BANGKOK, Thailand -- Thailand's military, narcotics bureau, airports and other security forces bought 1,576 fake "bomb detectors" for $30 million, investigators said, which the army currently uses against Islamist guerrillas despite a U.S. Embassy alert that the devices are "like a toy."

The Department of Special Investigation (DSI) --Thailand's equivalent to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation -- announced on July 18 that the manufacturers and distributors of the useless devices fraudulently sold them to Thailand's security forces and other agencies.

The DSI then sent the case to the National Anti-Corruption Commission, which set up 13 panels on July 24 to investigate the purchases.

About a dozen government agencies spent a total of $30 million on the similar hand-held units -- named GT200 and Alpha 6 -- despite a lack of proof that the items could function.

Thailand's top generals endorse the devices.

Voting rights advocates continue to call for weekend voting hours in light of the recent directive from the Secretary of State that closes down weekend voting across the state.

While the Secretary of State's new directive creates uniformity, it is not fair in its impact on voting populations. Get a copy of the report here

Early Voting article.

Join us at the corner of Broad and 4th on August 20th at 2pm for a Rally to Restore Weekend Voting in Ohio!

We will start the the Ohio Secretary of State's office (at the corner of Broad and 4th St) then we will march to the Franklin County Board of Election's Meeting to have our voices heard.

Contact Camille Wimbish for more information!
The original website for this special report includes three unpublished video clips of interviewees from the Politics of Genocide documentary film project: Ugandan dignitary Remigius Kintu, former Rwandan prime minister Fautisn Twagiramungu, and Nobel peace prize nominee Juan Carrero Saralegui.

State and local officials confirm the public records have been moved to off-site storage, though they remain in the custody of County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus...
The ballots cast in Waukesha County during the June 5th Gubernatorial recall in Wisconsin appear to be safe from destruction at the hands of one of the nation's most notorious election officials.
For now.

In our exclusive exposé earlier today, we detailed the threat made by the infamous Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus to "destroy" the county's ballots from the historic recall election between Gov. Scott Walker and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, as early as noon today, in apparent contravention of state law. The threat to destroy the ballots was made even as they (and the rest of the ballots cast in the election across the state) are still subjects of public records requests by a number of citizen groups attempting to verify the otherwise completely unverified results of the race by examining the ballots by hand for the first time.

Tested: How Twelve Wrongly Imprisoned Men Held Onto Hope
Budd and Dorothy Budd
Brown Books Publishing Group
The plight of the wrongfully convicted is finally on the national radar screen, helped along by the miracle of DNA testing, groups that work on their behalf, and the willingness of state governmental officials to admit that there are serious flaws in the criminal justice system. While a number of articles and books have brought much needed attention to the problem, Tested is the first book to examine how the wrongfully convicted survived the hell of prison knowing that they are innocent.

The Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism (CICJ) which publishes the freepress.org made a comprehensive public records request on July 3, 2012 to virtually every county and municipal election official in Wisconsin. The Free Press wanted to look at the ballots from the June 5, 2012 recall election of Governor Scott Walker. As outlined in a previous Free Press article, our staff was concerned with the election results deviating so far from the exit polls that predicted an evenly divided vote – or too close to call. Walker won with a 7% discrepancy from the polls.

With Wisconsin’s history as a progressive and honest state, the CICJ did not anticipate any problems with our public record request. Imagine our shock when Kathy Nickolaus, the Waukesha County Clerk, sent us an 8-page letter containing directives that made it practically impossible for us to look at the Wisconsin ballots, which are public records under that state’s laws.

According to the Huffington Post, "President Barack Obama's reelection campaign and Democratic political groups have been eager for Romney to pick Ryan, the architect of plans to slash government spending and overhaul entitlement programs that Democrats believe are political losers." ABC agrees: "The selection of Ryan as running mate makes it far more likely that Medicare, Social Security, and dramatic spending cuts will be as central to the campaign conversation this fall as jobs and the economy. Adding some of those famed political third rails into the mix is not just a potential risk Romney is willing to take, it is also clearly a potential risk he felt he had to take."

So, cutting Medicare and Social Security are unpopular, and Obama benefits from Romney's risky move in picking a runningmate willing to cut them. That's the story.

Israel’s ‘Bomb Iran’ Timetable
More Washington insiders are coming to the conclusion that Israel’s leaders are planning to attack Iran before the U.S. election in November in the expectation that American forces will be drawn in. There is widespread recognition that, without U.S. military involvement, an Israeli attack would be highly risky and, at best, only marginally successful.

At this point, to dissuade Israeli leaders from mounting such an attack might require a public statement by President Barack Obama warning Israel not to count on U.S. forces — not even for the “clean-up.” Though Obama has done pretty much everything short of making such a public statement, he clearly wants to avoid a confrontation with Israel in the weeks before the election.

However, Obama’s silence regarding a public warning speaks volumes to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Shell Oil's latest drilling plans are just the tip of the iceberg in what could become an environmental catastrophe for the fragile Arctic region. Earlier this month the oil company announced that it will begin drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off the coast of northern Alaska. Such activity would threaten the livelihood of countless endangered species - bowhead whales, beluga whales, gray whales, several seal species, Pacific walrus, polar bears, and about 100 fish species. More alarming still, the remote region is located 1,000 miles from the nearest Coast Guard base, making clean-up efforts near impossible should an oil spill occur.

This is American exceptionalism: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”

But you have to say it without the doubt, the regret — the horror — of Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist extraordinaire and director of the Manhattan Project, who famously uttered these words in reference to the Trinity nuclear explosion in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto desert on July 16, 1945.

When you remove Oppenheimer’s moral awareness from the quote, it sounds more like: “Oh, I wouldn’t hesitate if I had the choice. I’d wipe ’em out. You’re gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we’ve never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn't kill innocent people. . . . That’s their tough luck for being there.”

The unrepentant Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima less than a month after the Trinity explosion, made this comment in an interview with Studs Terkel in 2007, in response to Terkel’s question: “. . .when you hear people say, ‘Let’s nuke ’em. Let’s nuke these people,’” — the terrorists — “what do you think?”

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