More Russian nuclear fuel delivered to Iran

AFP
Thursday January 24, 2008

Russia delivered a sixth consignment of fuel for Iran's first nuclear power plant in the Gulf port of Bushehr on Thursday which makes it around 80 percent of the consignment, the official IRNA news agency reported.

"The sixth load of nuclear fuel arrived at the Bushehr plant on Thursday morning," said a statement from the Organisation for Production and Development of Nuclear Energy quoted by the news agency.

The delivery brings the nuclear fuel supplied by Russia so far to 66 tonnes or around 80 percent of the total order of 82 tonnes, IRNA said.

Previous deliveries were made on December 17 and 28, and January 18, 20 and 22. Two more consignments are due by February according to a timetable agreed by the two sides.

Late last month, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said the Bushehr reactor would be working at 50 percent capacity by mid-2008.

But the Russian constructors insist the 1,000-megawatt plant will not go on line until the end of the year.

After delivery of the first shipment of fuel, Russia said Iran no longer needed to pursue its own uranium enrichment, a message repeated by US President George W. Bush.

Tehran has so far defied successive UN Security Council ultimatums to suspend enrichment prompting two sets of UN sanctions.

The six major powers, the five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States -- plus Germany drew up a new text on Tuesday to put before the council.

The contents of the text agreed by the foreign ministers of the so called 5+1 were not released.

But a senior US official said the new draft "increases the severity of the sanctions already in place and will also introduce new elements."

Iran on Wednesday described as illegal and ineffective the threat of new UN sanctions and said it would clear up any remaining questions about its nuclear programme in talks with the UN watchdog.

The Western powers fear that Iran's nuclear programme is a cover for a drive to develop a bomb, a charge Tehran strongly denies.

Cheney Wants Surveillance Law Expanded

TOM RAUM
Associated Press
Wednesday, January 23, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Dick Cheney prodded Congress on Wednesday to extend and broaden an expiring surveillance law, saying "fighting the war on terror is a long-term enterprise" that should not come with an expiration date.

"We're reminding Congress that they must act now," Cheney told the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. The law, which authorizes the administration to eavesdrop on e-mails and phone calls to and from suspected terrorists, expires on Feb. 1. Congress is bickering over terms of its extension.

On Tuesday, Senate Republicans blocked an effort by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to extend the stopgap Protect America Act without expanding it, raising stakes for an expected showdown in the Senate later this week on a new version of the law.

"This cause is bigger than the quarrels of party and the agendas of politicians," Cheney said. "And if we in Washington, all of us, can only see our way clear to work together, then the outcome should not be in doubt."

Congress hastily adopted the stopgap act last summer in the face of warnings from the administration about dangerous gaps in the government's ability to gather intelligence in the Internet age.

Administration allies in Congress not only want the expiring law made permanent but amended to give telephone companies and other communications providers immunity from being sued for helping the government eavesdropping and other intelligence-gathering efforts.

Cheney said such providers "face dozens of lawsuits."

"The intelligence community doesn't have the facilities to carry out the kind of international surveillance needed to defend this country since 9-11. In some situations, there is no alternative to seeking assistance from the private sector. This is entirely appropriate," Cheney said.

FULL STORY: CLICK HERE

Ron Paul Comes in Second Again: This Time in Louisiana

Gambling 911
Thursday January 24, 2008

Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul enjoys yet another second place finish in a state caucus. This time it's Louisiana.

The Louisiana contest, however, is not a battleground state in the race for the Republican nomination as candidates have focused on bigger prizes in South Carolina and Florida.

Fred Thompson dropping out of the race helped boost Paul's vote count.

If Thompson had still been in the race, a Louisiana political source explained to NR, his state delegate strength in Louisiana would have been enough to potentially get him all of the state's 47 national delegates. The one big problem, though, is that he dropped out only hours before he finally won something.

John McCain won the state Tuesday.

Louisiana voters have become disenchanted with its state's stance against online gambling. Ron Paul is against Internet gambling prohibition.

Colin Powell Confronted on Depleted Uranium

Jones Report
Wednesday January 23, 2008

Members of WeAreChange Ohio confronted former Secretary of State Colin Powell about the use of depleted uranium in four separate wars-- including Gulf Wars I & II, Kosovo and Bosnia. Powell admitted to its use, but denied its relative harm, repeatedly calling it "useful."

Powell downplays the harmful birth defects those exposed to D.U. have suffered, suggesting that he has been around D.U. himself and suffered no damage.

Audience members also asked the former Secretary of State about falsified intelligence on Iraq, which Powell handily dismissed.

Depleted Uranium has been directed linked with:

Increased rates of immune system disorders and other wide-ranging symptoms, including chronic pain, fatigue and memory loss, have been reported in over one quarter of combat veterans of the 1991 Gulf War. Combustion products from depleted uranium munitions are being considered as one of the potential causes by the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, as DU was used in tank kinetic energy penetrator and machine-gun bullets on a large scale for the first time in the Gulf War. Veterans of the conflicts in the Gulf, Bosnia and Kosovo have been found to have up to 14 times the usual level of chromosome abnormalities in their genes.

Terror law plans to be unveiled

BBC
Thursday January 24, 2008

The government is pressing ahead with plans to allow the police to hold terrorism suspects for up to 42 days before they are charged.

The Counter Terrorism Bill, due to be published later, will propose to extend the limit beyond the current 28 days.

Some senior police officers support the move but it could be beaten by Lib Dem, Tory and rebel Labour MPs.

Attempts to extend the limit to 90 days in 2005 ended in then prime minister Tony Blair's first Commons defeat.

A survey by the Independent newspaper last month suggested 38 Labour MPs were against the 42-day plan, more than the 34 needed to defeat it.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, mindful of a potential rebellion, has been meeting backbenchers to press her case.

'Mass casualties'

She told BBC Radio 4's Today programme there was "a consensus that we face a serious threat from terrorism".

Ms Smith added: "It's growing in scale. It's becoming more complicated in nature. People need to intervene earlier because of the way in which it aims to cause mass casualties with no warning."

She also said that "there may come a time in the future where having to release somebody at 28 days in a very complex investigation might mean that you are not able to go forward and charge them and bring them to prosecution".

Asked whether she was proposing legislation to deal with a hypothetical situation, the home secretary replied: "We are putting in a provision for if it becomes unhypothetical."

Perino Dismisses CPI Study: Truth On How We Sold The Iraq War Is Not ‘Worth Spending Time On’

Think Progress
Thursday January 24, 2008

A new study by the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism found that the Bush administration issued 935 false statements about the threat from Iraq in the two years following 9/11. President Bush “led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

In today’s press briefing, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino attacked the study. Perino claimed the study “is so flawed” because it “only looked at members of the administration” and not “people around the world”:

I hardly think that the study is worth spending time on. It is so flawed, in terms of taking anything into context or including — they only looked at members of the administration, rather than looking at members of Congress or people around the world.

Because, as you’ll remember, we were part of a broad coalition of countries that deposed the dictator based on a collective understanding of the intelligence.

Watch it:

(Article continues below)

Perino argues that “we thought as a collective body that there” were WMDs. “The actions taken in 2003 were based on the collective judgment of intelligence agencies around the world,” added spokesperson Scott Stanzel.

The entire world community, however, didn’t endorse the Bush administration’s pre-war claims. For example, the IAEA’s Mohamed ElBaradei, Hans Blix, and other U.N. inspectors were all skeptical of Bush’s WMD allegations. Members of Congress who received the administration’s classified intelligence briefings raised similar concerns.

Dan Froomkin reports today that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s long overdue Phase II report on “whether the White House intentionally deceived the public” prior to the war will be out “before the end of spring.”

Transcript:

QUESTION: Any reaction to the study out from the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism, when they did what they called a count of hundreds of false statements made by the president and top administration officials regarding the threat posed by Iraq. And they counted during the two years after 9/11.

PERINO: I hardly think that the study is worth spending time on. It is so flawed, in terms of taking anything into context or including — they only looked at members of the administration, rather than looking at members of Congress or people around the world.

Because, as you’ll remember, we were part of a broad coalition of countries that deposed the dictator based on a collective understanding of the intelligence. And the other thing that that study fails to do is to say that after realizing that there was no WMD, as we thought as a collective body that there was, that this White House, the president set about to make reforms in the intelligence community to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

Government ordered to disclose draft Iraq dossier

Andrew Sparrow
London Guardian
Thursday January 24, 2008

A Whitehall spin doctor may have played a greater role in the drafting of the famous dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction than the government admitted at the time, the Information Tribunal said today.
In a ruling on a freedom of information request relating to what is alleged to be the first draft of the dossier published in 2002, the tribunal said that the public should be allowed to read the document.

The tribunal made its ruling following a three-year campaign by a researcher who believes that the dossier will undermine the government's claims that the document was entirely drawn up by John Scarlett, the then-head of the joint intelligence committee, and not government spin doctors.

The dossier, which claimed Iraq could launch weapons on of mass destruction within 45 minutes, became the subject of huge controversy when the BBC reported that it had been "sexed up" by Downing Street.

Today's decision relates to an early version of the dossier written by John Williams, a former Daily Mirror journalist who at the time was head of press at the Foreign Office. The so-called "Williams draft" was mentioned during the Hutton inquiry but it was never published and at the time the Foreign Office claimed that it had little influence on the version that was eventually published.

The government always claimed that the dossier eventually published in September 2002 was the work of the joint intelligence committee and its chairman, Scarlett.

But Tony Blair was subsequently accused of "sexing up" the dossier to persuade the public to support the war against Iraq and at the time of the Hutton inquiry there was a fierce debate about the extent to which his spin doctors, and principally his press chief, Alastair Campbell, were involved in the wording of the document.

Willliams, who has now retired from the Foreign Office, apparently started writing his version on September 7 2002, four days after Blair had announced that a dossier on Iraq's WMD would be published.

Full article here.

Britain IS heading for a recession, warns billionaire investor George Soros, but Footsie soars in early trade

UK Daily Mail
Thursday January 24, 2008

Britain and America are heading for a recesssion, one of the world's most powerful financiers said yesterday.

The bleak warning from George Soros follows a rollercoaster week on the financial markets demonstrated yesterday by the FTSE 100, which rose on Tuesday, falling again and the plunging Dow Jones rallying to finish up 300 points.

This morning, the FTSE 100 Index's rollercoaster ride took a new turn today as London's leading shares soared higher in early trading. With Asian stock exchanges also registering advances overnight, the Footsie opened more than 2 per cent, or 125.7 points, higher at 5735.

All eyes are now on the Bank of England to see how it will react to Tuesday's 0.75 per cent rate cut in America.

The most common view is that rates will fall next month from 5.5 to 5.25 per cent and 4.75 per cent by the autumn.

Mr Soros, best-known as the man who cashed in on the pound's withdrawal from the European Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday in the 1990s, said a major downturn is on its way.

Asked on Radio 4's Today programme if a recession was looming, he replied: "I think it will be very difficult to avoid it."

Mr Soros, in Davos for the World Economic Forum - a meetingof top political and business leaders - said America's Federal Reserve had no option but to hit the panic button on Tuesday.

If it had not, he said, America could have risked a repeat of the 1930s Depression.

He was backed up by Nouriel Roubini of Roubini Global Economics and Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley.

Full article here.

Study: Bush, aides made 935 false statements in run-up to war

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush and his top aides publicly made 935 false statements about the security risk posed by Iraq in the two years following September 11, 2001, according to a study released Tuesday by two nonprofit journalism groups.

President Bush addresses the nation as the Iraq war begins in March 2003.

"In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003," reads an overview of the examination, conducted by the Center for Public Integrity and its affiliated group, the Fund for Independence in Journalism.

According to the study, Bush and seven top officials -- including Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice -- made 935 false statements about Iraq during those two years.

The study was based on a searchable database compiled of primary sources, such as official government transcripts and speeches, and secondary sources -- mainly quotes from major media organizations.

The study says Bush made 232 false statements about Iraq and former leader Saddam Hussein's possessing weapons of mass destruction, and 28 false statements about Iraq's links to al Qaeda.

Bush has consistently asserted that at the time he and other officials made the statements, the intelligence community of the U.S. and several other nations, including Britain, believed Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

He has repeatedly said that despite the intelligence flaws, removing Hussein from power was the right thing to do.

The study, released Tuesday, says Powell had the second-highest number of false statements, with 244 about weapons and 10 about Iraq and al Qaeda.

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Press Secretary Ari Fleischer each made 109 false statements, it says. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made 85, Rice made 56, Cheney made 48 and Scott McLellan, also a press secretary, made 14, the study says.

"It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al Qaeda," the report reads, citing multiple government reports, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the 9/11 Commission and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, which reported that Hussein had suspended Iraq's nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to revive it.

The overview of the study also calls the media to task, saying most media outlets didn't do enough to investigate the claims.

"Some journalists -- indeed, even some entire news organizations -- have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical," the report reads. "These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, 'independent' validation of the Bush administration's false statements about Iraq."

The quotes in the study include an August 26, 2002, statement by Cheney to the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Cheney said. "There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

Soros Predicts Worst Recession in 50 Years

The First Post
January 22, 2008

Amid collapsing stock prices worldwide, the billionaire investor George Soros has told an Austrian daily, the Standard, that the United States is threatened with recession and the world is facing the worst financial crisis in half a century. “The situation is much more serious than any other financial crisis since the end of World War II,” Soros was quoted as saying.

He said over the past few years politics had been guided by some basic misunderstandings stemming from something that he called “market fundamentalism” - the belief that financial markets tended to act as a balance. “This is the wrong idea,” he said. “We really do have a serious financial crisis now.”

He added he was surprised how little it was understood that a US recession was also a threat to Europe. European shares duly fell nearly six per cent on Monday, their biggest one-day slide since 9/11.

Meanwhile in Mumbai, some market analysts are suggesting Soros shorted the Indian markets last week. Over 15 years after he shorted the British pound in September 1992 and earned one billion dollars, local market sources say one of Soros’s funds may have shorted the Nifty last week.

World's Largest Bond Insurers Collapsing!

Martin D. Weiss Ph.D.
Money And Markets
Wednesday January 23, 2008

Martin here with an urgent update on the rapidly unfolding credit crack-up:

Ambac and MBIA, the two largest bond insurers in the world, are careening toward collapse.

Barring a miraculous rescue, their demise could promptly deliver a massive blow to the U.S. bond market ... severely damage America's already shaken big banks ... and largely trash the net worth of millions of investors.

Yet, strangely, except for investors who owned Ambac and MBIA shares themselves — and who have now driven those shares into the gutter — few are paying attention.

And fewer still are taking appropriate defensive action.

Look. If this crisis were just a theoretical possibility, like it was when I first wrote about the fatal fallacy of bond insurance years ago, I might understand the stubborn complacency of most investors.

But now it's here, staring them in the face: Just this past Friday, soon after the closing bell in New York, the watershed event happened: Ambac lost its triple-A rating!

Fitch slashed Ambac's rating by two notches to AA, downgraded the long-term rating of Ambac's parent company by three notches, and said more cuts could be on the way.

Since the ratings of insured bonds are tied directly to the ratings of the insurer, Fitch was also forced to take action on the 137,000 bonds that are covered by Ambac, setting off a veritable ratings massacre in the market for municipal and mortgage-backed bonds.

Similarly ...

If I were still one of the only ones talking about the collapse of bond insurance, I could also understand the complacency of most investors.

But now, based on the current market price of credit swaps (bets on future defaults), Wall Street itself believes that the chance Ambac and MBIA will avoid bankruptcy is less than one in three.

And still most investors aren't paying attention!

Next, Brace Yourself for the Other
Shoes That Could Soon Be Falling

First, the other two leading rating agencies — Moody's and S&P — are likely to follow Fitch's lead and also downgrade Ambac. In fact, on Thursday, Moody's already warned it could do so very soon.

Second, the other major bond insurers, such as MBIA and FGIC, will get smacked with downgrades.

Third, the ratings massacre now taking place in Ambac-insured bonds will spread to $2.3 trillion worth of municipal bonds, mortgage-backed bonds, plus asset-backed bonds packed with credit card and auto loans.

Full article here.

US Stock Markets Decline : THE DOLLAR HOLOCAUST

Youtube
Wednesday January 23, 2008

The stock Market is about to crash and the Dollar is about to collapse and Ron Paul has been warning people since more than 30 years ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GzRWS...
and he even predicted the 1987 recession just like he predicted one happenning with in 2008 or 2009

US Stock Markets Decline : THE DOLLAR HOLOCAUST

Youtube
Wednesday January 23, 2008

The stock Market is about to crash and the Dollar is about to collapse and Ron Paul has been warning people since more than 30 years ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GzRWS...
and he even predicted the 1987 recession just like he predicted one happenning with in 2008 or 2009

(Article continues below)

If you want to have socialized free health care this will not happen and whoever is promising you is a liar!

if you want to continue the war in Iraq there is no money, and if you want to get out will you depend on a liar and a flip-flopper or will you look at the MOST CONSISTENT HONEST man in congress who is known as Dr. No!

He is Congressman Ron Paul who is a Doctor and an Economist who is the only man for the job plz research Ron Paul at
http://www.ronpaul2008.com
and research his stances on issues at
http://www.RonPaulstances.com
and research his SOLID consistent congressional record.

CIA document talks of need to "remove" Martin Luther King from leadership of "Negro movement"

Wayne Madsen Report
Wednesday January 23, 2008

On the occasion of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday and amid attempts by the Hillary Clinton campaign to "revise" the history of the civil rights leader in a blatant attempt to tarnish the candidacy of her rival, Senator Barack Obama, it is noteworthy to point out that Dr. King was assassinated as part of a U.S. government plan, documented in a CIA memo, to replace the Nobel Peace Prize winner as the leader of the "Negro movement."

The May 11, 1965, memo for the record, given to this editor by a member of the King family, recounts a conversation between an individual whose name was redacted and the CIA's Morse Allen, the CIA's research director who was responsible for Project Artichoke and MK-ULTRA, two of the CIA's behavior modification programs that, in part, sought to create willing assassins.

The memo bemoaned the anti-Vietnam war activities of civil rights leaders like A. Philip Randolph and King. It also warns of the attempt by the "Communist left" to infiltrate the "Negro movement." The mindset of the CIA is interesting. They saw the civil rights movement not as a broad based attempt by a number of Americans to secure equal rights for African Americans, but as a "Negro movement" that was seen as a potential Fifth Column for the Communists.

Allen was concerned that Communists would take advantage of a break by the civil rights movement with President Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War and a resulting "violent disruption of the Negro [emphasis added] Civil Rights Movement. Allen was also concerned that King might be assassinated "before his exposure" and that would make him a martyr. During the time the memo was written, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was trying to "expose" King. Hoover ordered the FBI to bug King's hotel rooms and tape record his alleged trysts. Hoover mailed one of the recordings to King's wife, Coretta Scott King, with a note urging Dr. King to commit suicide.

The most revealing part of the CIA memo is the following: "It is [redacted]'s belief that somehow or other Martin Luther KING must be removed from the leadership of the Negro movement, and is removal must come from within and not from without. [Redacted] feels that somewhere in the Negro movement, at the top, there must be a Negro leader who is 'clean' who could step into the vacuum and chaos if Martin Luther KING were either exposed or assassinated."

On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis. The King family never accepted the full guilt of the accused assassin, James Earl Ray.

King was succeeded as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In 1980, Abernathy endorsed the Republican ticket of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush over President Jimmy Carter. Abernathy founded the American Freedom Coalition along with Christian Right leader, Dr. Robert Grant. The organization received funding from Sun Myung Moon's quasi-fascist Unification Church.

The CIA memo stating that King should be replaced by someone "clean." Abernathy fit the bill.

Hillary Clinton, who is close to the right-wing Christian Fellowship Foundation cult leader David Coe and was a "Goldwater Girl" during the time the right-wing plot was being hatched against King in the mid-1960s, has played the "race card" in her campaign against Obama.

Hillary Clinton's father, Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, was a Goldwater supporter in 1964 and a Republican until his death in 1993. Hillary later worked for the Nelson Rockefeller campaign in 1968 and attended the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami. Bill Clinton reportedly cringed at Hugh E. Rodham's use of the "N word," which lasted up until the time Clinton was sworn in as president. Clinton's father-in-law died at the age of 82 in April 1993, a few months after Clinton was inaugurated.

This anniversary of the birth of Dr. King should, above all, remind us of the racist and covert operations by the United States government to assassinate King and destroy the civil rights movement. It is no time for a one-time Republican and Barry Goldwater supporter -- Goldwater only won his own state of Arizona and the segregationist states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana in 1964 --to raise the race issue. And it is no time for someone who grew up in suburban Chicago and who must have heard her father constantly ranting about the "niggers" to be using the race card against an opponent who is fulfilling Dr. King's dream of a color blind nation.

Hillary Rodham in 1964 was joined in her support for Goldwater by someone else who was irritated by the civil rights movement -- a young Houston businessman and CIA agent who was running for the US Senate against progressive Democrat Ralph Yarborough. George H. W. Bush lost that Senate race and was unable to join his father and Goldwater supporter, Prescott Bush, in the U.S. Senate as a father and son team. However, George H. W. Bush would later become the head of the CIA and receive the endorsement in 1980 of Dr. King's government-sanctioned "replacement."

Considering the racist nature of the Republican Party from 1964 to the present day, a transformation that was engineered by Hillary Clinton's one-time hero Barry Goldwater, Dr. King's name should not be used by either the leading Democratic candidate -- Clinton -- or her possible Republican opponent, John McCain, the Arizona senator who describes himself as the political heir of Goldwater.

FISA 2.0 Called 'Atrocious' Privacy Violation

Monisha Bansal
CNSNews.com
Wednesday January 23, 2008

With Congress working on legislation to revise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) before the sunset provision in the Protect America Act expires on Feb. 1, privacy advocates say the proposal being offered by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is "atrocious."

In August, Congress passed and the president signed the Protect America Act, which allows the attorney general and the director of national intelligence (DNI) to "authorize the acquisition of foreign intelligence information" without the approval of the special court established by FISA.

According to the liberal American Civil Liberties Union, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is likely to bring an amendment to the floor this week written by the Intelligence Committee.

"We're back pretty much where we were in August," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, during a conference call with reporters.

"Sen. Reid is about to move a bill to the floor that looks an awful lot like the Protect America Act, except with one additional very bad provision, and that's the provision that provides immunity to those telecommunications carriers that - in violation of the law -turned over their customer data to the NSA," she said. (NSA is the National Security Agency and Central Security Service of the U.S. government.)

Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, CEO of the Mellman Group, noted that according to a survey he conducted last week, "Americans surely want to protect the country from terrorism, but they also insist on protecting our constitutional rights."

"To that end, Americans vigorously oppose warrant-less wiretaps. They strongly support the notion that the government should have to get a warrant before wiretapping the conversations that U.S. citizens have with people abroad by 63 to 33 percent - almost a two-to-one margin," he said, noting that the numbers cut across party lines and ideology.

Fifty-seven percent of voters also rejected immunity for phone companies that may have violated the law by selling customers' private information to the government, preferring to let courts decide the outcome of any cases.

Brian Darling, director of Senate relations at the conservative Heritage Foundation, however, said, "I don't think Americans want to punish companies for good faith actions to help the federal government in capturing and investigating terrorists."

Darling added that "the Protect America Act restored the capability of our intelligence gathering federal officials to collect communications intelligence about al Qaeda by using cutting edge technology that enables us to collect data on terrorists."

"The Bush administration has asserted that this law has helped the United States develop a greater understanding al Qaeda networks," he told Cybercast News Service. "Al Qaeda continues to be a national security threat, and any effort to restrict the Protect America Act may have some unintended consequences that will slow the intelligence-gathering aspect of the global war on terror."

P.J. Crowley, director of homeland security at the liberal Center for American Progress (CAP), added that, while FISA is outdated, how it is updated matters.

Full article here.

Osama, al-Qaeda no longer Musharraf's priority

CNN/IBN
Wednesday January 23, 2008

New Delhi: Osama bin Laden is not Pakistan's priority any more says President Musharraf.

At a conference in Paris, which is the second leg of his European tour, Musharraf described the Taliban as the main threat to his regime.

He said close to 1 lakh Pakistani troops had been drafted to check the Taliban advance and related terror strikes by their affiliated groups.

As part of a multi-pronged strategy select areas of the Afghan border were being fenced and nearly 1000 checkpoints were being set up to monitor movement across the border.

Musharraf added that there was no way radical extremists like al Qaeda and the Taliban could gain control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

The Next Banking Crisis on the Way

Jim Jubak
MSN Money
January 21, 2008

Is this the quarter when banks finally admit all of their problems?

On Jan. 15, Citigroup (C, news, msgs) announced it would take an $18.1 billion write-down on its portfolio of subprime mortgages and other risky debt, and the bank cut its dividend 41%.

With other banks following suit — Merrill Lynch (MER, news, msgs) reported $16 billion in write-downs and other charges two days later, and Wells Fargo (WFC, news, msgs) delivered similarly huge losses — will they throw everything, including the kitchen sink, into their losses? That kind of quarter always marks the bottom in a crisis like this.

Nah. The banks and other financials have more losses from the subprime-mortgage mess on their books that they haven’t yet confessed. Worse, the mortgage debacle has spread to other types of debt, with banks and other financial companies reporting mounting losses in their credit card and auto loan portfolios. And worst of all, the next big leg of the crisis — the one I think will mark the true bottom — has just started.

As the economy slows, the default rate is rising for corporate debt, especially for the high-risk, high-yield corporate debt called "junk" by many of us. That’s opening a Pandora’s box of potential write-downs that could dwarf the losses in the mortgage market.

If that’s true, it would push off the kitchen-sink bottom until the second or third quarter of 2008, depending on how bad the economy gets and how long it stays in the dumps. (See my Dec. 28 column, "Don’t count on a ‘normal’ recession.")

A brief history of bubbles

It’s not surprising that it will take so long to work through this mess, if you remember how it all began. The current crisis is yet another in a string of financial bubbles — the tech bubble that burst in 2000, the housing bubble that burst in 2007 and the debt-market bubble that’s bursting now. Behind each bubble stands a global flood of cheap money created by:

• Central banks running their printing presses to fend off economic slowdowns or financial-market crashes.

• A weak yen that let traders and speculators borrow for almost nothing in Japan in order to buy stocks and bonds in other markets.

• A huge surge of exports from countries such as China determined to hold down domestic consumption.

• Soaring oil prices that gave oil producers billions of dollars to invest somewhere.

All of those dollars chased a limited supply of real assets and traditional stocks and bonds, bringing down returns just as a falling dollar and signs of inflation lowered real returns more. Everyone wanted something as safe as U.S. Treasurys that paid more than Treasurys.

Everyone wants to believe in magic

Wall Street obliged by packaging and then slicing debt backed by mortgages, so that even the riskiest mortgages could earn a safe AA or AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s (MCO, news, msgs) or Fitch. It performed the same magic with credit card debt, with auto loans and finally with corporate debt — even the riskiest kind, called high-yield because it pays out a higher dividend to compensate for its higher risk. It’s known as junk because in hard economic times it can become worthless. (See my Aug. 10 column, "How Wall Street got into this mess.")

Everyone wanted to believe that Wall Street’s magic worked. Investors from Citigroup to the Hillsborough County Public Schools in Florida (exposure: $573 million) bought in. The more investors who bought in, the more of these new products Wall Street could sell and the more money it was willing to lend to home builders, home mortgage lenders and credit card companies; to the savings and loans and banks that created the raw materials (mortgages, credit card debt, auto loans) that Wall Street needed to manufacture its products; and to the hedge funds and structured investment vehicles that bought what Wall Street produced.

It worked out just fine until reality stuck a pin in the bubble. It turns out that you can’t lend more and more money to less- and less-qualified home buyers without driving up the number of borrowers who pay late or can’t pay at all.

On Jan. 9, Countrywide Financial (CFC, news, msgs) reported that the foreclosure rate on its 9 million mortgages had climbed to 1.44% in December, double the 0.7% rate of December 2006. The delinquency rate had climbed to 7.2% of unpaid balances, up from 4.6% in December 2006. The rates were the highest ever for Countrywide, which entered the mortgage business in 2002.

Within a week, as bankruptcy rumors swirled around Countrywide, Bank of America (BAC, news, msgs) agreed to acquire the company for $4 billion.

Damage goes beyond mortgages

But the cause of this mess stretched far beyond any problems specific to the mortgage sector, so the damage wasn’t limited to that part of the debt markets. On Jan. 10, for example, American Express (AXP, news, msgs) announced that credit card debt at least 30 days past due had climbed to 3.2% of its portfolio from 2.9% in the third quarter, and write-offs of bad debt had climbed to 4.3% from 3.7% in the same period. In 2008, American Express expects write-offs to average 5.1% to 5.3%.

Continued: The real concern

How about auto loans? On Jan. 15, Sovereign Banc (SOV, news, msgs) said it would take $1.6 billion in charges for the fourth quarter of 2007, including a $600 million write-down on consumer and auto loans. The company had aggressively expanded its auto loan business in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia and Nevada in 2006 and 2007 — just in time to get hit by the cooling of the hot real-estate market in those states. The company has pulled out of the auto loan market in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina and Utah because of rising default levels.

But it’s the emerging problems in the corporate-junk-bond market that really worry me. The sector and the problems are big enough to produce another big setback for financial companies and the economy as a whole.

The real concern: Credit-default swaps

Actually, I’m worried not so much about the junk-bond market itself as the huge market for a derivative called a credit-default swap, or CDS, built on top of that junk-bond market. Credit-default swaps are a kind of insurance against default, arranged between two parties. One party, the seller, agrees to pay the face value of the policy in case of a default by a specific company. The buyer pays a premium, a fee, to the seller for that protection.

• Talk back: Do you think we’ve seen the worst for financial stocks?

This has grown to be a huge market: The total value of all CDS contracts is something like $450 trillion. Because buyers and sellers of insurance usually create multiple "policies" as they attempt to control risk, that number includes a lot of duplication. Real exposure, says the Bank for International Settlements, may be only 20% of that, or $90 trillion. Some studies have put the real credit risk at just 6% of the total, or about $27 trillion. That puts the CDS market at somewhere between two and six times the size of the U.S. economy.

The CDS market has been a good place to make money in the past few years because default rates in the junk-bond market have been historically low. The default rate for all junk bonds declined to 1.7% in 2006. That’s the lowest rate since 1996. With defaults that low, sellers were paid insurance premiums but didn’t have to cough up much in return.

But that default rate started to rise in 2007, climbing to 2.6%. And Standard & Poor’s projects the rate will climb to 3.4% by October. At that rate, 56 bonds would go into default in 2008, compared with 14 in 2007.

That level of default isn’t likely to inflict too much damage on the CDS market. The historical rate for defaults by corporate junk bonds has averaged 5% a year since 1980. But the default rate has run as high as 12.7% in previous recessions.

Will investors walk or run for the exits?

The junk-bond market isn’t in a panic yet, but the fear is climbing. The spread between the yield on the safe U.S. Treasury bonds and comparably risky high-yield bonds climbed by 0.81 percentage point in the few trading days up to Jan. 9. That’s the biggest increase in the spread in the first days of January ever measured.

I’d say that junk-bond investors, taking a clue from the 30%-to-50% losses suffered in the subprime-mortgage market by investors who held on too long, are moving toward the exits with all due speed. They also know that in the CDS market it’s very hard to tell who is ultimately holding the long or short end of any deal. And it’s even harder to judge the financial strength of the ultimate holder of any individual insurance contract. If the mortgage crisis is a guide, some of that insurance may turn out to be worthless because it’s held by an investor without the ability to pay.

Whether that exit continues at a purposeful walk or turns into panicked flight largely depends on the speed with which the economy slows and on the duration of any slowdown. Wall Street continues to talk as if all we’re facing is a two-quarter downturn, although perhaps of some severity, but the early money is starting to behave as though things are likely to be worse than that.

On Wall Street, fears have a nasty tendency of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies.

All it takes is enough investors behaving as if the short-term, asset-backed commercial-paper market is risky for that market to freeze into immobility, which leaves companies with less-than-sterling credit ratings without a source of short-term working capital.

All it will take in the CDS market is enough buyers and sellers deciding they can’t rely on this insurance anymore for junk-bond prices to tumble and for companies to find it very expensive or impossible to raise money in this market.

And that would be enough to make any economic downturn both longer and deeper than stock prices yet reflect.

The CIA Eyes the Internet

Alex Constantine
Alex Constantine’s Blacklist
January 19, 2008

Chooms: This is a TRUE story, not an execrable satire, capricious exercise in political fulmination or similar waste of petroleum …

The next phase in the institution of fascist law enforcement involves cyber-security and the Internet. Media martinets have been making noise about cyber-terrorism lately - similar to the manner in which they raised a good scare over anthrax preceding the mailing of the spores - and the CIA is currently laying the justification for legislation that will permit spying on us via our computers with this story in the current PC World: “CIA Says Hackers Have Cut Power Grid”:

“Several cities outside the U.S. have sustained attacks on utility systems and extortion demands.”

No one but the CIA appears to know anything about the outages and attendant extortion demands, and now the Company - one that trains death squads and put Saddam Hussein in power - is graciously letting us in on it …

“Criminals have been able to hack into computer systems via the Internet and cut power to several cities…. Speaking at a conference of security professionals on Wednesday, CIA analyst Tom Donahue disclosed the recently declassified attacks while offering few specifics on what actually went wrong.

“Criminals have launched online attacks that disrupted power equipment in several regions outside of the U.S., he said, without identifying the countries affected. The goal of the attacks was extortion, he said.”

Again, vagaries, no specifics - as if he were making the whole thing up …

“‘We have information, from multiple regions outside the United States, of cyber intrusions into utilities, followed by extortion demands,’ he said in a statement posted to the Web on Friday by the conference’s organizers, the SANS Institute. ‘In at least one case, the disruption caused a power outage affecting multiple cities. We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all involved intrusions through the Internet.’”

How did media around the world miss THAT ONE, especially in cities thrown into blackness and disarray by these vicious criminal “outages.” There must have been looting, chaos, casualties. But why is this secret information suddenly fit for lay consumption? …

‘According to Mr. Donahue, the CIA actively and thoroughly considered the benefits and risks of making this information public, and came down on the side of disclosure,’ SANS said in the statement.”

Risks? Anyone who thinks secrecy is necessary in this case may WORK for the CIA, which is holding all related information closely to its blood-stained vest:

“One conference attendee said the disclosure came as news to many of the government and industry security professionals in attendance.”

It may also come as a surprise to the cities around the world subject to these hideous “extortion plots.”

“It appeared that there were a lot of people who didn’t know this already,’ said the attendee, who asked not to be identified because he is not authorized to speak with the press.”

OF COURSE, the disclosure “came as news” - the CIA appears to have fabricated the whole problem, or perhaps hired provocateurs as they’ve often done in the past, to stir up tensions, fatten the counter-terror budget …

“He confirmed SANS’ report of the talk. ‘There were apparently a couple of incidents where extortionists cut off power to several cities using some sort of attack on the power grid, and it does not appear to be a physical attack,’ he said.”

We would all like an actual, concrete example of a power grid extortion plot, so the reporter gives us this:

“Hacking the power grid made front-page headlines in September when CNN aired a video showing an Idaho National Laboratory demonstration of a software attack on the computer system used to control a power generator. In the demonstration, the smoking generator was rendered inoperable.”

The scare mongering recalls Colin Powell’s tiny vial of death. Drastic steps that happen to violate civil liberties are necessary.

“The U.S. is taking steps to lock down the computers that manage its power systems, however. On Thursday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved new mandatory standards designed to improve cybersecurity. CIA representatives could not be reached immediately for comment.”

The Agency will search frantically for other existing “solutions.” As it happens, in little Bavaria, Nordic Big Brother is already taking on the Beast, according to Trend News: “German state of Bavaria to go ahead with online surveillance.”

That’s IT!

“The southern German state of Bavaria is to go ahead with controversial plans to permit security officials to monitor personal computers online to check for terrorist internet traffic, the state interior minister said Saturday.
A spokesman for Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann confirmed an earlier news report in the weekly Focus news magazine that Bavaria would not wait for planned federal legislation.”

No time for niceties like overhauling the Bavarian Constitution.

This is a likely peek at our own near future if the CIA succeeds in putting the fear into the proles. Legislators are enamored of the prospects:

“Herrmann said he would put forward draft legislation in February. Federal Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble favours similar plans to deploy a so-called ‘government Trojan’ to spy on the PCs of terrorist suspects. The German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe is currently considering a similar law put forward by the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia and is expected to rule in the spring. Schaeuble, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), last year suggested constitutional changes to give increased powers to counter-terrorism operatives, including online searches of PCs.

“Members of the Social Democrats (SPD), the junior partner in Merkel’s grand coalition, have opposed the plans on civil liberties grounds. SPD Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries has said she is not ‘in principle’ opposed to the idea but concerned about the practicalities of implementing legislation.”

We can all be reassured that government in Bavaria and stateside will handle its new powers “responsibly.”

“The head of the Federal Criminal Police (BKA), Joerg Ziercke , has criticized the debate as ’scare-mongering,’ adding that at most only 10 such online searches would be carried out in any one year.”
http://news.trendaz.com/index.shtml?show=news&newsid=1115506〈=EN

But when the cyber-security apparat is in place, who’s to stop the CIA Homeland Security thugs from “overstepping their bounds,” as they did with forced detainments, secret files and torture, to cite a few well-known examples?

Spaniard becomes Jesuits' new "black pope" (Superior General)

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Spaniard Adolfo Nicolas was elected the Jesuits' "black pope"(Superior General), as the head of the largest and perhaps most influential, controversial and prestigious Catholic order is known, in a secret conclave on Saturday.

Nicolas, 71, has run Jesuit operations in east Asia and Oceania since 2004 and spent most of his career in the Far East after being ordained in Tokyo in 1967.

The order said in a statement that Nicolas had been elected to succeed Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, who received permission from Pope Benedict to retire as head of the order formally known as the Society of Jesus at the age of 79.

Jesuit superior generals are known as "black popes" because, like the pontiff, they wield worldwide influence and usually keep their position for life -- and because their simple cassock is black, in contrast to the pope who dresses in white.

The 468-year history of the Jesuit order has often included stormy relations with the Vatican. Benedict's predecessor, Pope John Paul, believed the order had become too independent, leftist and political, particularly in Latin America.

Soft-spoken, white-haired Dutchman Kolvenbach won widespread praise for mending relations with the Vatican during his years in the post, after conflicts between his charismatic Basque predecessor and Pope John Paul.

Kolvenbach also had to deal with declining vocations and the future of the order founded by St Ignatius Loyola in 1540.

In the 1960s, the all-male order peaked with some 36,000 members worldwide. It now has about 19,200 members involved in education, refugee help and other social services.

The general congregation that elected Nicolas gathered 217 electors from all over the world at Jesuit headquarters, a block from the Vatican.

They spent four days in prayer and what is known in Latin as "murmuratio", or murmurings, about who should be elected. It is strictly forbidden to lobby for the post and anyone actively seeking the job must be 'turned in' by the other delegates.

The election is by secret ballot and delegates are not allowed to leave the room until Pope Benedict is informed who has won, in keeping with a tradition that the "white pope" is first to know who is the new "black pope".

But unlike a conclave to elect the pontiff, a Jesuit general congregation can continue for weeks or even months after the election to discuss future challenges and priorities.

Recession fears weigh on markets

BBC
Tuesday January 22, 2008

Many of Asia's and Europe's top share indexes have fallen sharply on Tuesday amid fears of a recession in the US leading to a global economic slowdown.

London's FTSE 100 index has had a bumpy day, dropping more than 3% at the open. It has since recovered and was recently trading between 1% higher and 1% lower.

Earlier, Asian markets had tumbled with Japan's Nikkei index closing down 5.7%, taking its decline this year to 18%.

Many analysts are predicting indexes will remain volatile in coming weeks.

"I think we can safely say that the stomping, snorting optimistic beast of a market is fleeing the field, to be replaced by something scary and grizzly," said BBC Business Editor Robert Peston.

"But volatility is the order of the day. In London, there has been a stunning bounce, which could yet turn out to be ephemeral.

"Having worked at assorted times on trading floors, I can smell the adrenalin, testosterone and fear that is creating this mayhem," he said.

Full article here.

Global economic crisis 'serious': IMF Chief

Investors skeptical of U.S. stimulus package, says IMF's Strauss-Kahn; an American recession would spread globally, he warns.

PARIS (AP) -- The head of the International Monetary Fund called the global economic situation "serious" and said markets worldwide had responded skeptically to a U.S. stimulus plan.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn stressed that a U.S. recession would affect economies across the globe.

"The situation is ... serious," said Strauss-Kahn following a meeting in Paris with French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "All the countries in the world are suffering from a slowdown in growth in the United States."

He said investors were skeptical that an economic stimulus plan presented last Friday by U.S. President George W. Bush would shore up the economy, which has been battered by problems in its housing and credit markets. The plan, which requires approval by Congress, calls for about $145 billion worth of tax relief to encourage consumer spending.

"It appears that the markets did not appreciate the packet proposed by President Bush," he said, adding that the negative reactions were "perhaps to be expected."

Stocks fell sharply worldwide Monday following declines on Wall Street last week amid investor pessimism over the U.S. government's stimulus plan. U.S. markets were closed Monday, but the downbeat mood from last week's market declines in New York circled through Europe, Asia and Canada. In Hong Kong, the blue-chip Hang Seng suffered its biggest percentage drop since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Strauss-Kahn, a Frenchman who took the reins at the IMF late last year, said he and Sarkozy discussed possible French responses to the situation in the United States.

"When [Sarkozy] says 'there are risks to doing something but there are even more risks in not doing anything,' I think he's right," Strauss-Kahn said. He did not elaborate on what measures the French might take.