Huff Post
August 17, 2012

Moss Bluff Elementary School in Louisiana is looking to streamline lunch payments by implementing a palm vein scanner program, but some parents aren't pleased.

A letter to parents this week informed them of the new scanner that will allow the school's nearly 1,000 students to move through the lunch line faster and with fewer payment mistakes -- an issue that had arisen in the past, KPLC-TV reports.

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Market Daily News
August 20, 2012

Michael Snyder: Why are Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and so many other countries experiencing depression-like conditions right now? It is because they have too much debt. Why do they have too much debt? It is because they allowed themselves to become enslaved to the bankers. Borrowing money from the bankers can allow a nation to have a higher standard of living in the short-term, but it always results in a lower standard of living in the long-term. Why is that? It is because you always have to pay back more money than you borrowed. And when you get to the point of having a debt to GDP ratio in excess of 100%, you are basically drowning in debt. Huge amounts of money that could be going to providing essential services and stimulating your economy are now going to service your horrific debt. Today, citizens in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy are experiencing a standard of living far below what they should be because the bankers have trapped them in endless debt spirals. Sadly, the vast majority of the people living in those countries have absolutely no idea what is at the root cause of their problems.

The Automatic Earth
Raul Ilargi Meijer
August 20, 2012

Alright, OK, so we have new sorts of relative highs in European and US stock markets, even as we keep a w(e)ary eye on Shanghai's new lows. The western highs seem to have a lot to do with all kinds of expectations of ECB sovereign bond purchases and/or cooling German resistance against them.

All this is accompanied by a rising Euro, and that little detail is far more puzzling than is generally acknowledged. Because there is only one reason for the ECB, with perhaps Angela Merkel and the Bundesbank chiming in, to even consider such measures as more - PIIGS - bond buying, that are tremendously unpopular among a broad swath of Europeans. That reason is that the PIIGS countries, and Greece, Spain and Italy in particular, are doing much worse than anyone wishes to admit in public.

Social Europe
21/08/2012 By George Irvin

Nouriel Roubini famously described the long decline of the euro as a ‘slow motion train wreck’. Mind you, economists disagree on exactly when the wreck will happen. Vicente Navarro has argued on this site that the euro will survive for as long as it serves the purposes of the German (and European) elite while, in the Financial Times, Wolfgang Muenchau thinks the crisis will last another 20 years given Germany’s proclivity for muddling through. By contrast, Megan Green at RGE sees the confluence of crises in Greece, Spain, and Italy during September and October 2012 as potentially lethal. But all agree that—sooner or later—it will happen.

GFP Note: We were discussing the RNC briefly at yesterday's Galactic Council Meeting. I mentioned that local law enforcement was planning to arrest up to 1,000 people, even though the event hadn't even started yet: Court officials increase staffing to handle RNC arrests.

So this morning I decided to follow-up and found that the FBI/Dept. of Homeland Security have issued a bulletin (which I can't find online) warning of possible violence by anarchist extremists. I have posted two articles below to show how different news outlets describe this bulletin. I suggest you also do a quick google search for "RNC Security Bulletin" to see how different sources are reporting on this. It's all over the internet now. Please contact me if you find the actual bulletin. Thank you.

CNN

By Carol Cratty

Wed August 22, 2012