Sweden Begins Terror Inquiry After Bombing in Stockholm

Swedish authorities are calling the bombing in the heart of Sweden's Capital an act of terrorism. Investigators believe the suicide bomber was a 28year old Swede of Iraqi origin, and who had been carrying pipe bombs and a backpack full of nails. They had also received e-mails minutes before the blasts of a guy making statements in English, Arabic, and Swedish.

He read haltingly from what was apparently a prepared script, and said that Swedes had brought “these actions” on themselves. The message singled out Lars Vilks, a cartoonist threatened repeatedly with murder since publishing a derogatory cartoon of the prophet Mohammed in 2007, and demanded that European nations withdraw their soldiers from Afghanistan. Then, with the sound of the turn of a page, he addressed his wife and children. The man confessed to them that trips he had made to the Middle East were not for business, but for “jihad”.

It terrifying to know that there are terrorist threats that go around all the time. Its also very upsetting that Countries like the United States and Sweden are targets for these terrorist groups because of actions we have  

Mental Health Break- How the Midterms Will be Remembered 1,000 Years From Now

A Secretive Banking Elite Rules Trading in Derivatives

Once a month an elite team coming from the huge giants like JPMorgan, Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, come together to protect the interests of big banks in the market. But they actually come together to ensure no other banks come into the market.

But big banks influence the rules governing derivatives through a variety of industry groups. The banks’ latest point of influence are clearinghouses like ICE Trust, which holds the monthly meetings with the nine bankers in New York.

Today our government is controlled by these banks. They control the market, trade and the prices of our fixed rates. If we continue on this path the Government will loose all sense of control and hand all the say in our country to the banks.

Hackers Attack Companies That Hindered WikiLeaks

On Wednesday, a small group of hackers came up with a campaign to hack companies against WikiLeaks that had released classified American Documents. Mastercard, Amazon and PayPal were targets by these group of Hackers. For they had hindered WikiLeaks by cutting of donations, revoking server space and cutting off commercial cooperation. These companies websites are dealing with heavy traffic and slow access caused by the hackers.

Mr. Housh, who has worked on previous campaigns with Anonymous but disavows any illegal activity himself, said it was the first time the group had enough firepower to bring down well-secured blue chip companies like Mastercard. “No tactics have changed this time,” he said, “but there is so much support and there are so many people doing it that sites like that are going down.”

Its odd to see these big cooperations struggling with these anonymous hackers that are hindering their web sites to work. You would expect for these companies to have a strong security team of hackers that would have no problem protecting their web sites. This proves that our privacy such as credit card numbers and social security numbers may not be as well protected as we may think.

Mental Health Break- How the Midterms Will be Remembered 1,000 Years From Now

House fails to extend unemployment benefits

Yesterday, on November 17th, the house failed to pass a bill that would have extended the jobless benefits for another three months. The last extension which lasted six months costed the government $34 billion, adding more to our deficit and also causing huge debate.

Both House and Senate Democrats have said they would have liked to extend the deadline by a year, but the House settled on three months in hopes that it would pass more easily.

I can understand that their are a lot of different opinions that causes debates. For the fact that millions of families are dealing with the hardships of not having a job, but also the fact that its digging a deeper hole for a our deficit which we are trying to dig ourselves out of. Its a hard call to decide wether we should help our nation in the long run or help our citizens in need now.

 

A Second Group of Experts Calls for Cutting Military Programs to Lower U.S. Debt

A bipartisan group of budget experts are putting the pressure on the Pentagon to reduce the spendings and reduce weapon programs. If this proposed five year plan to freeze Pentagon spendings, it would save $5.9 trillion dollars by 2020.

“Would this be easy? No,” said Gordon Adams, a professor at American University who led a team that prepared the group’s recommendations on military spending.

But given that the Pentagon accounts for more than half of the government’s discretionary spending, “We think it’s a reasonable plan,” he said.

Although its an on going debate about who's the problem, I believe that even though this will cut down the defense budget its a step in the right direction. If we continue on this path we can slowly work our way out of this deficit.