All posts by alternativefreepress

Tyranny

Prosecutor Admits He Knew Some Witnesses Were Lying To The Ferguson Grand Jury

AlternativeFreePress.com

St. Louis County District Attorney Bob McCulloch -of the Michael Brown shooting case- has admitted that he “decided that anyone who claimed to have witnessed anything was going to be presented to the grand jury… Even though their statements were not accurate.”

McCulloch admits that he presented witnesses who he knew were giving false statements during an interview with radio station KTRS.

KTRS Radio: Why did you allow people to testify in front of the grand jury in which you knew their information was either flat-out wrong, or flat-out lying, or just weren’t telling the truth?

District Attorney Bob McCulloch: Well, early on, I decided that anyone who claimed to have witnessed anything was going to be presented to the grand jury. And I knew that no matter how I handled it, there would be criticism of it. So if I didn’t put those witnesses on, then we’d be discussing now why I didn’t put those witnesses on. Even though their statements were not accurate.

So my determination was to put everybody on and let the grand jurors assess their credibility, which they did. This grand jury poured their hearts and souls into this. It was a very emotional few months for them. It took a lot of them. I wanted to put everything on there. I thought it was much more important to present everything and everybody, and some that, yes, clearly were not telling the truth. No question about it.

Missouri Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 4-3.3 reads:

A lawyer shall not knowingly: offer evidence that the lawyer knows to be false. If a lawyer, the lawyer’s client, or a witness called by the lawyer has offered material evidence and the lawyer comes to know of its falsity, the lawyer shall take reasonable remedial measures, including, if necessary, disclosure to the tribunal. A lawyer may refuse to offer evidence, other than the testimony of a defendant in a criminal matter, that the lawyer reasonably believes is false

McCulloch told KTRS, “There were people who came in and, yes, absolutely lied under oath” and apparently he won’t seek perjury charges.

Sources : Prosecutor Says He Knew Some Witnesses Were Lying To The Ferguson Grand Jury
St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch Breaks Silence

Corporate Welfare, Original, Tyranny

Microsoft’s temporary foreign workers: Canada sets a dangerous new precedent in corporate welfare

AlternativeFreePress.com

Canada’s Conservative/Con-artist government has created a new loophole around labour laws, granting an exemption to Microsoft allowing them to use temporary foreign workers without even pretending to look for Canadians to fill the jobs first.

The feds ridiculously claim the arrangement will create jobs for Canadians. Apparently, the government expects you to believe that eliminating qualified Canadians from the pool of applicants and replacing them with a revolving door of temporary foreign workers will create more jobs for Canadians.

The CBC quotes Toronto immigration lawyer Lorne Waldman: “There is certainly no justification that I can see that would support granting an exemption to a large number of foreign workers to come into Canada to take away jobs that could easily filled by Canadians… On the one hand, the government is telling us they are protecting Canadian jobs; on the other hand they’re signing agreements with big corporations in which they’re allowing them to bring in foreign workers.”

Because foreign workers will be working in Canada for only 24 month periods, Citizenship and Immigration Canada spokesperson Sonia Lesage claims that the foreign workers are not going to be entering the Canadian workforce, and therefore won’t be competing with Canadian workers. Is Sonia Lesange completely out of her mind? How can any sane person make such claims and expect the public to take them seriously? These workers will be taking “jobs in Canada that require work permits, and they could find Canadian graduates from computer science programs to fill them”, says a source who works in immigration law.

Microsoft is in bed with the Harper government specifically to get around labour laws. Karen Jones, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, has said specifically that the deal will allow Microsoft to get around rules on visas for foreign workers. “The U.S. laws clearly did not meet our needs. We have to look to other places,” she told Bloomberg Businessweek. Obviously Canadian law did not meet their needs either, but Harper’s cronies are happy to make Microsoft exempt from the law.

As Waldman told the CBC: “There is no other exemption that is specific to a corporation, and it does not fall within any of the other categories where exemptions are normally given,”

This is a dangerous new precedent in corporate welfare.

Written by Alternative Free Press
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Microsoft’s temporary foreign workers: Canada sets a dangerous new precedent in corporate welfare by AlternativeFreePress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Source: Foreign workers: Microsoft gets green light from Ottawa for foreign trainees (CBC)

Banksters

Canada’s housing market is due for a major correction

The Bank of Canada says home prices could be overvalued by as much as 30 per cent, but it continues to believe the market is headed for a soft landing. Housing could be overvalued by 30 per cent, Bank of Canada warns (The Star, December 10, 2014)

Slumping oil prices are likely to impact Calgary’s real estate market in the coming year, causing home prices to slow their rapid acceleration in Alberta’s largest city, according to a report by realtor group Re/Max. Slumping oil prices to hit home prices in Calgary in 2015: Re/Max (Financial Post, December 10, 2014)

Calgary housing starts tumbled in November, with experts warning plunging oil prices could further slow new home construction in the region.
Calgary housing starts fall in November (Calgary Herald, December 8, 2014)

It looks increasingly like the party is over for Toronto’s residential construction frenzy, while Calgary’s real estate market is taking a breather in the face of plummeting oil prices. Housing starts in Toronto fell 34 per cent in November, compared to the same month a year earlier, according to data from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. Meanwhile, StatsCan reported Monday that the value of building permits issued in the city fell 11 per cent in October, compared to a year earlier. Condo construction was particularly hit hard, with multi-family housing starts plummeting 46 per cent over the past 12 months. Toronto, Calgary Housing Markets Show Signs Of Slowdown (Huffington Post, December 8, 2014)

A post-recession housing boom, fuelled by record-low borrowing costs, has prompted some analysts to warn a bubble may be in the works. … The IMF saw signs of over valuation in single-family homes, especially associated with high-end buyers, but said tighter mortgage insurance rules, reduced affordability and the construction of multi-family units appeared to have contained price growth in other market segments. … “The balance of risks is modestly tilted to the downside for the Canadian economy,” the IMF said, pointing to the possibility of faster-than-expected tightening of global financial conditions and a further fall in oil prices.”…“Deeper downside risks to growth involve a combination of external shocks that are amplified by high household balance sheet vulnerabilities and a sharper-than-expected correction in house prices.” IMF can’t stop worrying about Canada’s so-called housing bubble (Financial Post, November 26, 2014)

Of course the only reason the correction didn’t occur years ago is that Canada’s banks received a bailout of “$114 billion in cash and loan support between September 2008 and August 2010. They were double-dipping in not only two but three separate support programs, one of them American.” The Big Banks’ Big Secret (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, April 30, 2012)

$114 billion only delayed the problem and made it larger.

Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Privacy, Tyranny

Obama Extends NSA Spying Powers Yet Again

Jason Ditz
Ben Swann: December 08, 2014

Back in March, Attorney General Eric Holder was promising that the Justice Department was on track to reform the NSA surveillance powers by the deadline of March 28, less than two weeks later. It didn’t happen.

A 90-day extension came and went, and then another 90-day extension was tacked on to that, pushing the deadline for the reform of the mass surveillance to December 5. This time, when the deadline rolled around there was so little expectation of actual reform that its approach was barely even covered. Even the administration seemingly gave it a miss over the weekend. Unsurprisingly, it was extended yet again with no real hint of reforms coming.

Other than a brief, failed attempt to pass a toothless version of a reform bill in the Senate, the notion that NSA mass surveillance is ever going to get altered in a meaningful way is looking more dubious all the time.

(read the full article at Ben Swann)

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Health/Environment

Massachusetts Whooping Cough Outbreak Only Infecting Vaccinated Students

AlternativeFreePress.com

Once again an outbreak of an apparently vaccine-preventable disease is infecting exclusively vaccinated people. 15 out of 15 students infected with whooping cough last month at Falmouth High School in Massachusetts had been vaccinated.

To report this information, CBS News decided to publish a ridiculous article focusing on the growing number of people choosing to not vaccinate their children. CBS spends 8 paragraphs detailing how “Once vaccination rates go down, the likelihood of an outbreak increases”, and then finally admits the truth: “But in this case, a school official tells WBZ that all the students had been immunized.”

Dr. Russell Blaylock, a board-certified neurosurgeon, author and lecturer who attended the LSU School of Medicine and completed his internship and neurosurgical residency at the Medical University of South Carolina explains how herd immunity is only truly obtainable through natural immunity:

“In the original description of herd immunity, the protection to the population at large occurred only if people contracted the infections naturally. The reason for this is that naturally-acquired immunity lasts for a lifetime. The vaccine proponents quickly latched onto this concept and applied it to vaccine-induced immunity. But, there was one major problem – vaccine-induced immunity lasted for only a relatively short period, from 2 to 10 years at most, and then this applies only to humoral immunity. This is why they began, silently, to suggest boosters for most vaccines, even the common childhood infections such as chickenpox, measles, mumps, and rubella.

Then they discovered an even greater problem, the boosters were lasting for only 2 years or less. This is why we are now seeing mandates that youth entering colleges have multiple vaccines, even those which they insisted gave lifelong immunity, such as the MMR. The same is being suggested for full-grown adults. Ironically, no one in the media or medical field is asking what is going on. They just accept that it must be done.”

RELATED:

Majority of flu vaccinations don’t work, admits CDC

New Jersey Mumps Outbreak Exclusively Infecting Vaccinated Population; same as in New York & Ohio

Measles Outbreak Traced to Fully Vaccinated Patient

Ohio & New York 2014 Mumps Outbreaks Only Infect Vaccinated Population

Written by Alternative Free Press
Creative Commons License
Massachusetts Whooping Cough Outbreak Only Infecting Vaccinated Students by AlternativeFreePress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Sources:
15 Falmouth High Students Diagnosed With Whooping Cough
Forced Vaccinations, Government, and the Public Interest

Tyranny

More Than 1000 People Have Been Killed by Police in 2014

Scott Shackford
Reason: December 9, 2014

There are no frills to be found at www.killedbypolice.net. The site is just a simple spreadsheet. The information it contains, though, is invaluable. It is a list of every single person documented to have been killed by police in the United States in 2013 and 2014. There are links to a media report for every single death, as well as their names, ages, and when known, sex and race.

The site is so valuable because, as we’ve noted previously, there is no reliable national database for keeping track of the number of people killed by police each year. The FBI tracks homicides by law enforcement officers, but participation is voluntary, and many agencies don’t participate. As I noted last week, Eric Garner’s death at the hands of a New York Police Department won’t show up in the FBI’s statistics for 2014 because the state of New York does not participate in the program.

The FBI’s statistics for 2013 say that law enforcement officers killed 461 people that year. Killedbypolice.net apparently got its start last year. Using their system of monitoring by news report, they have calculated that police actually killed 748 people between May and December. That’s 287 more than the FBI reports for the whole year.

And for 2014, which still has a couple of weeks left, the site has reported 1,029 people have been killed by police. That’s about a 30 percent increase over last year, though with four-month gap at the start of 2013 (measuring 25 percent of the year), it’s possible the numbers would be much closer if we had January through April. Even with the FBI’s broken numbers, we know that 2013 marked a two-decade high in killings by police.

(read the full article at Reason)

Geopolitics/War, Tyranny

Harper government hid secret customs agreement with China; wants Canadians ignorant

Harper government quietly signed customs agreement with China

Jacques Bourbeau
Global News : December 4, 2014

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government quietly signed a customs-sharing agreement with China without announcing it to the public, Global News has learned.

And the move has experts worried about the consequences to Canada’s security.

At the end of Harper’s trip to China in November, the government sent out a news release proudly detailing the progress made and agreements signed, including initiatives to strengthen commercial ties and increase exports.

But Harper made no mention of the agreement to share customs information with China, whereas similar agreements involving Israel and the European Union were widely disseminated.

The deal has many experts scratching their heads.

“China has for years been doing a tremendous job of stealing some of our technology,” said Garry Clement, a former RCMP superintendent with 30 years in the force.

“We’ve got a tremendous amount of counterfeit goods that we all know comes out of China. So I guess where my concern would come in is: what is the amount of intelligence that we’re actually going to share with them? And what (are) the controls we’re going to put on it, and how does that impact our relationship?”

There are many examples of Chinese attempts to steal hi-tech goods, blueprints and computer data.

Last year, a China-born naval architect, Qing Quentin Huang, was arrested for trying to smuggle information about Canada’s arctic patrol ships back to the Chinese government.

And Su Bin, a Chinese businessman, is accused of stealing data on the F-35 fighter jet and trying to sell it to Chinese state-owned companies.

Experts such as Charles Burton, an associate professor of Canada-China relations at Brock University, are asking why Canada is ready to share customs information with a government that is trying to evade our border cops.

“I’m hard-pressed to know why it is that Canada feels it would be in our interest to share information on senstitive matters of interdiction of illegal exports and other customs-related matters with the Chinese state, who would likely pass it on to exactly the people that we are hoping to prevent from doing this kind of illegal activity,” Burton said.

(read the full article at Global News)

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Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Health/Environment

Majority of flu vaccinations don’t work, admits CDC

The CDC Says The Current Flu Vaccine Everyone’s Taking Might Be A Bad Match For The Virus

Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters: December 3, 2014

A sampling of flu cases so far this season suggests the current flu vaccine may not be a good match for the seasonal flu strain currently circulating in the United States, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday.

The U.S. health agency issued a health advisory to doctors noting that flu virus samples the agency took from Oct. 1 through Nov. 22, showed that just under half were a good match for the current influenza A flu strain contained in the current H3N2lu shots for 2014-2015, suggesting the virus has drifted.

In past seasons when the influenza A strain has mutated, the vaccine has been less effective, the CDC said in the advisory.

(read the full article at Business Insider)

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