Silverstein laughs all the way to the bank
Larry Silverstein, a reputed illicit-sex-industry mobster, purchased the World Trade Center in 2001, shortly after the New York Port Authority lost an asbestos lawsuit and was ordered to remove all asbestos from the Twin Towers. Cost estimates for that asbestos removal ranged from the low billions to the tens of billions – far more than the outdated, half-empty buildings were worth. (The City of New York had been desperately seeking a way to demolish the Towers since around 1990, but was prevented from doing so by asbestos issues.)



Monsanto’s Food and Drug Administration can’t close down small dairies and private food clubs fast enough, bursting on the scene with guns drawn as if the criminalized right to contract for natural foods we’ve consumed for millennia deserves SWAT attention.
Crime generates an estimated $2.1 trillion in global annual proceeds - or 3.6pc of the world's gross domestic product - and the problem may be growing, a senior United Nations official has said.
Washington has pledged in a newly agreed strategic pact to help defend Afghanistan militarily for at least a decade after the country formally takes control of its own security, an Afghan official said Monday.
Our entire economy is now based on debt. We are told that we have to go into debt for everything.
"Expansion of this authority is necessary to permit DOD to conduct revenue-generating commercial activities to protect such operations and would provide an important safeguard for U.S. military forces conducting hazardous operations abroad," the request for legislation says. It was first reported by my colleagues at Inside Defense.
In a recent campaign-trail speech, President Obama delivered a line that was widely construed as a jab at Mitt Romney. But whether it was a direct jab at Romney was at least arguable until a Fox News host pumped it up with three additional words that Obama never said.
A new source of methane – a greenhouse gas many times more powerful than carbon dioxide – has been identified by scientists flying over areas in the Arctic where the sea ice has melted.





























