On July 20, headlines reported the news. The doyen of the White House House press corps was gone.

After a long illness, the Gridiron Club and Foundation announced her passing. She ended decades covering presidential press conferences saying, "Thank you, Mr. President." She was special. She'll be sorely missed. She spoke truth to power. Too few like her remain. Washington targets those who do. She withstood tough challenges. She did it throughout her career. She was born on August 4, 1920. She's a Winchester, KY native. Her father was a grocer. She was one of nine children. She was the first female White House press corps representative. She worked for UPI. She covered US administrations for five decades. She began during the Kennedy years. Her tenure was unprecedented. As a high school freshmen, journalism was her ambition. In 1942, she earned a Wayne State University BA in English. Her career spanned six decades. She became a Washington Daily News copy girl. She advanced to reporter status. She did so quickly. Her talent was too good to hold back. She began reporting local news. She did women's stories. In the early 1950s, she covered Washington celebrities and government agencies. ● In 1960, she covered President-elect John Kennedy. She attended daily press briefings and conferences. In 1962, she convinced Kennedy to let women attend annual White House dinners. Journalists and photographers were invited. ● In 1970, she became UPI's first female White House Bureau chief. In 1975, she was the first woman admitted to Washington's Gridiron Club. Later she became its president. ● In 1975-76, she was White House Correspondents Association's first female president. Over the span of her career, she became a legend in her own time. No one in modern-day mainstream US journalism matched her. She was a fixture at White House press conferences. She was called "the First Lady of the Press." It was for good reason. She covered 10 presidents for over five decades. She asked hard-hitting questions.

Inside Google HQ: What does the future hold for the company whose visionary plans include implanting a chip in our brains? - My visit to the legendary "Googleplex" at Mountain View comes at an awkward time for the company. Edward Snowden's revelations about the snooping of the US Government's National Security Agency (NSA) in its clandestine electronic-surveillance programme PRISM have provoked a crisis of trust in Silicon Valley. Trust is everything to Google. It stands on the verge of a technological breakthrough that can transform its relationship with us. Already, it is universally recognised as the world leader in searching for information. It handles around 90 per cent of internet searches in the UK: when we want to know something, most of us turn to Google. But it wants more – it wants to become our constant companion.

Activist Post: Literal Smart Dust Opens Brain-Computer Pathway to "Spy on Your Brain"

Journalist Glenn Greenwald says new reports from the trove of NSA data supplied by whistleblower Edward Snowden can be expected in the next few days. Speaking on a German talkshow, he said they would be even "more explosive in Germany" than previous reporting. Speaking on a political talk show on German public broadcaster ARD on Thursday night, Glenn Greenwald said he expected stories to appear in the coming days that would be even "more explosive" in Germany than reports previously published about cooperation between the National Security Agency and German intelligence authorities.

As Usual, Court Signs Off on Renewal Request. - The Office of the Director of National Intelligence reports that the secret authorization for the NSA to collect data on Americans’ phone calls, which was set to expire today, has been renewed by the FISA court. Of course, there’s no reason to expect the secretive FISA court to do anything less. In 2012 the FISA courts saw 1,856 “requests” to authorize government surveillance, and every single one was approved as a matter of course.

Wired.com: NSA Phone Snooping Cannot Be Challenged in Court, Feds Say

■ “It is pitiful,” said Barbara, a retiree who has lived in the city for eleven years. “I have never seen anything like it. The reason they are doing the bankruptcy to me, boils down to the people who are running the city, the politicians and the rich business people. They are stealing the money.”
■ She was especially angry about the contrast between the vast investments and public subsidies for upscale downtown development and the savage attack on working class living conditions and city services. “They just take, take, take, take,” she continued. “They never do anything for the city. They want to build up the downtown and let the rest of us starve. How can we stand it?. They have been doing the same thing for 60 years, but it is just now coming to a head.”
■ “Coleman Young was doing the same thing and the white mayor that was in office before him. They all do it. They are just for the rich people— white, black, or whatever. Race does not matter. They want Detroit to be just for the rich. They want us, the working people who have lived here all of our lives, to move out. That’s all it is.”

Michigan Republican Governor Rick Snyder and Kevyn Orr, the emergency manager overseeing the financial restructuring of Detroit, defended their decision to force the city into Chapter 9 bankruptcy at a press conference Friday. The bankruptcy of Detroit, a city of 700,000 people, is the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history. It sets the stage for draconian attacks on workers and pensioners, the gutting of what remains of city services, and the sell-off of public assets to pay creditors. The events in Detroit are being watched by local governments across the United States and will set a precedent for a nationwide assault on the pensions of public sector workers.

Michael Snyder: Everything Is Fine, But…

A report published earlier this week by Spanish newspaper ABC details a series of heavy-handed threats leveled by US Secretary of State John Kerry against the government of Venezuela. The threats were made in an attempt to bully Venezuela out of granting asylum to whistleblower Edward Snowden. During the phone call, Kerry reportedly made the following threats:

● To ground any and all Venezuelan airplanes flying in American or NATO airspace upon any suspicion that Snowden may be on board, including the flights of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. “Immunity is for the president, not for the plane,” Kerry said.
● To revoke US entry visas to Venezuelan citizens.
● To bring criminal charges for drug trafficking, money laundering and other crimes against Venezuelan officials. The ABC source said that Kerry mentioned specific names of government officials against whom the US would press charges.
● To immediately halt sales of US gas products to Venezuela. Venezuela purchases a half-million barrels of gasoline and 350,000 barrels of Methyl Tertiary Butyl Ether, a gasoline additive, from the US each month.

ABC.es: EE.UU. toma represalias contra Venezuela para que no acoja a Edward Snowden

■ Last week, German police and security officials investigated a young man from the town of Griesheim because he was critical of the secret services’ surveillance methods and jokingly proposed taking a walk to look at a US military building. The case shows how the infrastructure of a police state has been created in Germany. ■ The fact that the information about the protest walk came from the American secret service or military police, also points to the close collaboration between the intelligence services and the police. Clearly, various domestic and international intelligence agencies pass on their largely illegally collected data to the police authorities, which take action against individuals. ■ Based on the experience of Hitler’s Gestapo—literally, Secret State Police—collaboration between the police and secret services was officially banned in post-war Germany. However, as a result of the so-called “war on terror,” the link has been fully re-established. The example of Daniel B. shows that there is no separation of powers in everyday practice. In this way, the infrastructure of a police state has been created in Germany.

Real estate developer Larry Silverstein can’t seek $3.5 billion from airlines whose planes were hijacked by terrorists and flown into the World Trade Center’s twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, a judge ruled. - Silverstein, who leased the skyscrapers about two months before they were destroyed, already collected $4.1 billion from insurers and can’t collect twice under New York law, U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein ruled yesterday in a courtroom less than a mile and a half from the World Trade Center site.

“If this case were to go forward, the WTC companies would not be able to recover anything against the airlines,” said Hellerstein. The judge rejected any suggestion that Silverstein had sought a windfall, saying he was among the “heroes” who sought to “create beauty out of the destruction.”

Silverstein’s World Trade Center Properties LLC in 2008 sued United Continental Holdings Inc. (UAL), American Airlines and its parent AMR Corp. (AAMRQ), claiming their negligence led to the destruction of the towers. The company, which rebuilt the destroyed 7 World Trade Center and is rebuilding three other towers on the site, argued that the insurance accord didn’t bar it from seeking additional damages in civil cases because the payout didn’t correspond to specific types of economic losses, such as replacement costs for the buildings or lost rent from tenants. Hellerstein disagreed.

Kevin Barrett: 9/11 could be insurance fraud as “trial” of conspiring duo begins in NY today
■ Is this the world's worst case of insurance fraud...ever? That's what many are saying, as the world's biggest real-estate swindler and the world's most corrupt judge meet in a Manhattan courtroom on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. At issue: billions of dollars in loot from the demolition of the World Trade Center complex on September 11th, 2001.
■ World Trade Center owner Larry Silverstein - who confessed on national television to “pulling” World Trade Center Building 7 - will appear in the courtroom of Judge Alvin Hellerstein at 500 Pearl St. in New York City. The non-jury trial, which is expected to last three days, will decide whether Silverstein is entitled to recover $3.5 billion from airlines and airport-related companies, in addition to the $4.9 billion he has already received for his “losses” on September 11th.
■ The question on everyone's mind is: Why is Silverstein claiming that airliners destroyed his buildings, when he has already confessed to demolishing at least one of them himself? In the 2002 PBS documentary “America Rebuilds,” Silverstein admitted to complicity in the controlled demolition of WTC-7, a 47-story skyscraper that dropped into its own footprint in 6.5 seconds.
■ The mysterious destruction of Building 7 has become the Rosetta Stone of 9/11. Virtually all independent experts who have studied the case, including thousands of architects and engineers, agree that the government's explanation - that a few small office fires somehow destroyed WTC-7 - is a non-starter. Building 7, these experts say, was obviously taken down in a controlled demolition, as Silverstein himself admitted.

Les Visible: The Nearly Unendurable Stench of a Gone Dead Culture - Sometimes you come across a news item that is so over the top, so definitively surpassing all other news in recent memory that... you just have to visit it again. Even though a stench accompanies the subject, possibly even a stench as bad as this (you can't make this stuff up), committed, truth seeking internet journos, have to see the job through. So it is that we return to the matter of Larry 'the leech' Silverfishstein (or Silverfishstone as you prefer). What is most compelling about this event, is that the case is going through a single judge, instead of a (god help us) impartial jury. How is this even remotely possible? Furthermore it is going before another individual, who was complicit in 9/11 coverup, at the very least ...and that would be Alvin Hellerstein. Here is an individual that when compared to slime and scum, you can visibly see both the slime and scum, cringing and attempting to flow, creep (or anyway they can manage it) away from the neighborhood, so as not to be identified with this ass-clown vulture, this carrion crow, who sits upon the dead branches of a gone dead culture and feasts his ravenous eyes upon what may soon profit his unquenchable appetite.