According to one family, a confluence of run-of-the-mill Google searches led to an unwelcome visit by police.
Michele Catalano, a professional writer, describes what happened in a blog post on Thursday. According to her retelling, on Wednesday morning, six men identifying themselves as being from a “joint terrorism task force” showed up at her Long Island home. She believes Google searches by herself, her husband and her son raised red flags.
The plight of McDonald’s minimum-wage workersmade headlines earlier this month when the burger chain published a much-maligned sample monthly budget, purportedly aimed at helping its staffers save money.
In recent days, armchair prognosticators have taken their concerns to the internet, wondering on Twitter and in comments sections whether they’d be able to afford McDonald'sMCD+0.96% food if the company doubled its workers’ wages.
Arnobio Morelix, a student at the University of Kansas School of Business, found himself asking the same question, so he did some financial modeling based on McDonald’s annual reports and data sets submitted to investors.
Morelix’s take: If McDonald’s workers were paid the $15 they’re demanding, the cost of a Big Mac would go up 68 cents, from its current price of $3.99 to $4.67.
A Big Mac meal would cost $6.66 rather than $5.69, and the chain’s famous Dollar Menu would go for $1.17.
“Some folks online are complaining they will not pay $2 for their Dollar Menu, but the truth is that even if McDonald’s doubled salaries the price hike would not be 100%,” Morelix said. “I will be happy to pay 17 cents more for my Dollar Menu so that fast food workers can have a living wage, and I believe people deserve to know that price hikes would not be as high as it is often portrayed.”
A retiring Marine colonel who commanded a special operations unit in Africa during the deadly 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, told Congress on Wednesday that an elite four-man team under his command was kept in the Libyan capital that night to prevent attacks there.
Col. George Bristol’s statement corroborates previous testimony by his subordinate officer, Army Lt. Col. S.E. Gibson. Gibson told the House Armed Services Committee in June that, contrary to previous media reports, he was not ordered to “stand down” by higher headquarters in response to the Benghazi attacks. Rather, Gibson’s team was told to stay in the city of Tripoli to defend Americans there in the event of additional attacks and to help survivors being evacuated from Benghazi, Bristol said.
The US government has paid at least £100m to the UK spy agency GCHQ over the last three years to secure access to and influence over Britain's intelligence gathering programmes.
The top secret payments are set out in documents which make clear that the Americans expect a return on the investment, and that GCHQ has to work hard to meet their demands. “GCHQ must pull its weight and be seen to pull its weight,” a GCHQ strategy briefing said.
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon might have to cancel many modernization programs over a decade-long period should mandatory federal spending caps remain in place over the next decade, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Wednesday.
Hagel for the first time discussed end strength, hardware and missions that could be targeted as defense officials look for ways to reduce planned spending by $500 billion over that time frame.
While decisions on these and many other options laid out by Hagel during a Wednesday afternoon press conference at the Pentagon have not been finalized, the Strategic Choices and Management Review (SCMR)identified fundamental changes that DoD officials believe are necessary as the Pentagon prepares for a future with fewer funds.
Hagel launched the review in March. The Defense Department announced an overhauled military strategy in January 2012, but since that time, sequestration cuts have been put in place as Congress and the Obama administration have not been able to agree on a comprehensive plan to cut the US deficit.
The Pentagon has already been hit with a $37 billion budget cut in 2013, and faces a $52 billion cut to its 2014 budget proposal. The cuts have led to the curtailment of military training and the furloughing of hundreds of thousands of civilian employees.
The SCMR has looked at ways to modify DoD’s military strategy, which places an increased emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region, if sequestration remains in place over the decade.
Continued defense spending cuts would at best “bend” the strategy, Hagel said. Parts of the strategy would “break” under sequestration.
Repression: A proposed pornography-censorship scheme in the United Kingdom is going to censor political speech from day one. There is pressure from the UK Government on UK Internet Service Providers to introduce “default voluntary censorship”, which is supposed to get at “pornography”. This is a covert way of making censorship acceptable and even desirable, “for the children”, but the censorship will cover much more than that.
. . . . . . .
Naked Censorship
We arrive at the important conclusion that censorship is incapable of telling the difference between political contexts and purely pornographic ones. Even if you think the latter is okay to banish from the planet, political discussion is never – never, ever under any circumstance – okay to censor.
The conclusion is inevitable: censorship is not acceptable in any way, shape or form. But those of us who have studied history of power already knew that.
This is an amazing court decision, with enormous implications not only for Catholics, but for religious groups in general. It is hard to believe a court could rule in this way, or that this will not be overturned.
A federal judge in Wisconsin handed down an opinion yesterday granting the Catholic Church – and indeed, potentially all religious institutions – such sweeping immunity from federal bankruptcy law that it is not clear that it would permit any plaintiff to successfully sue any church in any court. While the ostensible issue in this case is whether over $50 million in church funds are shielded from a bankruptcy proceeding triggered largely by a flood of clerical sex abuse claims against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, Judge Rudolph Randa reads the church’s constitutional and legal right to religious liberty so broadly as to render religious institutions immune from much of the law.
