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Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 7/2/2017 6:20:31 PM
	“From Horrific to Catastrophic”: Court Ruling Sends Illinois Into Financial Abyss July 1, 2017 at 11:43 pm Written by Tyler Durden (ZH) — First Maine, then Connecticut, and finally late on Friday, confirming the worst case outcome many had expected, Illinois entered its third straight fiscal year without a budget as Republican Governor Bruce Rauner and Democratic lawmakers failed to agree on how to compromise over the government’s chronic deficits, pushing it closer toward becoming the first junk-rated U.S. state. Then came the begging. According to Bloomberg, on Friday Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, a Democrat who controls much of the legislative agenda, pleaded with rating companies to “temporarily withhold judgment” as lawmakers negotiate. “Much work remains to be done,” the Democrat said on the floor of the House Friday, before the chamber adjourned for the day. “We’ll get the job done.” Meanwhile, the state remains without a spending plan, its tax receipts and outlays mostly on “autopilot”, leaving it with a record $15 billion of unpaid bills as it spent over $6 billion more than it brought in over the past year, and with $800 million in interest on the unpaid bills alone. The impasse has devastated social-service providers, shuttering services for the homeless, disabled and poor. The lack of state aid has wrecked havoc on universities, putting their accreditation at risk. However, in a “shocking” development, just hours remaining before the midnight deadline to pass the Illinois budget, and Illinois’ imminent loss of its investment grade rating, federal judge Joan Lefkow in Chicago ordered Illinois to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars it owes in Medicaid payments that state officials say the government doesn’t have, the Chicago Tribune reported. Judge Lefkow ordered the state to make $586 million in monthly payments (from the current $160 million) as well as another $2 billion toward a $3 billion backlog of payments – a $167 million increase in monthly outlays – the state owes to managed care organizations that process payments to providers. While it is no secret that as part of its collapse into the financial abyss, Illinois has accumulated $15 billion in unpaid bills, the state’s Medicaid recipients have had enough, and went to court asking a judge to order the state to speed up its payments. On Friday, the court ruled in their favor. The problem, of course, is that Illinois can no more afford to pay the outstanding Medicaid bills, than it can to pay any of its $14,711,351,943.90 in overdue bills as of June 30. The backlog of unpaid claims the state owes to managed-care companies directly, as well as to the doctors, hospitals, clinics and other organizations “is crippling these providers and thereby dramatically reducing the Medicaid recipients’ access to health care,” Lefkow said in her ruling (attached below). * * * Friday’s court ruling, which meant that the near-insolvent state must pay an additional $593 million per month, may have been the straw that finally broke the Illinois camel’s back. “Friday’s ruling by the U.S. District Court takes the state’s finances from horrific to catastrophic,” Comptroller Susana Mendoza, a Democrat, said in an emailed statement after the ruling. As a result of the court decision, “payments to the state’s pension funds; state payroll including legislator pay; General State Aid to schools and payments to local governments — in some combination — will likely have to be cut.” “As if the governor and legislators needed any more reason to compromise and settle on a comprehensive budget plan immediately, Friday’s ruling by the U.S. District Court takes the state’s finances from horrific to catastrophic,” Mendoza said in a statement. “A comprehensive budget plan must be passed immediately.” Realizing where all this is headed, she said that payments to bond holders won’t be interrupted (more below). Friday night’s legal decision followed a previously discussed ruling, when on June 7, Judge Lefkow ordered lawyers for the state to negotiate with Medicaid recipients to come up with more money, but she stopped short of dictating how much more the state should pay each month, or when. That decision sent Illinois General Obligation bond soaring. Earlier this week, the parties again went before the judge to say they were at an impasse, with lawyers for Medicaid recipients asking for more than $1 billion a month to cover past and ongoing costs. Lawyers for Illinois countered that they could only come up with approximately $75 million more a month, which would translate to $150 million with federal matching dollars. Although the state is way behind, state officials said in court filings that they have been making more than $1 billion in Medicaid related payments each month in 2017, “including payments to safety net hospitals, MCOs, and other providers.” While the state was livid over the decision, plaintiffs were delighted. Tom Yates, one of the lawyers who represented the Medicaid recipients. said the judge’s ruling is a “fair result” that will help them have access to care. “Medicaid is an incredibly important program for 25 percent of the state’s population,” Yates said. It remains unclear, however, where Illinois would find the required funds. In her ruling, Lefkow said the state must pay the $2 billion toward its past obligations beginning July 1 and ending June 30, 2018. She ordered the state to file monthly reports showing that it’s making the payments consistent with the ruling. The Judge said she considered submissions by managed care organizations, including The Meridian MCO and Aetna Better Health Inc., in reaching her decision. Meridian is owed $540 million and Aetna is owed $700 million, the judge said. In addition, she considered submissions from doctors and clinics. Adding insult to crippling financial injury, the judge also ordered the state to file monthly reports showing that they are making the payments consistent with the ruling. * * * Meanwhile, despite the recent fireworks, things in Illinois remain on autopilot as the state needs a new budget to change financial direction. Without a budget, Bloomberg writes, the state has continued to spend more than it brings in. That’s forced it to cover “core priority” payments first, including payroll, debt service and pensions that total about $1.85 billion a month. While those bills include some Medicaid-covered payments like health services for children and adults, the state has said there aren’t enough funds to include general payments to managed-care organizations as a top priority. Also, without a budget that includes borrowing to pay down the bill backlog, Illinois by August will run out of money for key expenses for the first time since the stalemate began, according to Comptroller Mendoza. That means school funding, state payroll, and pension payments could be affected, she said. There won’t be enough money for these mandated or court-ordered payments. As noted above, Mendoza said that this won’t jeopardize debt-service payments, however she probably should have added “for now.” For now, Illinois hasn’t missed any bond payments and state law requires it to make monthly deposits to its debt-service funds. For now, despite the Illinois deadline coming and going, the political standoff shows no signs of ending. And now the market is set to react: investors have already punished Illinois for its fiscal woes. Yields on the state’s 10-year bonds have soared to 4.8%, 2.8% points higher than benchmark debt. That’s the highest yield of all 22 states that Bloomberg tracks. Summarizing best the chaos in Illinois was John Humphrey, the head of credit research for Gurtin Municipal Bond Management, which oversees about $10.1 billion of state and local debt who said that “recognizing that they’re continuing to work through the weekend, it doesn’t look good to adjourn halfway through your last day.” * * * The case is Memisovski v. Wright, 92-cv-01982, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois. To see full court ruling click here. By Tyler Durden / Republished with permission / Zero Hedge / Report a typo
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 7/3/2017 12:02:27 AM
	Scientists Now Believe the Universe Itself May Be Conscious June 28, 2017 at 6:56 pm Written by Jake Anderson (ANTIMEDIA) – You don’t have to look far to find outlandish theories on the nature of the cosmos and human consciousness. These days, notions once relegated to science fiction are finding their way into esoteric academic journals, and from there, into mainstream discourse. One example of this is the Simulation Argument, recently championed by Elon Musk; another is ‘time crystals,’ a tantalizing non-linear phase of matter. The newest symphony of mind jazz being broadcast across the Internet posits new ideas about the embattled theory of “panpsychism,” or the belief that mind is a fundamental property of the physical universe and is imbued into all states of matter. A new paper, published by physicist Gregory Matloff, has brought the idea back into scientific discussions, promising experimental tests that could “validate or falsify” the concept of a ubiquitous “proto-consciousness field.” Matloff also pushes the controversial idea of volitional stars, suggesting there is actually evidence that stars control their own galactic paths. As absurd as the theory sounds, it has several prominent adherents, including British theoretical physicist Sir Roger Penrose, who introduced panpsychism three decades ago. Penrose believed consciousness arises from the properties of quantum entanglement. He and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff authored the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) hypothesis, which asserts, among other things, that consciousness results from quantum vibrations inside microtubules. In 2006, German physicist Bernard Haisch took the idea further and proposed that consciousness arises within a “quantum vacuum” any time there is a significantly advanced system through which energy flows. Neuroscientist Christof Koch, another proponent of panpsychism, approaches it from a different angle, using integrated information theory to argue that consciousness is not unique to biological organisms. “The only dominant theory we have of consciousness says that it is associated with complexity — with a system’s ability to act upon its own state and determine its own fate,” Koch argues. “Theory states that it could go down to very simple systems. In principle, some purely physical systems that are not biological or organic may also be conscious.” Matloff and other scientists are moving the argument into a new phase: experimentation. Matloff intends to study the behavior of stars, specifically analyzing an anomaly in stellar motion known as Paranego’s Discontinuity. Matloff wants to know why certain cooler stars appear to emit jets of energy pointed in one direction, a characteristic that seems oddly and inexplicably ubiquitous in the galaxy. In 2018, he plans to use results from the Gaia star-mapping space telescope to show that the anomaly may be a willful stellar action. Meanwhile, as Matloff studies cosmic activity on the grandest scale, Koch approaches the experimental phase of the theory using brain-impaired patients. He wants to know if their information responses match underlying neurochemical foundations of consciousness. He plans to test this by wiring the brains of mice together to see if their minds merge into a larger information system. Panpsychism certainly has critics, as well. In an article for The Atlantic entitled “Why Panpsychism Is Probably Wrong,” Keith Frankish writes: “Panpsychism gives consciousness a curious status. It places it at the very heart of every physical entity yet threatens to render it explanatorily idle. For the behavior of subatomic particles and the systems they constitute promises to be fully explained by physics and the other physical sciences. Panpsychism offers no distinctive predictions or explanations. It finds a place for consciousness in the physical world, but that place is a sort of limbo.” The quote expresses a general sense that panpsychism oversimplifies the hard problem of consciousness in the universe, an opinion many scientists share. However, Matloff, Penrose, and other proponents continue undertaking the job of venturing outside the margins of accepted science to try reconciling intractable contradictions and anomalies exposed by quantum theory. Creative Commons / Anti-Media / Report a typo
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 7/3/2017 12:22:47 AM
	Number of US police shooting victims to approach 1,000 by end of year – report Published time: 2 Jul, 2017 05:20 Edited time: 2 Jul, 2017 15:18 © Lucy Nicholson / Reuters The number of people projected to die at the hands of police in 2017 is set to close in on 1,000 for the third year running, the Washington Post says in an annual study. Of the 492 people killed by police so far, nearly a quarter are black men. The Washington Post, which has tracked fatal shootings and killings by police since 2015 through its ‘Fatal Force’ project, published its half-year findings on Saturday. Despite the massive backlash against police brutality led by the Black Lives Matter movement, shootings continue largely unabated, the newly-released figures indicate. Read more Indicted FBI agent pleads not guilty to cover-up of fatal shooting of Oregon militia's LaVoy Finicum While the number of unarmed people killed by police since January has slightly decreased in comparison to the same period last year, the difference remains within the margin of error. In 2016, a total of 34 people were shot dead by police from January till July, while this year the count is seven people fewer. From all unarmed people killed, black men continue to stand out at 26 percent. While still disproportionate in terms of the total US population ratio - of which they represent about 6 percent - it is still a drop from 32 percent last year. READ MORE: Chicago creating ‘paramilitary occupying force to oppress communities’ – BLM spokesperson At the same time, the number of people killed in altercations with police appears to have risen slightly, the newspaper says. In 2016, 466 were reported killed by police by June 30, while this year the figure climbed to 492. Almost a quarter of them are black, the study found out. Half-year estimates suggest that 2017 will be no different to the two previous years, when the number of police killings was nearing four digits. In 2015, police shootings claimed the lives of 991 people, while last year the count reached 963. Read more Michael Brown’s parents settle wrongful death lawsuit with Ferguson According to the research, which draws on open sources such as social media posts, public records and media reports, some 8 percent of US police departments have been involved in at least one incident that led to the death of a suspect as a result of police shooting since the project started. Of particular concern is the number of victims that were suffering from mental issues at the time they were killed by police. Every fourth person killed was said to be battling with some sort of mental illness. At the same time, the number of police officers killed while on duty has also increased, according to statistics released by the FBI in May, which registered a staggering rise of 61 percent for 2016 in comparison to 2015. This represents 66 law enforcement officers“feloniously killed” in the line of duty in 2016. There is no official data available on police killings. The FBI is not required to collect statistical data on the matter, and relies on scarce voluntary reports submitted by law enforcement agencies. According to the Washington Post, it registered “twice as many shootings by police in 2015 and 2016 as ever recorded in a single year by the FBI’s tracking of such shootings.” (RT)
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 7/3/2017 10:44:31 AM
	‘Rogue’ SAS squadron investigated over executions of unarmed Afghan civilians – paper Published time: 2 Jul, 2017 09:57 FILE PHOTO © Omar Sobhani / Reuters “Credible” evidence indicates that Special Air Service troops executed unarmed civilians during night raids in Afghanistan and doctored after-action reports to shift blame onto their Afghan partners, the Times claims, citing military and defense sources. The series of killings allegedly took place during the final stages of Britain’s involvement in the Afghan war, the Times reported, citing a major Royal Military Police (RMP) investigation codenamed ‘Operation Northmoor’. Part of the RMP inquiry is said to have focused on a specific SAS squadron dubbed a “rogue” unit. Read more ‘I want to face war crimes trial,’ says British Army major over Iraq allegations Sources with detailed knowledge concerning the investigation said there is “strong evidence” that unarmed Afghan civilians suspected of being Taliban militants were executed during night raids on their homes. Conducting Night raids to apprehend suspected insurgents was a key tactic for British and other Western forces in Afghanistan. The suspects would then be sent to detention centers in an attempt to undermine the leadership of the Taliban. Some British army officers told the Times they believed the SAS’ night operations were often based on unreliable intelligence. Special Forces operatives were also inclined to kill rather than capture suspects, contrary to the rules of engagement. In many cases, SAS soldiers allegedly tried to create the false impression that their victims were high-ranked Taliban warlords in order to cover up the reported killings. Members of the “rogue unit” routinely carried Russian-made Makarov pistols commonly used by top Taliban or Al-Qaeda leaders so that they could photograph them alongside the bodies of their alleged victims, according to the Times. The ‘kill pistol’ was intended to make it look like the slain subject had posed a threat to SAS soldiers. An officer told the newspaper that a friend in another Special Forces unit had been offered such a “kill pistol,” but had refused it. In other instances, the SAS reported that the civilians had been shot dead by Afghan commandos, who often accompanied British soldiers during the raids. However, the RMP examined the bullets found in some of the victims and concluded that they were 5.56mm rounds, which were used by the SAS at the time, but not the Afghan army, which normally used 7.62mm rounds. Read more Hooded men: Conduct of British Army in N. Ireland ‘on scale of war crime,’ court told Another source told the Times that, at one point, an Afghan commando unit had refused to patrol with the British because of their conduct. An Afghan Special Forces officer also told the newspaper that in 2010 he had seen SAS soldiers planting drugs and guns on a victim who had been “needlessly” shot at a checkpoint. Sometimes the SAS would order the Afghans to stay outside the building they were raiding, possibly because they had already“decided, rather than capture, they’ll kill.” The RMP investigators reportedly acquired footage of some of the incidents – the so-called ‘kill TV’ – that shows British troops present at a shooting. Launched in 2014, the RMP investigation has taken on dozens of cases involving alleged killings by British Special Forces. It has become one of the largest inquiries conducted by British military police, with more than 100 detectives involved. However, the government is now reluctant to carry on with the investigation, as it could potentially lead to numerous courts martial being initiated to prosecute alleged war crimes. A Defense Ministry spokesman said on Friday that more than 90 percent of the 675 unlawful killing allegations examined by the RMP had been dropped and fewer than 10 cases are still being examined, the newspaper said. A senior Whitehall source told the Times that the leadership of the British military consider the RMP investigation into “mass executions” to be “credible and extremely serious.” The source added that the probe is “seen as a potential disaster for the government,” so there have been attempts “to keep it under control by reducing the scale of the investigation.” The Defense Ministry wanted “to just make it go away,” the source said. He believes officials are desperately trying to “avoid any of the detail of the accusations getting into the press and thereby undermining, in their view, national security, public trust, [and] work with allies.” (RT)
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 7/3/2017 11:06:39 AM
	FBI Investigating 1,000 ISIS-Related Threats in All 50 States BY ANUGRAH KUMAR , CHRISTIAN POST CONTRIBUTOR Jul 1, 2017 \| 10:05 AM (PHOTO: REUTERS/KRISTINA BARKER)An American flag is seen along Wyoming Highway 59 near a residential housing development south of Gillette, Wyoming, U.S. May 31, 2016. Days after Charlotte-area ISIS sympathizer Justin Sullivan was sentenced to life for planning mass murder in support of the Islamic State terror group, a North Carolina-based terrorism expert says the FBI is investigating about 1,000 ISIS-related threats in all 50 states. U.S. Attorney Jill Rose of Charlotte has confirmed that suspected ISIS sympathizers are being investigated in North Carolina while not disclosing the number, a "domestic-terrorism expert" told The Charlotte Observer that the state probes are among some 1,000 active FBI investigations. After Sullivan's conviction this week, Keri Farley, the FBI's assistant special agent in charge of North Carolina, was quoted as saying that while Sullivan's arrest saved lives, "homegrown violent extremists" are becoming more difficult to deal with. "Identifying a terrorist before an attack happens is one of the most difficult challenges we face," she said at a press conference. "It's harder than finding a needle in a haystack; it's like finding a needle in a stack of needles. But that's exactly what happened in this case." (christianpost.com)
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
	+2

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