The Hartford Courant looks at the on-line persona of Newtown gunman Adam Lanza:

Mass Murders Captivated Online User Believed To Be Adam Lanza (Courant.com)

Although Lanza did not use his name, investigators linked the poster's user name to Lanza, according to sources familiar with the probe of the Dec. 14 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The same user name appears in the Wikipedia edits, discovered by The Courant. A Wikipedia spokesman said the website could not identify the poster, citing privacy policies. Investigators are now looking into whether the same person did the Wikipedia editing.

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The poster who authorities suspect is Lanza questions Connecticut's assault-gun ban, offers a blueprint for his laptop computer and provides YouTube links to a commercial for a laughing doll from the 1970s and for The Rock-afire Explosion, an animatronics band that played in ShowBiz Pizza locations in the 1980s.

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The poster appears to be part of a video gaming "clan," communicating with the others through myshoutbox.com in February 2010. At one point, some fellow gamers appear to be lamenting the departure of the poster, and of others, from the clan.

Taking worship of markets to a new extreme, Mike Merrill decided to sell himself to stockholders, who would be able to vote on most aspects of his life, from romantic relationships to sleep schedules to making him register as a Republican.

Meet the Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share | Wired Business | Wired.com (Wired Business)

But, like many entrepreneurs before him, Merrill soon learned the downside to taking on outside funding. In the ensuing months and years, 128 people bought shares of Merrill, and he fell victim to competing shareholder interests, stock price manipu­lation, and investors looking for short-term gains at the expense of his long-term well-being. He was overwhelmed by paperwork and blindsided by takeover interest. He found himself beholden to his shareholders in ways he had never imagined, ruining personal relationships along the way. Through it all, Merrill clung stubbornly to the belief that since an IPO had worked for Google and Amazon, it should work for an individual too.

As more and more people wake up to what's been going on in Palestine the past few decades, the powers-that-be in Israel are getting desperate.

Israel to pay students to defend it online

Israel is looking to hire university students to post pro-Israel messages on social media networks—without needing to identify themselves as government-linked, officials said Wednesday.

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The Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz identified the official heading the project as Danny Seaman, a public diplomacy official who has written posts on his personal Facebook page which Haaretz described as being incendiary and anti-Muslim.

Haaretz posted what it said were four screen shots of his recent posts. In one of them, Seaman wrote: "Does the commencement of the fast of the Ramadan mean that Muslims will stop eating each other during the daytime?" In another, he uses profanity in a comment about the chief Palestinian peace negotiator.

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Public image is a paramount concern to Israeli officials. The prime minister's office oversees a national initiative for "hasbara"—a Hebrew term that officials translate as public diplomacy and critics call propaganda.

From the "why we are doomed" file. Besides the scientific ignorance and the "global government" paranoia about the U.N., note the subtle appeal to the racists in the audience: of course the U.N. official interfering with your sacred right to pollute the atmosphere with fossil fuel CO2 is from Nigeria....

Member of Congressional Science Committee: Global Warming a ‘Fraud’ to ‘Create Global Government’ | The Nation

Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), a senior member of the House Science Committee, used a portion of his time at a town hall this week to launch into a rant about global warming, which he described as a plot by liberals to “create global government to control our lives.”

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"And at the federal government, they want to create global government to control all of our lives. That’s what the game plan is. It’s step by step by step, more and bigger control over our lives by higher levels of government. And global warming is that strategy in spades.… Our freedom to make our choices on transportation and everything else? No, that’s gotta be done by a government official who, by the way, probably comes from Nigeria because he’s a UN government official, not a US government official."

A small victory for civil rights, as Bloomberg's "stop and frisk" policy is recognized as the assault on minority citizens that it is.

Stop-and-Frisk Practice Violated Rights, Judge Rules

In a blistering decision issued on Monday, the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, found that the Police Department had “adopted a policy of indirect racial profiling” that targeted young minority men for stops. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the city would appeal the ruling, angrily accusing the judge of deliberately not giving the city “a fair trial.”

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She emphasized what she called the “human toll of unconstitutional stops,” noting that some of the plaintiffs testified that their encounters with the police left them feeling that they did not belong in certain areas of the cities. She characterized each stop as “a demeaning and humiliating experience.”

“No one should live in fear of being stopped whenever he leaves his home to go about the activities of daily life,” the judge wrote. During police stops, she found, blacks and Hispanics “were more likely to be subjected to the use of force than whites, despite the fact that whites are more likely to be found with weapons or contraband.”

More and more, it's becoming clear that the "bankruptcy" of Detroit is an experiment in how the investment class might be able to loot a city. Detroit was the ultimate company town, a city so willing to capitulate to the auto industry that it used eminent domain to seize property on behalf of General Motors; but when the industry found it more profitable to move elsewhere, Motown got the shaft.

But it's not enough for the ruling class to abandon the city, not when they can steal some more from it:

On Vultures and Red Wings: Billionaire Gets New Sports Arena in Bankrupt Detroit | The Nation

Yes, the very week Michigan Governor Rick Snyder granted a state-appointed emergency manager’s request to declare the Motor City bankrupt, the Tea Party governor gave a big thumbs-up to a plan for a new $650 million Detroit Red Wings hockey arena. Almost half of that $650 million will be paid with public funds.

This is actually happening. City services are being cut to the bone. Fighting fires, emergency medical care and trash collection are now precarious operations. Retired municipal workers will have their $19,000 in annual pensions dramatically slashed. Even the artwork in the city art museum will be sold off piece by piece....

They don’t have money to keep the art on the walls. They do have $283 million to subsidize a new arena for Red Wings owner and founder of America’s worst pizza-pizza chain, Little Caesar’s, Mike Ilitch, whose family is worth $2.7 billion dollars.

From the "Apple delenda est" department:

Apple workers file lawsuit for lost wages due to bag searches (GigaOM)

Former employees at Apple stores in New York and Los Angeles have filed a class action suit, claiming the iPhone maker required them to stand in line for up to 30 minutes every shift and wait for a manager to search their bags.

According to a complaint filed in San Francisco federal court, the searches result in Apple workers being deprived of around $1,500 a year in unpaid wages:

It's worth noting that this innovative solution comes from a town whose mayor, Gayle McLaughlin, is a Green Party member. You won't see this from either major party, since both the Ds and the Rs are firmly corporatist.

'Eminent Domain for the People' Leaves Wall Street Furious (Common Dreams)

'Eminent domain' has long been a dirty term for housing justice advocates who have seen municipalities invoke public seizure laws to displace residents and communities to make way for highways, shopping malls, and other big dollar projects.

But in Richmond, city officials are using eminent domain to force big banks to stop foreclosing on people's homes in an innovative new strategy known as 'Principle Reduction' aimed at addressing California's burgeoning housing crisis.

Richmond became the first California city last week to move forward on a plan that has been floated by other California municipalities to ask big bank lenders to sell underwater mortgage loans at a discount to the city (if the owner consents), and seize those homes through eminent domain if the banks refuse. The city has committed to refinancing these homes for owners at their current value, not what is owed.

The latest nauseating discovery of how the surveillance state operates:

Exclusive: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans (Reuters)

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

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The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

The most disturbing aspect of this is that the very existence of this "Special Operations Division" (SOD), whereby the FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, and DHS pass information on to the DEA, is supposed to be secret. Agents are instructed to refrain from mentioning it in any reports, affidavits, or testimony, and to pretend that the information originated from other sources.

Finn Selander, a former DEA agent who saw the light and is now a Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, compares the process to a well-known criminal activity: "It's just like laundering money - you work it backwards to make it clean."

Good piece from the BBC on the militarization of policing in the U.S.

The rise of America's warrior cops (BBC News)

Police officers in the US today are increasingly not only armed but heavily armoured.

The author and investigative reporter Radley Balko traces this shift in his book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces.