei signed off on a plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington and bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies here, senior U.S. officials said Wednesday. “This is the kind of operation — the assassination of a diplomat on foreign soil — [...]

Two provisions of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional because they allow search warrants to be issued without a showing of probable cause, a federal judge ruled. U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as amended by the Patriot Act, “now permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance [...]

The United States lost its top-notch AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor’s on Friday in an unprecedented reversal of fortune for the world’s largest economy. S&P cut the long-term U.S. credit rating by one notch to AA-plus on concerns about the government’s budget deficits and rising debt burden. The move is likely to raise [...]

Drug warriors often contend that drug use would skyrocket if we were to legalize or decriminalize drugs in the United States. Fortunately, we have a real-world example of the actual effects of ending the violent, expensive War on Drugs and replacing it with a system of treatment for problem users and addicts. Ten years ago, [...]

It’s official: The housing crisis that began in 2006 and has recently entered a double dip is now worse than the Great Depression. Prices have fallen some 33 percent since the market began its collapse, greater than the 31 percent fall that began in the late 1920s and culminated in the early 1930s, according to [...]

Tripoli, Libya — NATO officials admitted Sunday that the alliance was probably responsible for an airstrike in a densely populated Tripoli neighborhood that Libyan authorities said killed nine people and injured 18. The early-morning airstrike destroyed one apartment building, crushing residents beneath tons of debris while they were sleeping, Libyan authorities said. Half a dozen [...]

Al-Qaeda founder and leader Osama Bin Laden is dead, according to US officials. The US is in possession of Bin Laden’s body, the reports say. President Barack Obama is due to make a statement shortly. Read Full Article

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Sunday another reactor of its quake-hit Fukushima nuclear power plants had lost its cooling functions, while at least 15 people at a nearby hospital were found to have been exposed to radioactivity. It was the sixth reactor overall at the Fukushima No. 1 and No. 2 plants to undergo cooling [...]

The companies with multimillion-dollar contracts to supply American airports with body-scanning machines more than doubled their spending on lobbying in the last five years and hired several high-profile former government officials to advance their causes in Washington, records show. L-3 Communications, which has sold $39.7 million worth of the machines to the federal government, spent [...]

The UN today warned that food prices could rise by 10%-20% next year after poor harvests and an expected rundown of global reserves. More than 70 African and Asian countries will be the worst hit, said the Food and Agricultural Organisation in its monthly report. In its gloomiest forecast since the 2007/08 food crisis, which [...]

Not as many people are aware of it as should be, but Jon Stewart’s older brother, Larry Leibowitz, is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Mr. Leibowitz was appointed chief operating officer in the first quarter of 2010. In this capacity, he (Leibowitz) is responsible for all the operations [...]

A privacy watchdog has uncovered a government memo that encourages federal agents to befriend people on a variety of social networks, to take advantage of their readiness to share — and to spy on them. In response to a Freedom of Information request, the government released a handful of documents, including a May 2008 memo [...]

The world’s rivers, the single largest renewable water resource for humans and a crucible of aquatic biodiversity, are in a crisis of ominous proportions, according to a new global analysis. The report, published Sept. 30 in the journal Nature, is the first to simultaneously account for the effects of such things as pollution, dam building, [...]

It sounds like something straight out of George Orwell’s nightmarish Nineteen Eighty-Four. In a move that harks back to the dark days of the KGB, the Russian security service has been given new powers to crack down on so-called ‘thought crime’. Read Full Article

FRENCH AID WORKER EXECUTED IN AFRICA AFGHANISTAN ‘SHOCKED’ BY LEAKED U.S. DOCUMENTS DRUG FIRM NOVARTIS FINED $295M FOR SEX DISCRIMINATION

The US government secretly advised Scottish ministers it would be “far preferable” to free the Lockerbie bomber than jail him in Libya. Correspondence obtained by The Sunday Times reveals the Obama administration considered compassionate release more palatable than locking up Abdel Baset al-Megrahi in a Libyan prison. Read Full Article

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38387214 http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/23/news/economy/bank_failures/index.htm