Fintan Dunne:

A New Jersey congressman says a man who gunned down a security guard at a federal building in Manhattan before killing himself was a whistleblower who had been given "a raw deal" by the agency that fired him. The armed US veteran named as Kevin Downing broke into a federal Department of Labor building in Lower Manhattan via a side door, shooting Idrissa Camara, a security guard in the head and killing him. He took his own life before police were able to arrive at the scene. U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell said Saturday that his staff worked with Downing to resolve his case and says he has no idea why Downing snapped. Downing was been fired from his job at the New York City office of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1999 for blowing the whistle on 'inexcusable taxpayer waste' according to a Change.org petition opened a year ago. The petition only attracted 48 supporters before it was closed. In his statement of petition Downing says that "[BLS] manag...

The dynamics of Friday's Greek situation are as follows. Tsipras says he has a mandate for a deal not a Grexit. True. Syriza is proposing near the SAME deal as it offered in June - one with wealth taxes the EU elites hate, but with even more austerity of the kind which Greeks just voted against. Sounds illogical? The flip-side that mainstream media are leaving out of the picture (so as to paint Tsipras as a fool?) goes to the core of Syriza's ethos and position. The flip-side is: DEBT WRITE DOWN, by any name you prefer. The Banksters- more than the EU are --and have been- key holdouts. This Syriza offer is designed to flush them out. No Debt Write Down, No Bailout Deal. Call the write down a reprofiling or a restructuring or call it an extension. Route it through any alphabet soup of acronymic institutions: ESM, EFSF, EFSM, IMF, KISS, MY, ASS. But - No Debt Write Down, NO Bailout Deal. #OXI Of course, in the event the Banksters force a Grexit, then the ref...

I  just watched the dream of European Union wither before my eyes in the EU parliament during a seven minute gutter level, populist and outright lying haranguing of Alexis Tsipras - by so-called 'EU centrist' Guy Verhofstadt. All of Verhofstadt's flourishing rhetoric - was just that: mere rhetoric. There was not even an attempt at balancing the gutter with the spire. Lies marched over damn lies. Gutter it was - all the way, until a self-satisfied Verhofstadt sat down . Merkel-led, right-wing EPP politics has long already trumped true economics and has asphyxiated our aspirational EU ethos. Verhofstadt's liberal ALDE group is clearly comfortable with the EPP in that political gutter. Their hysterical rhetoric is required as cover for their own failure. It was they who foisted upon Greece, two failed financial looting campaigns disguised as alleged 'Bailouts'. Thus did a banking class benefit from a cozy cartel with a political class. And still does - vi...

In the final hours before Greeks vote in a referendum Sunday, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has abandoned his country's stance that a 'NO' vote means a certain exit from the euro currency. The hardline CDU colleague of Angela Merkel also seemed to indicate that ECB liquidity support for Greek banks --currently withdrawn for a week, forcing their closure-- would resume after the referendum, regardless of the outcome. In an interview with Bild, Schäuble said: “ Greece is a member of the eurozone. There’s no doubt about that. Whether with the euro or temporarily without it: only the Greeks can answer this question. And it is clear that we will not leave the people in the lurch. ” Parsing his words carefully, the first two sentences of his statement above seem to quite definitively rule out a Greek exit from the Euro zone, despite his lukewarm reference to a "temporary" conditionality. “It is clear that we will not leave the peopl...

R ight To Water campaigners secured vital victory today as the EU citizens initiative (ECI) on water was steered by Sinn Féin MEP, Lynn Boylan to a clear 38 to 22 vote victory at a meeting of the EU Environment Committee. Around 1.9 million citizens across Europe had signed up to back the EU's first ECI initiative, which aims to assert the ordinary citizen's right of to access to water - and thus counters an international trend towards neoliberal privatization in law and trade agreements. “I am especially pleased to see that my amendments excluding water services from internal market rules and trade agreements such as TTIP were successful," said Lynn Boylan - an Irish MEP for Dublin. The two-thirds margin of victory strengthens the hand of campaigners, and though the vote is not binding on the European Commission, the outcome makes it far harder to ignore opposition to the inclusion of water in international trade agreements such as TTIP. [Source Links] ht...

An online poll has found that 63% of younger Greeks do not fear an exit from the Euro currency. Just over 1,800 people aged 22-45 took part in the survey, which was conducted by think tank ' Bridging Europe ', from 16-19th June, 2015. The poll also found that 80% regarded unemployment as the greatest negative consequence of economic austerity policies,and 69% believed that the financial institutions were responsible for the talks deadlock.

This is yet more evidence of just how comprehensively Irish people were royally screwed . From its inception in the IFSC to its implosion via ANGLO, NAMA and IBRC - all has been fraud, built on more fraud, built on dubiously legal fraud. At least it's on the parliamentary record. Though that makes no difference right now, because nobody is actually reporting or discussing it.   Except for us conspiracy theorists.     p.s. you know who you are <wink> Deputy Peter Mathews:       The House and the people of Ireland owe a "Thank You" to Deputy Catherine Murphy for persistently bringing this matter to the attention of the people of Ireland and the Dáil. We must have openness and light on the biggest banking collapse in the civilised world to date. As an outcome Anglo Irish Bank, now IBRC, and NAMA have a combined written down value of assets in the order of some €60 billion to €65 billion. Around one million people in Ireland toda...