Everything you ever wanted to know about the world's most expensive election but were afraid to ask: Here's the tale of the single-most psychotic leadership-selection method, and in the world's most heavily-armed nation -- a country totally unafraid to randomly flex its military and financial might, whimsically, this way or that -- and it can be found right here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20163081
It provides a crisp, clear 3-minute view of the infernal inferno of an election process we bright Americans have created for ourselves and then rapidly, placidly accepted -- if we dare look, and if we dare see.
Alex Baer: One More Peek, if We Dare Look
Israelis kill unarmed, mentally unfit Palestinian near Gaza border: medics
Israeli soldiers have shot and killed a Palestinian man who approached a fence near the border with Israel, medics said on Monday.
An Israeli military spokeswoman confirmed the shooting took place after darkness fell on Sunday, saying troops opened warning shots when a man walking west of the border in a riverbed failed to heed orders to leave the buffer area Israel maintains to try and prevent cross-border attacks.
Low wages at private prisons siphoning jobs from private businesses
On the outside, Unicor, with its big oaks and magnolia trees, looks like it could be part of a landscaped industrial park. Step a little closer and it's clear the apparel shop lies in the middle of a medium-security federal prison in east Alabama.
The factory and those like it that employ convicted felons are at the heart of a simmering debate about whether prisons should be siphoning away jobs - at much lower wages - that could be filled by those who need them during the nation's toughest period of unemployment in decades.
Apple paid only 2% corporation tax outside US
Apple paid less that 2% corporation tax on its profits outside the US, its filing with US regulators has shown. Apple paid $713m (£445m) in the year to 29 September on foreign pre-tax profits of $36.8bn (£23.0bn), a rate of 1.9%.
It is the latest company to be identified as paying low rates of overseas tax, following Starbucks, Facebook and Google in recent weeks.
Alex Baer: How to Get Real News, in One Easy Lesson
There's nothing like going to another country to get news about your own. At least the internet / internets / internest / interwebz / internexus -- whatever you choose to call it -- makes dashing out for an electronic paper tons easier than before, boarding an international flight every morning in your PJs.
There are at least three advantages that come to mind. First, the United States no longer has a press corps interested in journalism -- they have become professional softball lobbers and the current culture's fluff-and-product-placement pimps.
Now US Navy is arming drone boats
While the US Air Force's drones have been firing all sorts of air-to-surface missiles and bombs for roughly a decade now, the Navy took a big step toward getting in on the action last week when it launched six Israeli-made Spike missiles from an unmanned 36-foot motorboat.
The Navy pretty much admits that the project — called the unmanned surface vehicle precision engagement module (USV PEM) — is aimed at defeating threats that are straight out of Iran's war plans for the Persian Gulf region.
Breast Cancer Action: Why Fracking Must Be Banned
The United States, as it turns out, has a lot of unburned natural gas trapped as tiny bubbles in our shale bedrock. Until about a decade ago, much of this trapped underground gas was considered unrecoverable. But that all changed with the rollout of a drilling technique (pioneered by Halliburton) called hydrofracturing, or fracking.
Fracking bores horizontally through the bedrock, blasts it with explosives, and forces into the cracks, under enormous pressure, millions of gallons of water laced with a proprietary mix of poisonous chemicals that further fracture the rock. These boreholes provide the channel out of which the gas flows.
Here’s how hydraulic fracturing introduces cancer risks into communities from the start and into perpetuity:
Alex Baer: For Best Success, You Must Succeed - Part 2
Money, success -- it all gets tumbled and jumbled around together, mixed together and stirred ' round and 'round. It's little wonder we've lost track of everything that might rightly be beneath any banner called Success. We usually restrict Success to dance a jig on the rusty insignia of a battered money clip.
Maybe this is a Big Step Up for the Species. Hard to tell. We used to invoke Success only on the heads of dead animals we were dragging back to the hearth in the cave.
Soldiers win $85m compensation from Iraq war contractor
A jury has ordered an $85m (£53m) compensation payout by the American military contractor Kellogg Brown and Root – which helped build Guantánamo Bay and has tendered to run key police services in Britain – after finding it guilty of negligence for illnesses suffered by a dozen soldiers who guarded an oilfield water plant during the Iraq war.
After a three-week trial the jury deliberated for two days before reaching a decision against KBR, which used to be part of Halliburton corporation. KBR was ordered to pay $6.2m to each of the soldiers in punitive damages and $850,000 in non-economic damages.
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