The House Financial Services committee voted moments ago to ban pay practices at financial firms that encourage "inappropriate risk," one of the government's boldest moves into the private sector.

White supremacist radio host Hal Turner was an FBI informant, his lawyer revealed in court today. The announcement is a confirmation of what hackers claimed nearly a year ago after allegedly gaining access to his e-mails.

Turner was arrested on June 24 for allegedly calling for the murder of three judges who supported the Chicago gun ban. The confession by his attorney came at a bond hearing Tuesday.

"Attorney Michael Orozco [...] said his client gave authorities information about a plot to assassinate President Barack Obama," reported the Associated Press.

However, prosecutors said they had no information about the alleged plot, but did confirm Turner had a relationship with the bureau. Attorney William Hogan told the wire service that relationship had ended "some time ago."

Washington and Beijing are working closely on a range of economic, environmental and security issues. So it might seem strange that U.S. Pacific Air Force’s new annual wargame, “Pacific Vision,” imagines a no-holds-barred assault by Chinese forces on the U.S. military’s Pacific outposts �" and how U.S. forces might dodge the attacks. “A key subject was dispersal of aircraft, in particular, during a military emergency since bases in Okinawa, Guam, Hawaii and Alaska are now considered vulnerable to attack by ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, cyber weapons and directed energy such as lasers and high power microwaves,” Ares’ David Fulghum reports.

Schwarzenegger used his line-item veto authority to save an additional $656 million that will let the state restore a reserve fund he said is needed for tough times.

Democrats immediately protested the social spending reductions and threatened to block his political agenda during his final months in office.

"This kind of game playing by the governor doesn't bode well for success in terms of water, corrections, pensions or any of the other items the he is looking to in order to build some kind of real legacy," Assembly Speaker Karen Bass said.

During a discussion of the Obama birth certificate controversy, MSNBC host Chris Matthews and his guests implied that anyone who questions the official 9/11 story, thinks the Bilderberg group are exercising power to create a world government, people who are worried about gun control and immigration, or even people who are merely skeptical of government, are psychologically insane.

Responding to Matthews’ implication that people who had questions about Obama’s birthplace were “full mooners” and insane, MSNBC political analyst Howard Fineman included “people who are worried about the government taking up the guns, people who deny the federal government has a right to tax your income, people who are worried about being overrun at the borders,” in the same category and said they were merely looking for a reason to find a conspiracy behind Obama.

"The total potential federal government support could reach up to $23.7 trillion," says Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, in a report released today on the government's efforts to fix the financial system.  Yes, $23.7 trillion.

"The potential financial commitment the American taxpayers could be responsible for is of a size and scope that isn't even imaginable," said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

"If you spent a million dollars a day going back to the birth of Christ, that wouldn't even come close to just $1 trillion -- $23.7 trillion is a staggering figure." To be sure, we aren't there yet.

This is the same Citigroup that received $45 billion in bailout money. The same Citigroup that will soon be 34% owned by the U.S. government. The same Citigroup that has lost 95% of its share value since 2007.

Citigroup is in no position to be awarding bonuses of $10 million -- let alone adding another zero to that amount. So why is it mulling such a colossally dumb move? Because the guy demanding it is probably the bank's most valuable employee.

Enter Andrew Hall. He's a rock star, a legend among banking circles. He makes a boatload of money for Citigroup as head of Phibro, the bank's energy-trading unit. The Wall Street Journal calls Phibro a secretive operation, housed in a former Connecticut dairy farm, that "occasionally accounts for a disproportionate chunk of Citigroup income."

I have been hearing a lot of pundits and politicians bemoan “socialized medicine” and its supposed inefficiencies and inequities. These horror stories are never accompanied by data, just hearsay and anecdotes from “a friend of a friend” in Canada or the United Kingdom. Rarely have I heard from people who have themselves experienced a universal public health care system. As one of those people, I thought I should speak up.

While living in Finland for three years, I experienced socialized medicine up close and personal. I gave birth to my son there.

It made the administration look more humane than the Bush-Cheney team. But that is not the whole story.

Obama left unaddressed the possibility of torture in secret foreign prisons under our control as in Abu Ghraib in Iraq or Bagram in Afghanistan, not to mention the 'black sites" sponsored by our foreign clients in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, Thailand and other countries.

"The United States will not torture," Obama said in his directive. But he has been silent on the question of whether the U.S. would help others do the torturing.

Senior police officers are receiving “off-book payments” and secret perks totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds, including private school fees and cars for their spouses.

The Times has discovered that one chief constable heading a force of just 1,700 officers was paid a £74,000 top-up on his salary last year. Sean Price, of the Cleveland force, was paid a £50,000 “retention package” and an “honorarium” of £24,000, raising his income to £200,000.

The private deals, sometimes referred to as debentures or supplements, are negotiated with police authorities behind closed doors and paid over and above salaries agreed in national negotiations.

The incentives include generous relocation packages, satellite TV, home security and even “lifestyle coaching”. They are legal but largely hidden from the public. The Times has uncovered the scale of the practice.

Pregnant women account for 6% of U.S. swine flu deaths since the pandemic began in April, even though they make up just 1% of the U.S. population.

The head of the U.S. agency weighing new curbs faulted "excessive" speculation but also underscored the role of financial investors in helping set fair prices that can benefit consumers.

In this week’s Nature Physics an international team, led by Oxford University scientists, report that a short pulse from the FLASH laser ‘knocked out’ a core electron from every aluminium atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure. This turned the aluminium nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.

''What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before,’ said Professor Justin Wark of Oxford University’s Department of Physics, one of the authors of the paper. ‘Transparent aluminium is just the start. The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of 'miniature stars' created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth.’