From Academy Award® nominated filmmaker, Charles Ferguson ("No End In Sight"), comes INSIDE JOB, the first film to expose the shocking truth behind the economic crisis of 2008. The global financial meltdown, at a cost of over $20 trillion, resulted in millions of people losing their homes and jobs. Through extensive research and interviews with major financial insiders, politicians and journalists, INSIDE JOB traces the rise of a rogue industry and unveils the corrosive relationships which have corrupted politics, regulation and academia. Narrated by Academy Award® winner Matt Damon, INSIDE JOB was made on location in the United States, Iceland, England, France, Singapore, and China.
U.S. home sales plummeted in July to a level not seen in more than a decade, spurring fears of renewed weakness in housing prices and the broader economy.
Sales of previously owned homes fell 27.2% from June to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.83 million, the National Association of Realtors said Tuesday, the lowest level since the industry group started its tally in 1999.
The expiration of a home-buyer tax credit in the spring was expected to damp buying, though less severely. Economists said the sales drop—together with a corresponding rise in the inventory of unsold homes—meant another decline in housing prices was on the horizon. House prices had stabilized last year after declining since 2006.
High unemployment and meager wage growth already are driving many Americans' reluctance to make major purchases, so a return of falling home equity could further depress confidence and consumer spending.
Files declassified in America have revealed covert public relations and lobbying activities of Israel in the U.S. The National Archive made the documents public following a Senate investigation. They suggest Israel has been trying to shape media coverage of issues it regards as important. You can download the files from the web-site of the Institute for Research on Middle Eastern policy. And we can cross to Washington now and talk to Grant F. Smith who is a director at that Institute.
Further tests are to be carried out on the body of an MI6 worker found in a holdall in the bath at his central London flat.
The body of Gareth Williams, 30, from Anglesey, was found in the Pimlico flat on Monday afternoon. Police believe he may have been murdered two weeks ago.
A post-mortem examination carried out on Wednesday proved inconclusive.
The Metropolitan Police said more tests, including toxicological analysis of his blood, would be conducted.
The force is treating the death as "suspicious and unexplained".
New crime prediction software being rolled out in the nation's capital should reduce not only the murder rate, but the rate of many other crimes as well.
Developed by Richard Berk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the software is already used in Baltimore and Philadelphia to predict which individuals on probation or parole are most likely to murder and to be murdered.
Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway - and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.
That is the bizarre - and scary - rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants - with no need for a search warrant.
It is a dangerous decision - one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.
Any way you slice your bagel, if you slice it in New York, it's going to cost you more.
New York State tax officials are enforcing a sales tax for sliced or prepared bagels (with cream cheese or other toppings), along with whole bagels eaten in the store, according to the state Department of Taxation and Finance.
Boston scientists are looking into possibilities available to safeguard the public in the event of a chemical or biological terrorist attack in underground subway systems; the MBTA in Boston has taken action to prepare ahead of time by testing in the subways. "This past Friday scientists released nontoxic gases and fluorescent particles into Boston's subway tunnels. They were trying to study how toxic chemicals and biological agents can spread through Boston's subway system in a terrorist attack. The Department of Homeland Security has organized a grant which will look for ways to minimize the impact of an airborne assault on subway systems across the country."
A shocking one in 10 ready-made salads on sale contains more salt than a Big Mac, according to the Consensus Action on Salt (Cash) research.
Out of the 270 salad and pasta bowls surveyed, only six contained less salt than a packet of crisps and a tenth had more than the 2.1g contained in a Big Mac burger.
The worst offender was found to be a spicy crayfish noodles salad from Eat, containing 3.51g of salt - more than 17 times saltier than a Pret A Manger No Bread Tricolore with 0.2g of salt.
The outbreak of salmonella in eggs is energizing efforts to pass a long-stalled food-safety bill that could prevent or mitigate such problems, according to federal officials, congressional supporters and independent experts.
The bill, designed to overhaul a fractured food-safety system that hasn't been updated in decades, would expand federal regulators' powers to police food manufacturers. The House passed a version in 2009, but the legislation has stalled in the Senate, despite bipartisan support.
South Korean psychiatrists have determined that an antidepressant called Bupropion is not only a smoking cessation but a successful way to reduce video game addictions as well.
The study focused on 11 participants who play StarCrafton average for at least four hours per day, causing six of the 11 players
to ditch school for more than two consecutive months and two to end up divorced.
The group was given Bupropion, an antidepressant and smoking cessation aid, for six weeks. At the end of the trail period, the group’s cravings to play StarCraft allegedly decreased by 23.6 percent, decreasing their total playing time by 35.5 percent. The participants also underwent MRI scans that showed they responded less strongly to seeing pictures of Zerglings – an alien foe in StarCraft, displayed in the pre-rendered image above.
According to the South Korean government, two million of the country’s residents – nearly one in 10 online users – are addicted to the Internet, causing the government to implement an Internet curfew for underage gamers.
Victoria Vasconcellos, the petite founder of an Internet retailer in this Chicago suburb, is in the thick of a regulatory battle that could affect millions of American cigarette smokers.
Ms. Vasconcellos imports electronic cigarettes from a Chinese manufacturer and sells them on her website, Cignot.com, to 14,000 customers. The 48-year-old is part of a growing legion of e-cigarette purveyors who are defying the Food and Drug Administration, which contends the nascent nicotine products are drug devices that require pre-market approval and may pose their own health risks. The FDA began intercepting shipments of the products from China two years ago.
E-cigarettes are battery-powered tubes that turn nicotine-laced liquid into a vapor mist. Sellers say they are potentially less harmful than cigarettes because they don't have the toxins of burning tobacco. A growing number of people who use them say they are an effective way to quit smoking.
