An idea is going the rounds that the American Treasury should mint a new coin. Not any old coin, but a $1,000,000,000,000 platinum one. If the zeros are right, that’s one trillion dollars. And, as long as there is room for some suitable words, it need not be very big either, only the size of an existing coin. The trillion-dollar coin would be deposited with the Federal Reserve and so improve the government’ ...

A U.S. Navy minesweeper ran aground on a coral reef in the Philippines on Thursday, but there were no injuries to the crew and Philippine authorities were trying to determine if the ship caused damage to a marine park in a protected area. 
 The Navy said in a statement that the crew of the USS Guardian was working to find out the best method of safely extracting the ship. It had just completed a port call i ...

Militants with possible links to al Qaeda seized about 40 foreign hostages, including several Americans, at a natural-gas field in Algeria, posing a new level of threat to nations trying to blunt the growing influence of Islamist extremists in Africa. 
 Simon Constable, Julian Barnes and Drew Hinshaw discuss the latest from Algeria and Mali, and Colleen McCain Nelson looks at how successful President Obama' ...

It seems like a scene from the sci-fi thriller Minority Report, but police in three US cities are already using or testing new technology for predicting crimes before they happen – and taking preemptive, concrete steps to prevent them, US media reported. The crime prediction software, developed by Richard Berk, a criminology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was designed for use by probation offi ...

With the U.S.’s dramatic expansion of drone use for both surveillance and targeted bombings, a veritable arms race in unmanned aerial vehicles has begun, prompting concern from some in Washington worried about international rivals using drones like the U.S. does.   “The number of countries that have acquired or developed drones expanded to more than 75, up from about 40 in 2005, according to the Government ...

We have chosen to highlight United States agencies; however, this top 10 list has global impact, as the U.S. has now proven to be the enforcement division of the overarching globalist agenda of centralized control. One could argue that every government agency serves the purpose of stifling freedom and wasting taxpayer money. Yet, the 10 listed below go the extra mile for their sheer corruption, draconian re ...

Is the American health care system "the best in the world"? If so, perhaps Oregon is spinning its wheels trying to fix a health care system some U.S. congressmen say isn't broken. Let's hear what these national leaders say and then check reality.   Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says, "We do start with the notion, however, that we have the best health care in the world." If McConnell had diabetes, h ...

People often ask me, in terms of my argument about "ten steps" that mark the descent to a police state or closed society, at what stage we are. I am sorry to say that with the importation of what will be tens of thousands of drones, by both US military and by commercial interests, into US airspace, with a specific mandate to engage in surveillance and with the capacity for weaponization – which is due to be ...

The Pentagon has informed Congress of its plans to sell four Global Hawk high-altitude spy drones to South Korea. Under the deal Seoul’s surveillance capabilities would be greatly improved, even though the US DoD itself wanted to retire the aircraft. ­The US Department of Defense wants to sell four of the Block 30 version of the RQ-4 Global Hawk aircraft to Seoul under the Foreign Military Sales program. It ...

Head of Iran's Space Agency (ISA) Hamid Fazeli says the country plans to launch two indigenous satellites into orbit by the end of the current Iranian calendar year (March 20, 2013). “The launching of the two satellites, Fajr and Shrif Sat, by the end of the current year is on our agenda,” Fazeli told reporters on Saturday. Pointing to the latest developments regarding Iran’s Nahid satellite, Fazeli pointed ...