Man with 'suspicious' pack arrested near Pentagon

© AFP/Getty Images Win Mcnamee

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Police blocked off roads around the Pentagon on Friday and searched the surrounding area after arresting a man with a suspicious backpack in nearby Arlington National Cemetery.

Police later identified the suspect as 22-year-old Marine Corps reservist Yonathan Melaku.
"Melaku was in possession of a backpack that contained unknown materials which initially caused public safety concerns," the FBI said in a statement.

"Bomb experts at the scene, however, were able to determine that the items were non-explosive and inert. The materials in the backpack will undergo further testing," the statement read.

America Is Bankrupt (But Not the Way You Think)

Wiki Commons Image

Harvard Business Review

Healthcare, schools, police, tax breaks: which would you keep, slash, or cut? The axe has to swing, so where, if you were the lumberjack, would you aim it? It's the central, polarizing question in this age of austerity.

Or is it? Maybe relying on cuts to reboot prosperity is a bit like starting a diet to treat Alzheimer's: probably not going to work.

Consider an allegory: a household racking up debt not just because they have easy credit, but because they're a dysfunctional family to begin with. Meet the new Joneses: they're a little less Cleaver and little more Soprano.

Dad Jones is the CEO of Toxico, a major, blue-chip energy corporation. He's an imperious millionaire, but he's stingier than Scrooge McDuck. Though he rakes it in, he flat-out refuses to contribute much, if anything, towards basic household costs--and when the family sets up rules to make him, he quickly finds loopholes. In fact, last year, instead of contributing to the household purse, he managed to find a way get a net contribution from it.

Declare Your Independence From the Empire

Michael S. Rozeff
Lew Rockwell

The peoples of the world once looked up to America and Americans. They held them in high respect and esteem. They respected their ideals. They respected their know-how and products.

Now, by its foreign policies of empire and their domestic counterparts, the U.S. government is destroying the dignity of America and Americans. Our morality is falling along with our productivity. Today, there is less and less of which Americans can be proud and there is more and more of which to be ashamed.

America can go in one of two ways. It can continue on the path of empire, in which case it continues downhill and impedes the world’s progress; or it can renounce empire, in which case it restores the dignity of Americans and imparts new opportunities to the peoples of the world.

America can lead the world down, in which case it becomes a backwater; or it can lead the world up, in which case Americans establish a moral center for freedom that radiates light to the world and opens up new paths for freedom everywhere.

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America In Decline: A Society In Denial

Mark Weber
IHR

During the 1950s and 1960s, the United States was the richest and most envied country in the world. It was also unrivaled as the world's manufacturing powerhouse. Americans proudly regarded their country is a model, and many people around the world agreed.

Today, the US is still the world's largest economy and pre-eminent military power, and it's still a country of great resources and wealth. But things have changed tremendously over the past half century.

More than ever before in our history, the American people sense that something is very wrong in our country. They are concerned about rising social-economic inequality, an erosion of national identity and purpose, increasing social polarization, and growing contempt for the US around the world.

Polls show that, as a long term trend, ever more Americans think that the US is "on the wrong track, and that this country is "in a state of decline." Surveys also show that Americans now believe that life for their children will be less prosperous and secure than it has been for them.


A popular song of the 1960s, "California Dreamin'," had the line, "I'd be safe and warm, If I was in LA." Los Angeles is still warm, but these days LA County is home to more than thirteen hundred criminal street gangs with 150,000 members. In one recent ten year period, the toll of lives taken by these gangs was nearly six thousand killed. That's more than the number of Americans who lost their lives in the Nine Eleven attacks of 2001, and in the Afghanistan war -- combined.

No one in the world today looks to Los Angeles as a model city. In listings of the world's top 15 "quality of living" cities, not one is in the US. In survey after survey, this country's place in global ratings of quality of life has been slipping. Likewise, the US has been steadily falling behind in education, engineering, science, and basic literacy.

During the 1950s and 1960s, California had one of the nation's best educational systems, with an enviable network of quality elementary schools. Today the achievement level of California schools is near the bottom for the entire United States.

Just a few decades ago, the US was the world's premier creditor nation. Today it's the number one debtor nation.

Perhaps most alarming of all, Americans now see the US rapidly becoming an unrecognizable `third world' country." This is due, above all, to the dramatic transformation of the racial-ethnic character of this country's population, a change that's the result of large-scale immigration from non-European countries, especially Mexico, and a birth-rate among Americans of European origin that has fallen below the replacement level.

Demographics, they say, is destiny. In 1950, every state and every major city in the US still had a majority European-origin population. Today four states -- including Texas and California, the most populous -- and most of our major cities have majority non-white populations.

This change has been especially dramatic here in southern California. It's no exaggeration to say that over the past half century, this region has been transformed more fundamentally than Poland, Hungary and other eastern European countries changed during nearly 50 years of Soviet Russian occupation and domination.

The great demographic trends in our country are forcing -- year by year -- dramatic changes in our culture, our politics, our educational level, our economy, and our quality of life.The comfortable, proud and confident America of the 1950s and 1960s is gone -- gone forever.

To imagine that California might return to what it was in 1960 is about as realistic as to imagine that Alaska will once again be Russian, or that Louisiana will return to being French.

The anxiety that Americans across the country feel about the future is much more than worry about the troubled economy. Americans have never been so socially divided, confused about themselves as a nation, and worried about the future.

In this situation, a failure of political and cultural-educational leadership has brought an unprecedented breakdown of trust. Nothing better underscores this erosion of trust than the Iraq war fiasco. In the months leading up to the US attack against Iraq in March 2003, government officials and much of the media -- as we now know -- deceived the public with alarmist falsehoods to justify the invasion and occupation of that country.

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Escaping Reality: Sweet Hallucinations Of A Lost American Dream

Michael Vail
Blacklisted News

Americans today are behaving like resigned and subdued rape victims. The American dream has long since been dead but we still reminisce and wish to return to the days of old. This country is being run like a corporation and we have been severely downsized. The writing was on the wall but no one dared to look. If they did look, none dared to speak it aloud. This is what has led us to the world we live in today and still none dare call it treason!

There was a time when our country succeeded because of the hard work of every man and woman. We made products and had valuable goods and services to offer the world. Yet there was a change that took place by our trusted government officials and they began to move our nation towards debt and exploitation. Every weaker nation on earth was our prey and the military and supporting corporations leaned on them and forced them to do their bidding.

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10 Signs the U.S. is Becoming a Third World Nation
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