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Thursday, August 26, 2010 at 02:05PM Thursday, August 26, 2010 at 02:00PM A film by Bryan Law and Dan Dicks, United We Fall is a documentary about the North American Union that is being developed right now between Canada, the United States and Mexico.
Thursday, August 26, 2010 at 10:25AM 
The aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan at the center of a politically sensitive corruption investigation is being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Afghan and American officials.
Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for the National Security Council, appears to have been on the payroll for many years, according to officials in Kabul and Washington. It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does in exchange for his money, whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing American views inside the presidential palace, or both.
Mr. Salehi’s relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration’s policy in Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Mr. Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while sometimes subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it.
Mr. Salehi was arrested in July and released after Mr. Karzai intervened. There has been no suggestion that Mr. Salehi’s ties to the C.I.A. played a role in his release; rather, officials say, it is the fear that Mr. Salehi knows about corrupt dealings inside the Karzai administration.
The ties underscore doubts about how seriously the Obama administration intends to fight corruption here. The anticorruption drive, though strongly backed by the United States, is still vigorously debated inside the administration. Some argue it should be a centerpiece of American strategy, and others say that attacking corrupt officials who are crucial to the war effort could destabilize the Karzai government.
Thursday, August 26, 2010 at 09:52AM 
Director James Cameron says audiences don't have to look to the stars to find resonance for his sci-fi blockbuster "Avatar," which returns to theaters Friday with nine more minutes of footage.
They can find a big, oozing parallel right in the Gulf of Mexico.
"The BP mess is a classic example of how our energy policies, or lack thereof, are going to hurt us," Cameron recently told the Daily News. A symptom of the same corporate greed that drove the fictional RDA Corporation to pillage the planet Pandora in the film, he said.
Cameron had a close-up view of the environmental devastation in the first few weeks after the April 20 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion. In early June, the 56-year-old writer-director-producer convened with a group of 25 experts who came up with a suggestion of a method to plug the leaking wellhead that had been spewing one million gallons of oil a day. After ignoring his group's report, BP successfully adopted an almost identical method two months later.
"Lots of technologies were offered to us. They were thoroughly evaluate by a team of industry engineers," BP spokesman Robert Wine responded by email. "We did have some contact with James Cameron. His technologies were not suitable."
But Cameron said the the oil giant has been running roughshod over the EPA, Coast Guard and scientific experts since the early days of the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history. He points to the use of the toxic dispersant, Corexit - BP says it weighed the risks and had government approval - and the company's blockade of outside inspection of the wellhead site.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 10:02PM Seattle Times
Last December, Army Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs began joking with other soldiers about how easy it would be to "toss a grenade" at Afghan civilians and kill them, according to statements made by fellow platoon members to military investigators.
One soldier said it was a stupid idea. Another believed that Gibbs was "feeling out the platoon."
Others told investigators Gibbs eventually turned the talk into action, forming what one called a "kill team" to carry out random executions of Afghans.
In one of the most serious war-crimes cases to emerge from the Afghanistan war, five soldiers from a Stryker infantry brigade based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord are now charged with murder for their alleged roles in killing three Afghan civilians.
In two of the incidents, grenades were thrown at the victims and they were shot, according to charging documents. The third victim also was shot.
The soldiers allegedly killed the three Afghans while out on patrol, and anyone who dared to report the events was threatened with violence, according to statements made to investigators.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 09:43PM Aug. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Investors face defaults on government bonds given the burden of aging populations and the difficulty of increasing tax revenue, according to a Morgan Stanley executive director.
“Governments will impose a loss on some of their stakeholders,” Arnaud Mares in the firm’s London office wrote in a research report today. “The question is not whether they will renege on their promises, but rather upon which of their promises they will renege, and what form this default will take.” The sovereign-debt crisis is global “and it is not over,” he wrote.
Rather than miss principal and interest payments, governments may choose a “soft” default in which they pay back debts with devalued currencies resulting from faster inflation or force creditors to take lower returns, Mares said in an interview.
Borrowing costs for so-called peripheral euro-region nations from Greece to Ireland surged today, resuming their ascent on concern that governments won’t be able to cut their budget deficits. Standard & Poor’s lowered Ireland’s credit rating yesterday on the rising cost of supporting nationalized banks.
Population trends may be a better predictor of the ability to meet obligations rather than debt as a percentage of gross domestic product, which doesn’t reflect governments’ available revenue and is “backward-looking,” Mares wrote.
While the U.S. government’s debt is 53 percent of GDP, one of the lowest ratios among developed nations, its debt as a percentage of revenue is 358 percent, one of the highest, the report said. Italy has one of the highest debt-to-GDP ratios, at 116 percent, yet has a debt-to-revenue ratio of 188, Mares said.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 09:21PM NPR
U.S. special forces, along with Afghan interpreters, raided an Afghan home two weeks ago and announced they had killed three suspected militants.
The next morning, hundreds of people blocked the highway nearby, protesting that the young men were college students home for the holy month of Ramadan.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 09:18PM 
NEW YORK – The planned mosque and Islamic center blocks from ground zero got a new boost Wednesday from a coalition of supporters that includes families of Sept. 11 victims.
New York Neighbors for American Values rallied for the first time at a municipal building near ground zero.
"I lost a 23-year-old son, a paramedic who gave his life saving Americans and their values," Talat Hamdani said, and supporting the Islamic center and mosque "has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with standing up for our human rights, including freedom of religion."
Among the nearly 2,800 people killed when the World Trade Center was attacked in 2001 were more than 30 Muslims, she noted.
Opponents of the Islamic center project argue it's insensitive to the families and memories of Sept. 11 victims to build a mosque so close. Supporters cite freedom of religion.
The new coalition was started by members of 40 civic and religious organizations that "spontaneously called each other, because we had the feeling that something very negative was happening," said Susan Lerner, executive director of the New York office of the watchdog group Common Cause.
The controversy was triggered by "irresponsible politicians" using it as an election issue, she said. Names mentioned at the rally included former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican, and the highest-ranking Democrat in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 03:14PM AMATEUR astronomers are enjoying a cat-and-mouse game with the US military in keeping track of its secret space plane, the X-37B.
The X-37B was launched in April amid much publicity, but scant detail about its true use.
Built by Boeing's Phantom Works division, the X-37B program was originally headed by NASA.
It was later turned over to the Pentagon's research and development arm and then to a secretive Air Force unit.
Only a very select few in the US military know what it's for, but observers on Earth believe they're putting together the puzzle piece by piece.
Several sources claim quote arms control advocates who say it's clearly the beginning of the "weaponisation of space".
In May, avid skywatcher Ted Molczan studied the X-37B's orbit from his home in Toronto and said its behaviour suggested it was testing sensors for a range of new spy satellites.
Since then, the X-37B been arguably the least-secret secret project on the planet, as fellow backyard astronomers joined in the scrutiny, aided by how-to video guides and apps such as the Simple Satellite Tracker.
That is, they did until July 29, when the shuttle disappeared, causing all kinds of consternation and conspiracy theories about its fate.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 02:39PM 
A senior Washington intelligence source reported this morning that a serious fight has erupted inside the Federal Reserve over hyperinflation, and that people close to the Fed are going to be leaking details, which means the fight will intensify and become more public. He added that that fight is now erupting inside this week's annual Jackson Hole economic summit of the Fed, whose host, Thomas Hoenig of the Kansas City Fed, has publicly dissented from Bernanke's hyperinflationary decisions at each of the last eight meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee. And indeed, sources at that Jackson Hole gathering report that it is an extremely interesting one, especially its off-the-record discussions.
Lyndon LaRouche responded, "I'm not surprised about the brawl in the Fed; for me it's not commentary. I know what's going on. If we don't get rid of this President, you're not going to have a country. We're talking about very short term. I think interpreting events is a mistake, because you're not interpreting the non-events, or the events which are happening but which are not being reported or not being referred to."
Returning to this topic, he added, later: "The break actually happened several weeks ago, and what you're seeing with this Jackson Hole meeting of the Fed, and things like that, is you're seeing reflections of the fact that anybody on the inside knows, without any statistical mumbo-jumbo, that this system is coming down fast."
Similarly, today's Wall St Journal reports that the Aug 10 meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, whose decision to purchase hundreds of billions of Treasuries was part of the Weimar-hyperinflationary turn in policy that LaRouche had forecast, was the "most contentious" such meeting in "bubbles" Ben Bernanke's four-plus-year tenure as Chairman.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 02:39PM 
WIKILEAKS is preparing to release a leaked CIA paper, the whistleblower website said today.
"WikiLeaks to release CIA paper tomorrow," it said late yesterday in a Tweet also posted on its website, which is already locked in a dispute with the Pentagon over the leaking secret military documents on the Afghan war.
It published nearly 77,000 classified US military documents on the war in Afghanistan on July 23 and has said it will publish another 15,000 within the next couple of weeks.
The site, which has also previously leaked information leading to shocking revelations in places ranging from Iraq to Iceland, did not provide any further details about the CIA paper it planned to release.
WikiLeaks has been heavily criticised by US authorities and others for endangering lives with the Afghan leaks, and the site's founder Julian Assange has claimed the Pentagon could be orchestrating a smear campaign against him.
The 39-year-old Australian was at the weekend caught up in a media storm after Swedish prosecutors issued a warrant for his arrest on suspicion of rape, only to retract the order hours later.
Authorities are still, however, investigating a separate claim of molestation against Assange, and the former hacker has reportedly hired one of Sweden's top defence lawyers ahead of a looming decision by prosecutors about whether he will be prosecuted.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 05:30AM WSJ
U.S. officials believe al Qaeda in Yemen is now collaborating more closely with allies in Pakistan and Somalia to plot attacks against the U.S., spurring the prospect that the administration will mount a more intense targeted killing program in Yemen.
Such a move would give the Central Intelligence Agency a far larger role in what has until now been mainly a secret U.S. military campaign against militant targets in Yemen and across the Horn of Africa. It would likely be modeled after the CIA's covert drone campaign in Pakistan.
The U.S. military's Special Operation Forces and the CIA have been positioning surveillance equipment, drones and personnel in Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya and Ethiopia to step up targeting of al Qaeda's Yemen affiliate, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, known as AQAP, and Somalia's al Shabaab—Arabic for The Youth.
U.S. counterterrorism officials believe the two groups are working more closely together than ever. "The trajectory is pointing in that direction," a U.S. counterterrorism official said of a growing nexus between the Islamist groups. He said the close proximity between Yemen and Somalia "allows for exchanges, training." But he said the extent to which AQAP and al Shabaab are working together is "hard to measure in an absolute way."
Authorizing covert CIA operations would further consolidate control of future strikes in the hands of the White House, which has enthusiastically embraced the agency's covert drone program in Pakistan's tribal areas.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 05:23AM MEXICO CITY – Mexican marines found the dumped bodies of 72 people at a rural location in northern Mexico following a shootout with suspected drug cartel gunmen that left one marine and three suspects dead, the Navy reported late Tuesday.
The cadavers of 58 men and 14 women were found at a spot near the Gulf coast south of the border city of Matamoros. It appears to be the largest drug-cartel body dumping ground found in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against drug trafficking in late 2006.
"The federal government categorically condemns the barbarous acts committed by criminal organizations," The Navy said in a statement. "Society as a whole should condemn these type of acts, which illustrate the absolute necessity to continue fighting crime with all rigor."
Mexican drug cartels often use vacant lots, ranches or mine shafts to dump the bodies of executed rivals or kidnap victims. The Navy did not give details on the victims' identities, who had killed them or whether the bodies had been buried.
The discovery of bodies came about when Marines manning a checkpoint on a highway in northern Tamaulipas state were approached by a wounded man who said he had been attacked by cartel gunmen at a nearby ranch. The man was placed under the protection of federal authorities.
Navy aircraft were dispatched to the scene, and when the gunmen saw them, they opened fire on the marines and tried to flee in a convoy of vehicles.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 11:58PM With government bribe money gone, so is any sane demand
By MarketWatch
CHICAGO (MarketWatch) -- Nobody wants to buy a house. Nobody in their right mind, anyway.
Oh, sure, a lot of gullible first-time buyers got lured into the market over the last 18 months to take advantage of an $8,000 federal tax credit (not realizing how little difference that money will make when the first property-tax bill hits at the same time the roof springs a pesky leak and the city hits you with a special assessment for sidewalk repair). But that tax credit has expired -- and, with it, any semblance of demand for homes.
The July data on existing-home sales show just how much the tax credit skewed the housing market in the months it was in effect. Sales plunged 27.2%, the biggest one-month drop on record, and inventories of unsold homes jumped to 4 million, a 12.5-month supply at the current sales pace, the worst level that measure has seen in at least 11 years. Read more on the plunge in existing-home sales.
Because of the original timing of the tax credit -- you had to sign a contract on a house by April 30 and close by June 30 (the closing deadline was later extended to Sept. 30) -- it was obvious that sales would get an artificial boost in June as buyers rushed to beat the deadline (since existing-home sales are reported once they close, not at the contract signing). And, by extension, there would be a big drop in July.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 11:48PM Reuters
Mexican President Felipe Calderon warned on Tuesday that more bloodshed will likely occur as his government continues its campaign to defeat violent drug cartels.
More than 28,000 people in Mexico have died in drug violence since Calderon launched his drug fight when he took office in late 2006, and gruesome attacks are on the rise.
Over the weekend, four decapitated bodies, their genitals and index fingers cut off, were hung upside down from a bridge in a popular getaway outside Mexico City. Another two bodies were dumped near the same bridge on Tuesday, police said.
But Calderon told a local radio station that escalating bloodshed was a sign that the cartels were on the run.
"I don't rule out that there might be more bouts of the violence we're witnessing, and what's more, the victory we are seeking and will gain is unthinkable without more violence," Calderon said. "This is a process of self-destruction for the criminals," he added.
Backed by millions of dollars in U.S. aid, Calderon has sent more than 45,000 troops and thousands of federal police to fight the cartels that are battling over smuggling routes into the United States and Mexico's growing local narcotics market.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 10:12PM 
The headless bodies of four men were hung upside down by their feet from an overpass in Cuernavaca, an established, wealthy neighborhood outside of Mexico City.
The corpses in their macabre poses were found early Sunday in this area of rich, elite homes. The Morelos State Attorney General's office reports that the victims' heads and genitals were cut off, also missing from the victims were their index fingers.
Police report that the heads of the men were placed along the side of a highway with a hand written sign that stated: "This is what will happen to all those who support the traitor Edgar Valdez Villareal".
The South Pacific Cartel which goes by the initials CPS, claimed responsibility for the Murders and beheadings. They are described by local authorities as a recently formed gang responsible for several other brutal and gruesome killings.
Problems Getting Worse
It is hard for some to believe, but the violence connected to Mexico's ongoing cartel drug wars is getting more deadly, more violent. President Felipe Calderon's push to fight the powerful cartels and rival gangs engaged in literal turf wars with police, has helped drive the death toll to unheard of numbers; since 2006, when Calderon took office, drug violence has claimed the lives of more than 28,000 people.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 09:49PM The company formerly known as Blackwater violated U.S. export control laws nearly 300 times, ranging from attempts to do business in Sudan while that country was under U.S. sanctions to training an Afghan border patrol official who was a native of Iran, the State Department said Monday.
The alleged violations were spelled out in documents released Monday by the State Department as part of a $42 million settlement with Blackwater that will allow the company, now known as Xe Services LLC, to continue receiving U.S. government contracts.
The agreement appears to spell the end of a three-and-a-half-year, multi-agency federal probe into Xe Services' unauthorized exports of defense technologies and services. While elements of the case were presented to a federal grand jury, the company and its currently serving officers have avoided criminal prosecution.
The State Department said Monday that Xe Services' alleged violations, while widespread, "did not involve sensitive technologies or cause a known harm to national security." Additionally, it said, they took place while Xe "was providing services in support of U.S. government programs and military operations abroad."
Under the agreement with the U.S. government, the Moyock, N.C., company was levied a $42 million fine, but Xe is allowed to use $12 million of that to strengthen the company's export control compliance programs. Xe won't be barred from further U.S. government contracts, and a government policy of denying most of the firm's export control applications, in place since December 2008, will be lifted.
Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/08/23/99561/state-department-details-blackwater.html#Comments_Container#ixzz0xZvSyzZd
Click to read more...
Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 09:16PM 
Adolf Hitler is likely to have been descended from both Jews and Africans, according to DNA tests.
Samples taken from relatives of the Nazi leader show that he is biologically linked to the 'sub-human' races he sought to exterminate.
Journalist Jean-Paul Mulders and historian Marc Vermeeren used DNA to track down 39 of the Fuhrer's relatives earlier this year.
They included an Austrian farmer revealed only as a cousin called Norbert H.
A Belgian news magazine has reported that samples of saliva taken from these people strongly suggest Hitler had antecedents he certainly would not have cared for.
A chromosome called Haplopgroup E1b1b (Y-DNA) in their samples is rare in Germany and indeed Western Europe.
'It is most commonly found in the Berbers of Morocco, in Algeria, Libya and Tunisia as well as among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews,' Mr Vermeeren said.
'One can from this postulate that Hitler was related to people whom he despised,' adds Mr Mulders in the magazine, Knack.
Haplogroup E1b1b1, which accounts for approximately 18 to 20 per cent of Ashkenazi and 8.6 per cent to 30 per cent of Sephardic Y-chromosomes, appears to be one of the major founding lineages of the Jewish population.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 08:54PM 
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – More Americans now disapprove of President Barack Obama than approve of him as high unemployment and government spending scare voters ahead of November's congressional elections, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed on Tuesday.
In the latest grim news for Obama's Democrats, 72 percent of people said they were very worried about joblessness and 67 percent were very concerned about government spending.
The unemployment rate of 9.5 percent and the huge budget deficit are dragging down the Democrats and eating away at Obama's popularity only 20 months after he took office on a wave of hope that he could turn around the economy.
Another bit of bad economic data arrived on Tuesday when the National Association of Realtors reported sales of existing homes plummeted in July to their slowest pace in 15 years.
Piling the pressure on Obama, the top Republican in the House of Representatives called on the administration's economic team to quit.
Obama's disapproval rating was 52 percent in Tuesday's poll, overtaking his approval rating for the first time in an Ipsos poll. Only 45 percent of people said they approved of the president's performance, down from 48 percent last month.
That number, coupled with a hearty 62 percent who think the country is going in the wrong direction, could spell trouble for Democrats, who control both chambers of Congress and the White House.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 08:49PM The pace of home sales in the United States took a sharp turn for the worse in July, falling a record 27 percent from June and raising new concerns about the economy's health.
Sales of previously owned homes fell to an annualized pace of 3.8 million, down from 5.3 million in June and 5.1 million a year earlier. Sales volume fell in all regions of the country, while the median selling price was $182,600, similar to where it stood both in June and a year earlier.
What's surprising is less the decline itself – forecasters had expected sales to cool after the expiration of a special tax credit for home buyers – as the magnitude. Housing-market forecasters had expected about 4.7 million sales for July.
STORY: Existing home sales down. But six cities defy housing gloom.
The July surprise is bad news for the economy in two ways. First, the housing market tends to mirror conditions in the overall economy, and this report amplifies concern that momentum is slowing in the second half of 2010. The stock market sagged further on the housing news Tuesday morning.
Second, in a look further ahead, the news suggests that working through a glut of unsold homes and foreclosed properties may take longer, and weigh more on consumer confidence, than some economists predicted.
The plunge in sales activity raises a stark question: What will it take to bring buyers back to the market?
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