A New York City-based bitcoin exchange itBit has become the first to receive a charter under New York banking laws.
ItBit is a commercial exchange that trades the virtual currency. Thursday’s announcement makes it the first company to receive a charter from the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS).
(Activist Post) In the months since the Sandy Hook Mass Shooting we have seen the largest attack on private firearm ownership in the history of the country. From calls for confiscation to a push for numerous gun bans, the gun control lobby has done everything in their power to attack the 2nd Amendment.
Now, a report from a New York attorney has revealed that the New York State Police are instigating proceedings that are leading to the confiscation of pistol permits from citizens who have been legally prescribed anti-anxiety medicine.
Jim Tresmond, an attorney at Tresmond Law Firm, is currently representing two different clients who had their pistol permits revoked because of a prescription to an anti-anxiety medicine.
“We are representing a client right now who is impacted by this onerous activity of the government,” Tresmond said in a post on WBEN.com.
“We were flummoxed by this whole matter,” explained Tresmond. “The HIPAA act is supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening. It’s a gross invasion of our privacy rights.”
According to Tresmond, the New York State Police are responsible for this direct attack on the 2nd Amendment due to the fact that they send the information to the courts that initiates the proceedings. Tresmond also noted that he believes the two clients he is representing are only the beginning to what could be a massive revocation of gun permits, all completely outside of law.
As noted by Paul Joseph Watson, this is most likely connected to the NY Safe Act of 2013 which has a provision that many mental health experts have spoken out against due to the fact that it could lead people who need help to stay away over fears of losing their firearms.
Section 9.46 of the NY SAFE Act of 2013 authorizes therapists, doctors, nurses and social workers to report patients they determine may engage in conduct that may result in harm to self or others.
If a determination is made that the person in question poses a threat, the provision permits the government to confiscate firearms. The provision is a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment and the legal standard of probable cause.
Sadly, attacks on gun ownership through the health industry are seemingly gaining ground with the number of reports showing health professionals helping police take away citizens’ guns rising sharply since the Sandy Hook Mass Shooting.
Last week, a report by this author documented the horrors one American veteran faced after he attempted to visit a pain management doctor.
David A. Schmecker, a Navy veteran with no history of arrests or mental illness, had his guns confiscated during an illegal search of his home after he refused a forced psychological evaluation that was issued simply for seeking a follow-up pain management appointment.
Not having any past history of arrests or mental illness, Schmecker politely refused the evaluation, which was the beginning of what would end up being an illegal seizure of a patriotic veteran’s guns during a search that was conducted without a warrant and without any regard for the law.
After Schmecker refused the evaluation, his doctor called his house and heard what he claimed was an “odd” answering machine message that apparently led the doctor to call the police and order a wellness check.
“The police came to my home, and, without any justification whatsoever, hauled me away for a psychiatric evaluation at a local hospital. I submitted to their forceful insistence under duress and fear of arrest or worse,” Schmecker told Survive and Thrive TV.
“So they came into my house and they searched my house, looking for contraband of anything, they looked through everything … I basically knew if I resisted I would never have gotten out of the hospital, I would have gone into the hospital and possibly the morgue, and not only that, if I had survived, I would have been stuck in the hospital.”
Clearly the powers that be, frustrated that their gun grabbing efforts have so far failed in Congress, are turning their sights towards mental health and the use of different types of doctors and health professionals to supersede the 2nd Amendment and begin backdoor confiscation of firearms throughout the country.
(electronicintifada) I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or scream when tipped off about the latest propaganda blitz planned by European Friends of Israel, a key lobby group in Brussels.
Its calendar for the next few weeks — not yet posted on the EFI website — features a number of events designed to present Israel as a caring and liberal country, which has managed to inoculate itself from financial crises.
Later this month (23 January) the EFI will host a mini-conference titled Humanitarian aid – Israel as a world leader. According to the EFI’s blurb, Israel has “aid teams poised to respond in the wake of natural or man-made disasters anywhere in the world.” One of these teams, apparently, was “first on the scene in January 2010 after the earthquake hit Haiti.”
Have those few words broken all previous records for chutzpah? At the time Israel was rushing to help Haiti (or so we are told), it was enforcing a medieval siege on more than 1.5 million people in Gaza. Israel was in no hurry to address the “man-made disaster” its own policies had caused. Rather, it was only after Israeli troops murdered nine activists trying to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza on a flotilla in May 2010 that it moved to ease, but not lift, the blockade.
“Self-congratulation”
Nor, it should be added, is there anything heroic about having the first aid workers in Haiti. As a short new book — L’échec humanitaire: le cas haïtien (The humanitarian failure: the Haitian case — by Frédéric Thomas illustrates, that Caribbean nation has been betrayed and misled by the Western aid industry. Of $10 billion pledged to Haiti at an international donors’ conference in New York during March 2010, less than $2.5 billion had been released by July 2012.
Thomas is especially scathing of how aid pledges are made for purposes of “self-congratulation,” in which the “first recipient of the message is not the Haitian people but voters in the donor country, who are invited to agree with their governments, so generous and effective.” While he does not mention Israel, the criticism can be applied to it.
Israel sent over 250 soldiers to Haiti after the earthquake, and posted videos in their honor on Facebook. Not only was this a clear case of hasbara — as propaganda is called in Hebrew — it violated a principle which genuine humanitarians regard as fundamental: that emergency assistance should be of a civilian nature and be seen as impartial.
Sandy solidarity?
The EFI is a cross-party alliance of members of the European Parliament (MEPs). Its conference — to be hold in the Parliament’s headquarters — will be addressed by Navonel Glick from the Israeli Forum for International Humanitarian Aid (IsraAid). Glick has been in New York lately in an apparent gesture of solidarity with victims of Hurricane Sandy.
IsraAid took advantage of that catastrophe by claiming that having a strong military enables Israel to undertake emergency missions. Of course, the less humane side of the same army was displayed when Israel rained its bombs down on Gaza for eight consecutive days in November, again making a mockery of its claim to be a “world leader” in humanitarianism.
Soon after mythologizing about Israel’s aid operations, the EFI will turn the spotlight on Israel’s economic prowess. A promotional note for a 29 January meeting says that though Israel is small “a host of reforms aimed at liberalizing the economy have allowed it to stand out as one of the world’s most competitive economies.” The main speaker will be Chaim Hurvitz from Israel’s top pharmaceutical firm Teva.
In a March 2012 study, Who Profits? — a project set up by Palestinian and Israeli women — documented how Teva benefits from the occupation. The construction of Israel’s apartheid wall has meant that pharmacies and hospitals in occupied East Jerusalem have been prevented from dispensing medicines manufactured in the West Bank. As a result, healthcare services on which all Palestinians in East Jerusalem and many others from across the West Bank rely have been forced to buy Israeli and foreign drugs.
Ironic twist
In an ironic twist, EFI will switch from applauding “competitiveness” — a doctrine which holds that social protections should be dismantled — to embracing young Israelis who demand that the welfare state be preserved. On 20 February, its special guest will be Daphne Leef, who the EFI has appointed “leader” of last year’s Tel Aviv protests against the right-wing policies of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Leef has a skewed sense of justice. In a much-circulated speech delivered during September 2011, she grew emotional over how “one million Israelis were living under the threat of missiles” fired from Gaza, without saying anything about how four million Palestinians live under a brutal occupation.
It is not hard to see why the EFI is happy to court her. Leef is a useful pawn for lobbyists determined to perpetuate the lie that Israel is a vibrant democracy.
The state announced that it has sold four sets of rusting trains to scrap dealers — an embarrassing end for a once-grand plan to create high-speed rail service between Manhattan and Albany.
The sale of the trains and spare parts netted a mere $420,000, a far cry from the tens of millions of dollars taxpayers sank into the doomed project.
The trains were among seven retired Turboliners former Gov. George Pataki’s administration acquired from Amtrak in 1998.
Each of the trains consisted of two engines and three passenger cars — and were supposed to be refurbished for high-speed use.
But after spending $70 million on the project, the state could only get three of the seven to run — and then only sporadically.
They were plagued with problems, from fires to poor air conditioning.
By 2002 the project was halted and Amtrak towed the three barely working trains to a rail yard in Delaware.
The remaining four have been rusting away in a rail yard outside of Schenectady, costing taxpayers $150,000 a year just in storage costs.
In June, a frustrated Gov. Cuomo announced the state would finally rid itself of the trains, even auctioning them off for scrap if necessary.
And that’s exactly what happened.
Metro Metal Recycling, of upstate Watervliet, purchased the 12 passenger cars.
The company’s founder, Charlie Van Hall, said crews will cut the cars into sections, truck them to his facility, and then “sell every single part that is usable.”
An Albany-area scrap firm, NH Kelman Scrap, bought the eight locomotives for $16,000 each.
A company official, Lawrence Schillinger, said he plans to melt down the locomotives.
