Chris Roubis

Posts Tagged ‘news’

If you’re upset that congressional approval of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 can send you away to military prisons and be tortured in America, don’t worry — it could be worse.

The US could send you somewhere else.

No, really. They could. And they can. Anywhere else, too. Really.

While the bill that left Capitol Hill last week and awaits authorization from US President Barack Obama allows for the United States to indefinitely detain and torture American citizens suspected of aiding enemy forces, one provision in the bill specifies that that detention doesn’t necessarily have to occur domestically — nor does it have to be in a foreign prison run by the US.

The ongoing detention of foreign terror suspects at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has been a hot topic since the War on Terror began, with American military authorities torturing could-be criminals without ever bringing them to trial. An exposé years earlier on the Abu Ghraib facility in Iraq revealed how American troops were subjecting detainees to disgusting, inhumane conditions; conditions which left some dead without ever going to trial. While Abu Ghraib has since been shut down, Guantanamo Bay continues to hold suspected criminals despite a promise to Obama to shut it down.

When the commander-in-chief inks his name to NDAA FY2012, Americans can be on their way to the same torture cells that have kept al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked terrorists for the last decade. It’s now been revealed, however, that US citizens and anyone suspected of a crime against America can be sent all over the world.

Under the legislation, the president has the power to transfer suspected terrorists “to the custody or control of the person’s country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity.”

China? Sure. Iran? Why not! North Korea? That’s a possibility too. David Glazier, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, tells Mother Jones that this was an authority that the president has had before, but only under the new NDAA is the legislation endorsed and insured that it could be applied to Americans.

“If the president could lawfully transfer a German prisoner of war to a foreign country, then in theory he could do the same thing with an American prisoner of war,” Glazier says.

Under the Feinstein Amendment imposed under NDAA FY2012, the Democratic senator from California proposed a law which would not change “existing law” with regards to detaining Americans. As Mother Jones notes, however, the jury is still out on what exactly “existing law” is when it comes to the topic, with those suspected of hostilities against America already being imprisoned without trial — citizen and otherwise. Both US-born Bradley Manning has been under military watch, isolation and torture for nearly two years, and the same has applied to a countless number of suspected terrorists at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.

Al Franken, a Democrat senator from Minnesota, wrote in an op-ed last week that the provisions put in NDAA such as Feinstein Amendment were enough for some lawmakers to sign onto the legislation, but he said the final draft was still “simply unacceptable.”

“These provisions are inconsistent with the liberties and freedoms that are at the core of the system our Founders established. And while I did in fact vote for an earlier version of the legislation, I did so with the hope that the final version would be significantly improved. That didn’t happen, and so I could not support the final bill,” wrote Franken.

As Americans ready for a legislation that will impose a government-sanctioned firewall over the Internet, the elite computer-literate hacktivists attacking the law are finding ways to circumvent the passing of SOPA.

If the House and Senate have their way, the Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA, will leave Capitol Hill soon and seemingly cloak the Internet with Congress-created blockades that will shun every user of the World Wide Web from a whole slew of content, including music, videos and, in a nutshell, knowledge. Under the legislation, violation will yield massive fines and imprisonment — all for such action as uploading videos to YouTube. While the legislation is being delivered as a way to deal with copyright infringement and piracy on the Web, the law itself will severely cut down the free-flow of information online and would make something as simple as singing karaoke a crime if the footage ever finds an audience on the Web.

“SOPA is a joke,” an activist affiliated with the online collective Anonymous says to RT under condition of anonymity. “It’s Internet censorship under the guise of anti piracy. Everyone knows this.”

That guise is being guided by the government, however, which could make it come to life in the very near future. Only one week ago Congress approved the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, a legislation that allows for the indefinite detention and torture of American citizens. With being shackled at Gitmo a real-life threat now, activists against SOPA realize that the censorship shouldn’t be something that they’d put pass Capitol Hill. In preparation, adds the source aligned to the online collective Anonymous, “We are preparing for censorship much like China.”

As the realities of SOPA passing becomes an Orwellian-threat almost coming to life, computer users are quickly taking to the Web to spread information to other surfers on how to sneak pass the firewall that could cause the censoring of the Internet. “Most of us have been stockpiling IP addresses,” adds the source. Under SOPA, the government is believed to go after the Web by means of attacking the Internet’s domain naming system, or DNS. That’s the process that translates the actual, alphabetical domain name from a series of numerical characters, the Internet protocol (IP) address.

In order to get around such filtering, activists have already begun circulating lists online that chronicle the IP-addresses of popular websites that could be censored on SOPA so that users will be able to keep a roster handy of the digits that can be typed to dig up sites even as at risk as Google.com (which you could alternatively navigate to with the numbers 74.125.225.86 pasted into your browser). “SOPA emergency lists” have been spread around the Web in recent days via Twitter and viral messaging, allowing users to save a list of sites as innocent as Digg.com or The Onion, which are just as prone to having the plugged pulled on them than anyone else.

Erik Martin, the general manager of the popular website Reddit, wrote last week that, “If SOPA passes in anything like its current form, it would almost certainly mean the end of Reddit.”

“SOPA would make running Reddit near impossible,” added Martin. “And we have access to great lawyers through our parent company. I can’t imagine how smaller sites without those kind of resources could even attempt a go at it if SOPA passes.”

For the less computer-savvy, developer T Rizk has created an add-on for the popular Web browser FireFox which instantly translates domain names to their IP equivalent. His program, DeSopa, is available for free and is just one of the latest alternatives birthed through the chilling legislation.

“I feel that the general public is not aware of the gravity of SOPA and Congress seems like they are about to cater to the special interests involved, to the detriment of Internet, for which I and many others live and breathe,” T Rizk explains to TorrentFreak.

“It could be that a few members of Congress are just not tech savvy and don’t understand that it is technically not going to work, at all. So here’s some proof that I hope will help them err on the side of reason and vote SOPA down.”

Other material circulating online includes a tutorial sent through Twitter that serves as a beginner’s guide to both the Stop Online Privacy Act and PIPA, the Protect IP Act that stands to yield similar consequences. One text file, “Why SOPA and PIPA Suck,” explains in layman’s terms, “How this legislation may very well fuck up the Internet.”

“It is often difficult for us average folk to sympathize with the billionaire performers in Hollywood and RIAA/MPAA who claim that we’re stealing from them and compromising profits,” writes the author of the document. “They are correct – it is stealing, plain and simple. However, you don’t see blanket legislation that infringes our basic privacy for any other crime, like shoplifting.”

“To the best of my knowledge, Congress has never enacted this type of blanket legislation that invades our privacy – except in the name of combating terrorism, of course.”

Even easier to understand is a video uploaded to YouTube this week by Leah Kauffman, the mastermind behind the Obama Girl-videos that led up to the 2008 Election. Over computer-programmed drums and a soft piano melody, Kauffman sings, “Don’t put up a firewall when we could have it all / Say no to protect IP / You won’t stop piracy / What is this China?”

The American Civil Liberties Union has added, “By instituting this practice in the United States, SOPA sends an unequivocal message to other nations that it is acceptable to censor speech on the global Internet.” Even the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, said in a recent speech that SOPA would essentially “criminalize linking and the fundamental structure of the Internet itself,” calling it “reasonable,” but that its “mechanism is terrible.”

Despite their attempts at appearing as advocates against SOPA, Google has also gone on the record to encourage Congress to find other ways to strike down websites that the government doesn’t want to grow. Before Congress last month, Google copyright policy counsel Katherine Oyama told a House Judiciary Committee that while the bill would “jeopardize our nation’s cybersecurity,” she asked lawmakers to consider other ways of censorship.

“If you cut off someone’s financial incentives, they’re not going to want to pay for the servers, the bandwidth and the infrastructure,” she said. In order to do that, she suggested the government look towards the precedent set by stopping funds from going to Julian Assange and his whistleblowing site, WikiLeaks.

“You look at WikiLeaks. I think this is a good example of the fact that this a strong remedy: choking these sites off at their revenue source,” said Oyama. “I think [copyright infringing sites] are in business because they can sell advertising or because they can process from subscribers. If you could get the entire industry together and choke off advertising and choke off payments to those sites, you could be incredibly effective without introducing the collateral damage we discussed to free speech or Internet architecture.”

Google and other big web companies shouldn’t expect the battle to end with a little snafu in the financing of the sites in question, however. Given the support that anti-SOPA and PIPA activists have received in this month alone, Big Internet is a force to be reckoned with. When the National Defense Authorization Act was approved last week, hacktivists were quick to wage an all-out campaign on the lawmakers who helped make the law possible. In the days since, personal information and private details relating to the politicians that voted in favor of NDAA have made its way around the Web, with hackers vowing to continue to wage a cyberwar against Congress and those that let the US government turn America into a battlefield.

“We’ve been watching you systematically destroy the rights of your own people, one law at a time. No longer shall we stand by and watch you enslave our fellow citizens,” an Anonymous operative wrote on the Web recently. “You have continued down this path of treason by creating acts such as the National Defense Authorization Act, Stop Online Piracy Act, Protect IP Act, and more. You’ve tried to conceal the true purpose of these bills, and pass them without the consent of the American people.”

“We are now here to undo your sordid life’s work in its entirety. No longer will your transgressions go unnoticed. No longer will you enslave the people. The world will know of your violations against the rights of the citizens you were elected to represent,” adds the Anonymous operative.

Congressman Ron Paul continues to gain support in Iowa, this time with a new poll from a state university placing the GOP hopeful clear ahead of the competition.

According to a survey released on Tuesday by Iowa State University in conjunction with Gazette and KCRG, Paul has taken first place with 27.5 percent of the vote from likely caucus-goers. Last month Paul only polled with 20.4 percent support, but the falling out of pizzaman Herman Cain from the race as well as a strong campaign from the congressman’s camp are making a victory in Iowa seem increasingly more likely for the candidate.

As RT reported earlier in the week, this victory is only the latest in a string of successes for the Republican Party hopeful. Congressman Paul captured nearly a quarter of the vote in a new survey from Public Policy Polling and has seen a surge in popularity all along the campaign trail as of late.

This success, however, does not come without its opposition. The mainstream media continues to label Paul a fringe candidate, despite his stances which are finding a broader audience among Republican voters as the election season continues.

As this support surges, Paul is also becoming a threat to not just the GOP establishment but for also Democratic candidate, President Barack Obama. With a Washington Post/ABC News poll placing the current commander-in-chief neck-and-neck with former-Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, a third-party run for Congressman Paul could detract from either of the candidates’ audience and cause a serious upset come 2012.

“The reality is Ron Paul is poised to become a major figure in the Republican Party if his momentum continues and he’s able to win in Iowa,” GOP strategist Steve Schmidt tells Washington Post. “The open question is: How much durability does he have over the balance of the race?”

Ron Paul was among the first candidates to pull out of a proposed GOP debate hosted by reality-television star Donald Trump scheduled for later this month, a move which prompted almost every other Republican hopeful to revoke their participation.

In the latest poll out of ISW, Paul leads the race with former-House Speaker Newt Gingrich trailing behind him at 25.3 percent, followed by Romney at 17.5 percent. The study comes from data collected between December 8 and 18 from a pool of 740 registered Republicans and 200 registered independents.

Those in the one percent apparently have feelings too. And on the eve of Christmas, the biggest wish coming out of Wall Street is that others would play nice and stop hating them because of their success.

“This attack is destructive,” John A. Allison IV of BBT Corp. Banks tells Bloomberg. Those assaults, says Allison, shouldn’t be waged at the one percent because they are successful; after all, that success came as a result of such hard work as foreclosing on the thousands of Americans and then benefiting off of their misfortunate.

“Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive,” Allison says.

If those thousands of protesters rallying for a chance in American society to reverse the widening inequality gap between the few rich and the many poor are bothering you, think of how all those billionaires must feel.

“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” billionare Paychex Inc. founder Tom Golisano adds to the news agency.

America’s wealthy elite are finally sick of all the demonstrations, name calling and not-so-nice words directed at their wallets and the corrupt conduct that made them oh-so fat. Frankly, says the one percent, it ain’t all that fair.

“Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” JPMorgan Chase Co. CEO Jamie Dimon told an audience at a conference last month. Sure, Dimon raked in $23 million in 2010 alone, but he really isn’t all that evil, he says. Yeah, yeah, so his company managed to profit immensely off of the bankrupting of the rest of America, but do you really have to point the finger?

For the 99 percent, absolutely. Such has been the agenda behind the growing Occupy Wall Street campaign, which recently celebrated its three-month anniversary. But it’s not even America’s rich going after those pesky protesters, either. In the upcoming video game adaption of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6, Occupy-esque protesters are portrayed as filthy, violent hostage-taking terrorists. The television program Law and Order attempted to co-opt the movement as well, trying to paint a not-so-pretty picture of the movement by putting Manhattan protest-hub Zuccotti Park in a recent episode, a move which they later withdrew.

For the one percent, those cries, no matter how harsh, are being waged by the envious and ill informed. Anti-movement support coming from the mainstream isn’t helping either, and some even have words a bit harsher.

Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot Inc., says those that don’t have the same wealth as him don’t mean all that much. Granted, there aren’t a lot of other Americans valued at $1.5 billion, but according to Marcus, “Who gives a crap about some imbecile?”

“They deserve what they’re going to get,” said Marcus recently, reports Bloomberg News. “Are you kidding me?” he asked.

For many, it’s no joke. Thousands have been arrested so far while protesting in the Occupy movement and several have been injured as a result of police force. Still, that doesn’t seem to prove that they know what they’re doing, say the wealthy elite. According to the one percent, the other chunk of America needs to learn a thing about manners if it wants to excel in the game.

“You’ll get more out of me if you treat me with respect,” adds Omega Advisers’ Leon Cooperman.

You heard it, folks. Treat others how you’d like to be treated. So, please, take those protest signs and get out already. You’re making Lower Manhattan look cheap.

Disregard those racist uncles, rancid pot roasts and screaming children a’plenty.The holidays are a time for pushing pessimism aside and embracing family, faith and tradition.

Also being cast away now, statistics show, is flying home for the holidays.

At TSA security checkpoints in airports across America, ‘tis the season for government gropers and festive full body scan. Those increasing anti-air travel sentiments worsened by ongoing intrusions at the hands of the Transportation Security Administration are causing more and more Americans to forego flights as travelers this season are saying they’d rather ride busses and cars then deal with airplanes this year.

According to the results of a survey just released by the US Travel Association, two-out-of-five travelers this season are saying they’re trying to skip the plane and those pesky lines and checkpoints in lieu of other methods of transportation. It might not seem like a substantial number, but the association’s CEO, Roger Dow, tells US News World Report, “Our research shows that reducing hassle without compromising security will encourage more Americans to fly — as many as two to three additional trips a year — leading to an additional $85 billion in spending that would support 900,000 American jobs.”

If Congress wants to keep jobs, perhaps they should pull the plug on stripping passengers of their clothes and humiliating them in terminals from coast-to-coast.

For those that do opt to fly this season — and the TSA predicts that statistic to come to around 93 million next week — don’t be fooled into thinking that any conversation initiated by a security agent is a ploy to help ease the stress of sitting through Christmas dinner with Aunt Edna. The TSA says that “the vast majority” of travelers this year could be caught off guard with a “casual greeting” conversation with a Behavior Detection Officer (BDO) while they wait to approach airport x-rays, writes the Agency on their website. That small talk isn’t to calm your pre-flight jitters. Instead, rather, the TSA will be gauging passengers to weed out those that come off suspicious and then sending them off for additional screening.

Merry Christmas! Hope you wanted a rubber glove!

You can expect those friendly little chats as just the start of the delays that will be dropped on you while you wait in white-out conditions to board a jet for your jaunt. The US Travel Association adds that around 70 percent of passengers will be checking bags this year, 35 percent don’t know the checked-bag policy for their airline of choice and more than half are unaware of the policies that the TSA is implementing on younger travelers this year.

And don’t forget: no snow globes in your checked baggage. The TSA can’t gauge the specific size and contents of the gooey liquid inside, so those are a strict no-no.

WASHINGTON — The government told passenger airlines Wednesday they’ll have to do more to ensure pilots aren’t too tired to fly, nearly three years after the deadly western New York crash of a regional airliner flown by two exhausted pilots.

1. 1. 
      

      
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The Federal Aviation Administration’s update of airline pilot work rules, some of which dated to the 1960s, reflects a better understanding of the need for rest and how night shifts and traveling through time zones can increase errors.

“This is a big deal,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said. “This is as far as our government has ever gone” to protect the traveling public from pilot fatigue.

Carriers have two years to adapt to the new rules. The FAA estimated the cost to industry at $297 million over 10 years, a fraction of the $2 billion a year that an airline trade association had estimated the draft proposal released by FAA over a year ago would cost.

The airline industry had opposed the draft rule as too costly for the safety benefits it would achieve. But FAA officials made substantial changes to the final rule to lower the cost. Several expensive reporting and training requirements were eliminated.

Safety advocates have been urging FAA for over two decades to update pilot work rules, but previous efforts stalled after airlines and pilots unions were unable to agree on changes. Those efforts were revived after the February 2009 crash near Buffalo that killed 50 people. Families of the dead have lobbied relentlessly for more stringent regulations to fight pilot fatigue.

The rules would limit the maximum time a pilot can be scheduled to be on duty — including wait time before flights and administrative duties — to between nine and 14 hours. The total depends on the time of day pilots begin their first flight and the number of time zones crossed.

The maximum amount of time pilots can be scheduled to fly is limited to eight or nine hours, and pilots would get a minimum of 10 hours to rest between duty periods, a two-hour increase over the old rules. The minimum amount of time off between work weeks will be increased 25 percent, and there will be new limits on how many hours per month pilots can fly. Pilots flying overnight would be allowed fewer hours than pilots flying during the day.

But cargo carriers — which do much of their flying overnight when people naturally crave sleep — are exempted from the new rules. The FAA said forcing cargo carriers to reduce the number of hours their pilots can fly would be too costly when compared with the safety benefits.

Imposing the rules on cargo airlines like Federal Express or United Parcel Service would have added another $214 million to the cost, FAA officials said.

The exemption for cargo carriers, which runs counter to the FAA’s goal of “one level of safety” across the aviation industry, drew strong criticism from pilots unions.

“To potentially allow fatigued cargo pilots to share the same skies with properly rested passenger pilots creates an unnecessary threat to public safety. We can do better,” said Robert Travis, president of the Independent Pilots Association, which represents UPS pilots.

National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Deborah Hersman, while calling the new rule “a huge improvement,” also expressed dismay that cargo operations weren’t included.

“A tired pilot is a tired pilot, whether there are 10 paying customers on board or 100, whether the payload is passengers or pallets,” she said.

LaHood said he plans to invite top officials from cargo airlines to meet with him next month so that he can urge them to voluntarily follow the new rules.

The charter airlines that transport nearly 90 percent of U.S. troops around the world had also lobbied heavily for an exemption to the new rules, saying military missions could be jeopardized. But FAA officials rejected those pleas.

The rules will prevent about one and a half accidents a year and an average of six deaths a year, FAA officials predict. They should also improve pilots’ health, officials said.

Jean Medina, a spokeswoman for the Airlines for America trade association, said the group is reviewing the new requirements. “We support changes to the rule that are science-based and that will improve safety,” she wrote in an email.

Researchers say fatigue, much like alcohol, can impair a pilot’s performance by slowing reflexes and eroding judgment.

The changes replace “rules that were dangerously obsolete and completely ineffective,” said Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va. “The rule applies fatigue science in a way that makes sense.”

Susan Bourque, who lost a sister in the Buffalo air crash, said she was particularly pleased that the rule will require pilots to sign a statement before each flight stating that they are rested and fit for duty. “It’s a pretty good day,” said Bourque, of East Aurora, N.Y.

Scheduling wasn’t an issue in the Buffalo accident, but NTSB concluded that the pilots’ performance was likely impaired by fatigue.

Neither pilot appeared to have slept in a bed the previous night. The flight’s captain had logged onto a computer in the middle of the night from an airport crew lounge where sleeping was discouraged. The first officer had commuted overnight from Seattle to Newark, N.J., much of the time sitting in a cockpit jumpseat. They could be heard yawning on the ill-fated flight’s cockpit voice recorder.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Associated Press

This is the last known photo of Huguette Clark, taken 80 years ago. She hid away in a New York hospital room for at least the past 22 years, until her death in May. This photo was made on Aug. 11, 1930, the day of her divorce, in Reno, Nev. Her marriage lasted two years. She had no children.

New York — A New York state official has accused the attorney and accountant for mysterious heiress Huguette Clark of a tax fraud that could cost her estate $50 million in IRS penalties. While the men denied any wrongdoing, the accountant resigned this week from handling her $400 million estate just before the allegations were leveled in court documents.

The allegation was made by the office of the public administrator of New York County, who was appointed by the court as a third administrator, in effect to watch the actions of Clark’s attorney and accountant. The public administrator, Ethel J. Griffin, asked the court on Tuesday to remove attorney Wallace “Wally” Bock and accountant Irving Kamsler as executors, a position that would normally pay each of them about 2 percent of her estate, or roughly $16 million each.

Document: Read the full petition at msnbc.com. (PDF file opens in a new window.)

Clark, who died in May at age 104, gained public attention in a series of articles on msnbc.com over the past two years, focusing at first on the mystery of her empty mansions and then the financial dealings of her attorney and accountant. The full series of articles is at http://clark.msnbc.com. Born in 1906, Clark was the youngest child of former U.S. Sen. William Andrews Clark (1839-1925), a copper miner and U.S. senator from Montana, said to be one of the richest men in the world.

Public administrator’s petition to remove Bock and Kamsler, Dec. 20, 2011

Family motion to intervene in the estate case, Nov. 28, 2011

Huguette Clark’s last will and testament, signed April 19, 2005

Huguette Clark’s previous will, signed March 7, 2005

Family’s petition seeking a guardian for Huguette Clark, September 2010

Attorney Bock’s sworn statement to the court, September 2010

Judge’s ruling rejecting her family’s guardianship petition, September 2010

Kamsler letter informing Clark of his guilty plea, February 2009

Kamsler’s criminal court file and investigator’s report

—

Previous stories in the Huguette Clark mystery on msnbc.com:

Archive of all stories, photos and videos

Photo narrative, “The Clarks: An American story of wealth, scandal and mystery,” Feb. 26, 2010.

Printable version of the photo narrative, Feb. 26, 2010. 

Clark family notes and sources, Feb. 26, 2010.

Investigative report, part one, “At 104, the mysterious heiress Huguette Clark is alone now: Relatives are kept away. Only her accountant and attorney visit. Who protects Huguette Clark, with 3 empty homes and no heirs?” Aug. 19, 2010.

Investigative report, part two, “Who is watching Huguette Clark’s millions? Reclusive heiress’s assets are sold by two advisers, one an accountant with a felony conviction. Another elderly client signed over his property to the same accountant and attorney,” Aug. 20, 2010. 

“Criminal probe begins into the finances of reclusive heiress Huguette Clark: Manhattan DA’s Elder Abuse Unit is on the case. The same unit prosecuted the Brooke Astor case — though Clark has about four times the wealth,” Aug. 24, 2010. 

“Report sparks welfare check on heiress Huguette Clark,” Aug. 25, 2010. 

“Generosity of an heiress: four homes for a nurse, gifts for attorney’s family,” Sept. 1, 2010. 

“Huguette Clark, the reclusive heiress, has signed a will, attorney says,” Sept. 2, 2010.

“Family of copper heiress asks court to protect her from attorney, accountant,” Sept. 3, 2010.

“Attorney for 104-year-old heiress defends his handling of her finances,” Sept. 7, 2010. 

“Judge leaves pair under investigation in control of heiress Huguette Clark’s fortune,” Sept. 9, 2010. 

“Huguette Clark, the reclusive copper heiress, dies at 104,” May 24, 2011.

“Family excluded from Huguette Clark burial,” May 26, 2011.

“The 1 percent of the 1 percent: How Huguette Clark’s millions were spent,” Nov. 19, 2011.

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — A Navy tradition caught up with the repeal of the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule on Wednesday when two women sailors became the first to share the coveted “first kiss” on the dock after one of them returned from 80 days at sea.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta of Placerville, Calif., descended from the USS Oak Hill amphibious landing ship and shared a quick kiss with her partner, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell of Los Angeles. The crowd screamed and waved flags around them.

Both women, ages 22 and 23 respectively, are fire controlmen in the Navy. They met at training school and have been dating for two years.

Navy officials said it was the first time on record that a same-sex couple was chosen to kiss first upon a ship’s return. Sailors and their loved ones bought $1 raffle tickets for the opportunity. Gaeta said she bought $50 of tickets. The Navy said the money would be used to host a Christmas party for the children of sailors.

The ship returned to Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story following an 80-day deployment to Central America. The crew of more than 300 participated in exercises involving the militaries of Honduras, Guatemala Colombia and Panama as part of Amphibious-Southern Partnership Station 2012.

Snell is based on the USS Bainbridge, the guided missile destroyer that helped rescue cargo captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates in 2009.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Fred Prouser / Reuters

An existing single family home which is up for sale is pictured in Burbank, Calif., Dec. 15, 2011.

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Real estate agents are famous for putting a listing in the best possible light to close a sale. On Thursday, the industry’s national trade association confirmed that its monthly data have been painting a rosier picture of the pace of home sales since 2007.

As msnbc.com reported in March, the National Association of Realtors has been overstating the pace of existing home sales by more than 16 percent. The trade group now says just 17.7 million existing homes were sold from 2007 to 2010, not the 20.6 million it originally reported. The NAR made no changes to its data on home prices.

In its announcement of the downward revisions, the trade group sought to downplay the impact of “re-benchmarking” the data lower.

“From a consumer’s perspective, only the local market information matters and there are no changes to local multiple listing service data or local supply-and-demand balance, or to local home prices,” NAR economist Lawrence Yun said in a release explaining the revisions.

The NAR’s monthly sales data is a critical input for a host of widely-watched forecasts generated by public and private economists – from Wall Street to the Federal Reserve. Investors make big bets based on the data. Debates on government policy, from the White House to Capitol Hill, rely on this barometer of the health of the housing industry, a critical pillar of the U.S economy.

Barclays Capital

The revision shows that home sales were substantially lower than originally reported over the past three years.

But beginning about a year ago, the data reported by the NAR began diverging from the assessment of independent researchers. That began a lengthy reassessment of its data collection methods and analysis as the trade group met with government and private housing experts, including the Federal Reserve, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Mortgage Bankers Association, the National Association of Home Builders, government-owned mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and CoreLogic, a California-based data firm that first raised doubts about the association’s data.

It would not be the first time the NAR’s economics team has overstated the health of the housing market. Following the housing market peak in late 2005, the trade group’s forecasts remained upbeat well into 2007.

Thursday’s downward data revisions confirm that the housing market has fallen further than originally thought. But the new numbers don’t change the outlook for the market’s recovery. That’s because the revisions also lowered the NAR’s estimate of the number of houses for sale by 18 percent, to 2.6 million from 3.1 million.

“The balance between supply and demand is the same,” said Paul Dales, a senior economist at Capital Economics. “The revisions therefore hold no implications for either the previous, or future, path of prices.”

The median price for an existing home fell 3.5 percent in November from a year earlier to $164,200, according to the NAR.

On Thursday, the trade group cited a number of factors that combined to skew the data upward. Since the housing market collapsed in 2007, fewer homeowners have opted to sell their house without a real estate agent. At the same time, more homebuilders have begun using the multiple listing services to find customers. Those shifts tended to inflate the number of sales captured by those MLS systems, which form the basis for the NAR’s data collection.

The expansion of MLS services since 2007 has already created some regional overlap, with more than one MLS system listing the same property in some cases. That overlap lead to some double counting of sales, the NAR said.

The group also cited changes in the way the Census Bureau collects data, population shifts and noted that some sales were counted twice as homes were “flipped” shortly after they were purchased.

The “re-benchmarked” data show the pace of home sales was substantially slower from 2007 through 2010 than originally reported. The figure for 2007 was lowered 11 percent to 5.04 million; 2008 was lowered 16 percent to 4.11 million; 2009 dropped 16 percent to 4.34 million; and 2010 fell by 15 percent to 4.19 million.

The latest monthly data from the group show that existing home sales rose 4 percent in November to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.42 million.

The NAR report follows news Tuesday that home builders are seeing a gradual recovery new housing starts and permits. Last month, builders broke ground on an annual rate of 685,000 homes, according to the Commerce Dept. That was a 9.3 percent jump from October and the fastest pace since April 2010.

The National Association of Realtors announces existing home sales in November increased 4 percent, reports CNBC’s Diana Olick.

Opening testimonies in the Article 32 hearing for PFC Bradley Manning raised many questions this week over the credibility of the government’s key witness against the alleged WikiLeaks contributor.

Following four days of testimonies led by the prosecution against Bradley Manning, the attorneys for the accused whistleblower called only two witnesses on behalf of the defense Wednesday before retiring their case. 

The brief few minutes of testimonies brought by Manning’s attorneys follows days of speeches offered by government witnesses, including the former hacker that alerted the authorities who also happens to be a recovering drug addict and felon.

With Day Six of the hearing coming to a close in less than two hours Wednesday morning, the court is slated to return Thursday for closing arguments in the Article 32 hearing which will determine if Manning shall go before a court martial. The prosecution called 20 witnesses during the first four days of testimonies before Manning’s attorneys were given only two bodies on the stand.

In the days before the case began, David E. Coombs, attorney for Manning, asked the US government for around 50 witnesses to help support his case, including President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Coombs charged on the first day of the hearing that Army Lt. Col. Paul Almanza, the presiding officer, could not possibly be seen as impartial given that he allowed for every witness wanted by the prosecution to take the stand, dwarfing the dismal duo of testimonies that was allowed today.

Wednesday morning’s testimonies called by the defense were made up of statements offered by Sergeant Daniel Padgett, one of Manning’s superior officers in Baghdad, and Captain Barclay Keay, a night-time supervisor of the soldier. In all, the testimonies lasted 35 minutes, the first five of which were not broadcast to nearby members of the media due to a technical glitch.

On Tuesday, the government presented perhaps the most significant witness against Manning, Adrian Lamo, a former hacker. Lamo had forged an online friendship with Manning and says he opened himself up for the soldier to confide in him regarding the leaked documents he is accused of uploading to WikiLeaks, only to later turn him into the authorities. During Tuesday’s testimony, however, Lamo confirmed that he had battled problems with drug abuse and was convicted of a felony. The ex-hacker also attested that he had overdosed on amphetamines, suffered an addition of prescription narcotics in the past and was involuntarily institutionalized at one point.

When Coombs questioned Lamo about the chat transcripts between Manning and himself, he specifically called into question Lamo’s insistence to Manning that he was both a minister as well as a journalist. According to the transcripts, Lamo instructed Manning that he could treat their correspondence as either a confession or interview, vowing the truth to “never to be published.”

Despite this assurance, Lamo said on the stand this week that Manning “neither declined nor accepted” his offer of source protection. When Coombs asked him why, he told his client of his confession, “none of this is for print,” Lamo told the courtroom, “It was not for print by me.”

Lamo also admitted to being diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and was medicated at the time of his chats with Manning.

Other testimonies offered up this week linked Manning to documents uploaded to WikiLeaks and allegedly connected the soldier with the site’s mastermind, Julian Assange. As RT reported earlier this week, the introduction of Julian Assange into the case could at last give the US government a reason to extradite the WikiLeaks leaders to America. Authorities in the States have long hunted Assange for his involvement in publishing classified documents to the Web, and by expressing ties between the two men, may finally be able to get him in an American courtroom.

Witnesses called by the prosecution linked an online account belonging to Manning with an Internet-account believed to be owned by Assange. In a chat transcript introduced into court, Manning also allegedly tells an online friend, “I was the source of the July 12, 2007, video from the Apache Weapons Team which killed the two journalists and injured two kids.”

At the same time, however, Staff Sergeant Peter Bigelow testified on Tuesday that he had no idea who Assange was, calling into question how up-to-snuff the American intelligence community has been throughout the whole ordeal, despite some leaders saying that the Assange/Manning cause could have been a catastrophe for US security and diplomatic relations. Special Agent David Shaver said on Sunday that he had linked Manning’s computer with cables published by WikiLeaks, only to admit during cross-examination the next day that none of those they he compared actually matched.

Testimonies this week also largely suggested that Manning was emotionally disturbed during his time in the military and was prone to outbursts and unusual behavior. Former supervisors of the soldier testified that Manning was also expressed symptoms of paranoia and psychosis, struck a female supervisor in the face once and had to be restrained during tantrums in the past. Despite this, he was granted ongoing access to intelligence that the government says was detrimental to the security of the country and jeopardized by Manning’s involvement with Assange.

“I’m amazed that the army ever allowed Manning to go to Iraq – let alone anywhere near classified information,” Dominic Rushe of The Guardian writes Tuesday.

Daniel Ellsberg, former Department of Defense insider and leaker of the Pentagon Papers, told RT earlier this week that he believes the government is trying to work a confession out of Manning linking him with Assange, regardless of what the truth is. Ellsberg calls into question the 18 months of captivity leading up to the Article 32 hearing, almost a year of which left the soldier in complete and total isolation.

“What is torture for?” asked Ellsberg to RT’s Alyona Minkovski on Monday. “It’s really a way of getting false confessions. That’s what it does. That’s what it’s for. And in this case, I think they want not only an association with Assange as with some journalist or whoever, they want this very special, an ‘unjournalistic’ kind of thing. They want to show some kind of conspiracy . . .and they want to break him down.”

Ellsberg recalls that his own whistle blowing trial nearly 40 years earlier was dismissed after a judge found “gross governmental misconduct that offends the sense of justice.” In the case of the isolation and torture of Manning, Ellsberg says such a trend is still “perfectly evident” four decades later and he appalled that the hearing is proceeding as it.

Following closing arguments slated to begin Thursday, the presiding officer of the court will be tasked with completing his report on the hearing by January 16, 2012, at which point he will have to recommend whether or not Manning shall go before a court martial. Prosecutors have lobbied 22 charges against the alleged whistleblower. If convicted of all, Manning faces the death penalty but the US government says they will not seek capital punishment.

The prosecution says Manning penned a text file on a portable memory card in which the soldier wrote of the leaked files, “This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time, removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare. Have a good day.”