until now is being a good year in the bitcoin enviroment although it is not being so in price
manipulation is really bad...

The German central bank or Bundesbank said Monday that it stepped up the repatriation of its gold reserves from overseas storage last year.

"The Bundesbank successfully continued and further stepped up its transfers of gold," the central bank said in a statement.

"In 2014, 120 tonnes of gold were transferred to Frankfurt from storage locations abroad: 35 tonnes from Paris and 85 tonnes from New York."

Germany's gold reserves are the second-biggest in the world after those of the United States and totalled 3,384.2 tonnes this month, according to the latest data compiled by the World Gold Council.

For decades the Bundesbank's gold holdings have been kept in the treasuries of other central banks -- in Paris, London and New York.

According to the German central bank's own data, 1,447 tonnes are stored at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, 438 tonnes at the Bank of England in London and 307 tonnes at the Banque de France in Paris.

There were historical reasons for this.

After World War II and the export revival of West Germany's "economic miracle" in the 1950s, the central bank accumulated dollars it swapped for gold at the Federal Reserve. With Germany split between capitalist west and the communist East German state until 1990, storing most of the gold abroad was a way to keep it out of Soviet reach during the Cold War.

But surging mistrust of the euro during Europe's debt crisis fed a campaign to bring home Germany's gold reserve from New York and London, with some political parties fuelling fears the gold might have been tampered with.

Under the Bundesbank's new gold storage plan in 2013, it decided to bring back 674 tonnes from abroad by 2020 and store half of its gold in its own vaults.

"Implementation of our new gold storage plan is proceeding smoothly. Operations are running very much according to schedule," said Bundesbank executive board member Carl-Ludwig Thiele.

"We also called on the expertise of the Bank for International Settlements for the spot checks that had to be carried out. As expected, there were no irregularities," Thiele said.

Since the transfers began in 2013, the Bundesbank said it has relocated a total of 157 tonnes of gold to Frankfurt -- 67 tonnes from Paris and 90 tonnes from New York.

State efforts to stop warrantless NSA spying are off to a fast start in the 2015 legislative session.

Just two weeks into this year's legislative season, and with many legislatures not even in session yet, legislators in four states have already introduced bills to ban material support or resources to any federal agency engaged in warrantless spying.

These bills not only support efforts to turn off NSA’s water in Utah, but would also have practical effects on federal surveillance programs if passed.

Legislators in South Carolina, Missouri, Alaska and Indiana have all filed versions of the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, and representatives in seven other states have committed to introduce similar bills this year. Sources close to OffNow suggest even more bills will get introduced before the legislative season ends in spring.

“To have four bills already filed, and commitments from seven more legislators - on top of having a bill in Utah set to move forward that would set the stage to turn of the water at the Bluffdale data center - this is really beyond our expectations this early in the session,” OffNow executive director Mike Maharrey said. “I think Americans are sick of being spied on, and they are sick of empty reform talk by D.C. politicians. I think this movement at the state level is indicative of the American people saying, 'Fine! If you can’t get things fixed in Washington, we’ll fix it through our states.'”

Following model language drafted by OffNow, the Fourth Amendment Protection Act legislation supports actions in Utah and would have a practical effect in any state that passes it.

President Obama will ask Congress to hike capital gains taxes on wealthy Americans and impose a fee on large financial firms in Tuesday's State of the Union address, the White House announced Saturday.

The new taxes and fees, which the administration says will raise $320 billion over 10 years, would be used to finance $235 billion in new spending on community college tuition and targeted tax relief.

Senior administration officials said the proposals are designed to "raise wages and incomes for middle class families in the new economy" and that they'd "make the system more fair" by closing loopholes that primarily benefit top income-earners. Many Democrats have long sought higher taxes on capital gains, or income derived from investments, to make the tax code more progressive.

Of the estimated $320 billion in new revenue the president is seeking, $210 billion would come from a pair of adjustments to capital gains taxes. The first adjustment would close the so-called "trust fund loophole," a feature of the tax code that "lets the wealthy pass appreciated assets onto their heirs tax-free," according to the White House.

The second adjustment would raise capital gains taxes on the top 1 percent of income earners, currently at 15 percent, to 28 percent -- the same level it was at under former President Ronald Reagan, the White House is quick to point out.

An additional $110 billion would come from a new fee on highly leveraged financial services firms (firms bearing a heavy debt load) with more than $50 billion in assets. Roughly 100 firms would be targeted by the new fee, which a White House fact sheet argued would help "discourage excessive borrowing."

In return for those new taxes and fees, the president will ask Congress to set aside $60 billion to offer rebates to states that offer free community college tuition and an additional $175 billion in new tax benefits.

The president would offer a $500 second-earner tax credit that allows spouses in two-earner families to obtain a tax credit now available to the principle earner. That change could benefit 24 million couples.

He would also triple the child care tax credit to $3,000, a move that could benefit 5.1 million families with children under 5 and 6.7 million families overall.

And he'd offer a $2,500 tax credit for college students pursuing a full degree and consolidate the six federal college education tax benefits into only two. The tax credit could reach 8.5 million students and families, and the tax benefits through simplification could benefit 25 million families and students that claim those tax benefits, the White House estimates.

Finally, the president will also call for Congress to allow part-time workers to apply for and eventually receive retirement benefits through automatic enrollment in company-run savings plans. ‎This could benefit up to 30 million workers.

With the president's big speech looming, the White House is hoping the early announcement of the proposals could heighten the visibility of the address and gin up enthusiasm among groups sympathetic to his ideas.

"This is a clearer way for the president to present his vision," a senior administration official said Saturday.

Of course, the call to raise taxes on the wealthy and impose a fee on big financial institutions will likely go over like a lead balloon with Republicans, who now control both houses of Congress. The president has previously proposed hiking capital gains taxes, but the GOP has successfully thwarted any such action, arguing the move would discourage investment and put a crimp in economic growth.

Dozens of Syrian civilians died last month after being jailed by ISIS for violating Sharia Law. But it wasn’t Islamic extremists who ended their lives—it was the United States.

An airstrike carried out Dec. 28 on an ISIS headquarters in the northern Syrian town of Al Bab may have killed more than 50 civilians, according to McClatchy. Reports gathered from eyewitness and a Syrian opposition human rights group revealed a death toll ranging between 55 and 61 civilian prisoners inside the building that was demolished by American missiles. Between 13 and 25 ISIS guards also died in the attack. If those numbers are accurate, it would represent the worst case of civilian deaths caused by the U.S. bombing of Syria.

One source told McClatchy that 35 prisoners were imprisoned for minor infractions of Islamic Law, “such as smoking, wearing jeans or appearing too late for the afternoon prayer,” Roy Gutman and Mousab Alhamadee reported.

The U.S. military did not confirm the airstrike until last weekend. An early Pentagon statement said there had been no evidence of civilian casualties but a later email from the Defense Department acknowledged there had been reports of some deaths.

Some psychologists have long theorized that it is possible for interrogators to use certain techniques to obtain false confessions from suspects by tricking them into believing that they committed the crime in question. The Association for Psychological Science noted that this phenomenon has been observed in the cases of some wrongfully-accused criminal suspects. However, Julia Shaw of the University of Bedfordshire and Stephen Porter at the University of British Columbia decided to put the theory to the test in a lab setting and conducted a study, which was recently published in the scientific journal Psychological Science. The above-embedded video coverage by Discovery Channel‘s DNews describes their findings.

The study, which included 60 adult college students as participants and was funded by the University of British Columbia’s Lashley and Mary Haggman Memory Research Award and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, demonstrated that 71% of those who were suggestively told that they had committed a crime in their youth developed vivid false memories of the event. As a control, 50% of the participants in the study were told instead that they had experienced an emotionally intense event that never took place using the same techniques. 76.67% of those who were asked to describe the false emotional event were found to have similarly developed false memories.


“Our findings show that false memories of committing crime with police contact can be surprisingly easy to generate, and can have all the same kinds of complex details as real memories… All participants need to generate a richly detailed false memory is 3 hours in a friendly interview environment, where the interviewer introduces a few wrong details and uses poor memory-retrieval techniques,” said Julia Shaw of the study’s findings.

When it comes to financial stability, black Americans are often in much more precarious financial situations than white Americans. Their unemployment rate is higher, and so is the level of poverty within the black community. In 2013, the poverty rate among white Americans was 9.6 percent, among black Americans it was 27.2 percent. And the gap between the wealth of white families and black families has widened to its highest levels since 1989, according to a 2014 study by Pew Research Center.

The facts of this rift aren’t new, or all that surprising. But perhaps what’s most unsettling about the current economic climate in black America is that when black families attain middle-class status, the likelihood that their children will remain there, or do better, isn’t high.

“Even black Americans who make it to the middle class are likely to see their kids fall down the ladder,” writes Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. In a recent blog post Reeves says that seven out of 10 black children who are born to families with income that falls in the middle quintile of the income spectrum will find themselves with income that's one to two quintiles below their parents' during their own adulthood.

A 2014 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, which looked at factors like parental income, education, and family structure, shows a similar pattern: Many black Americans not only fail to move up, but show an increased likelihood of backsliding. According to the study, “In recent decades, blacks have experienced substantially less upward intergenerational mobility and substantially more downward intergenerational mobility than whites.”

The greater probability of slipping back applies to blacks across income groups. According to the Fed study, about 60 percent of black children whose parents had income that fell into the top 50 percent of the distribution saw their own income fall into the bottom half during adulthood. This type of downward slide was common for only 36 percent of white children.

Bravo... is this so hard to understand? Bitcoin will do the same job regardless the price, so why not eliminate the risk of the crazy volatility by investing in a company that makes money from these hopeless delusional libertarians.

Edit: Beside, even if Bitcoin fails and if we get a Bitcoin 2.0, these companies will still operate, while Bitcoin bag holders will lose it all.

Anyone have full copy/paste? Don't want to create account.

Four leading Republican presidential prospects are expected to appear this weekend
in the California desert before an exclusive gathering of rich conservatives convened
by the Koch brothers’ political operation, several sources tell POLITICO.

Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul ofKentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida, and Gov.
Scott Walker ofWisconsin, received coveted invitations to speak to the vaunted
network assembled by the billionaire industrialist mega-donors Charles and David
Koch, the sources said.

The meeting, set to be held at a Palm Springs hotel, is the annual winter gathering of
Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the nonprofit group that oversees the
network offiscally conservative groups formed with help from the Kochs and their
operatives.

None ofthe White House prospects invited to the meeting this weekend responded
to questions about whether they planned to attend and, if so, what they planned to
discuss. A spokesman for Freedom Partners declined to comment on the function,
which is closed to the press.

It comes at a pivotal time for both the Koch network, which has become increasingly
involved in partisan politics, and for the sprawling Republican presidential
field, which some party insiders fear could be headed for a chaotic and costly
primary.

Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, both of whom are eyeing runs oftheir own, are
considered the favorites of rich Republican donors from the party’s
establishment wing, who traditionally have exerted great sway over presidential
nominating fights.

But neither is necessarily a perfect fit for the donors and operatives in the Kochs’
expanding donor network, where small government, free market policies tend to be
valued over aggressive stances on military intervention or social issues. That
could present an opening for prospective presidential hopefuls who have emphasized
fiscal issues more than foreign policy, like Paul, Walker and Indiana Gov. Mike
Pence. Pence is not expected in Palm Springs this weekend. But he has spoken at past
gatherings and is considered a favorite of the Kochs’ allies, as is Walker, whose
fight against his state’s public employee unions over collective bargaining
rights made him something of a test case for the expansion ofthe Koch network and
its most robust political arm, Americans for Prosperity.

Stan Hubbard, a billionaire Minnesota media mogul and mega-donor who has
attended Koch donor gatherings, but is not headed to Palm Springs, called Walker “a
hell of a good man.” Yet, Hubbard also had positive things to say about Bush, a
former Florida governor (“a really nice guy”) and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (“a
good communicator”), while dismissing Romney, a former Massachusetts governor,
as “a terrible candidate,” and questioning whether Cruz or Paul could win a general
election.

“What scares me is the ultra-right-wing people – which I would be, but you can’t get
elected being ultra-right-wing – so what scares me is them screwing it up by
supporting someone like the senator from Texas,” said Hubbard of Cruz. “I mean,
forget it.”

Cruz and Rubio have staked out aggressive foreign policy stances that in some ways
seem out of step with the more non-interventionist ofthe Koch network’s donors.
But they’re also seen as unlikely to be able to keep up with Bush or Romney when it
comes to corralling support from more hawkish mega-donors in the GOP’s Wall
Street or country club wings.

Major donors are expected to play an outsized role in the 2016 presidential election,
especially in the primaries, thanks partly to a pair of 2010 federal court rulings that
paved the way for super PACs that can accept unlimited checks to support
candidates.

While the Kochs’ operation has stayed out of GOP primaries, the possibility ofits
donors or groups backing a candidate in the 2016 GOP presidential primary has
tantalized the political class.

The 2012 general election marked the first time that AFP aired ads expressly
opposing a candidate — President Barack Obama. AFP went on to spend heavily on
ads attacking Democratic Senate candidates in the run-up to the 2014 midterms, and
was credited with helping Republicans capture the Senate. All told, the groups in
the Koch network combined to spend about $290 million ahead ofthe midterms.
The Freedom Partners donor meetings – which started in 2003 and are now held
twice a year – are central to the expansion ofthe Koch network. Dubbed “seminars”
within Koch circles, they bring together dozens of conservative business leaders from
across the country – including a healthy contingent ofheartland industrialists like
the Kochs – for three days of presentations from top conservative politicians,
operatives and thought leaders, including American Enterprise Institute President
Arthur Brooks, pundit Erick Erickson and pollster Frank Luntz.

The seminars typically conclude with a fundraising session of sorts where donors
pledge donations that can reach into the seven figures to support policy and political
efforts discussed during the seminars. Freedom Partners, which was formed in late
2011, disseminates the cash among a host of groups in the network.
There’s a lot of discussion among donors and strategists within the Koch operation
about whether to wade into the Republican presidential primary, according to an
operative familiar with the operation.

“These funders just had a very successful cycle and I imagine some of the folks want
to go for the big enchilada,” said the operative, asserting the Koch network could
have a major impact on the presidential race ifit decided to engage heavily. “They are
the most sophisticated operation, which would be a huge asset” for Republicans.

Dr Tony Perry, a pioneer in cloning, has announced precise DNA editing at the moment of conception in mice.

He said huge advances in the past two years meant "designer babies" were no longer HG Wells territory.

Other leading scientists and bioethicists argue it is time for a serious public debate on the issue.

Designer babies - genetically modified for beauty, intelligence or to be free of disease - have long been a topic of science fiction.

Dr Perry, who was part of the teams to clone the first mice and pigs, said the prospect was still fiction, but science was rapidly catching up to make elements of it possible.

In the journal Scientific Reports, he details precisely editing the genome of mice at the point DNA from the sperm and egg come together.

Dr Perry, who is based at the University of Bath, told the BBC: "We used a pair of molecular scissors and a molecular sat-nav that tells the scissors where to cut.

"It is approaching 100% efficiency already, it's a case of 'you shoot you score'."

...

The German reporter then elaborated on how shocked he was about how “willing to kill” the ISIS fighters are. He said that they were ready to commit genocide. “They were talking about [killing] hundreds of millions. They were enthusiastic about it, and I just cannot understand that,” said Todenhofer

He warned that the Islamic State “is much stronger than we think,” and that their recruiting has brought motivated jihadis from across the globe. “Each day, hundreds of new enthusiastic fighters are arriving,” explained Todenhofer. “There is an incredible enthusiasm that I have never seen in any other war zones I have been to.”

The journalist asserted that the U.S.-led bombing campaign was not going to stop the Islamic State and its continuing jihad. He told Al Jazeera that he believed the terror group would only be stopped if fellow Sunni Iraqis would rise up against them.

DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran sees no sign of a shift within OPEC toward action to support oil prices, its oil minister said, adding its oil industry could ride out a further price slump to $25 a barrel.

The comments are a further sign that despite lobbying by Iran and Venezuela, there is little chance of collective action by the 12-member OPEC to prop up prices - entrenching the reluctance of individual members to curb their own supplies.

In remarks posted on the Iranian oil ministry's website SHANA, Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh called for increased cooperation between members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

"Iran has no plan (to hold an emergency OPEC meeting) and is currently in consultations with other OPEC member states in a bid to prevent the sharp fall in the oil price, but these consultations have yet to bear fruit," he said.

This seems kinda cool, I'm not one of those freaks that care about their "privacy".
I believe that those who are innocent and have nothing bad to hide shouldn't care about this.