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Dallas police in standoff with armed suspect as bombs found in HQ - rolling coverage
Follow the latest updates as police deal with bombs left at headquarters and local stations and pursue up to four armed suspects

Four bags were found in front of the Dallas Police Headquarters. According to the Dallas police, one bag was confirmed to contain pipe bombs.

An explosive ordinance robot was dispatched to move the bags found in the parking lot. The police department just reported that the robot took a hit during an initial explosion. It remains functional, however.

Shooting at Dallas Police Headquarters

3:45 a.m. Dallas Police Chief David O. Brown Press Conference

On June 13, 2015, at approximately 12:30 a.m., witnesses observed what they believed to be multiple suspects firing gun shots at the Dallas Police Headquarters at 1400 South Lamar Street.

The suspects were parked in front of headquarters. Patrol elements arrived, at which time the suspects rammed a Dallas Police squad car and began shooting at officers, striking the squad cars.

There were no officers struck.   Officers returned fire at which time the suspect fled the location in what witnesses say is an armored vehicle.

Officers chased the suspects south of Dallas to the parking lot of a Jack in the Box at 121 South Interstate 45 Service Road in Hutchins at approximately 12:44 a.m.

Fast-track Hands the Money Monopoly to Private Banks — Permanently

It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
— Attributed to Henry Ford

In March 2014, the Bank of England let the cat out of the bag: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it. So wrote David Graeber in The Guardian the same month, referring to a BOE paper called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy.” The paper stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong. The result, said Graeber, was to throw the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window.

The revelation may have done more than that. The entire basis for maintaining our private extractive banking monopoly may have been thrown out the window. And that could help explain the desperate rush to “fast track” not only the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), but the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA would nip attempts to implement public banking and other monetary reforms in the bud.

The Banking Game Exposed

The BOE report confirmed what money reformers have been saying for decades: that banks do not act simply as intermediaries, taking in the deposits of “savers” and lending them to borrowers, keeping the spread in interest rates. Rather, banks actually create deposits when they make loans. The BOE report said that private banks now create 97 percent of the British money supply. The US money supply is created in the same way.

U.S. House Admits Nazi Role in Ukraine

By Robert Parry

Last February, when ethnic Russian rebels were closing in on the Ukrainian port of Mariupol, the New York Times rhapsodically described the heroes defending the city and indeed Western civilization – the courageous Azov battalion facing down barbarians at the gate. What the Times didn’t tell its readers was that these “heroes” were Nazis, some of them even wearing Swastikas and SS symbols.

The long Times article by Rick Lyman fit with the sorry performance of America’s “paper of record” as it has descended into outright propaganda – hiding the dark side of the post-coup regime in Kiev. But what makes Lyman’s sadly typical story noteworthy today is that the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives has just voted unanimously to bar U.S. assistance going to the Azov battalion because of its Nazi ties.

When even the hawkish House of Representatives can’t stomach these Nazi storm troopers who have served as Kiev’s tip of the spear against the ethnic Russian population of eastern Ukraine, what does that say about the honesty and integrity of the New York Times when it finds these same Nazis so admirable?

And it wasn’t like the Times didn’t have space to mention the Nazi taint. The article provided much color and detail – quoting an Azov leader prominently – but just couldn’t find room to mention the inconvenient truth about how these Nazis had played a key role in the ongoing civil war on the U.S. side. The Times simply referred to Azov as a “volunteer unit.”

Hackers compromised US security-clearance database

Intruders who hacked the databases of the US federal government’s Office of Personnel Management have stolen security clearance data on intelligence and military personnel, AP reports, citing officials who say the breach is far worse than acknowledged.

The hackers managed to steal the entire federal database of Standard Form 86, according to officials who spoke with AP on condition of anonymity. The form is submitted by individuals for a cavity-like background search, prior to gaining security clearance.

The 127-page-long form (PDF) contains highly personal information about the individual, including possible drug and alcohol abuses, and financial and criminal histories. In addition, it contains a reference section with extremely sensitive information concerning the applicant’s contacts and relatives including their personal data.

Nearly all clearance holders working with the CIA, National Security Agency and military special operations personnel, have potentially been exposed, sources believe. The time of the intrusion so far remains unknown.

4 Ways the One Percent Is Trying to Buy Their Immortality
Tech oligarchs are deathly serious about buying off the grim reaper.

Humankind has long dreamed of immortality. Surely, somewhere, Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth awaits, allowing us to escape our inevitable fate of non-existence. Not surprisingly, some very wealthy tech executives are determined to buy their way out of that inevitability. These guys are living the high life and they don’t want it to stop.

Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, is worth somewhere north of $2 billion, and a member in good standing of the one-percent club that is projected to control half the planet’s wealth by next year. While economic inequality does not appear to weigh on him, other forms do. "Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead," he told the New Yorker recently. His thoughts on death? “Basically, I’m against it,” he told the Telegraph newspaper.

Oracle founder Larry Ellison has similar deep thoughts. “Death has never made any sense to me.” A billionaire many times over, he has contributed over $400 million to research so far, much of it through his Ellison Medical Foundation, in his quest to live forever. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, Pierre Omidyar of eBay have all placed hefty bets on science, and sometimes pseudo-science, to make sure they stick around a long, long time. “The talent migrating into the field is like nothing I’ve seen in my 40 years in the field,” Ken Dychtwald, a gerontology and longevity expert told Time magazine, “and they’re convinced there is nothing you can’t do if you can turn biotechnology into information technology,”

The ethics behind the search for immortality are dicey, to say the least. “There will be breakthroughs in the next 15 or 20 years that will have to do with aging itself—actually stopping the biological clock,” Dychtwald told Time. “And I think that really rich people are going to get access to it… Imagine a time when ten thousand really rich people get to live forever, or not have to get dementia.”