Saturday, 5 October 2013

USAHitman | Conspiracy News

Tor anonymizer network among NSA’s targets, Snowden leaks reveal

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 05:43 PM PDT

Top-secret national security documents disclosed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden show United States and British intelligence have long attempted to crack the Tor anonymizer network used by human rights workers, journalists, cybercriminals and others.
On Friday, the Guardian published leaked documents attributed to the former intelligence contractor revealing how the US National Security Agency and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, have worked extensively towards compromising the computers of people who browse the Internet with Tor, a program that routes traffic through multiple nodes in an effort to help mask the identities of its users.
According to the Guardian’s James Ball, Bruce Schneier and Glenn Greenwald, the NSA’s “current successes against Tor rely on identifying users and then attacking vulnerable software on their computer.”
“While it seems that the NSA has not compromised the core security of the Tor software or network, the documents detail proof-of-concept attacks, including several relying on the large-scale online surveillance systems maintained by the NSA and GCHQ through internet cable taps,” the writers add.
The Guardian has so far published three top-secret government slideshows used to discuss the Tor network and possible vulnerabilities that might compromise users if properly exploited.
In one document, the NSA notes that Tor, or “The Onion Router,” enables anonymous Internet activity to Iranian and Chinese dissidents, terrorists and “other targets too!” The software has become increasingly used around the globe by privacy-minded individuals of all sorts in recent months. However, previous documents disclosed by Mr. Snowden detailed how the intelligence community have made many successful efforts to compromise other would-be secure modes of communicating.
As RT reported previously, the number of Americans using Tor jumped 75 percent between June 1, just days before the first Snowden leak, and August 27, 2013.
One government document, “Peeling Back the Layers of TOR with Egotisticalgiraffe,” suggests the security of some Tor users can be compromised if the government or other malicious actor can exploit bugs in the Firefox browser and other vulnerabilities.
In another slideshow, “Tor Stinks,” the government claims it already has access to a select number of nodes which anonymized traffic is navigated through.
The “goal,” according to the NSA slide, is to “expand [the] number of nodes we have access to.” To accomplish as much, it’s acknowledged that GCHQ runs Tor nodes under a program of its own, and that other partners may be able to assist with further efforts to deconstruct traffic patterns to narrow-in on otherwise anonymous users.
Other tools used by the NSA involve collecting cookies from Tor users created when they are browsing the Web without the anonymizer software running. One technique, codenamed “QUANTUM,” exists to degrade, deny and disrupt Tor access, according to the documents. Another, “QUANTUMCOOKIE,” “forces client to divulge stored cookies” which could then further aid investigators attempting to hone in on targets otherwise protected by Tor.
Despite the NSA and GCHQ’s efforts, though, Tor itself has proved to be invincible to government attacks thus far.
“Can we exploit nodes? Probably not,” reads one slide which cites “legal and technical challenges.”
Still, the government has considered disrupting traffic over the Tor network to likely draw users off the nodes and into a habitat where their actions could be more easily traced. In one slide, the NSA suggests they could “set up a lot of really slow Tor nodes,” disguised as high bandwidth, “to degrade the overall stability of the network.”
Tor documents, courtesy of Glenn Greenwald:

Adobe hacked, millions of customers’ data compromised

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 05:03 PM PDT

A security breach targeting the source code used by software giant Adobe has compromised the information of nearly three million customers, the company confirmed this week.
Brad Arkin, Adobe’s chief security officer, announced in a blog post Thursday that a sophisticated cyber attack on the company’s network caused the source code for numerous programs to be illegally accessed by hackers, as well as the personal information of millions of Adobe users.
Founded in 1982, the Silicon Valley company is known for an array of products, including the PhotoShop editing software and the PDF, SWF and FLV file formats.
According to Arkin, Adobe believes the attackers pilfered customer names, encrypted credit and debit card numbers, expiration dates, and other information related to customer orders pertaining to roughly 2.9 million Adobe clients.
Arkin said the company does not believe the attackers accessed decrypted information, but stopped short of confirming that plain-text data wasn’t compromised.
“We’re working diligently internally, as well as with external partners and law enforcement, to address the incident,” he said.
He also stated that the theft of customer data and the source code for numerous Adobe products was likely related.
Brian Krebs, a well respected security researcher and former Washington Post reporter, acknowledged that he stumbled upon a 40 GB trove of Adobe source code around one week ago on the same server thought to be used by the hackers behind other recent major compromises. Krebs said that the source code pertained to Adobe’s ColdFusion and Acrobat software, which would suggest that hackers have obtained the blueprints for some of the company’s most widely used products.
Hold Security, a firm that worked in conjunction with Krebs, said that “This breach poses a serious concern to countless businesses and individuals.”
If hackers have been able to access Adobe source code, they could theoretically be able to analyze that information and engineer malware that exploits vulnerabilities and compromises the security of several million users, experts fear.
“Effectively, this breach may have opened a gateway for new generation of viruses, malware, and exploits,” Hold Security said in a statement.
“We are not aware of any zero-day exploits targeting any Adobe products,” the software makers responded. “However, as always, we recommend customers run only supported versions of the software, apply all available security updates, and follow the advice in the Acrobat Enterprise Toolkit and the ColdFusion Lockdown Guide.”
Speaking to Krebs, Adobe’s Arkin said “We are in the early days of what we expect will be an extremely long and thorough response to this incident.”
“We’re still at the brainstorming phase to come up with ways to provide higher level of assurance for the integrity of our products, and that’s going to be a key part of our response,” he said. “We are looking at malware analysis and exploring the different digital assets we have. Right now the investigation is really into the trail of breadcrumbs of where the bad guys touched.”
Following Adobe’s announcement on Thursday, shares in the company fell 64 cents each but have since rebounded.
Source

Man critical after setting himself on fire on National Mall

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 05:01 PM PDT

A man set himself on fire on the National Mall in the nation’s capital as passers-by rushed over to help douse the flames, officials and witnesses said Friday afternoon.
The reason for the self-immolation was not immediately clear and the man’s identity was not disclosed. But it occurred in public view, on a central national gathering place, in a city still rattled by a mass shooting last month and a high-speed car chase outside the U.S. Capitol on Thursday that ended with a woman being shot dead by police.
The man on the Mall suffered life-threatening injuries and was airlifted to the hospital, said District of Columbia fire department spokesman Tim Wilson.
He was standing by himself in the center portion of the Mall when he emptied the contents of a red gasoline can on himself and set himself on fire moments later, said Katy Scheflen, who witnessed it as she walked across the area. Police say they responded around 4:20 p.m. Friday.
Scheflen said passing joggers took off their shirts in an effort to help douse the flames, and the man was clearly alive as the fire spread. A police department spokesman said he was conscious and breathing at the scene. MedStar Washington Hospital Center tweeted that the man was taken there and he was in critical condition.
“There was not a lot people could do because it was a gasoline fire,” Scheflen said.
She said he may have said something before he acted “but it was nothing intelligible.” She said she did not see him holding any signs before he set himself ablaze and that there was another man with a tripod set up near him but did not mention if he was filming.
Lt. Pamela Smith of the U.S. Park Police, which is investigating along with the D.C. police department, said: “I’m not aware of any signage or any articulation of any causes.”
The D.C. police department has dispatched its violent crimes branch, which responds to cases in which a person suffers serious injury.
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Despite lobbyist claims, piracy not killing media industry, study shows

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 05:01 PM PDT

Online piracy is not the scourge of the media industry, as proponents of a crackdown on copyright infringement claim, says a new study. Creative business is doing well, with those embracing the new realities of digital sharing even flourishing.
The study by the London School of Economics says that claims by industry lobbyists of damage from piracy are largely exaggerated. Meanwhile, policies aimed at curbing illegal file sharing that that the likes of the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and the British Video Association are neither efficient nor help the entertainment industry to boost its bottom line.
The policy report suggests that attempts to stop digital sharing and close sites like The Pirate Bay are going against the natural development of creative communities and advise to review UK’s attitude to copyright.
“Neither the creative industry nor governments can put a stop to cultural change that is global and in many cases welcomed, including by other segments of industry,” said LSE’s Professor Robin Mansell, co-author of the report.
“There is a need to foster recognition and economic reward for creators and there is a need for copyright legislation to underpin economic growth,” Mansell added. “But such legislation needs to be consistent with 21st-century values and practices.”
Even the champions of the copyright crusade like music records and film producers don’t suffer as much as they claimed, the study showed. Overall the music industry revenue in 2011 was $60 billion, while in 2012 in showed growth for the first time since 1999. About a third of the money that year came from digital channels.
“Contrary to the industry claims, the music industry is not in terminal decline but still holding ground and showing healthy profits,” said study co-author Bart Cammaerts, senior lecturer in the LSE Department of Media and Communications. “Revenues from digital sales, subscription services, streaming and live performances compensate for the decline in revenues from the sale of CDs or records.”
Filmmakers have even less to complain about. The decline in sales and rentals of DVDs was more than compensated by digital distribution.
Despite the Motion Picture Association of America’s claim that online piracy is devastating the movie industry, Hollywood achieved record-breaking global box office revenues of $35 billion US in 2012, a 6 percent increase over 2011,” the report says.
Book publishers see the loss of print sales, but enjoy the rise in e-book sales.
“The rate of growth is not declining despite reports lamenting the ‘end of the book’,” the report says. In 2013, the global book publishing industry was worth $102 billion, more than any of the other entertainment industries.
And the gaming industry is working “working with the online participatory culture, rather than against it,” and was quite successful in finding new income streams. It is projected to grow at 6.5 percent and reach total revenues of US$87 billion in 2017, up from $63 billion in 2012, the report says.
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Capitol Punishment: Unarmed mom with health issues gunned down by Capitol Police

Posted: 04 Oct 2013 04:02 PM PDT

When it emerged that the woman shot dead by police on Capitol Hill was a depressed single mother, questions surfaced as to why police fired a stream of bullets at an unarmed driver who had an eighteen month old baby in the back of her car.
New details surrounding the death of Miriam Carey are swiftly changing the story’s turn of events: originally, one in which she was accused of being armed and confronted by police heroics during a government shutdown, into one about over-zealous police gunning down an emotionally-troubled woman in front of her child.
The 34-year old dental hygienist from Connecticut had been hospitalized after suffering previous bouts of depression, which began after the birth of 18-month old Erica. “She had postpartum depression after having the baby,” the victim’s mother, Idella Carey, told ABC News. “A few months later, she got sick. She was depressed…she was hospitalized.” Carey [Idella] was under the impression that her daughter was taking the baby to a doctor’s appointment in Conneticut.
Her pregnancy with Erica had been unplanned, according to her former boss, Dr. Barry Weiss, who spoke to NBC Connecticut. Carey [Miriam] had seemed increasingly stressed after discovering the news, and around January 2012, she suffered a fall down a staircase bad enough to have to take two to three weeks off work. She was fired around a year ago, but said there was “nothing unusual about her leaving our office.”
One 59-year-old resident of the building where Carey lived said that she “seemed nice” but had been behaving unusually recently. “She would often speed her car in and out of the parking lot here, and that was something that really concerned me,” he said. “She was pleasant. She was very happy with her daughter, very proud of her daughter…I just never would have anticipated this in a million years,” said Carey’s next-door neighbor, Erin Jackson.
An anonymous law enforcement official later said that Carey harbored the delusional belief that President Barack Obama was communicating with her, according to AP.
At the moment, the public only knows what little it can glean from the available footage and witness accounts. They say she plowed into a security barrier and hit a Secret Service agent who tried to change her direction by waving.
After the police first opened fire on her, she floored the gas and drove off. But after a high-speed pursuit through Capitol Hill streets, she ran into Capitol Hill police officers, who surrounded her car after she slammed into a barrier. One witness reported one of the officers even sticking his weapon into the open window of Carey’s car.
She wheeled the car around and hit a police cruiser, while almost hitting several more officers, before driving off again. From that moment all that is known is that the officers shouted for her to stop as she moved away. Then shots were fired (multiple reports declare more than a dozen were heard in total) and Carey was killed in the vicinity of the Supreme Court. She received six bullets from police guns.
Investigators told the public that the pursuit may have been worse had it not been for the barriers near the White House.
“The perimeters worked… They did exactly what they were supposed to do,” said DC Police chief Cathy Lanier during a press conference following the shooting. The question that then arises is why any further action was required to immobilize Carey herself, when there was all the time in the world to prevent her car from moving?
Dr. Mark Mason believes the situation was entirely overkill on the part of the Capitol Police.
“Given the fact that we have an unarmed female – the police have come forward to say she was unarmed; there was an infant in the car; there was no gunfire of any kind that came from the car at any time – a lot of questions need to be asked,” Mason told RT.
“The police in Washington DC way-way overreacted. There are alternatives to respond to situations short of deadly force. A speeding car – there’s a variety of ways of stopping them,” he continued, mentioning the option of shooting out the tires.

A black Infiniti coupe is pictured after its involvement in police shootout on Capitol Hill in Washington

The option of taking a suspect – even one considered a deadly terror suspect – into custody alive is a proven possibility, as was the case with one suspected Boston Bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. He remains in prison at the moment, despite having been accused of perpetrating the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon bombings. He was captured alive by police.
Back in May, 27-year-old Ibrahim Todashev who had alleged links to the other Boston Marathon bombing suspect, Dzhokhar’s brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was shot six times during questioning by the FBI after apparently attacking one of the agents. He appeared to have been unarmed and there are still no further details of the situation. Tamerlan himself died in a stand-off with police in April.
However, the separate cases are incomparable. While the Boston Bombings killed three and injured over 260, there is no evidence that Carey had any intent to cause danger to another human being.
On Friday, a man from Ohio named Joseph Reel, pleaded guilty to crashing his Jeep near a white House Secret Service guard booth – an incident which happened in June. As the hearing unfolded, US District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras cited Carey’s case, telling Reel he was “lucky to be alive,” according to AP.
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Debt doomsayer: Treasury forecasts ‘back to 2008 recession or worse’ if US defaults

Posted: 03 Oct 2013 05:05 PM PDT

The US government default caused by the ongoing budget standoff in the Congress could have a “catastrophic” effect on the country’s economy, which would be felt for decades, the Treasury Department said in report.
The US government went on partial shutdown this Monday after the Democratic-led Senate turned down repeated efforts by the Republicans to pass a budget, constraining the implementation of ‘Obamacare’ – a healthcare law, which the president considers a centerpiece of his political legacy.
If the Congress fails to raise the $16.7 trillion federal borrowing limit by October 17, the government could begin running out of money to pay its bills, which would result in an unprecedented US debt default.
“In the event that a debt limit impasse were to lead to a default, it could have a catastrophic effect on not just financial markets, but also on job creation, consumer spending and economic growth — with many private-sector analysts believing that it would lead to events of the magnitude of late 2008 or worse, and the result then was a recession more severe than any seen since the Great Depression,” the Treasury said in a report on Thursday.
The consequences of the default, which include high interest rates, reduced investment, higher debt payments, and slow economic growth, would also be sustainable and “could last for more than a generation,” the department warned.
The Treasury said the “we may be starting to see some tentative signs that the current debate is affecting financial markets,” with the crisis already shaking the Wall Street where the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 136.66 points (0.90 per cent) to 14,996.48 on Thursday.
The Treasury also noted that the negative spillovers from an “unprecedented” US default would “reverberate around the world” as “credit markets could freeze, the value of the dollar could plummet, US interest rates could skyrocket.”
The International Monetary Fund has also sounded the alarm over the American debt crisis, which is putting the world economy under threat.
IMF chief Christine Lagarde stressed that it is “mission critical” to urgently find the way out of the stalemate – as she arrived in Washington for the next week’s IMF and World Bank meetings.
“The ongoing political uncertainty over the budget, over the debt ceiling doesn’t help. The government shutdown is bad enough, but failure to raise the debt ceiling would be far worse and could very seriously damage not only the US economy, but also the entire global economy,” she said.
According to Lagarde, the economic growth in the US has already been hurt by excessive fiscal consolidation, and will be below 2 percent this year before rising by about 1 percentage point in 2014.
Congressional action remains the only way to avoid the US default, an unnamed Treasury official told the reporters.
He stressed that the Treasury Department has no plans of using the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which says that the validity of the US public debt “shall not be questioned,” to get around the debt limit.
But there are no signs that the budget dispute will be solved before being dragged into a second week, with all of the government’s non-essential workers sent home due to the shutdown.
Obama has refused to negotiate on raising the debt ceiling with the Republicans, saying that offering concessions would set a poor precedent for future heads of the White House.
“If we screw up, everybody gets screwed up. The whole world will have problems,” he said in his emotional speech on Thursday, adding that the debt default would throw the US economy back into a recession.
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Pentagon spent $5.5bn only hours before govt shutdown

Posted: 03 Oct 2013 05:01 PM PDT

As clocks at the Pentagon approached midnight late Monday evening and inched America towards a government shutdown, the United States Department of Defense spent $5.5 billion dollars on an arsenal of items ordered at the last minute by Uncle Sam.
Foreign Policy reported on Tuesday that the Defense Department awarded 94 contracts totaling over $5.5 billion a day earlier, ensuring the mightiest military on Earth would stay significantly well-stocked throughout an indefinite shutdown that has sent hundreds of thousands of federal workers home without pay and polarized lawmakers in Washington.
Comparatively, Foreign Policy’s John Reed noted that on September 3 — the first workday of the month — the Pentagon published news of only 14 contracts: practically one-seventh of what was signed off on as Monday’s midnight deadline seemed increasingly more likely to come and go without a compromise.
The shutdown, now in its third day with no end in sight, is costing the US an estimated $300 million in lost economic output each day, according to research firm IHS Inc.
But as hundreds of thousands of federal employees remain furloughed and national parks and programs stay shuttered indefinitely, the Pentagon does not seem to have much to worry about.
“This goes to show that even when the federal government is shut down and the military has temporarily lost half its civilian workforce, the Pentagon can spend money like almost no one else,” Reed wrote.
The contracts were handed out to companies providing products or services for the United States Defense Logistics Agency, as well as the Navy, Air Force, Army, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Missile Defense Agency, and Special Operations Command.
Among those newest contracts are $2.5 billion to aircraft engine-maker Pratt & Whitney for “spare parts,” $66 million for a new fuel pier at the Naval Base Point Loma and $7.5 million for a fleet of 60 Mercedes-Benz trucks to be used by the US Africa Command.
Also on the ledger is over $15 million for bulk helium, nearly $66 million on combat helmets and another $9 million for field jackets to be supplied to the Afghanistan National Police.
Additionally, the Pentagon gave one contractor nearly $10 million to repair a Defense Department gym. With upgrades, the facility will receive new racquetball and squash courts, new floors, a triathlon club, cross fit training space and – for some reason – a television studio.
The Department of Defense asked for $525.4 billion from the federal government during Fiscal Year 2013 – a reduction of around $5.2 billion from the year prior.
As RT recently reported, the Pentagon is expected to spend upwards of $7 billion during the next year on sending supplies out of Afghanistan as the US prepares to end the war which is now in its twelfth year.
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Snowden’s email service Lavabit consistently denied US govt access despite intimidation

Posted: 02 Oct 2013 05:07 PM PDT

The Federal Bureau of Investigation secretly obtained a court order compelling Lavabit, the email service used by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, to hand over its private SSL key, thereby allowing the FBI to monitor Lavabit’s users.
The FBI order was handed down on July 16, according to Wired, shortly after Lavabit refused to bypass the company’s internal security systems to facilitate a government request asking the email provider to trace the internet IP address of an individual user.
Government documents indicate that the FBI sent Lavabit a so-called “pen register” order on June 28, forcing the Texas-based company to record the connection information belonging to a particular user each time that user logged in to check his or her email. Lavabit was then required to turn that data over to the government.
The pen register came down just weeks after the first Snowden leaks were published in the Guardian and The Washington Post. Among the unveiled programs was PRISM – a massive electronic data mining program employed to collect and store communication data extracted from internet companies including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and others.
While the identity of the FBI’s Lavabit target was not disclosed in the filings, the suspect is described as having committed violations under the Espionage Act, indicating with near certainty that Snowden was the motivating factor.
The June 28 order, as seen by Wired, required Lavabit to turn over all “technical assistance necessary to accomplish the installation and use of the pen/trap device.”
When the company – which is now embroiled in a court battle with the government – refused to comply, authorities filed a motion to compel, saying the single user “enabled Lavabit’s encryption services, and this Lavabit would not provide the requested information.”
“The representative of Lavabit indicated that Lavabit had the technical capability to decrypt the information, but that Lavabit did not want to ‘defeat its own system,’” the order went on.
Prosecutors soon asked that founder Ladar Levinson and Lavabit be held in contempt “for its disobedience and resistance to these lawful orders.” A search warrant was issued demanding “all information necessary to decrypt communications sent to or from the Lavabit email account [redacted] including encryption keys and SSL keys.”
A search warrant and SSL key would grant the government unobstructed access to Lavabit’s servers, and a court informed Levinson that he would be fined $5,000 each day he refused to hand over the necessary information.
“I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,” Levinson wrote on August 8. “After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations.”
Now embroiled in a costly legal battle, Levinson has already raised over $20,000 to pay the necessary legal fees. That makes up half of Levinson’s goal, he said, because unfortunately “defending the constitution is expensive.”
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Fukushima leak is 20,000 times radioactive than Tepco claimed

Posted: 02 Oct 2013 05:02 PM PDT

(Emphasis Added): New spill at No. 1 laid to typhoon miscalculation Authorities are still groping for a solution to the water crisis at the crippled nuclear plant, which is rapidly running out of storage space and facing a growing risk of flooding from typhoons. The water contained strontium and tritium and was emitting beta-ray radiation of 580,000 becquerels per liter, according to Tepco, which was apparently trying to drain rainwater from the flood containment area into the tanks during the typhoon.
Previous reports of 200,000 Bq/liter
Kyodo News, Oct. 3, 2013: Tepco said Wednesday it detected 200,000 becquerels per liter of beta ray-emitting radioactive substances, including strontium-90, far above the legal limit of 30 becquerels per liter.
NBC News, Oct. 3, 2013: Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, said the water which spilled from the storage tanks had radiation readings as high as 200,000 becquerels per liter — almost 6,700 times higher than the legal limit of 30 becquerels.
Tepco not sure how to even measure the radioactivity, let alone contain it?
Associated Press, Oct 3, 2013: In recent meetings, regulators criticized TEPCO for even lacking basic skills to properly measure radioactivity [...] “As far as TEPCO people on our contaminated water and sea monitoring panels are concerned, they seem to lack even the most basic knowledge about radiation,” said a Nuclear Regulation Authority commissioner Kayoko Nakamura, a radiologist. “I really think they should acquire adequate expertise and commitment needed for the job,” she said.
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Obama: If you do not allow us to raise the debt ceiling you will not get your SS check

Posted: 02 Oct 2013 05:02 PM PDT

By Brett LoGiurato
Early Thursday morning, Potomac Research Group analyst Greg Valliere predicted that if the debt-ceiling deadline grew closer, President Barack Obama would play his “trump card” in the debate. He would remind seniors that if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling, seniors wouldn’t get their Social Security checks.
“GOP strategists like Karl Rove surely know that it’s just a matter of time before President Obama throws a game-changer — warning senior citizens that their Social Security checks won’t be mailed because of John Boehner,” Valliere wrote in a note to clients.
A few hours later, Obama did just that during a speech at M. Luis Construction Company in Rockville, Md. He spent much of the speech warning that while the ongoing government shutdown was damaging, failure to raise the debt ceiling by an Oct. 17 deadline would be even worse.
“In a government shutdown, Social Security checks still go out on time. In an economic shutdown — if we don’t raise the debt ceiling — they don’t go out on time,” Obama said. “In a government shutdown, disability benefits still arrive on time. In an economic shutdown, they don’t.”
Earlier on Thursday, the Treasury Department warned in a big report that breaching the debt ceiling could inflict economic calamity “more severe than any seen since the Great Depression.”
“The United States has never defaulted on its obligations, and the U.S. dollar and Treasury securities are at the center of the international financial system,” the report said.
“A default would be unprecedented and has the potential to be catastrophic: credit markets could freeze, the value of the dollar could plummet, U.S. interest rates could skyrocket, the negative spillovers could reverberate around the world, and there might be a financial crisis and recession that could echo the events of 2008 or worse.”
The Treasury says that the debt ceiling needs to be raised by Oct. 17 to avoid potential default on some U.S. obligations. After that date, the Treasury would have only approximately $30 billion to meet all of its commitments. On some days, expenditures can go as high as $60 billion.
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Pills made from poop could cure serious gut infections

Posted: 02 Oct 2013 05:01 PM PDT

Hold your nose and don’t spit out your coffee: Doctors have found a way to put healthy people’s poop into pills that can cure serious gut infections – a less yucky way to do “fecal transplants.” Canadian researchers tried this on 27 patients and cured them all after strong antibiotics failed to help.
It’s a gross topic but a serious problem. Half a million Americans get Clostridium difficile, or C-diff, infections each year, and about 14,000 die. The germ causes nausea, cramping and diarrhea so bad it is often disabling. A very potent and pricey antibiotic can kill C-diff but also destroys good bacteria that live in the gut, leaving it more susceptible to future infections.
Recently, studies have shown that fecal transplants – giving infected people stool from a healthy donor – can restore that balance. But they’re given through expensive, invasive procedures like colonoscopies or throat tubes. Doctors also have tried giving the stool through enemas but the treatment doesn’t always take hold.
There even are YouTube videos on how to do a similar treatment at home via an enema. A study in a medical journal of a small number of these “do-it-yourself” cases suggests the approach is safe and effective.
Dr. Thomas Louie, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Calgary, devised a better way – a one-time treatment custom-made for each patient.
Donor stool, usually from a relative, is processed in the lab to take out food and extract the bacteria and clean it. It is packed into triple-coated gel capsules so they won’t dissolve until they reach the intestines.
“There’s no stool left – just stool bugs. These people are not eating poop,” and there are no smelly burps because the contents aren’t released until they’re well past the stomach, Louie said.
Days before starting the treatment, patients are given an antibiotic to kill the C-diff. On the morning of the treatment, they have an enema so “the new bacteria coming in have a clean slate,” Louie said.
It takes 24 to 34 capsules to fit the bacteria needed for a treatment, and patients down them in one sitting. The pills make their way to the colon and seed it with the normal variety of bacteria.
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143-year-old law has Washington treading gingerly during shutdown

Posted: 02 Oct 2013 05:00 PM PDT

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By Steve Liesman
Administration officials now live in fear of a 19th-century law that could get them fired, penalized or even imprisoned if they make the wrong choices while the government is shut down.
The law is the Antideficiency Act, passed by Congress in 1870 (and amended several times), which prohibits the government from incurring any monetary obligation for which Congress has not appropriated funds.
In shutting down the government, most memos cite the law as the reason. The Government Accountability Office says employees who violate the Antideficiency Act may be subject to disciplinary action, suspension and even “fines, imprisonment, or both.”
CNBC has learned that in several executive branch departments, high-level staff members review individual decisions about what government activities to allow for fear of running afoul of the Antideficiency Act. One White House official said he has advised his employees not to check their email or cellphones. Under the act, even volunteering for government service is expressly prohibited.
In a memo to his department employees today, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew cited the law as the reason for reduced staffing.
“For the duration of this impasse, as required by the Antideficiency Act and directed by OMB, the Department will be required to operate with only the minimal staffing level necessary to execute only certain legally exempted activities,” Lew wrote.
The only exemptions to the shutdown concern “emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property,” according to government documents. That has meant airports and the Postal Service are open, Social Security checks get paid and federal prisons and courts will operate as normal as do most national security functions including the military and the Central Intelligence Agency. But national parks and museums are closed along with big parts of the departments of Education and Commerce
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Mark Levin: You lay one damn hand on a WWII vet, I’ll bring half a million people to DC

Posted: 02 Oct 2013 05:00 PM PDT

By Jeff Poor
Conservative talker Mark Levin has a stern warning for President Barack Obama and his administration: Don’t mess with the World War II veterans.
Levin, author of “The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic,” told his audience on his Wednesday radio show should there be any action taken against those veterans for visiting the World War II Memorial on the National Mall, even with the government shutdown, he would bring 500,000 people to march on the Washington, D.C. in response.
“I want to tell you folks something — I want to say this loud and clear to the people who are on Capitol Hill who are listening, to this administration: You lay one damn hand on one of those World War II vets at that memorial, I’ll bring half a million people to that damn memorial,” Levin said. “You got that? I’m sitting here stewing thinking about this — playing these damn games. You will ignite a movement in this country like you have never seen before — the biker patriot army, veterans from all over the country, every single war and battle in this country — Republican, Democrat, Independent, whatever.”
“I’ll be damned if one president with his feet up on the desk in the Oval Office, with a smirk on his face, looking at his golf cart — I’ll be damned if this president or anybody else is going to shut down that World War II Memorial, period,” he continued. “These men are in their 80s and 90s, so let me repeat: You lay one hand on one of those men and arrest them for going to their memorial, which they fought, which was not paid by you, dammit — was paid by the American people.
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China cave so huge it has its own weather system..

Posted: 01 Oct 2013 07:31 PM PDT

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Adventurers have stumbled across a cave so enormous that it has its own weather system, complete with wispy clouds and lingering fog inside vast caverns. A team of expert cavers and photographers have been exploring the vast cave system in the Chongquing province of China and have taken the first-ever photographs of the natural wonder.
They were amazed to discover the entrance to the hidden Er Wang Dong cave system and were stunned when they managed to climb inside to see a space so large that it can contain a cloud.
Photographer and caver Robbie Shone, from Manchester, was part of a team of 15 explorers on a month-long expedition that discovered the hidden system.
‘A few of the caves had previously been used by nitrate miners, at the areas close to the entrance, but had never been properly explored before,’ he said.
‘All the major passageways were deep underground and had never seen light before.