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Support Opednews. Make a tax deductible donation to make OEN Strong.  Daily Headlines
Reports
are that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is engaged in a
massive, covert military buildup. Evidently somebody in government is
expecting some serious civil unrest. The question is, why?
Remember
in the mid-1990s when USDA began telling people to wash their cutting
boards and utensils after preparing meat and always use a meat
thermometer? Because US meat and poultry is so full of pathogens, if you
don't kill them they might kill you? That was the beginning of the
government's move to pass food safety risks on to customers, and, more
distressingly, to meat processors themselves. The move is continuing
The
majority of college instruction in America is now provided by part-time
workers. These professionals- called adjuncts- receive no benefits or
security. Their pay is paltry. Their numbers are growing. Why are
they treated so poorly? It's because college administrations realize
that they comprise a cheap labor source. They are exploitated in the
name of naked profit.
By RT TV
"Aggressive and insidious": More details of Canada spying techniques to follow, Greenwald promises 
Brazilian-US
relations have also been ruined by the recent leak, with Rousseff
postponing a state visit to Washington in response to the US spying on
her communications with top aides. Rousseff has demanded a full public
apology from President Obama. However, no such apology has been made
It
should concern us all that there is a well-funded movement pressing
science, intellectual discourse, and reason out of the public domain and
attempting to replace them with pre-enlightenment thinking or, in
Harris's words, with "a vastitude of ignorance."
The
fiscal crisis in Washington is not simply a threat to economic and
government stability, as serious as that is. It is a premeditated scheme
to carve out a new constitutional structure that gives the Koch
Brothers and other right-wing billionaires the power to void the
democratic process.
Two Pa. politicians have soent 2 years praising fracked gas as the future of the state. So, why are they now praising coal?
By Jim Hightower
In The Name Of Making Us "Safe," The NSA Has Shredded Privacy Rights And Now Treats All Citizens As Suspects 
Doing
the serious police work to sort out the tiny number of people in our
country who are connected in any substantive way to real terrorist
threats is too much bother for NSA's techno-warriors, so they've taken
the shortcut of dumping all 330 million of us into a digitalized,
guilty-until-found-innocent box, keeping an unblinking computer eye on
us, and hoping the few bad guys stand out.
By Danny Schechter
The Bali Conference The Media Ignored: The One About The Environbment Danny Schechter was covering the conference on sustainable development that most of the media ignored to focus on what John Kerry was wearing.
By John Whitehead
Transforming America's Schools into Authoritarian Instruments of Compliance Despite a general consensus that zero tolerance policies have failed to have any appreciable impact on student safety, schools have doubled down on these policies to the detriment of children all across the nation.
Cell Delivery Systems Researchers Win Nobel Prize in Medicine | Blogcritics
Researchers
bought an order of chicken nuggets from 2 fast-food chains, plucked a
nugget from each, broke them down, and analyzed them in a lab.
But
ask yourself, how can Wall Street soar while Main Street struggles? The
question answers itself, if there is only one venue earning a profit;
it's the only game in town. It's like a highway dinner, if you want a
cup of coffee and a cheeseburger at 2 AM, that's where you go. It
doesn't matter if the coffee's no good or the service is bad.
President
Barack Obama on Tuesday told House Republicans to stop making threats
and pass a budget, which would bring an end to a crippling government
shutdown. House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, has warned that he
will not allow Congress to raise the ceiling unless Obama offers
concessions on his signature reform of expanded health care coverage.
Obama blasted that stance. "We can't make extortion routine as part of
our democracy. Democracy doesn't function this way. And this is not just
for me. It's also for my successors in office, whatever party they're
from," he said.
While
the verdict in this Shootout at the Free Trade Corral remains open,
workaholic China proceeds. After its spectacular New Silk Road successes
in Central Asia, Beijing has just proposed a -- what else is new --
Maritime Silk Road (MSR) in Southeast Asia, boosting trade between China
and ASEAN.
Over
800,000 people crowded Jerusalem's streets and alleys outside the
Sanhedria cemetery Monday night to pay their last respects to Rabbi
Ovadiah Yosef, an outsized and outspoken leader of Sephardi Jewry who
died earlier in the day at age 93. Yosef died in a Jerusalem hospital at
1:20 p.m. Monday, sparking outpourings of grief from across the rainbow
of Israeli society, though his passing was most deeply felt in the
large, and largely traditional, Sephardi community.
By Tom Engelhardt
Tomgram: Pratap Chatterjee, Big Bro Wants You Sometimes, the world sends you back to school. These last months have offered us a crash course -- call it Surveillance 101 -- in how Washington, enveloped in a penumbra of extreme secrecy, went to work creating a global surveillance state on a scale almost beyond the imagination.
By Cathy Lynn Pagano
Emerging Archetypal Themes: The Scales of Libra and the Ancient Celts: Relationships for Grown-Ups. 
Don't
you think we need to look at our beliefs about marriage and romantic
love and let go of the patriarchal view of monogamous relationships,
whether gay or straight? If we want to see an example of how to
conduct grown-up relationships, we have to go back about 3,000 years to
the Celts. Their Brehon Laws recognized 10 different types of marriages,
as well as legitimizing lovers. What do you think?
By Karl Grossman
Tea Party Cabal in Congress and Voter Backlash Will voter reaction to the U.S. government shutdown--notably the effect the Tea Party cabal is having on the public--have an impact in the coming election. Will citizen outrage towards the GOP and particularly the Republican arch-conservatives whose actions have triggered the shutdown result in a voter backlash?
So
how is this farce going to end? I can see it now. Obama will put ALL
entitlements except Obamacare on the chopping block. The people in our
government will ask all Americans to make a huge sacrifice in order to
keep our nation afloat. The government will loot the Social Security
trust fund to keep their military afloat and give us the finger.
President
Obama on Wednesday will nominate Federal Reserve vice chairman Janet
Yellen to lead the U.S. central bank, officials said, selecting a
renowned economist with a focus on combating unemployment for one of the
most powerful positions in the world. The former chairman of the
Council of Economic Advisers in the Clinton administration, Yellen would
also be the first Democrat to lead the Fed since Paul Volcker stepped
down in 1987.
This
is about the Republican Party and what it's going to be," Bernstein
said. "Is it going to conduct a fact-based, philosophical argument in
our political system or is it going to be a nihilistic, hateful,
asymmetrical in terms of facts and the truth part of the party, as in
Joe McCarthy?"
President
Obama proclaims his love of "transparency" but has an odd idea what the
word means. He generally defines it as sharing some information with
Congress and the Courts but keeping the public in the dark and punishing
those who ask too many questions.
Despite
the right-wing populist demagogy of the Tea Party, the real enemy of
the Republicans is not Obama, but American working people as a whole,
and particularly the tens of millions of retired workers who rely on
Social Security for their income and Medicare for their health care.
Neither party proposes even the slightest incursion into the wealth of
the financial aristocracy.
By William John Cox
The Failure of War as an Instrument of Foreign Policy: A More Effective Solution 
Making
war against nation states and their people no longer works. Unstable
and undemocratic countries are usually controlled by individuals and
cabals against whom military force ends up harming their own domestic
victims more than the entrenched leadership, and new regimes offer
little improvement.
why
are Republicans talking like this? Because they want to sound as if
they're willing to blow up the economy if they don't get their way. A
crazy person with a bomb is much scarier than someone holding a bomb who
looks and acts reasonable. Sounding crazy is part of the Republican
bargaining strategy.
By Andrew Schmookler
I Think I Know What the President Will Do If Congress Fails to Raise the Debt Limit Some interpret the President's remarks at his news conference this afternoon as "dismissing" the possibility of his unilaterally rescuing the nation from default. That's not how I am reading between the lines.
Why
anyone who claims to be pro-life would want to deny health care to
single mothers is an enduring mystery in the morally mischievous ethos
of the Republican Party. But the exclusion of a working poor population
that skews disproportionately black in the South is simply a
continuation of the divide-and-conquer politics that have informed
Republican strategy since Nixon.
Latest Articles
Based
on unresolved mistrust and resentments, both Indian and Pakistani
policy makers perceive the other side as an arch-enemy and have compiled
lists of alleged offenses to back up their perception. The Pakistani
list is much longer, however, and only an Indian renouncement of
Jingoistic policies toward its neighbor is likely to bring peace to the
Indian sub-continent.
I
originally published elsewhere this column written a couple of months
ago. In light of the current GOP assault on national governance and
governing, I thought that it would be useful to publish it here at this
time. For if the GOP is not stopped, soon, as goes North Carolina, so
goes much of the rest of the nation.
Perhaps
President Obama and the other grand bargainers who think these sorts of
cuts to seniors make sense have some theory under which budget cuts in a
downturn boosts private sector demand, but most of us have to live in
the real world, not the dreams of budget cutters. Whacking seniors with a
cut to their Social Security and higher medical expenses makes this
situation worse.
Two
prior columns about Tyler Cowen's praise of the faux
"hyper-meritocracy." Cowen assumes that productivity determines personal
wealth and is measured by wealth. The support of the wealthy for
austerity in response to the Great Recession demonstrates that the
wealthy remained the problem even after their frauds drove the crisis.
They sought a policy that would have compounded the Great Recession (as
it did in the Eurozone).
 Best News Links from the Web
GENEVA
(7 October 2013) -- The United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture,
Juan E. Méndez, today called on the US to immediately end the indefinite
solitary confinement imposed on Albert Woodfox since 1972. Mr. Woodfox
was convicted of murder together with Herman Wallace, who was released
last week when his conviction was overturned on appeal. A day later, on 2
October, Mr. Wallace died after battling cancer, having spent 41 years
in solitary confinement. "This is a sad case and it is not over"
stressed Mr. Méndez. "The co-accused, Mr. Woodfox, remains in solitary
confinement pending an appeal to the federal court and has been kept in
isolation in a 8-foot-by-12 foot (2.5 x 3.5 m. Approx.) cell for up to
23 hours per day, with just one hour of exercise or solitary
recreation." "Keeping Albert Woodfox in solitary confinement for more
than four decades clearly amounts to torture..."
Unlike
most of the nearly 400,000 orderly and somber graves over Arlington's
612 acres, the newer graves in Section 60 carried fresh reminders of
lives cut too short. Arlington National Cemetery was enforcing a policy
that forbids the placing of these graveside mementos. In short time,
these headstones have been stripped of these expressions of love and
loss. Some are saved by the cemetery, some discarded. These elements of
humanity have been swept away. Section 60 suddenly looks like every
other section of the cemetery, save for the freshness of the graves.
Evidence of open wounds, healing and reflection are no more.
News
coverage of a trucker protest seeking to clog the roads in and around
Washington, D.C., this weekend prompted a schism between the ride's
leaders. The ride's loosely organized leadership is now in agreement,
however: truckers will not seek to "arrest" congressmen. Longtime
Georgia trucker Earl Conlon was until Monday morning the coordinator of
truckers traveling to D.C. on Oct. 11-13. He claims credit for calling
the protest. If police interfere with the I-495 convoy, Conlon said
Monday, truckers would turn off the vehicles and make the road a parking
lot.
Veterans
regional offices will be closed and nobody will answer their phones
beginning Tuesday morning as the government shutdown forces furloughs of
7,000 employees of the Veterans Benefits Administration. Another shoe
could drop soon as VA officials warn that a government shutdown ending
in the last two weeks of October could result in delays in Nov. 1
benefits payments, including disability compensation, GI Bill living
stipends and dependency and indemnity compensation for survivors. No
firm date has been given for when the VA would run out of money.
If Dems Give In, Social Security And Medicare Will Be Future Hostages | Common Dreams
If Dems Give In, Social Security And Medicare Will Be Future Hostages. A good analysis of Republican tactics--enhanced and enabled of course by Democrats. Likely to ring many bells for any reader here.
Is
Japan's Abe Honest About Global Help for Fukushima? A large part of the
fate of the world may depend on the answer, which so far has not been
encouraging.
One
of the biggest hoaxes of American history is that the Civil War ended
back in 1865. Unfortunately, it has not ended yet. What was achieved
back then was an armistice, similar to the situation between the two
Koreas. As the current logjam in the U.S. Congress makes plain, the
Civil War is still very present in today's America -- and with virulence
that most other civilized nations find as breathtaking as it is
irresponsible.
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