A U.S. District Court judge says the FBI’s reasons for withholding information on assassination plots against Occupy movement leaders in several U.S. cities aren’t good enough.

It was quietly reported last June that the FBI was aware that an organization — possibly a law enforcement agency — had plans to assassinate leaders of the Occupy movement, and the bureau did nothing about it. Now a U.S. District Court judge says the FBI has some explaining to do.

Not only did the FBI not intervene at all, but it didn’t even alert or notify the leaders of Occupy movements in several cities whose lives were threatened. Their inaction goes against the bureau’s practice of informing potential victims of violent threats made against them.

The public and Occupy leaders only learned about the assassination plans after documents containing the information were obtained by the human and civil rights advocacy group, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Though the documents largely detailed how the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. military and private corporations had flagged Occupy Wall Street protesters as “domestic terrorists” and “criminals” in order to spy on them, there was one paragraph on page 61 that caught the group’s attention.

Read the full article... (mintpressnews.com)

A new NASA study predicts a rather grim future if things don't change soon. I'm normally not too into the gloom and doom stuff, but I find it very interesting that even NASA is now saying the Elite are a threat to our whole society. From rawstory.com:

...“the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or “Commoners”) [poor]” These social phenomena have played “a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse,” in all such cases over “the last five thousand years.”

Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with “Elites” based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both:

“… accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels.”

The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these challenges by increasing efficiency:
“Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use.”

Full article... (rawstory.com)

MOSCOW — Tens of thousands of anti-government protesters marched in central Moscow Saturday against a Kremlin-backed referendum in Crimea on whether to break away from Ukraine and join Russia.

It was the largest anti-government demonstration since 2012. Demonstrators waved Russian and Ukrainian flags, while opposition activists — including two members of the Pussy Riot punk band — shouted "Say no to war!" and "Putin, go away!" from the stage.

Protesters also held up banners that read: "For your freedom and for ours!" One demonstrator held up a plate of salo — cured pork fat that is a staple of Ukrainian cuisine and adored by many Russians — along with a poster that read: "Make salo, not war!"

Read the full article... (therepublic.com)