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"I hold the British government responsible as I had warned them about British citizen Altaf Hussain after his open threats to kill PTI workers," Khan said. Altaf Hussain is the London-based leader of Karachi's dominant political party MQM. He is wanted...
"Nutria are something like a cross between a beaver and a New York sewer rat. They were first brought to Louisiana in the 1930s in order to be farmed for their fur, which was growing in popularity. No one knows exactly how they escaped into the wild....
"When the US moved off the gold standard in the early 1970s, the dollar more or less became a de facto oil-backed currency. In return for protection and the purchase of US treasury bonds, among other things, oil-producing Arab states agreed to conduct...
"Hong Kong is where the concept of off-shore banking began. Lead by HSBC – which was founded by the British opium smuggler William Jardine – this shady secretive banking hub is the nexus for the washing of Golden Triangle heroin proceeds. The British...
"Ansarov shoots the creatures on a light table because they’re translucent and the light coming from underneath helps illuminate their insides. The man-of-wars are usually alive when Ansarov and his wife find them on the beach, so the couple use a beer...
"50+ students, faculty, and staff are maintaining a ‘sit-in’ inside Jamshed Bharucha’s office on the 7th floor of the Foundation Building of the Cooper Union. As students we have reclaimed the President’s office in response to the Administration and the...
"After the last rigged election, in 2009, the majority of our civil society, opposition groups, reformers and activists transmuted into the Green Movement. Some fundamentalist candidates defend the suppression of this nonviolent movement, and reformists...
"Still, the stats it's able to release aren't specific, and include all requests from the last six months in a range, said to be between 9,000 and 10,000, covering between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts. We still have no official reports on what those inquiries...
“I would say that roughly 90 percent of the credit card lawsuits are flawed and can’t prove the person owes the debt,” said Noach Dear, a civil court judge in Brooklyn, who said he presided over as many as 100 such cases a day." http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/problems-riddle-moves-to-collect-credit-card-debt/ dealbook.nytimes.com Judges...
"Noel Blanc tells the story of a terrible car accident that badly injured his father in 1961 as he was driving home along Sunset Boulevard from a job in San Francisco. Mel Blanc, driving an Aston Martin, collided with another car on Dead Man’s Curve....
"Guattari eventually loosened up on his authoritarian tendencies after landing in a hospital as part of a draft-dodging scheme (Guattari was avoiding being sent to Algeria). As a patient, Guattari realized that life under the rule of tyrannical nurses...
"Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic. There have often been rumours of this kind of espionage at international conferences, but it is highly unusual for...
"Take a look at the win rate of the Chamber of Commerce. According to the Constitution Accountability Center, the Chamber moved from a 43 percent win rate during the very conservative Berger Court to a 56 percent win rate under the very conservative Rehnquist...
"Today is Juneteenth, which commemorates the ending of slavery in Texas on June 19, 1865. Although the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, it was not enforced in the state of Texas due to a lack of Union troop presence...
"The event which changed this view was the discovery of a wartime Bell Telephone report by an unknown author describing an ingenious idea for secure telephone speech… The relevant point is that the receiver needs no special position or knowledge to get...
"With the rise of capitalism, finance and corporations, formal political dynasties became less relevant to the expansion and maintenance of power and empire. Instead, dynastic power was and remains largely wielded in the corporate and financial sectors."...
"...to study Quantum Physics Engineering. Luis Roberto has an IQ that is comparable to that of the German physicist, Albert Einstein, between 152 and 160. Starting from the age of 5, the young boy learned English on his own, and is also learning French...
indypendenthistory: Bandit’s Roost (1888), by Jacob Riis, from “How the Other Half Lives.” Bandit’s Roost, at 59½ Mulberry Street (Mulberry Bend), was the most crime-ridden, dangerous part of all New York City.
"Turkish TV viewers witnessed a small group of "demonstrators" throwing molotov cocktails at police, while holding the flag of a fringe Marxist party. The "protesters" were in fact middle-aged undercover police officers, staging a not very plausible "attack"...
O.W.: Do you know why her plane went down? It was full of big-time American physicists, shot down by the Nazis. She was one of the only civilians on the plane. The plane was filled with bullet holes. H.J.: It was shot down by who? O.W.: Nazi agents in...
"Like other demonstrators, he had brought some vinegar. The idea is that breathing through a cloth soaked in vinegar neutralizes the effects of tear gas, though this doesn’t really seem to work. The police claim that the product can be used to make bombs,...
"...the filter of classified information on public websites was "Armywide" and did not originate at the Presidio. Presidio employees described how they could access the U.S. site, guardiannews .com, but were blocked from articles, such as those about...
"[The pope has] named five people to head a commission of inquiry into the Vatican bank's activities and legal status. Two of them are Americans: Monsignor Peter Wells, the No. 3 official in the Vatican secretariat of state, and Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard...
“Mr. President, parliamentary inquiry,” Van De Putte said. “At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room?” The chamber gallery, full of hundreds of pro-choice demonstrators wearing...
"KG: It was released at the end of January 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq. I saw an email that had been sent from the NSA to GCHQ. It was a request for GCHQ to help the NSA intercept the communications of six nations that sat on the Security Council...
