Israel controls the United States of America

Plan for nationwide free wireless broadband finally shot down

For four years the Federal Communications Commission tossed the idea around like a beach ball: a coast-to-coast free wireless service across the low end of the 2GHz "AWS-3" band. The service would pay for itself via advertisements and by selling commercial access to various portions of the license area. The company that proposed the plan, M2Z Networks, would commit to building out the project in a decade, and pay five percent of its annual revenue to the United States Treasury.

But on Wednesday M2Z informed the press that the FCC has told the company and its backers that the Commission is dropping the concept, and that is so:

"We gave careful and thorough consideration to the proposal, but ultimately determined that this was not the best policy outcome," Ruth Milkman, chief of the FCC's Wireless Bureau told us. "We remain vigilant in our efforts to facilitate the universal deployment and adoption of broadband, especially through the much-needed reform to the Universal Service Fund."

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Not a light bulb's worth of solar electricity has been produced on the millions of acres of public desert set aside for it. Not one project to build glimmering solar farms has even broken ground.

Instead, five years after federal land managers opened up stretches of the Southwest to developers, vast tracts still sit idle.

An Associated Press examination of U.S. Bureau of Land Management records and interviews with agency officials shows that the BLM operated a first-come, first-served leasing system that quickly overwhelmed its small staff and enabled companies, regardless of solar industry experience, to squat on land without any real plans to develop it.

At a time when the nation drills ever deeper for oil off its shores even as it tries to diversify its energy supply, the federal government has, so far, failed to use the land it already has — some of the world's best for solar — to produce renewable electricity.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Nevada, where a Goldman Sachs & Co. subsidiary with no solar background has claims with the BLM on nearly half the land for which applications have been filed, but no firm plan for any of the sites.

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"From my analytical perspective, we're in the midst of history's greatest and most perilous financial bubble. And I am beside myself that nobody in a position of influence seems to care.

We've witnessed momentous analytical and policy errors over the years - and these blunders are allowed to repeat themselves without thorough analysis and review. All this talk about fighting deflation and helping Main Street misses the point - and only feeds the bubble. I'm fed up with ideology trumping sound analysis."

A 12-year battle over the possession of a painting that was stolen from a Jewish Austrian by the Nazis came to a close on Monday when the work by Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele was displayed at a Vienna museum.

The oil painting was returned over the weekend after the Leopold Museum agreed to pay $19 million (15 million euros) as part of the settlement to the estate of art dealer Lea Bondi Jaray, the original owner.

U.S. authorities had refused to return the painting to the Leopold Museum after it was exhibited in 1998 at the New York Museum of Modern Art because of a claim by her descendants.

Bondi Jaray was forced to sell the painting, "Portrait of Wally," at an unrealistically low price in the prelude to World War II as part of a widespread Nazi campaign that stripped Jews in Austria, Germany and later other European countries of their possessions.

"Portrait of Wally" — which pictures Valerie "Wally" Neuzil, a woman Schiele knew and used as a model — was among more than 100 works the Leopold Foundation had leant to MoMA.

U.S. customs refused to let the work leave the country after Henry Bondi of Princeton, New Jersey, filed a claim that said his late aunt was forced to give up the painting before fleeing Vienna in 1939 to escape to London when Germany annexed Austria.

She died in 1969. Henry Bondi also has since died.

The controversy over the portrait, which the Leopold Museum acquired after the war, contributed to Austria passing a 1998 law that stipulates the restitution of property taken from the country's Jews by the Nazis.

But the restitution law applies to state institutions, not to private museums such as the Leopold Foundation — something that Vienna's Jewish community asserts was exploited by Leopold.

The museum was created by the late Rudolf Leopold. He is credited with assembling Austria's largest and most important private art collection, which includes more than 5,000 works by renowned artists such as Schiele, Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka.

According to the Jewish community's website, paintings by Schiele, Klimt and Egger-Lienz that were looted by the Nazis were bought by the Austrian state with public funds and given to the Leopold Foundation

A judge in Washington has acquitted three men over allegations that they covered up responsibility for the still unsolved murder of a friend who was stabbed to death in their house.

The judge, [b]Lynn Leibovitz,[/b] said she was not persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that the men had sought to prevent the police from discovering who was responsible for killing Robert Wone, a lawyer. But Leibovitz offered a damning assessment of the behaviour of the men – Joseph Price, [b]Victor Zaborsky[/b] and Dylan Ward – who lived in a "committed relationship".

The judge said they had lied in claiming that Wone, who was a longstanding friend of Price's and had gone to stay at the Washington house after working late rather than making a long journey home to his wife in Virginia, was killed by an unknown intruder. She described their behaviour in dealing with the police after the killing as suspicious. His body was found laid out neatly on a bed with his arms at his side. There was almost no blood to be seen and no evidence of a struggle. A pathologist suggested Wone had been injected with a paralysing drug.

The police were unable to discover who killed Wone but concluded that the three accused men were covering up for the murderer.

The judge said that the defendants were probably lying about the intruder and had not behaved as might be expected of people who had just endured the shock of a brutal killing by a stranger entering their home.

"Some of the most persuasive evidence in the record supporting the government's position is the demeanour and conduct of the defendants. From the beginning, each one of them … displayed a demeanour wholly at odds with what anyone would expect from an innocent person whose friend had just been murdered tragically and violently in his home," she said.

"It is very probable that the government's theory is correct, that even if the defendants did not participate in the murder some or all of them knew enough about the circumstances of it to provide helpful information to law enforcement and have chosen to withhold that information for reasons of their own."

But the judge said that prosecutors had not proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Wone family has filed a $20m wrongful death lawsuit against the three men which requires a lower standard of proof.all

"Sound familiar? Yes indeed, in "This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly," economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff pinpoint the key signal that will blow the whistle and call the game: The "90% ratio of government debt to GDP is a tipping point in economic growth." For 800 years "you increase it over and beyond a high threshold, and boom!"

Warning, fans, the numbers on the game-clock are flashing wildly. America's ratio is now 92%, thanks to Obama's $1.7 trillion budget, future deficits, exploding debt. Soon, Ka-Booom! Another great nation bites the dust. Depression follows. Goodbye retirement"

"According to the Congressional Budget Office, congress has already approved $345 billion for war in Afghanistan, not to mention $708 billion in Iraq....

....adding in debt payments
on moneys borrowed to fight that war, long-term care for veterans wounded in it, the war's impact on energy prices, and other macroeconomic impacts, the current tax bill for the Iraq war must be at least tripled and probably quadrupled or more to arrive at its real long-term cost......"

As for just us Americans, "US households lost almost $8 trillion of wealth in the stock market on top of the $6 trillion loss in the market value of their homes," which is so much money that "The total wealth loss of $14 trillion by US households in 2009 was equal to the entire 2008 US GDP."

[b]No citizenship rights to terrorists: Senator Lieberman[/b]

It is time that citizens involved in acts of terrorism be stripped of their nationality, an influential Senator has said, in the wake of the arrest of Pakistani-born US national Faisal Shahzad, the suspect behind the Times Square bomb plot.

“I think it’s time for us to look at whether we want to amend that law to apply it to American citizens who choose to become affiliated with foreign terrorists organisations, whether or not they should also be deprived automatically of their citizenship and therefore be deprived of rights that come with that citizenship when they are apprehended and charged with a terrorist act,” Senator Joe Lieberman told the Fox News in an interview.

Lieberman, Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said that he is trying to amend an old US law that says if an American citizen is found to be fighting in the military of a nation with whom the US is at war, they lose their citizenship.

The Senator, however, denied that he was targeting the Pakistani-Americans in general.

“I think that, I wouldn’t want to single out a group.

Rest assured that people travelling to certain countries, particularly going to areas of the country that, Pakistan for instance, may have contact with radical, anti-American Islamists, extremists. One way or another, we are watching them very closely and they should know that,” he said.

There were many loyal Pakistani-American citizens and they were probably most angry and embarrassed when somebody committed an act like this, Lieberman said while praising the community.

“But, you know, you raise a point and some of us have started to talk about it here, which is, you know, there is an existing law, which hasn’t been much used. It says that if an American citizen is shown to be fighting in a military force that is an enemy to the US, then that person loses their citizenship and they no longer have the rights of citizenship.

That’s an old law that was adopted during a very different time of conflict,” he said.

In a statement, Lieberman said the FBI, New York City Police Department, Department of Homeland Security and Connecticut law enforcers deserve the gratitude for breaking open this case quickly.

“But let’s not forget that but for the grace of God and the sheer incompetence of the suspect, this explosion could have taken place as planned, and many people might have died,” he added.

Anti-"Tea Party" blogger Jason Levin incurred world scorn by encouraging alleged supporters in 65 US cities to "crash" Tea Party protests April 15. He goaded them to infiltrate Tea Party ranks and destroy the movement by saying and doing outrageous things. Much is not known about Levin. But his tactics resemble efforts by another saboteur to discredit critics online through disinformation and cyber-attack. That is the state of Israel.

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