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Body scanner unveiled at station A high-tech body scanner for detecting would-be terrorists has been unveiled at London's Paddington station ahead of a four-week trial. (BBC)
4-year-old turns up on government 'no-fly' list: Confusion over boy's name trips up family’s journey home for the holidays Edward Allen’s reaction to being on the government’s “no-fly” list should have been the tip-off that he is no terrorist.
“I don’t want to be on the list. I want to fly and see my grandma,” the 4-year-old boy said, according to his mother.
Sijollie Allen and her son had trouble boarding planes last month because someone with the same name as Edward is on a government terrorist watch list.
“Is this a joke?” Allen recalled telling Continental Airlines agents Dec. 21 at Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport. “You can tell he’s not a terrorist.” (Associated Press)
Bush approval rating tracker Every US president's popularity among the American public is measured by approval ratings; opinion polls conducted weekly or monthly by a host of polling companies.
Chart how George W Bush has fared over the last five years in relation to key events of his presidency. (BBC)
The California Zero-Emission Vehicle Mandate: A Study of the Policy Process, 1990-2004 The Zero-Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate, one of the most daring environmental policies related to transportation, was implemented in September, 1990, by the California Air Resources Board (CARB). It originally required that, starting in 1998, 2% of the in- state new light duty vehicle sales of major automakers had no emissions of criteria pollutants. The required ZEV percentage would be increased to 5% in 2001 and to 10% in 2003. CARB organized biennial reviews of the programs, to elicit stakeholder participation and monitor the evolution of the program. Through this review schedule, the program underwent several revisions resulting from intense policy debates.
This dissertation research is concerned with the study of the policy process over the ZEV mandate, from its conception, through its inception, and the biennial reviews, until 2004. The study is structured as three core chapters. The first chapter studies the origin of the ZEV mandate, trying to understand the conditions that favored and the factors that resulted in its implementation. To guide the study in this chapter, I use the Multiple Streams theoretical framework. The second chapter presents an empirical study of the policy process during the biennial reviews. This study aims at understanding the dynamics of policy change and coalition stability, identifying the policy dimensions that dominated the debate over time. I use the Advocacy Coalition Framework to frame the study in this chapter theoretically. The third core chapter presents a theoretical study of the strategic policy behavior of the main actors in the policy process. I develop a game- theoretical model of an environmental regulator (CARB) that needs to set emission standards in the presence of multiple industry players (automakers), who in turn need to
decide on their level of compliance in the presence of a competitor. The model presented improves over previous published work in the subject.
The results of these studies yield numerous conclusions with both theoretical and practical implications. I find that Multiple Streams is useful to understand the origin of the ZEV mandate, while I identify and/or confirm arguments by other scholars about significant limitations in the framework. Through the analysis of the public testimonies given by stakeholders at the biennial reviews, I identify the policy areas of major concern at different points in time along the policy process. I also identify the policy positions of each stakeholder and obtain estimates of the groups of stakeholders with similar policy beliefs (belief coalitions.) I find that these belief coalitions show some stability over time, though less than what was found by previous studies. One of the major conclusions from the model of strategic behavior is that the competitiveness of the auto industry tends to preclude collusion. The regulator may use this industry competitiveness to its advantage and achieve higher social benefits. (University of California)
The Colbert Bump is the curious phenomenon whereby anyone who appears on The Colbert Report gets a huge boost in popularity,causing them to win elections, receive massive increases in money in (making Colbert the greatest fundraiser ever), receive major awards and even get laid (The Colbert Bumpin' Uglies). (Wikiality)
Who Killed the Electric Car? s a 2006 documentary film that explores the creation, limited commercialization, and subsequent destruction of the battery electric vehicle in the United States, specifically the General Motors EV1 of the mid 1990s. The film explores the roles of automobile manufacturers, the oil industry, the US government, the Californian government, batteries, hydrogen vehicles, and consumers in limiting the development and adoption of this technology.
It was released on DVD to the home video market on November 14, 2006 by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
During an interview with CBS News, director Chris Paine announced that he would be making a sequel: Who Saved the Electric Car?, later renamed Revenge of the Electric Car. (Wikipedia)
WikiLeaks is an international organization that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous sources and leaks. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press. Within a year of its launch, the site claimed a database that had grown to more than 1.2 million documents.
The organization has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the U.S., Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. Newspaper articles and The New Yorker magazine (June 7, 2010) describe Julian Assange, an Australian journalist and Internet activist, as its director.
WikiLeaks has won a number of awards, including the 2008 Economist magazine New Media Award. In June 2009, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange won Amnesty International's UK Media Award (in the category "New Media") for the 2008 publication of "Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances", a report by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights about police killings in Kenya. In May 2010, the New York Daily News listed WikiLeaks first in a ranking of "websites that could totally change the news".
In April 2010, WikiLeaks posted video from a 2007 incident in which Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S. forces, on a website called Collateral Murder. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available for public review. In October the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organisations. (Wikipedia)
The new technology at the root of the NSA wiretap scandal When the NSA wiretapping story first hit the pages of the NYT a few days ago, there were clearly a huge number of unanswered questions. Is the wiretapping that the President has authorized illegal under the FISA act? Is it unconstitutional? If it's illegal, does the President have the authority to violate the law if he's acting in the best interests of the republic? And then there's the question of why the NYT sat on this story for over a year before going public with it.
I'm not really going to make any attempt to answer questions of legality and constitutionality, because the Internet is full of armchair constitutional scholars right now who're fighting tooth and nail over these questions, generating much heat but very little light. Instead, I'd like to point your attention to some later developments in this case that clearly indicate that there's much more going on here than we initially assumed. When the truth comes out (if it ever does), this NSA wiretapping story will almost certainly be a story not just about the Constitutional concept of the separation of powers, but about high technology. (Ars Technica)
Spies warned of Tube attack A leaked four-page report by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which oversees all spying, is the first definitive evidence that the intelligence services expected terrorists to strike at the Underground (London Times)
Bush Authorized Domestic Spying Post-9/11 Order Bypassed Special Court - Authorities, including a former NSA director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, were worried that vital information could be lost in the time it took to secure a warrant from a special surveillance court (Washington Post)
Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.
Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.
The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.
"This is really a sea change," said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. "It's almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches." - The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted. (New York Times)
Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.
Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.
The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.
"This is really a sea change," said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. "It's almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches."
Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight. (New York Times)
7/7 inquiry would be a 'distraction', says Clarke Charles Clarke provoked anger among Islamic leaders and families of the victims of the London bombings today when he confirmed that there would be no public inquiry to investigate the atrocity (London Times)
Air Marshals Expand Beyond Planes The so-called "Visible Intermodal Protection and Response" teams, or VIPER teams, will patrol Amtrak's Northeast Corridor and Los Angeles rail lines; ferries in Washington state; bus stations in Houston; and mass transit systems in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore. (Associated Press)
Tonkin Gulf Intelligence "Skewed" According to Official History and Intercepts: Newly Declassified National Security Agency Documents Show Analysts Made "SIGINT fit the claim" of North Vietnamese Attack The largest U.S. intelligence agency, the National Security Agency, today declassified over 140 formerly top secret documents -- histories, chronologies, signals intelligence [SIGINT] reports, and oral history interviews -- on the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. Included in the release is a controversial article by Agency historian Robert J. Hanyok on SIGINT and the Tonkin Gulf which confirms what historians have long argued: that there was no second attack on U.S. ships in Tonkin on August 4, 1964. According to National Security Archive research fellow John Prados, "the American people have long deserved to know the full truth about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The National Security Agency is to be commended for releasing this piece of the puzzle. The parallels between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq War make it all the more worthwhile to re-examine the events of August 1964 in light of new evidence." Last year, Prados edited a National Security Archive briefing book which published for the first time some of the key intercepts from the Gulf of Tonkin crisis. (George Washington University)
American Christian Fundamentalist Leader Calls For Global War If Christian fundamentalists are to be believed, America's invasion of Iraq and the consequent brutal slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians in that country are all part of a grand divine plan that will finally culminate in the 'second coming' of Jesus Christ (Countercurrents.org)
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