The Observer

US to reconsider aid to Egypt

2011-01-30T06:19:00.001-08:00

In the aftermath of Egypt’s crackdown on protesters on Friday, Washington has announced it is reviewing its aid package to the country.

Egypt has received $28bn in assistance since 1975, according to the US Agency for International Development. While USAID's website says the funds have gone to programs devoted to health, trade and education – among other things – most US aid goes to Egypt's military.

Egypt receives close to $2bn in economic and military aid every year, making it the second largest recipient of US foreign assistance after Israel. Of that, $1.3bn is devoted to military assistance, according to the Congressional Research Service, the public policy arm of the US congress.

One third of Egypt's military aid is used to upgrade its weapons systems - in essence to replace older Soviet weapons with US arms, according to a CRS report.

During the past four days of protests, it's been widely reported that tear gas canisters fired at protesters are stamped "Made in USA".

Among the weapons the US has provided Egypt: F-4 jet aircraft, F-16 jet fighters, armoured personnel carriers, Apache helicopters, antiaircraft missile batteries, and aerial surveillance aircraft, according to the US State Department.
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Military aid to Egypt

2011-01-30T06:15:00.000-08:00

From the Camp David peace accords in 1978 until 2000 (the latest year for which figures are available), the United States has subsidized Egypt's armed forces with over $38 billion worth of aid. Egypt receives about $2 billion annually--$1.3 billion in foreign military financing and about $815 million in economic support fund assistance --making it the second largest regular recipient of conventional U.S. military and economic aid, after Israel. In 1990, the United States also forgave $7.1 billion in past Egyptian military debt in return for Egypt's support of Operation Desert Shield. In addition, Egypt receives excess defense articles worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually from the Pentagon. The announcement that 23,000 U.S. troops will be based in Egypt to conduct biannual military training exercises (Operation Bright Star) may have longer term implications for U.S. aid to the region, as might Egypt's willingness to support U.S. efforts against the Taliban.
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Wikileaks: US embassy cables: browse the database

2010-12-29T02:28:00.000-08:00

Use our interactive guide to discover what has been revealed in the leak of 250,000 US diplomatic cables. Mouse over the map below to find key stories and a selection of original documents by country, subject or people. Click on red dots for latest stories...

Wikileaks interactive guide

California panel wants say on health insurance rate hikes

2010-03-24T06:09:00.000-07:00

Assembly committee passes a bill requiring companies to justify increases. The measure faces an uncertain future in the full Legislature amid an industry lobbying effort.

California lawmakers who want to go further than the newly signed federal healthcare overhaul scored a victory Tuesday when a proposal to make insurance companies justify rate hikes sailed through the Assembly's Health Committee.

The bill would put health insurers and health maintenance organizations under the same strict regulation that has covered automobile and other types of property insurance for the last two decades. It would require approval of some rate hikes by state agencies.

"Now that Congress has mandated that every American must show proof of owning a health insurance policy or face fines, California must ensure that the prices that insurers charge for coverage are fair," said Jerry Flanagan, healthcare policy director for Consumer Watchdog.
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The Scariest Jobs Chart Ever

2009-10-11T23:56:00.000-07:00

Anything's possible, but this seems unlikely. In 1948, U.S. consumers were not still saddled with the massive debts that are stifling consumption today. And consumers still represent 70%+ of spending. The other interesting point with respect to the 1948 "V" is that we have now gone as many months from the peak as it took employment to recover in full in the 1948 recession. And we're still losing jobs.

Most importantly, regardless of what the jobs recovery eventually looks like, it hasn't started yet. The economy is still losing 250,000+ jobs a month. The average workweek, which should be the first indicator to turn up, also fell in August to match its record low. This would not seem to be consistent with a sustained, v-shaped recovery.
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Canada's armed forces wave the flag up north

2009-09-10T11:15:00.001-07:00

EVERY summer Canada’s armed forces conduct military exercises in the Arctic, allowing them to test their abilities far from southern supply centres. This year they have chosen Iqaluit, the capital of the territory of Nunavut, as the jumping off point for what they are calling Operation Nanook.

Members of the national and international media have been invited to observe this show of Canadian fighting prowess. Some 700 soldiers, sailors and airmen will search for a downed aircraft, hunt a submarine and deal with a mock explosion at the tank farm that supplies all of Iqualuit’s fuel.
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Iran, North Korea and the bomb

2009-09-10T11:13:00.000-07:00

HONESTY is a rare commodity in the nuclear underworld, where Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Syria and possibly others—as well as Argentina, Brazil, Libya and South Africa in times past—have long done deals for the equipment, technology and materials needed for their illicit nuclear programmes. Yet North Korea and Pakistan’s notorious blackmarket-maker, Abdul Qadeer Khan, have both proudly and separately decided to tell the world more about their nuclear exploits. By contrast there is a worrying silence from Iran and Syria, two countries in the spotlight this week at the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear guardian, for their suspect nuclear activities.
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Mad As Hell Doctors

2009-08-29T11:21:00.000-07:00

We are a small group of Oregon-Based doctors who care. We believe there is only one way to control costs, one way to remove profiteering from the system, one way to reclaim the care of our patients, and one way to be sure everyone is covered: we must replace our current pay-or-die system and with a comprehensive, publicly financed, privately delivered, Single Payer system that puts people first. Our moment to take a stand for Single Payer is NOW. We may not have another opportunity like this in our lifetime. Please support this unprecedented road trip to real health care reform.

There's no nice way to say it. The financial cost of health care is killing our citizens, hobbling our economy, crushing small business, and threatening the solvency of our government. In the meantime, the Health Care Industry is spending almost two million dollars a day lobbying Congress and manipulating public opinion to accept “reform” legislation that leaves a vicious, for-profit system intact. The "public option" is a trap. We need real reform that finds immediate savings, controls costs, and accomplishes the moral imperative of true Universal Access. A Single Payer plan is the only real path to a Health Care System that is socially, ethically and fiscally responsible.
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The Horrifying Hidden Story Behind Drug Company Profits

2009-08-06T07:05:00.000-07:00

Our governments have chosen, over decades, to allow a strange system for developing medicines to build up. Most of the work carried out by scientists to bring a drug to your local pharmacist -- and into your lungs, or stomach, or bowels -- is done in government-funded university labs, paid for by your taxes. Drug companies usually come in late in the process of development, and pay for part of the expensive but largely uncreative final stages, like buying some of the chemicals and trials that are needed. In return, then they own the exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from the resulting medicine for years. Nobody else can make it.

The argument in defense of this system offered by Big Pharma is simple, and sounds reasonable at first: we need to charge large sums for "our" drugs so we can develop more life-saving medicines. We want to develop as many treatments as we can, and we can only do that if we have revenue. A lot of the research we back doesn't result in a marketable drug, so it's an expensive process.

But a detailed study by Dr Marcia Angell, the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, says that only 14 percent of their budgets go on developing drugs -- usually at the uncreative final part of the drug-trail. The rest goes on marketing and profits. And even with that puny 14 percent, drug companies squander a fortune developing "me-too" drugs -- medicines that do exactly the same job as a drug that already exists, but has one molecule different, so they can take out a new patent, and receive another avalanche of profits.

Yet moves to change the current system are blocked by the drug companies and their armies of lobbyists. That's why the way we regulate the production of medicines across the world is still designed to serve the interests of the shareholders of the drug companies -- not the health of humanity.
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Hiroshima mayor calls for abolishing nuke weapons

2009-08-06T06:23:00.000-07:00

Hiroshima's mayor urged global leaders on Thursday to back President Barack Obama's call to abolish nuclear weapons as Japan marked the 64th anniversary of the world's first atomic bomb attack. "We refer to ourselves, the great global majority, as the 'Obamajority,' and we call on the rest of the world to join forces with us to eliminate all nuclear weapons by 2020," Akiba said.

Hiroshima was instantly flattened and an estimated 140,000 people were killed or died within months when the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped its deadly payload in the waning days of World War II. A total of about 260,000 victims of the attack are officially recognized by the government, including those that have died of related injuries or sickness in the decades since.
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Today's weapons are far more destructive. - Bill

U.S. Recession Worst Since Great Depression, Revised Data Show

2009-08-02T04:51:00.000-07:00

The first 12 months of the U.S. recession saw the economy shrink more than twice as much as previously estimated, reflecting even bigger declines in consumer spending and housing, revised figures showed. The world’s largest economy contracted 1.9 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the last three months of 2008, compared with the 0.8 percent drop previously on the books, the Commerce Department said yesterday in Washington. Gross domestic product has shrunk 3.9 percent in the past year, the report said, indicating the worst slump since the Great Depression.

The report signals the process of repairing tattered balance sheets following the biggest drop in household wealth on record may be further along than anticipated. “The current downturn beginning in 2008 is more pronounced,” Steven Landefeld, director of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, said in a press briefing this week. The revisions were in line with past experience in which initial figures tended to underestimate the severity of contractions during their early stages, he said.
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How fact-free claims about Obama's citizenship gained mainstream currency

2009-08-02T04:41:00.000-07:00

The false allegation that President Barack Obama was born in another country is more than a fact-free smear. Marked by accusations and backstabbing, it's the story of how a small but intense movement called "birthers" rose from a handful of people prone to seeing conspiracies, aided by the Internet, magnified without evidence by eager radio and cable TV hosts, and eventually ratified by a small group of Republican politicians working to keep the story alive on the floors of Congress and the campaign trails of the Midwest.

"He is NOT an American citizen," yelled a woman at a town hall meeting in Delaware, angrily confronting a congressman. "I don't want this flag to change. I want my country back." When Rep. Mike Castle, R-Del., responded that Obama is a citizen, she and others in the room jeered him.

"It's a fascinating phenomenon," said Jerrold Post, director of the political psychology program at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs and author of the recent book "Political Paranoia." "They are not searching for the truth. They are searching for anything that confirms their fixed idea, their malevolent idea. ... It doesn't soothe people to tell them it's not legitimate. That makes them angry."
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Pharisees on the Potomac

2009-07-19T21:44:00.000-07:00

Like cats that have lost their whiskers, the Republicans seem off balance now that they have lost their talent for hypocrisy. They are still practicing the ancient political art of Tartuffery, of course, just without their former aplomb.

Who can forget the glory years, when the Gipper invoked God but never went to church? When Arlen Specter accused Anita Hill of perjury to distract from Clarence Thomas’s false witness? When Newt Gingrich and other conservatives indulged in affairs with young Washington peaches as they pushed to impeach Bill Clinton? No one had more flair than W. and Cheney, crowing about making us safe as they made the world more dangerous, and bragging about fiscal restraint while they spent us into oblivion.
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Maddow Exposes C Street

2009-07-13T08:11:00.000-07:00

Whatever else Washington, D.C. stands for, it certainly stands as the center for mixing sex, religion and politics. Whether it’s brothels, hustlers, men’s rooms, escorts, mistresses or interns, it seems there is an unending supply of politicians willing to give the mix a vigorous stir. And, unlike their Liberal brethren, it’s the Conservatives who have the Bible in one hand and condoms (hopefully) in the other!

All of this was documented recently on the Rachel Maddow Show, home of the rising MSNBC broadcast personality who displays intelligence and awareness with her probing and incisive interviews. As Maddow has discovered, today’s philandering Conservative politico isn’t the simple adulterer of the past. Twenty-first century cheaters must have God-driven purpose to their activities according to Coe, proprietor of the secretive Christian-centered C Street House.

Additionally, It’s hard to imagine, for those of us living outside of the beltway, that it was only 30 years ago Republican lawmakers were condemning the benign, self-admitted lust of then President Jimmy Carter who revealed in a 1976 Playboy interview that, “Because I’m just human and I’m tempted…the Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ Christ said, ‘I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery.’ I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times…This is something that God recognizes, that I will do and have done, and God forgives me for it.”
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The Family by Jeff Sharlet (Amazon)

Cheney ordered CIA to hide info from Congress

2009-07-12T01:55:00.000-07:00

In the eight years of his vice presidency, Cheney was the Bush administration's most vehement defender of the secrecy of government activities, particularly in the intelligence arena. He went to the Supreme Court to keep secret the advisers to his task force on energy and won. A report released on Friday by the inspectors general of five agencies about the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program makes clear Cheney's former chief of staff, David Addington, had to approve every government official who was told about the program. The report said "the exceptionally compartmented nature of the program" frustrated FBI agents who were assigned to follow up on tips it turned up.

High-level NSA officials who were responsible for ensuring the surveillance program was legal, including the agency's inspector general and general counsel, were not permitted by Cheney's office to read the Justice Department opinion that found the eavesdropping legal, several officials said. Questions over the adequacy and truthfulness of the CIA's briefings for Congress date back to the creation of the intelligence oversight committees in the 1970s after disclosures of agency assassination and mind-control programs and other abuses. But complaints increased in the Bush years, when the CIA and other intelligence agencies took the major role in pursuing al-Qaida.
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Cheney kept CIA program from Congress

Cheney Is Linked to Concealment of C.I.A. Project

2009-07-11T14:35:00.000-07:00

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday. The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day. The question of how completely the C.I.A. informed Congress about sensitive programs has been hotly disputed by Democrats and Republicans since May, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the agency of failing to reveal in 2002 that it was waterboarding a terrorism suspect, a claim Mr. Panetta rejected.
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How The Climate Bill May Spur An Energy Revolution

2009-06-28T06:53:00.000-07:00

Congress has taken its first step toward an energy revolution, with the prospect of profound change for every household, business, industry and farm in the decades ahead. Such a law would impact how much people pay to heat, cool and light their homes (it would cost more); what automobiles they buy and drive (smaller, fuel efficient and hybrid electric); and where they will work (more "green" jobs, meaning more environmentally friendly ones).

Critics of the House bill brand it a "jobs killer." Yet it would seem more likely to shift jobs. Old, energy-intensive industries and businesses might scale back or disappear. Those green jobs would emerge, propelled by the push for nonpolluting energy sources.
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With our free market system, there is a need to have economic motivations. As technology advances and production of solar cells and windmills increases, one would expect costs to mitigate. - Bill

CIA Mistaken on 'High-Value' Detainee, Document Shows

2009-06-16T08:57:00.001-07:00

An al-Qaeda associate captured by the CIA and subjected to harsh interrogation techniques said his jailers later told him they had mistakenly thought he was the No. 3 man in the organization's hierarchy and a partner of Osama bin Laden, according to newly released excerpts from a 2007 hearing.

President George W. Bush described Abu Zubaida in 2002 as "al-Qaeda's chief of operations." Intelligence, military and law enforcement sources told The Washington Post this year that officials later concluded he was a Pakistan-based "fixer" for radical Islamist ideologues, but not a formal member of al-Qaeda, much less one of its leaders.
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Former Military Interrogator to Cheney: You are Wrong, Torture Cost American Lives

2009-06-15T20:55:00.000-07:00

The torturing of Muslim prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay emboldened and inflamed foreign fighters, who arrived in Iraq to join the fight, and made up nearly 90 percent of all suicide bombers, who were responsible for the deaths of American soldiers.

Matthew Alexander, a former military interrogator stationed in Iraq, Air Force reserve officer and a 14-year veteran, says Dick Cheney is dead wrong when he claims torture saved American lives and that Cheney ‘fundamentally misunderstands the way America is viewed around the world.” Alexander says he personally conducted more than 300 interrogations in Iraq and oversaw more than 1,000 and most of the captured foreign fighters said they came to fight against the U.S., because of the torture of Muslims by Americans.

“At the prison where I conducted interrogations,” Alexander said, “we heard day in and day out, foreign fighters who had been captured state that the number one reason that they had come to fight in Iraq was because of torture and abuse…” Seeing pictures and hearing stories of Muslims brutally tortured by Americans put foreign fighters over the edge.
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North Korea says it will 'weaponize' its plutonium

2009-06-13T06:50:00.000-07:00

North Korea vowed on Saturday to embark on a uranium enrichment program and "weaponize" all the plutonium in its possession as it rejected the new U.N. sanctions meant to punish the communist nation for its recent nuclear test. North Korea also said it would not abandon its nuclear programs, saying it was an inevitable decision to defend itself from what it says is a hostile U.S. policy and its nuclear threat against the North.

The North will take "resolute military action" if the United States or its allies try to impose any "blockade" on it, the ministry said in a statement carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency. North Korea describes its nuclear program as a deterrent against possible U.S. attacks. Washington says it has no intention of attacking and has expressed fear that North Korea is trying to sell its nuclear technology to other nations. The statement came hours after the U.N. Security Council approved tough new sanctions on North Korea to punish it for its latest nuclear test on May 25.
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L.A. County considers congestion pricing for 110 and 10 freeways

2009-06-10T06:22:00.000-07:00

Like other tollways in Southern California, officials plan to use congestion-based pricing -- tolls that rise and fall in direct relation to the volume of traffic -- to keep individual motorists, carpools, van pools and buses in the high-occupancy lanes at a minimum speed of 45 mph, even during rush hour. Under the tentative pricing schedule, 25 cents per mile would be charged when demand is lowest for the lanes, while the maximum toll, $1.40 per mile, would be in effect during the busiest part of the day. Vehicles carrying more than one person would not be charged.
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Get Ready for Inflation and Higher Interest Rates

2009-06-10T02:14:00.000-07:00

Rahm Emanuel was only giving voice to widespread political wisdom when he said that a crisis should never be "wasted." Crises enable vastly accelerated political agendas and initiatives scarcely conceivable under calmer circumstances. So it goes now. Here we stand more than a year into a grave economic crisis with a projected budget deficit of 13% of GDP. That's more than twice the size of the next largest deficit since World War II. And this projected deficit is the culmination of a year when the federal government, at taxpayers' expense, acquired enormous stakes in the banking, auto, mortgage, health-care and insurance industries.
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Kennedy health plan includes long-term care

2009-06-10T02:13:00.000-07:00

Americans would be able to buy long-term care insurance from the government for $65 a month under a provision tucked into sweeping health care legislation that senators will begin considering next week. The 651-page bill, released Tuesday by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., would revamp the way health insurance works. Insurance companies would face a slew of new government rules, dealing with everything from guaranteed coverage for people with health problems to possible limitations on profits. Taxpayers, employers and individuals would share in the cost of expanding coverage to nearly 50 million uninsured Americans.
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Guantanamo's Immediate Reaction Force still terrorizing detainees

2009-06-09T15:47:00.000-07:00

As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: "blows to [the] testicles;" "detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;" being "inoculated … through injection with 'a disease for dog cysts;'" the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred "under the authority of American military personnel" and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.
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Wikipedia blocks access from Church of Scientology in L.A.

2009-06-07T22:10:00.000-07:00

The Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has blocked all contributions from computers at the Church of Scientology's Los Angeles headquarters to stop users there from revising articles to reflect a pro-Scientology viewpoint. The site has also banned some critics of the controversial religion from editing Scientology articles to tamp down a long-standing battle between the two groups, a Wikipedia spokesman said. Rosenthal said the Church of Scientology -- using multiple accounts -- was locked in a fierce edit war with critics.
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Church of Scientology accused of fraud
France Could Ban Scientology
Wikipedia - with references

Councilman Parks on $265,000 pension: I earned it

2009-06-07T21:55:00.002-07:00

As The Times' Rich Connell reports, pension spending is a growing concern for city budget planners. The city could face a $1-billion budget shortfall in 2010-2011, and an even larger deficit the year after, chiefly because of pension investment losses, according to the city’s top budget analyst. Connell's review of city records found that Los Angeles Councilman Bernard Parks, City Hall’s budget committee chief, who is warning that soaring payroll and pension costs threaten the city’s financial stability, receives $22,000 a month in city retirement benefits in addition to his $178,789 a year salary.
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$265,000 + 178,789 = $443,789 total
Just one example... No wonder California is in financial trouble -- Bill

Treasuries Drop for 3rd Day on Signs Worst of Recession Is Over

2009-06-07T21:48:00.000-07:00

Treasuries fell for a third day on speculation a government report this week on retail sales will add to signs the worst of the U.S. economic recession is over. Ten-year yields rose to highest level in seven months as the Treasury Department prepared to sell $65 billion in notes and bonds over the next three days, raising concern rates will have to increase to attract investors. Government securities have fallen 6.2 percent this year, heading for their first annual loss in a decade, according to Merrill Lynch & Co.’s U.S. Treasury Master index, as employment and manufacturing improve.
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U.S. unemployment rate hits 9.4% in May, highest since 1983

2009-06-06T05:18:00.000-07:00

The unemployment rate rose to the highest level since 1983, a full one-half percentage point above the 8.9% in April. Normally, losing more than 300,000 jobs in one month and seeing the jobless rate near 10% would be cause for alarm. But May's job losses are the lowest since September and were only half the average monthly losses in the last six months.

In the present climate, that is seen as the latest in a series of signs that the economy is beginning to turn around. Home sales are up. Consumer confidence is improving. The stock market has rebounded since hitting a 12-year low in March. "The pace of the recession finally seems to be slowing," said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project.
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Medical bills prompt more than 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies

2009-06-05T16:52:00.000-07:00

This year, an estimated 1.5 million Americans will declare bankruptcy. Many people may chalk up that misfortune to overspending or a lavish lifestyle, but a new study suggests that more than 60 percent of people who go bankrupt are actually capsized by medical bills. Bankruptcies due to medical bills increased by nearly 50 percent in a six-year period, from 46 percent in 2001 to 62 percent in 2007, and most of those who filed for bankruptcy were middle-class, well-educated homeowners, according to a report that will be published in the August issue of The American Journal of Medicine.

"Unless you're a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, you're one illness away from financial ruin in this country," says lead author Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., of the Harvard Medical School, in Cambridge, Mass. "If an illness is long enough and expensive enough, private insurance offers very little protection against medical bankruptcy, and that's the major finding in our study."

Woolhandler and her colleagues surveyed a random sample of 2,314 people who filed for bankruptcy in early 2007, looked at their court records, and then interviewed more than 1,000 of them. They concluded that 62.1 percent of the bankruptcies were medically related because the individuals either had more than $5,000 (or 10 percent of their pretax income) in medical bills, mortgaged their home to pay for medical bills, or lost significant income due to an illness. On average, medically bankrupt families had $17,943 in out-of-pocket expenses, including $26,971 for those who lacked insurance and $17,749 who had insurance at some point.
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Obama At Buchenwald: 'No Patience' For Holocaust Denial (VIDEO)

2009-06-05T12:01:00.000-07:00

President Barack Obama toured a World War II concentration camp Friday after prodding the international community to redouble efforts toward separate Israeli and Palestinian states in hopes of resolving a conflict fueled by the Jewish nation's post-Holocaust creation. "These sites have not lost their horror with the passage of time," Obama said after seeing crematory ovens, barbed-wire fences and guard towers at the Buchenwald camp. "More than half a century later, our grief and our outrage over what happened have not diminished."

Earlier in Dresden, alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the U.S. president pressed for progress toward Mideast peace, saying: "The moment is now for us to act." He added: "The United States can't force peace upon the parties" but America has "at least created the space, the atmosphere, in which talks can restart."
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Cheney: "There Was Never Any Evidence ... Iraq Was Involved In 9/11"

2009-06-03T12:52:00.000-07:00

In an interview with Fox News' Greta van Susteren, former Vice President Dick Cheney admitted that there is no evidence that Iraq was involved in the September 11th attacks. "On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9-11, there was never any evidence to prove that," he told the "On The Record" host in a joint interview with his daughter Liz. "There was "some reporting early on ... but that was never borne out," Cheney said. "George ... did say and did testify that there was an ongoing relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq, but no proof that Iraq was involved in 9-11."
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Chinese economists deem huge holding of US bonds "risky," split on way out

2009-05-31T08:02:00.000-07:00

On the first day of U.S. treasury secretary Timothy Geithner's visit to China, the Beijing-based Global Times published a survey of 23 famous Chinese economists on Sunday, saying that the majority of them deemed the vast holding of U.S. bonds "risky." Among the 23 experts polled, 17 said they believed that U.S. equities pose great risks to China's economy.

Li Wei, an expert with the Institute of Ministry of Commerce, and Tian Yun, a scholar at the China Macro Economics Institute, expressed concerns over the risks, saying that the United States may export its deepening crisis to China "by printing U.S. dollar notes uncontrollably."
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The End of the Big Business-China Love Affair

2009-05-31T06:47:00.000-07:00

The Chinese government has begun turning a cold shoulder to Western corporations hoping to cash in on its consumers. Meanwhile, corporations are paying much closer attention to the risks and hidden costs of supplying their home markets with stuff made thousands of miles away in China. None of this necessarily means an end to the extraordinarily co-dependent economic relationship that China and the U.S. in particular have built up over the past decade. But it does mean big changes.
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Former Interrogator Rebukes Cheney For Torture Speech

2009-05-26T11:57:00.000-07:00

A former top interrogator is responding forcefully to the case Dick Cheney made on Thursday in favor of torture (what the former VP and his allies refer to as "enhanced interrogation methods.") Brave New Films released a short video Tuesday of Matthew Alexander taking apart Cheney's argument piece by piece. Alexander, who uses a pseudonym for security reasons, was a 14-year military interrogator who oversaw more than a thousand interrogations and conducted more than 300 in Iraq himself. He led the interrogation team that scored one of the United States' most high-profile captures, that of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and he did it using traditional methods.
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Councilman Parks on $265,000 pension...

2009-05-25T11:34:00.000-07:00

Connell's review of city records found that Los Angeles Councilman Bernard Parks, City Hall’s budget committee chief, who is warning that soaring payroll and pension costs threaten the city’s financial stability, receives $22,000 a month in city retirement benefits in addition to his $178,789 a year salary. In all, nearly 600 people receive city pensions in excess of $100,000 a year, according to figures obtained by The Times.
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22,000 a month retirement = 264,000 plus 178,800 salary. This totals $442,000 per year. I bet the percent he pays for tax is less than an average income. - Bill

Dick Cheney media offensive all about fear of prosecution?

2009-05-24T18:34:00.000-07:00

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s vocal offensive defending the Bush legacy on the war on terror has raised a lot of eye brows as to what purpose it serves. During his service as VP he worked behind the scenes avoiding the media mostly, where as now he has been front and center criticizing Obama, which has surprised many as a break in protocol and very poor form for a previous administration to speak out against the new President.

Last night on CNN, Liz Cheney, perhaps inadvertently, revealed that part of the reason we’ve seen her dad come out of his bunker to defend the torture regime that he authorized, is that he is anxious to head off any investigation of future prosecution.
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Soaring costs raise stakes for healthcare revamp

2009-05-22T04:04:00.000-07:00

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Democrat with a lead role in crafting the proposed overhaul, said he saw a 75 percent to 80 percent likelihood that legislation will pass the U.S. Senate with broad support from Democrats and Republicans. Baucus said lawmakers were now motivated by "sobering" projections of rising health costs and millions more uninsured Americans, now estimated at about 46 million, if they fail.
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Was Abu Ghraib Worse Than We Could Have Imagined

2009-05-18T22:48:00.000-07:00

The president has stated that he will continue to block the release of additional Abu Ghraib photos depicting torture or “troop abuse” as it is now being referred to in some mainstream media outlets. What could be driving the 180 degree turn in the president’s decision to release the Abu Ghraib photos?
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'GQ': Top-secret Iraq war reports featured Biblical phrases

2009-05-18T19:33:00.000-07:00

ON THE MORNING OF Thursday, April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House. The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.”

This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine. On March 31, a U.S. tank roared through the desert beneath a quote from Ephesians: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” On April 7, Saddam Hussein struck a dictatorial pose, under this passage from the First Epistle of Peter: “It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.”
GQ Magazine: read article

When you vote, be careful of what you wish for... You might get something you never expected.

Mixed reception at Notre Dame for Obama

2009-05-18T06:57:00.000-07:00

Notre Dame commencements are a family tradition for Morgan Caudle, the fourth member of her family to graduate from the prestigious Catholic university. "We must find a way to live together as one human family," the president said. But Caudle, 22, bucked that tradition Sunday, skipping the formal ceremony to attend a rally and prayer vigil organized by students opposed to the university inviting President Obama to speak and receive an honorary degree.

Graduating senior Tara Makowski hadn't even planned on attending commencement, but changed her mind after learning Obama would be speaking. "I think it is a real honor and something I'm always going to remember," said Makowski, 22, of Seattle. "He is the president of the United States." For the two 2009 Notre Dame graduates, memories of their commencement will be forever filtered by the president's visit — but for opposite reasons.
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Sorry Folks: Happy Days Are Not Here Again

2009-05-16T16:27:00.000-07:00

“Demonizing the bankers as if they and they alone created the financial meltdown is both inaccurate and short-sighted,” Citigroup chairman Richard Parsons told reporters recently. “Everybody participated in pumping up this balloon and now that the balloon has deflated, everybody has some part in the blame.”

Oh no we don’t.

Talk about dissembling. The truth is that the top subprime lenders whose loans are largely blamed for triggering the global collapse were owned or backed by giant banks – including Citigroup, whose chairman now feels so unjustly vilified – that are now collecting hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money. Even worse, several paid huge fines to settle predatory lending charges for their direct, sub-prime activity. So, big banks funding the subprime industry weren’t hapless victims of an unforeseen financial collapse as they portray themselves; they were enablers who were bankrolling the lending that all-but brought down the world’s financial system.
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Gov't losses big in home market

2009-05-15T07:28:00.000-07:00

The nation's teetering economy has Uncle Sam playing a growing role in neighborhoods across the country — as a homeowner. The combination of a deep recession and a foundering housing market has left the government with more than 50,000 houses on its hands — enough homes to fill a city the size of Riverside, Calif., or Miami. Now federal records show it's struggling to unload the houses and facing billions of dollars in losses. "Everybody's in this market together," says Bill Apgar, a senior adviser to Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan. "Obviously, this is not the best time to be a home seller."
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Officials: Obama to restart Gitmo tribunals

2009-05-15T07:24:00.000-07:00

President Obama will restart Bush-era military tribunals for a small number of Guantanamo detainees, reviving a fiercely disputed trial system he once denounced but with new legal protections for terror suspects, U.S. officials said Thursday.
Obama suspended the tribunals within hours of taking office in January, ordering a review but stopping short of abandoning President George W. Bush's strategy of prosecuting suspected terrorists.

An administration official familiar with Obama's decision said between 10 and 20 of the 241 detainees currently at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, would be tried by military commissions. Thirteen other detainees — including five charged with helping orchestrate the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington— already have been moved into the system and are expected to be tried there.

The rest of the detainees would either be released, transferred to other nations or tried by civilian prosecutors in U.S. federal courts, an official said. It's also possible that some could continue to be held indefinitely as prisoners of war with full Geneva Conventions protections, according to another senior U.S. official.
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The Health Care Industry's PR Scam

2009-05-13T14:53:00.000-07:00

In a much-anticipated statement today, Barack Obama announced what is largely a public relations end-run by the health care industry, designed to trim a few scraps off of the nation’s porcine health care budget, while preserving its basic system of medicine for profit.

In a letter to Obama that was released over the weekend, executives from the Advanced Medical Technology Association (the medical device manufacturers lobbying group), the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association, America’s Health Insurance Plans, and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, as well as the Service Employees International Union, pledged to “do our part” to reduce health care costs. Their vague, pie-in-the sky promise amounts to just a 1.5 percent reduction in the growth rate of health care spending. Such is the explosion in health care costs that even this miniscule reduction represents a potential $2 trillion saving over 10 years. But there’s no guarantee this figure will be achieved.
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What Do Americans Want? Legal Pot, White House Online Survey Reports

2009-05-13T14:18:00.000-07:00

Forget about the economic crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and saving Social Security: An online opinion survey released by the White House this week ranks legalizing pot, playing online poker and cracking down on Scientologists as far more important issues.

The results are part of a "Citizen's Briefing Book," which compiles the results of an online project launched by President Obama's transition office to solicit policy ideas from the citizenry. More than 125,000 users submitted 1.4 million votes during the wide-open process, leading to results that clearly do not align with recent scientific polling.
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Citizen’s Briefing Book

2009-05-13T14:10:00.000-07:00

As a closing act for the Transition, Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett requested that the Office of Public Liaison create a process by which Americans outside of Washington could come together to present ideas directly to the President – a “Citizen’s Briefing Book.”

The idea was to use the Transition website, change.gov, to create a grassroots version of the research binders that presidents receive every day. But instead of advice from top government officials, the Citizen’s Briefing Book is composed of ideas submitted by ordinary people and reflecting the enthusiastic engagement from the public we saw throughout the course of Change.gov.

125,000 users submitted over 44,000 ideas and cast over 1.4 million votes, with the most popular ideas accumulating tens of thousands of votes each. This book contains some of the top ideas, broken into groups by issue area. You can tell how popular each idea was by looking at the number next to it – it represents how many people voted for the idea, with 10 points awarded for each positive vote. In addition, you will find a “word cloud” for each category of ideas representing the frequency with which various words and concepts appeared through the entire process. Out of the tens of thousands of submissions, these ideas found the most support; here they are, unvarnished and unedited.
read Citizen’s Briefing Book

Health care news worth sharing

2009-05-13T13:54:00.000-07:00

We also have an unprecedented commitment from health care industry leaders, many of whom opposed health reform in the past. Monday, I met with some of these health care stakeholders, and they pledged to do their part to reduce the health care spending growth rate, saving more than two trillion dollars over the next ten years -- around $2,500 for each American family. Then on Tuesday, leaders from some of America's top companies came to the White House to showcase innovative ways to reduce health care costs by improving the health of their workers.

Now the House and Senate are beginning a critical debate that will determine the health of our nation's economy and its families. This process should be transparent and inclusive and its product must drive down costs, assure quality and affordable health care for everyone, and guarantee all of us a choice of doctors and plans.

Reforming health care should also involve you. Think of other people who may want to stay up to date on health care reform and other national issues and tell them to join us here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/EmailUpdates

Health care reform can't come soon enough. We spend more on health care than any country, but families continue to struggle with skyrocketing premiums and nearly 46 million are without insurance entirely. It is a priority for the American people and a pillar of the new foundation we are seeking to build for our economy.

We'll continue to keep you posted about this and other important issues.

Thank you,
Barack Obama

HealthCare.gov

Coming Together, Bringing Down Costs

2009-05-12T12:47:00.000-07:00

Today the President hosted a meeting that marked one of the most promising signs for health reform to date, and not only because the topic was saving more than $2 trillion on health care costs. Representatives from hospitals, the insurance industry, medical device and pharmaceutical companies, labor and physicians came to the White House to discuss major steps being taken to lower health care costs across the board.
See Video

I know from my career studying hospital management that there are efficiencies that can be made. This is a good first step. - Bill

Roll Call - What are your representatives doing ???

2009-05-12T04:13:00.001-07:00

Roll Call is a great way to learn what your representatives are doing in Washington. Understand the issues. Make them accountable for their actions. Did you know that Jerry Lewis, our representative in Washington, voted against the Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act?
learn more about this

Roll Call

You can get email on how all your House and Senate representatives vote from Roll Call.

Or you can follow the link on the right of this page.

This is data, not spin. - Bill

Leahy wants to probe 'chain of command' on torture

2009-04-26T17:00:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- An independent commission is needed to determine who authorized the use of abusive interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists, a leading advocate of such a panel said Sunday. "I want to know who was it who made the decisions that we will violate our own laws; we'll violate our own treaties; we will even violate our own Constitution," Sen. Patrick Leahy told CBS' "Face the Nation."

"That we don't know," said Leahy, D-Vermont, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "We don't know what that chain of command was." Former President George Bush repeatedly denied that his administration authorized the torture of prisoners in U.S. custody. But a set of legal opinions released earlier in this month documented the Bush administration's justification for coercive interrogation techniques including waterboarding, which has been considered torture since the Spanish Inquisition.
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Advocate happy credit-card companies called on the White House carpet

2009-04-26T16:58:00.000-07:00

President Obama had invited card-company executives to the White House to discuss legislation he supports that would crack down on practices such as tricky fine print and sudden, retroactive changes in interest rates. "The days of any-time, any-reason rate hikes and late-fee traps have to end," Obama said after meeting with the executives, whose companies include banks such as Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase that have received billions of dollars in federal bailout funds.

It was a singular moment to Keest and other advocates who have struggled for years to make the case against such practices to a bipartisan coalition of bank-friendly Republicans and Democrats. "I think Obama understands - and may be the first person in a long time in the White House to understand - that debt at any price is not good for households and may well not be good for the economy," Keest said Friday.
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Summers says no unremitting freefall in US economy

2009-04-26T14:16:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The sense of "unremitting freefall" in the U.S. economy has disappeared and the picture is no longer completely negative, but rather mixed, President Barack Obama's economic adviser Lawrence Summers said on Sunday. "Six or eight weeks ago, there were no positive statistics to be found anywhere. The economy felt like it was falling vertically. Today, the picture is much more mixed," Summers said.

"There are some negative indicators, to be sure. There are also some positive indicators. And no one knows what the next turn will be. But I think that sense of unremitting freefall that we had a month or two ago is not present today. And that's something we can take some encouragement from," he added. Summers also said U.S. economic imbalances cannot continue forever and the United States was on a path toward containing the economic downturn and toward recovery.
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Consumer bankruptcy: A guide

2009-04-25T15:33:00.000-07:00

Bankruptcy can help free you from crushing debts and provide a fresh start, but if you're not careful and completely honest, you could end up in worse shape. Here's a look at how it works. As popular as bankruptcy is today, it's nothing new, going at least all the way back to the Bible's Book of Deuteronomy, which simply states: "At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts." If only it were that divinely simple.

Here's a guide to consumer bankruptcy with answers for concerns such as: Who can apply? Will I need a lawyer? What debts can be eased? How will it affect my credit rating? And, perhaps most important of all during this foreclosure-cursed time, will I be able to keep my house? Bankruptcy can be a highly effective tool for getting back on your financial feet. But it's a serious step with long-range consequences, and financial advisors generally say it should be considered only as a last resort. Used unwisely, it can do more harm than good.
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Department of State

2009-04-23T10:54:00.000-07:00

Get the latest on what's happening -- click HERE

The President's address to the CIA

2009-04-23T07:35:00.000-07:00

“What Makes the United States Special”
click HERE

Obama says CIA memos could yet lead to charges

2009-04-22T07:14:00.000-07:00

The Obama administration’s release of secret memos on “enhanced interrogation” techniques is testing the president’s commitment to keep the nation looking forward, not backward. As recently as Monday, the administration’s course had seemed clear. To a cheering crowd at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Va., President Obama said: “You need to know that you’ve got my full support.” Yet today he suggested that the officials who crafted the memos could still face legal action.
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CFR: A Costly Exit from Iraq

2009-04-22T06:59:00.000-07:00

Measured in blood, the price tag in Iraq is absolute: 4,238 Americans (PDF) have died during America's six-year war. For Iraqis, the toll is far greater. Icasualties.org, which tracks body counts reported by the media, notes nearly 45,000 civilians have been killed since Iraq's Shiite-led government was formed in April 2005; another website puts the tally since 2003 close to 100,000. Yet as the Pentagon prepares its exit strategy in line with President Barack Obama's announced plans to end the war by 2012, a wholly different calculus is emerging. With the end of combat rhetorically on the horizon, the cost of leaving is now measured in financial, logistical, and, above all, political terms.

Obama told marines at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, that while the United States would leave Iraq "sovereign, stable, and self-reliant," the price of staying had become too great. "What we will not do is let the pursuit of the perfect stand in the way of achievable goals," the president said. "We cannot sustain indefinitely a commitment that has put a strain on our military and will cost the American people nearly a trillion dollars."
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Mayo Clinic backs new personal health record site

2009-04-21T12:35:00.000-07:00

The Mayo Clinic has combined its medical expertise with Microsoft Corp.'s technology in a free Web site launching Tuesday that will let people store personal health and medical information. The Mayo Clinic Health Manager, as the site is called, is one of many emerging services for so-called personal health records. The sites, from companies such as Microsoft and Google Inc. and major health insurers, are meant to give people an easy way to stash medical information and transfer it to a new clinic, hospital or specialist. But those providers aren't necessarily ready for such an electronic revolution, which for now means it takes some work on the patient's part to set up and maintain the records.

Anyone can sign up for an account, not just Mayo Clinic patients. Users can give access to different slices of their health information to doctors and family members as the need arises. The site prompts people to get started by answering questions about their family medical history and current and past health problems, allergies and medications. Based on that information plus age, gender and other factors, the site recommends additional tasks - scheduling a mammogram, for instance - and articles for further reading. People can add contact details for doctors, pharmacies and insurance companies and set reminders for upcoming appointments.
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Obama open to prosecution, probe of interrogations

2009-04-21T12:33:00.000-07:00

President Barack Obama left the door open Tuesday to prosecuting Bush administration officials who devised the legal authority for gruesome terror-suspect interrogations, saying the United States lost "our moral bearings" with use of the tactics. The question of whether to bring charges against those who devised justification for the methods "is going to be more of a decision for the attorney general within the parameters of various laws and I don't want to prejudge that," Obama said.

Obama also said he could support a congressional investigation into the Bush-era terrorist detainee program, but only under certain conditions, such as if it were done on a bipartisan basis. He said he worries about the impact that high-intensity, politicized hearings in Congress could have on the government's efforts to cope with terrorism. The president had said earlier that he didn't want to see prosecutions of the CIA agents and interrogators who took part in waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, so long as they acted within parameters spelled out by government superiors who held that such practices were legal at the time.
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From insects to waterboarding: 10 'torture' techniques blessed by Bush

2009-04-18T13:47:00.000-07:00

In this August 1, 2002 memo, Jay S Bybee of the US Department of Justice approves ten methods of "enhanced interrogation" on the suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah. He was writing to John Rizzo, CIA acting general counsel. These ten techniques are: (l) attention grasp, (2) walling, (3) facial hold, (4) facial slap (insult slap), (5) cramped confinement, (6) wall standing, (7) stress positions, (8) sleep deprivation, (9) insects placed in a confinement box, and (10) the waterboard.
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Tortured Reading: Of Waterboards, Shackles, and Sly Lawyers

2009-04-18T13:39:00.000-07:00

I've been reading the torture memos released yesterday by the Obama administration, which has also signaled it will not be chasing any past government employee for possible torture-related charges. I noted Thursday the tortured legal reasoning that led the Bush Justice Department in a 2002 memo to tell the CIA that it was just fine to use "the waterboard." Reading the memos is a dispiriting exercise. It shows how government lawyers applied their smarts to turn black into white. The Bush Justice Department breaks down the coercive interrogation techniques the CIA was using into mind-numbingly small details in order to approve them within an ultra-narrow legalistic framework.
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Divisions Arose on Rough Tactics for Qaeda Figure

2009-04-18T13:37:00.000-07:00

The escalation to especially brutal interrogation tactics against the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, including confining him in boxes and slamming him against the wall, was ordered by officials at C.I.A. headquarters based on a highly inflated assessment of his importance, interviews and a review of newly released documents show. Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case. Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said.

Even for those who believed that brutal treatment could produce results, the official said, “seeing these depths of human misery and degradation has a traumatic effect.” C.I.A. officers adopted these techniques only after the Justice Department had given its official approval on Aug. 1, 2002, in one of four formerly secret legal memos on interrogation that were released Thursday. A footnote to another of the memos described a rift between line officers questioning Abu Zubaydah at a secret C.I.A. prison in Thailand and their bosses at headquarters, and asserted that the brutal treatment may have been “unnecessary.”
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Did waterboarding work?

2009-04-18T13:33:00.000-07:00

Left unsettled after the release of memos on CIA interrogation of black site detainees, many of whom later ended up at Guantanamo Bay like this prisoner, is whether the harsh methods worked. The White House and Senate are studying whether harsh interrogation tactics were effective. The reports may determine whether the methods banned by President Obama will ever be used again by the U.S.

The release of internal Bush administration interrogation memos this week answered long-standing questions about the CIA's techniques for getting prisoners to talk, but left unsettled a debate in Washington over whether those methods worked. The White House and the Senate Intelligence Committee are in the early stages of inquiries designed to address that issue, which nearly eight years after the Sept. 11 attacks remains one of the most divisive in the intelligence community.

In response to those efforts, the CIA has begun assembling thousands of classified cables that contain daily reports from the agency's secret prisons, tracking the interrogation methods used on high-value detainees and how much information was obtained as a result. The outcome of the studies could influence whether the U.S. government ever returns to interrogation tactics that were depicted as crucial to intelligence collection under President Bush but banned by President Obama during his first week in office.
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2009-04-15T13:02:00.001-07:00

This photo taken Wednesday April 15, 2009 and released by the French Defense Ministry, showing the interception of a small vessel, left, by French military officers aboard two dinghies, right, on Wednesday, 550 miles (900 kilometers) east of the Kenyan port of Mombasa. The French Defense Ministry says it detained 11 pirates during a French assault on a pirate "mother ship" and thwarted a pirate attack on a Liberian-registered vessel.
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Pirates attack of U.S. cargo ship repelled

2009-04-15T07:42:00.000-07:00

An AH-1 helicopter escorts a UH-1Y helicopter while U.S. Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Bryan E. Campbell prepares an M2.50 caliber machine gun in support of counter-piracy surveillance operations over the Gulf of Aden, April 6, 2009. Pirates armed with grenade launchers and automatic weapons attempted to hijack a U.S.-flagged cargo ship off the Somali coast, officials said.

While the ship, Liberty Sun, sustained some damage in Tuesday's assault, the crew was unharmed and the vessel was able to continue with its shipment of humanitarian aid to its destination port in Mombasa, Kenya... "The pirates fired rocket propelled grenades and automatic weapons at the vessel, which sustained damage." A U.S. Navy spokesman said the Liberty Sun sent a distress call and by the time the USS Bainbridge arrived five hours later, the pirates had fled.
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Obama embraced pragmatism as well as leaders on his trip

2009-04-09T07:41:00.000-07:00

Istanbul, Turkey -- He talked dinosaurs with the British prime minister's sons and bonded with the young Russian president over their shared coming of age in the post-Cold War years. He elicited an embrace from the physically standoffish leader of Turkey. At one point in President Obama's overseas charm offensive, one world leader confided that he'd never felt able to personally "connect" with the previous American president.

"You'll notice my approach is quite different from my predecessor," Obama told the prime minister of Spain, as the two began and ended an official bilateral meeting by talking about their daughters. As Obama hugged his way across Europe and Turkey in recent days, the visual images clearly showed a president trying hard to build personal relationships with his foreign counterparts. In one week's time, he sat down with the leaders of 15 countries. But amid the photo opportunities and public displays of affection there emerged a clarifying message about dealings based on "shared interests." Rapport is "necessary but also not sufficient," said Denis McDonough, Obama's deputy national security advisor.
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U.S. citizens caught up in immigration sweeps

2009-04-09T07:25:00.000-07:00

Frank Ponce de Leon, a native of Mexico who lives in La Puente, Calif., spent almost three months in immigration custody — all the while insisting he was a U.S. citizen. “I knew they couldn’t hold me forever, and sooner or later they would see it my way because I had every right,” he said. The detentions, which in some cases have nearly led to the deportation of citizens or legal residents, are drawing increased attention. Though born in Belize, he had come of age in South Los Angeles, spoke fluent English, served a stint in the Army and had become an American citizen about seven years earlier. He spent months in custody before an appeals panel blocked his deportation and an immigration judge finally ordered Castillo set free.
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Spies compromised US electric grid

2009-04-08T19:30:00.000-07:00

Spies hacked into the U.S. electric grid and left behind computer programs that would let them disrupt service, exposing potentially catastrophic vulnerabilities in key pieces of national infrastructure, a former U.S. government official said Wednesday.
The intrusions were discovered after electric companies gave the government permission to audit their systems, the ex-official said. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. "The vulnerability may be bigger than we think," the official said, adding that the level of sophistication necessary to pull off such intrusions is so high that it is "almost without a doubt" done by state sponsors.
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Obama wins praise from many Muslims

2009-04-08T12:10:00.000-07:00

CAIRO (AP) — President Barack Obama is winning praise from many Muslims across the Mideast and elsewhere for his outreach to their religion and its people. Riad Kahwaji is director of the Dubai-based Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis. He says Obama's recent speech in Turkey speech showed "good will toward the Muslim and the Arab world" — something he calls "nice to see and hear."
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Fidel Castro wants to help Obama: U.S. lawmaker

2009-04-08T11:40:00.000-07:00

Fidel Castro appeared healthy and asked how Cuba's leadership could best help U.S. President Obama move to normalize relations between the two countries, two U.S. lawmakers said on Tuesday after meeting the 82-year-old former Cuban president in Havana. "Of course, he has been ill. But I think we will agree that he was very healthy, very energetic, very clear thinking," Representative Barbara Lee, one of three Democrats to meet Castro, told a Washington news conference.

Representative Laura Richardson said Castro appeared eager to see relations change between the two countries. "He was very well aware of what was going on," Richardson "As he leaned in, he looked directly into our eyes, quite aware of what was happening, and said to us 'how can we help President Obama?'"
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Go back into hiding, GOP begs Dick Cheney

2009-03-24T08:06:00.000-07:00

Congressional Republicans are telling Dick Cheney to go back to his undisclosed location and leave them alone to rebuild the Republican Party without his input. The veep, who showed a penchant for secrecy during eight years in the White House,has popped up in media interviews to defend the Bush-Cheney record while suggesting that the country is not as safe under President Obama. Rep. John Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) said, “He became so unpopular while he was in the White House that it would probably be better for us politically if he wouldn’t be so public...” Cheney did “House Republicans no favors,” the lawmaker said, adding, “I could never understand him anyway.”
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Is Mexico's drug trade America's biggest threat?

2009-03-13T08:43:00.000-07:00

These days you don't have to go to South Asia to find a country our Defense Department is very worried about. You can take I-35. You can walk! Mexico has landed on the U.S. national security worry list. A Defense Department study released in November coupled Mexico with Pakistan as states in danger of "rapid and sudden collapse." The drug war in Mexico is more and more just... war. Drug cartels are blamed for killing more than 6,000 people since January of last year. Six thousand!

The mayor of Ciudad Juarez, Jose Reyes Ferriz, is hiding out right now, presumably in El Paso, Texas, from drug lords who killed six of his city's police officers and are now, even still, threatening to kill Reyes and his family. According to our own Justice Department, Mexican drug cartels are operating in as many as 230 U.S. cities and control about 90 percent of the cocaine market, and most of the maijuana, meth, and heroin markets here. So, we're left with a situation in which a country with 109 million people, the 11th most populous country in the world, has a government that is unsafe within its own borders, one of which it shares with us!

Rachael Maddow

Mexico's drug war creates new class of refugees

2009-03-04T06:46:00.000-08:00

The Juarez police lieutenant was recovering from three gunshot wounds, the result of an assault by hit men for a drug cartel. His name was on a death list brazenly posted at a monument for fallen peace officers. Lt. Salvador Hernandez Arvizu didn't like his odds of surviving in Mexico. So he fled his hospital bed, hoping to take refuge in the U.S. At a border post in El Paso, he filled out immigration paperwork, made a formal request for political asylum -- and was taken directly to jail. The Juarez policeman is part of a new breed of would-be refugees -- business owners, law enforcement officers, journalists and other professionals -- on the run from Mexico's vicious drug wars. Increasingly, they are seeking safe haven in the U.S. by filing for asylum.

The number of asylum requests filed at U.S. border entries by Mexican nationals nearly doubled to almost 200 in the last fiscal year, and the pace has increased this year. Seventy Mexican asylum-seekers filed petitions in the first quarter, most of them in El Paso and San Diego. The figures are small compared with the vast scale of illegal immigration, but many fear explosive growth if the bloodshed worsens. Drug violence in Mexico has claimed at least 7,000 lives in little more than a year, most of them along the border and many carried out to maximize their gruesome effect. Mass killings and beheadings have had a terrorizing effect on border towns from Texas to Tijuana.
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Cost of locking up Americans too high - Pew study

2009-03-02T14:05:00.000-08:00

One in every 31 U.S. adults is in the corrections system, which includes jail, prison, probation and supervision, more than double the rate of a quarter century ago, according to a report released on Monday by the Pew Center on the States. The study, which said the current rate compares to one in 77 in 1982, concluded that with declining resources, more emphasis should be put on community supervision, not jail or prison.

"Violent and career criminals need to be locked up, and for a long time. But our research shows that prisons are housing too many people who can be managed safely and held accountable in the community at far lower cost," said Adam Gelb, director of the Center's Public Safety Performance Project, which produced the report. The United States has the highest incarceration rate and the biggest prison population of any country in the world, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Most of those in the U.S. corrections system -- one in 45 -- are already on probation or parole, with one in 100 in prison or jail, the Pew study found. Those numbers are higher in certain areas of the country, and Georgia tops all states with one in 13 adults in the justice system. The other leading states are Idaho, where one in 18 are in corrections and Texas, where the rate is one in 22. In the nation's capital, Washington, D.C., nearly 5 percent of adults are in the city's penal system.
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Investigating Bush's Crimes

2009-02-24T16:14:00.001-08:00

JANNA BROWER

When the Obama transition team opened a questions referendum on its popular change.gov website in December, one issue quickly soared to the top. "Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor (ideally Patrick Fitzgerald) to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?" And when Obama stepped to the microphone at his first presidential press conference, the question came again, this time with reference to a Congressional call for a truth commission. Obama's response: "My view is also that nobody is above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen; but that generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards." The answer was a slight variation on the theme he has struck consistently since the final days of his campaign. But what does it mean with respect to the criminal accountability of Bush-era policy-makers? Many are inclined to hear confirmation of their hopes--Republicans eager to see the disastrous Bush years passed over without more fuss will stress the intention not to "look back," while Obama supporters who embraced his strong criticism of Bush's torture and surveillance policies will emphasize his observation that "nobody is above the law." Others are displeased with the ambiguity and press for a conclusive decision on the question.

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Obama's Iran strategy

2009-02-22T08:45:00.000-08:00

President Obama is working against time to untangle 30 years of enmity and prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, but even his own advisors know the chance of success is slim. So they also have been working on Plan B: What do we do if Iran gets the bomb? Today, the Obama administration is debating its Iran policy behind closed doors. Last year, however, four of its key appointees wrote about the issue as private citizens, and their writings suggest they are already planning for how to handle a nuclear Iran.

Dennis Ross, the former Middle East peace negotiator who is expected to be named as Obama's top Iran advisor, argued for giving diplomacy a chance to work but suggested that containment might have to be the future course of U.S. policy. "Maybe, even if we engage the Iranians, we will find that however we do so and whatever we try, the engagement simply does not work," Ross wrote in a September report published by the Center for a New American Security, a think tank that has supplied several appointees to the new administration. "We will need to hedge bets and set the stage for alternative policies either designed to prevent Iran from going nuclear or to blunt the impact if they do."

If diplomacy fails, another Obama advisor wrote in the same report, the alternative "is a strategy of containment and punishment." That was the conclusion of Ashton B. Carter, Obama's reported choice as an undersecretary of Defense, who also warned: "The challenge of containing Iranian ambitions and hubris would be as large as containing its nuclear arsenal." Most (and maybe all) of Obama's advisors see the costs of attacking Iran as outweighing the benefits. If Iran gets closer to acquiring nuclear weapons, they've warned, military action won't look any more appetizing than it did under George W. Bush.
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U.S. Airways live recordings on YouTube

2009-02-06T06:51:00.000-08:00

click here to choose U.S. Airways recording

Trump: Obama 'absolutely right' on executive pay cap

2009-02-04T23:33:00.000-08:00

Donald Trump, businessman and CEO of The Trump Organization, knows a little something about money. Trump spoke with CNN's Larry King about whether there should be executive pay limits, if there should be a stimulus plan and when there could be an end to the economic downturn. The following is an edited portion of the interview.

Larry King: Is Obama right or wrong to go after these executives with salary caps?

Donald Trump: Well, I think he's absolutely right. Billions of dollars is being given to banks and others. You know, once you start using taxpayer money, it's a whole new game. So I absolutely think he's right.

King: What about the whole concept of bailouts?

Trump: Well, it's a little bit different. A lot of people are not in favor of bailouts. You know, we talked about all the different things going on in this country. Let's face it, Larry, we are in a depression. If they didn't do the bailout, you would be in depression No. 2 and maybe just as big as depression No. 1, so they really had to do something. The problem is they're giving millions and billions of dollars to banks and the banks aren't loaning it. If you are a prime customer of a bank and if you need 10 cents, you can't get it. The banks are out of business. They're not loaning. Now, billions of dollars has been given. They're supposed to be loaning out that money and they're using it for other purposes, so it is a real mess.

King: If you were in the Senate, would you vote for the stimulus plan?

Trump: Well, I'd vote for a stimulus plan. I'm not sure that all of the things in there are appropriate. Some of the little toys that they have are not really appropriate, and they're a little surprising that they seem to want it, because the publicity on it has been terrible. I would certainly vote for a stimulus, but I would really vote for banks having to loan out the money because they're not doing that.

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Mexico under siege: The drug war at our doorstep

2009-01-23T04:36:00.000-08:00

6,285 is the estimated number of people who have died in drug-related violence in Mexico since the start of 2007.
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US Airways pilot knew 'we're gonna be in the Hudson'

2009-01-18T03:41:00.000-08:00

BIG LIFT: A crane moves US Airways Flight 1549 from its mooring along a seawall to a barge. Investigators interview the captain, Chesley B. Sullenberger III, and his co-pilot, and release new details about the emergency landing in New York. The plane is hoisted out of the water. The pilot of a crippled US Airways jetliner made a split-second decision to put down in the Hudson River because trying to return to the airport after birds knocked out both engines could have led to a "catastrophic" crash in a populated neighborhood, he told investigators Saturday.

Capt. Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III said that in the few minutes he had to decide where to set down the powerless plane Thursday afternoon, he felt it was "too low, too slow" and near too many buildings to go anywhere else, according to the National Transportation Safety Board account of his testimony. Co-pilot Jeff Skiles, who was flying US Airways Flight 1549, saw the birds coming in perfect formation, and made note of it. Sullenberger looked up, and in an instant his windscreen was filled with big, dark-brown birds.

"His instinct was to duck," said NTSB board member Kitty Higgins, recounting their interview. Then there was a thump, the smell of burning birds, and silence as both aircraft engines cut out. The account illustrated how quickly things deteriorated after the bump at 3,000 feet, and the pilots' swift realization that returning to LaGuardia or getting to another airport was impossible. The birds had not been on the radar screen of the air traffic controller who approved the departure, Higgins said.
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Adult Illiteracy In The U.S.

2009-01-09T18:29:00.000-08:00

A troubling report released by the Education Department suggests that a shocking number of Americans can barely read. One in seven American adults lack sufficient reading skills. Seth Doane reports.
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Cheney's delusions

2008-12-20T08:04:00.000-08:00

His defense of waterboarding, Guantanamo and the Iraq invasion is indeed Darth Vader-like. We probably shouldn't have been surprised at Vice President Dick Cheney's blustering, obstinate insistence on ABC News on Monday that he's been right all along about virtually everything. But that doesn't mean we have to agree.

In the interview, Cheney not only acknowledged that he was involved in approving the harsh interrogation methods used by the CIA on suspected terrorists, but said he still thinks that waterboarding was an appropriate way to extract information. He said -- contradicting even President Bush -- that he believes the notorious American prison at Guantanamo Bay should remain open for the foreseeable future, and he reiterated that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was justified by, believe it or not, Saddam Hussein's weapons programs.

Maybe this was just a desperate, last-minute effort to rescue what appears to be a legacy in deep trouble, but it came across asnothing less than self-delusion. Despite public opinion polls showing that only about a third of the country believes the U.S. should have invaded Iraq, undaunted by the irrefutable fact that America's prestige has plummeted around the world, notwithstanding the outcry by human rights advocates against torture and the fact that there is no meaningful peace in sight in Iraq or Afghanistan, Cheney soldiers on with the same cocky, we know what we're doing and laws be damned attitude that has come to define him.
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California Supreme Court allows good Samaritans to be sued for nonmedical care

2008-12-18T19:55:00.000-08:00

In a decision that could give pause to would-be good Samaritans, the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a young woman who pulled a co-worker from a crashed vehicle isn't immune from civil liability because the care she rendered wasn't medical. Lisa Torti of Northridge now faces trial for allegedly contributing to the injuries suffered by fellow department store cosmetician Alexandra Van Horn, who was rendered a paraplegic in the car crash on Topanga Canyon Road that ended a night of Halloween revelry in 2004.

The high court's narrow definition of who qualifies for immunity when coming to the aid of an accident victim drew criticism within its own ranks, with three of the seven justices deeming the ruling "an arbitrary and unreasonable limitation" on protections for those trying to help. Because the relevant section is within the code's emergency medical services division, lawmakers probably intended it "to immunize from liability for civil damages only those persons who in good faith render emergency medical care at the scene of a medical emergency," Moreno wrote.
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VOA: Georgia

2008-12-11T07:37:00.000-08:00

In November 2003, the small Caucasus nation of Georgia made headlines around the world, as tens of thousands took to the streets to demand a new government and a new direction. The "Rose Revolution" brought high hopes for democracy, economic opportunity and a decisive tilt westward towards Europe and the United States.

Today, Georgia is still navigating a difficult course between East and West, as its war with neighboring Russia in August proved. VOA Correspondent Sonja Pace was recently in Georgia visiting cities, villages and areas once in the frontline of the fighting. She talked with those directly affected by the war and those fortunate enough to have been away from the shooting and shelling.
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U.S. researchers closer to creating new solar cells

2008-12-01T09:52:00.000-08:00

U.S. researchers have taken one step closer to creating high-efficiency solar cells using cheap plastic with a dash of silicon, it was announced on Saturday. The solar cells, being developed by researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), have significantly greater sunlight absorption and conversation than previous polymers, the university said in a press release on its website. "Ideally, we'd like to push the performance of the solar cell to higher than 10 percent efficiency. We know the potential is there," he added.
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What is Wikileaks?

2008-11-30T07:17:00.000-08:00

Wikileaks is a website that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors. Within one year of its December 2006 launch, its database had grown to more than 1.2 million documents. Wikileaks runs on modified MediaWiki software.

Wikileaks developers have stated that there will be checks in place to keep the "completely anonymous" system from being flooded with false documents, pornography, and spam. Their stated goal is to ensure that whistle-blowers and journalists are not thrown into jail for emailing sensitive or classified documents, such as what happened to Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who was sentenced to 10 years in jail in 2005 after publicising an email from Chinese officials about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Traffic following its disclosure increased from eight Google searches to over 1,000,000 in the first two weeks.
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Wikileaks is available in the Other Sources panel of The Observer on the right.

Who are Somalia's pirates?

2008-11-22T06:16:00.000-08:00

On Nov 20, Somali pirates demanded $25 million for the Saudi-owned MV Sirius Star, a hijacked supertanker now docked in Somalia's semi autonomous Puntland region. Pirates gave ship owners 10 days to comply with the demand. Today's pirates are mainly fighters for Somalia's many warlord factions, who have fought each other for control of the country since the collapse of the Siad Barre government in 1991.

Their motives? A mixture of entrepreneurialism and survival, says Iqbal Jhazbhay, a Somali expert at the University of South Africa in Tshwane, as Pretoria is now called. "From the evidence so far, these primarily appear to be fighters looking for predatory opportunities," says Mr. Jhazbhay. They operated "roadblocks in the past, which were fleecing people as a form of taxation. Now they've seen the opportunities on the high seas."

Initially, one of the main motives for taking to the seas – working first with local fishermen, and later buying boats and weapons with the proceeds of every ship they captured – was "pure survival," says Jhazbhay, explaining that armed extortion is one of the few opportunities to make a living in lawless Somalia. Now it has become a highly profitable, sophisticated criminal enterprise hauling in millions of dollars in ransom payments.
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Arab countries meet to tackle Somali pirate threat
Hitting the High Seas? Check Your Pirate Insurance

Oil lobby pushes energy agenda

2008-11-21T07:04:00.000-08:00

While the institute wouldn’t divulge its budget or specific target areas, its chief executive officer, Jack Gerard, indicated it was preparing a multimillion-dollar campaign, including a wide array of advertising and lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill. So far this year, the institute has spent $3.6 million on lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The oil and gas industry made major headway this year when President George W. Bush lifted the presidential ban on offshore drilling for oil and natural gas and Congress allowed the congressional moratorium to expire. But lobbyists see growing concern among the oil industry that Democrats, who will control both Congress and the White House next year, may move to reinstate the ban. So, industry leaders are now looking to seize the opportunity to speed domestic production in response to the nation’s growing energy and economic crisis.
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Africa a country? Report says Palin thought so

2008-11-07T07:39:00.000-08:00

It appears Sarah Palin's geographic confusion may extend beyond believing that Alaska's proximity to Russia lent her foreign policy expertise. According to a Fox News report, the Republican vice presidential candidate didn't seem to know that Africa is a continent. "We're told by folks that she didn't know what countries … were in NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, that being the Canada, the U.S., and Mexico," Cameron reported Wednesday. "We're told she didn't understand that Africa was a continent rather than a country just in itself."

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Russia perceives military threat from United States

2008-11-06T12:24:00.000-08:00

Russia will deploy missiles near NATO member Poland in response to U.S. missile defense plans, President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday in his first state of the nation speech. Medvedev also cast Russia’s August war with Georgia and the global financial turmoil as consequences of aggressive U.S. policies. He said he hoped the next U.S. administration would improve relations. He congratulated Barack Obama on his election victory and said he was hoping for “constructive dialogue” with the incoming U.S. president.

The president said the Iskander missiles will be deployed in Russia’s Kaliningrad region, which lies between Poland and the ex-Soviet republic of Lithuania on the Baltic Sea. Equipment to electronically hamper the operation of prospective U.S. missile defense facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic also will be deployed, he said. He did not say whether the short-range Iskander missiles would be fitted with nuclear warheads and it was not clear exactly when the missiles would be deployed. “Mechanisms must be created to block mistaken, egoistical and sometimes simply dangerous decisions of certain members of the international community,” he said, making it clear he was referring to the U.S.

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California gets 'next generation' solar plant

2008-10-23T15:12:00.000-07:00

1,000-foot-long mirrors focus sun's rays to heat water and make electricity. This solar thermal power plant in Bakersfield, Calif., uses mirrors along the ground to direct sunlight onto horizontal columns. Those then heat up water, producing steam that is used to power an electricity generator.

Calling it a sign of things to come, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday helped unveil a demonstration facility that concentrates the sun's rays via mirrors to produce electricity. "This next generation solar power plant is further evidence that reliable, renewable and pollution-free technology is here to stay," Schwarzenegger stated. "Not only will this large-scale solar facility generate power to help us meet our renewable energy goals, it will also generate new jobs as California continues to pioneer the clean-tech industry."

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Why Are More Older Americans Sleeping in Their Cars?

2008-10-13T14:50:00.000-07:00

Behind a security gate in the desolate parking lot of a historic church in Santa Barbara, Calif., the grandmother settles in for the night in her Jeep Grand Cherokee. She reads a book, says her prayers and tucks a coat under her head before drifting off to sleep in the back seat. No one knows she is homeless—not her coworkers at the coffee shop where she earns $8 an hour nor her colleagues at the real estate firm where she spends time each week trying to rebuild a business.

“I figured I’d always have money,” says the woman, 55, who preferred to remain anonymous and recently owned two homes worth nearly $2 million. “I never dreamed this would happen.” Unable to sell her homes or shoulder the $10,000-a-month mortgage payments, she declared bankruptcy in 2005. A year later, she lost both properties, becoming an early statistic in America’s foreclosure crisis. Today she epitomizes the changing face of homelessness as a small but growing number of lower- and middle-income Americans—people who never expected to become homeless—are driven out of their homes and onto the street by the nation’s economic turmoil and the record foreclosure rate.

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Warren Buffett: We Have "Terrible, Terrible Problems"

2008-10-10T12:56:00.000-07:00

Oct 1, 08 3:29 PM

The most charming man alive phones CNBC from a jet to explain why he just bought $3 billion of GE, urge Congress to pass the bailout, and explain that a situation he just described as an "economic Pearl Harbor" has already gotten worse.

A few key points:

Warren reiterates support for the bailout, but also reiterates--half a dozen times--that it is only a good deal for the taxpayer if the government buys the trash assets for market prices. Unfortunately, the government has already said it won't be paying market prices. It will be paying above-market prices--and thus quietly recapitalizing the banks without getting much equity in exchange. Warren Buffett wouldn't do this deal. The US taxpayer shouldn't, either.
Warren says we now have "terrible, terrible problems." He blasts Congress as being a couple of paramedics who arrive at the heart attack victim and, instead of reaching for the defibrillator paddles, argue about who's fault it was.
"There's no way a smart person can go broke except through borrowed money."

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General Petraeus agrees with Barack Obama

2008-10-09T21:56:00.000-07:00

Petraeus: "I Do Think You Have To Talk To Enemies". In a case of comically awful timing, Petraeus yesterday gave a talk at the Heritage Foundation in which he more or less echoed Barack Obama's views on negotiating with hostile foreign leaders -- views that McCain has repeatedly subjected to criticism and ridicule.

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Iraq, Royal Dutch Shell to ink gas deal

2008-09-23T02:11:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month, the Iraqi Cabinet approved the agreement following nearly eight months of discussions between Iraqi oil officials and Shell. Monday’s ceremony will finalize the deal. Shell is expected to pump $3 billion to $4 billion over five years to gather at least 500-600 million cubic feet of flared gas per day from the southern fields. The agreement also provides for construction of a number of liquefied natural gas facilities, the statement said.

The agreement will be Iraq’s second major hydrocarbon deal since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 that toppled Saddam Hussein after the approval of the $3 billion deal with China to develop the Ahdab oil field in southern Iraq. Under the contract, China National Petroleum Corp. will develop the field for 20 years. It’s expected to produce up to 25,000 barrels per day after three years, and eventually reach 125,000 barrels per day.

Iraq has the world’s third-largest oil reserves with an estimated 115 billion barrels. It also sits on an estimated 112 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves, according to the ministry.

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Are we science-savvy enough to make informed decisions?

2008-09-15T22:08:00.000-07:00

For decades, educators and employers have worried that too few Americans are preparing for careers in science. But there's evidence to support a new, broader concern in this election year: Ordinary Americans may not know enough about science to make informed decisions on key questions. But only 26% believe that they themselves have a good understanding of science. And 44% couldn't identify a single scientist, living or dead, whom they'd consider a role model for the nation's young people.

These results are disturbing, science education experts say, because scientists aren't the only ones who must distinguish solid scientific methods from bogus ones. Some important scientific questions are being debated this year, including food safety, imported-product safety and the effect of biofuels.

Finding trustworthy sources

Whether a person is planning a child's diet or staking out a position on global warming, insights from science are indispensable, experts say, but only if someone knows which findings to trust. "People will respond to demagoguery if they don't believe they have sufficient knowledge and sufficient confidence in their ability to weigh arguments and assess what's behind them," says Walter Massey, a board member of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, which commissioned the survey.

"The danger is that we move increasingly toward being a society where the most important decisions are ultimately made by fewer and fewer people." Even figuring out which organizations to trust for guidance requires some basic knowledge of what constitutes good research methodology, Massey says.

SURVEY: A SOBER OUTLOOK

American adults surveyed take a dim view of the USA's status as a world science leader.

70% believe the USA is not now the world leader in science achievement.

35% believe the USA will be the world science leader in the next 20 years.

79% agree that science is not receiving the attention it deserves in schools.

Source: A telephone survey of 1,304 adults by Harris Interactive on behalf of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry

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Chinese Company Inks First Oil Deal With Baghdad

2008-09-15T19:25:00.000-07:00

The Iraqi Oil Ministry headed by Hussein al-Shahristani has substantially reinstated a 1997 agreement with the China National Petroleum Company (CNPC) for exploration and development of an oil field in Southern Iraq. The Al-Ahdab oil field in the Shiite dominated province of Wasit in southern Iraq is where the Chinese concession is located.

The 1997 deal was tabled after U.N. sanctions and the U.S. invasion that followed made its execution impractical. The value of the new arrangement is $3 billion rather the estimated $1.2 billion value of the earlier deal. Security arrangements, to be provided by the Iraqi government, are a part of this deal.

This is the first deal finalized by the Iraqi Oil Ministry, but the government of the semi- autonomous region of Kurdistan has been bumping heads with Baghdad by inking a whole series of deals independent of the central government. These deals include an agreement with Hunt Oil of Dallas, Texas, a firm with close ties to U.S. President George W. Bush.

A deal has been struck with Heritage Oil of Canada and another with a consortium of South Korean companies headed by the Korean National Oil Company. A Lebanese construction firm, Make Oil, has also contracted to build a three billion dollar oil refinery in Dhouk, Kurdistan.

These independent deals have caused difficulty between the government of Kurdistan, the Iraqi central government in Baghdad and the U.S. State Department, and it is another roadblock to the passage of an oil law in the Iraqi Parliament.

Current Iraqi oil production is between 2.3 and 2.5 million barrels per day on the world’s second or third (depending on who is estimating) largest proven reserves of 115 billion barrels.

For further reading, see:

http://english.aljazeera.net/business/2008/08/200882813538226440.html

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080902/ap_on_mi_ea/iraq_china_oil

http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2008/Sep02/0,4670,IraqChinaOil,00.html

China, Iraq reach $3 billion oil service deal
Bringing China into the Middle East

Bush extends $1 billion in aid to Georgia

2008-09-04T12:06:00.000-07:00

Offering new support for Georgia after its losing military clash with Russia last month, President Bush said Wednesday that the United States would provide up to $1 billion in assistance to the beleaguered Caucasus nation. But by including no money for Georgia's military, the White House appeared to be trying to avoid irritating Moscow while the region remains tense. The package includes humanitarian assistance and help in rebuilding infrastructure. It does not include money for the Caucasus nation's military.

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McCain's Financial Guru, Phil Gramm, has been Wrecking the Economy for Years!

2008-08-26T16:50:00.000-07:00

Even without becoming president, Gramm still inflicted terrible damage on the economy. In 1999, he happened to be Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee just when the finance, insurance, and real estate industries were spending $200 million lobbying Congress to deregulate the banks. They targeted their campaign contributions to the leaders of Congressional banking committees, and Phil was there. He introduced the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. When it became law, it repealed the Depression-era banking reform law called the Glass-Steagall Act.

In the run-up to the stock market crash of 1929, bankers invested vigorously in the market, loaned money to speculators to invest, and even loaned their depositors' money to companies in which they were invested. When the market imploded, 11,000 banks failed, and millions of Americans went broke overnight. A lot of them blamed bankers.

The Roosevelt Administration enacted the Glass-Steagall Act to create a firewall between commercial banks and investment (corporate securities) banks because the volatile mixture of the two helped fire the speculative frenzy in the stock markets. The Act also established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) which allowed ordinary Americans to put their money into accounts that were federally insured and detached from stock market risks. For many Americans, the Glass-Steagall Act was the New Deal.

Seven decades later, Phil Gramm got rid of that banking reform law at the request of investment bankers, although the FDIC still exists.

Phil took charge again in 2000. Congress was trying to pass a 10,000 page, $384 billion omnibus spending bill just before Christmas break, and Senator Gramm clandestinely slipped in a 262-page amendment entitled the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. (CFMA) The entire bill passed and was signed into law by lame-duck President Bill Clinton.

The CFMA effectively made the market for exotic derivatives off-limits to regulatory agencies like the SEC. Two of these financial instruments, credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, led directly to the sub prime real estate debacle and the banking credit crisis of today.

Phil Gramm´s legislation created a shadow banking system that operates outside any government oversight. Unfortunately, it leads to financial disasters that often require government (taxpayer) rescue in order to avert a national economic catastrophe.

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What Was The Glass-Steagall Act?

2008-08-26T16:40:00.000-07:00

In 1933, in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash and during a nationwide commercial bank failure and the Great Depression, two members of Congress put their names on what is known today as the Glass-Steagall Act (GSA). This act separated investment and commercial banking activities. At the time, "improper banking activity", or what was considered overzealous commercial bank involvement in stock market investment, was deemed the main culprit of the financial crash.

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