White House and Office of Homeland Security Involved in Crackdown of Occupy Wall Streeters!!

Dear Commons Colleagues,

This was sent by colleague, Stuart Ewen, at Hunter College.  The Nation of Change is reporting that President Obama and the Department of Homeland Security have been heavily involved behind the scenes in the crackdown  of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Specifically:

“A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild makes it increasingly evident that there was and is a nationally coordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy Movement.

The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard insists “are likely only a subset of responsive materials,” in the possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.”

Nonetheless, blacked-out and limited though they are, she says they offer clues to the extent of the government’s concern about and focus on the wave of occupations that spread across the country beginning with last September’s Occupy Wall Street action in New York City.

The latest documents reveal “intense involvement” by the DHS’s so-called National Operations Center (NOC). In its own literature, the DHS describes the NOC as “the primary national-level hub for domestic situational awareness, common operational picture, information fusion, information sharing, communications, and coordination pertaining to the prevention of terrorist attacks and domestic incident management.”

The DHS says that the NOC is “the primary conduit for the White House Situation Room” and that it also “facilitates information sharing and operational coordination with other federal, state, local, tribal, non-governmental operation centers and the private sector.”

This is troubling maybe even hypocritical given that President Obama and the Democrats in general have adopted the 99% percent theme of the Occupy Wall Street Movement in this election year.

Tony

 

Rebekah Brooks Charged Over Phone Hacking for Rupert Murdoch’s Newspapers: Faces Criminal Trial For ‘Perverting The Course Of Justice’ !

Dear Commons Community,

Rebekah Brooks, the former head of Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper wing and a key figure in the phone hacking crisis, is to face criminal charges over the scandal, it was announced today.  The Huffington Post reported:

“The Crown Prosecution Service said that Brooks “conspired with her husband, Charles Brooks, and others to pervert the course of justice.”

Speaking at a press conference, Alison Levitt, the chief adviser to the Director of Public Prosecutions, said that Brooks and five others —her husband, her assistant, their chauffeur, their security and the head of security at News International — had all been charged. (A seventh person was arrested but is not being charged.)

She claimed that, between July 6 and 19th of 2011, Brooks and her assistant had illegally removed seven boxes of material from News International headquarters, and the group had tried to conceal information from the police about the phone hacking scandal. The charges all stem from actions allegedly taken at the very height of the phone hacking scandal which had suddenly engulfed the entire Murdoch empire.”

Tony

 

New High Resolution Photo of Earth from the Russian Elector-L Satellite!

Go here for  a zoomable version.

Dear Commons Community,

The photo above was shot by Russian weather satellite Electro-L, and is derived from the highest resolution images ever taken of Earth.  The satellite, which is in orbit 36,000 kilometers above the equator, snaps a picture of the planet every 30 minutes, with resolution of up to 121 megapixels. The images are especially impressive for having been taken in a single snapshot. NASA images of the Earth are often an amalgam of several photos.

Tony