The charity is fighting our public records request for information on how it raised and spent money after the superstorm.
Just how badly does the American Red Cross want to keep secret how it raised and spent over $300 million after Hurricane Sandy?
The charity has hired a fancy law firm to fight a public request we filed with New York state, arguing that information about its Sandy activities is a “trade secret.”
The Red Cross’ “trade secret” argument has persuaded the state to redact some material, though it’s not clear yet how much since the documents haven’t yet been released.
As we’ve reported, the Red Cross releases few details about how it spends money after big disasters. That makes it difficult to figure out whether donor dollars are well spent. Continue reading →
This image captured on July 23, 2012, at 12:24 a.m. EDT, shows a coronal mass ejection that left the sun at the unusually fast speeds of over 1,800 miles per second.
A perfect storm of events created a massive magnetic cloud that could have caused fireworks on Earth. Earth dodged a huge magnetic bullet from the sun on July 23, 2012.
According to University of California, Berkeley, and Chinese researchers, a rapid succession of coronal mass ejections – the most intense eruptions on the sun – sent a pulse of magnetized plasma barreling into space and through Earth’s orbit. Had the eruption come nine days earlier, it would have hit Earth, potentially wreaking havoc with the electrical grid, disabling satellites and GPS, and disrupting our increasingly electronic lives.
The solar bursts would have enveloped Earth in magnetic fireworks matching the largest magnetic storm ever reported on Earth, the so-called Carrington event of 1859. The dominant mode of communication at that time, the telegraph system, was knocked out across the United States, literally shocking telegraph operators. Meanwhile, the Northern Lights lit up the night sky as far south as Hawaii.In a paper appearing today (Tuesday, March 18) in the journal Nature Communications, former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow and research physicist Ying D. Liu, now a professor at China’s State Key Laboratory of Space Weather, UC Berkeley research physicist Janet G. Luhmann and their colleagues report their analysis of the magnetic storm, which was detected by NASA’s STEREO A spacecraft.”Had it hit Earth, it probably would have been like the big one in 1859, but the effect today, with our modern technologies, would have been tremendous,” said Luhmann, who is part of the STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Observatory) team and based at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. Continue reading →
Peons, please meet your Master: Lt. J. Paul Vance, Public Information Officer, CT State Police Phone: (860) 685-8230 Fax: (860) 685-8301
…Politicians in Connecticut have grossly overplayed their hand with the state’s so-called “assault weapon” ban and registration act. Being politicians, they seem to feel they are above consequence for their actions, and so it seems as if they will push ahead with plans to attempt to bring the owners of more than 350,000 “undocumented” firearms and nearly 2 million standard capacity magazines to heal. There are but 1,120 sworn officers in the Connecticut State Police as of last week. There are though to be between 80,000-100,000 owners of “undocumented” firearms and magazines, along with perhaps hundreds of thousands of sympathetic owners of various other arms… go here and go here for the full list of tyrants (originially published at Sipsey Street Irregulars)
In times of trouble, your charitable donations and taxes, that in the good times go to fund organizations such as the Red Cross and Fema, seem to disappear as these agencies end up doing very little for the residents of disaster areas. During hurricane Sandy, where both the government and Red Cross had more than 8 days to prepare for the exact locations where the storm would strike, few efforts by both agencies could be found.
And on November 1st, the disgust was so great for the Red Cross, a Staten Island official publicly announced that no American should give donations to the decades old relief agency…via The Daily Economist.
The charity is fighting our public records request for information on how it raised and spent money after the superstorm.
The Grey Enigma 