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Wednesday, February 7, 2007 |
AzStarNet: "The president's proposed $2.9 trillion budget, unveiled Monday, would significantly increase defense spending while restraining other areas of government.
THE WINNERS:
- Defense Department: $624.6 billion, a 4.1 percent increase over 2007. The Army would get $130.1 billion, a 20.4 percent increase. Some $37.6 billion would go to fix or replace equipment destroyed in battle.
- Veteran Affairs: $84.4 billion, a 13.3 percent increase over 2007.
- State Department: $37.4 billion, a 12.9 percent increase over 2007.
THE LOSERS:
- Amtrak: $800 million, $500 million less than fiscal 2007.
- Environmental Protection Agency: $7.1 billion, a 4.9 percent cut from fiscal 2007.
- Low Income Home Energy Assistance: $1.8 billion, down from $3.2 billion.
- Corporation for Public Broadcasting: $350 million, down from $460 million in fiscal 2007.
- Education Department: $62.6 billion, a 5 percent cut from fiscal 2007; would eliminate more than three dozen programs.
- Labor Department's Bureau of International Labor Affairs: Cut from $73 million to $14 million, nearly 81 percent.
- Office of Disability Employment Policy: Cut from $28 million to $19 million, or 32 percent.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Cut by $550 million."
Independent: "Republicans in the Senate blocked not only a vote, but even a debate, last night on a bipartisan resolution opposing President Bush's troop 'surge' in Iraq - dealing a big blow to critics of the war, and defying the will of the electorate as expressed in last November's mid-term Congressional elections."
11:26:52 AM 
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BigNews: "A senior Iranian diplomat in Baghdad has been abducted by gunmen appearing to be Iraqi army troops."
Independent: "According to an Iraqi official, Mr Sharafi was detained on Sunday by an Iraqi army unit that reports directly to the US military, outside the Baghdad branch of the Iranian Bank Melli. Some accounts spoke of a gun battle before the car carrying the diplomat escaped."
IRNA: "Witnesses said that US troops were involved in abduction of Iranian diplomat."
You can bet on it that the gunmen were led by CIA or Joint Support Group militias. The aim is to harass Iran; maybe even to try and turn the diplomat for a few million dollars (confidence in which is going down) to justify a new war.
Indymedia: "On the 13th November, the British Prime Minister made a series of remarks aimed at wooing Iran and Syria to help the Middle East Peace Process and solve the Iraqi crisis. The following day, in response, the right wing and conservative British newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, ran two different but related stories.
The main article written by Con Coughlin - the well-known and experienced British writer - was entitled, 'Iran is training the next al-Qa'eda leaders'. The other was entitled, 'Iran plotting to groom the Bin Laden's successor' which was written with George Jones. In these articles Coughlin claimed that Iran kept and trained Saif-al-Adel, a 46 year old former Egyptian army officer and the former security officer, in Tehran for the purpose of becoming the next al-Qa'eda leader.
A careful study of those two astonishing articles indicates that the sources of the two stories, which are surrounded by bizarre allegations and grave accusations, are either 'a senior Western intelligence official' or 'a senior Foreign Office official'.
The British researcher, David Leigh, who was one of the senior editors of the Guardian at the time revealed in the second edition of the 11th year (2000) of the monthly 'British Journalism Review' (pages 21 to 26) that one or more officials from the British Intelligence Service (known as MI6) were providing Coughlin with their fabricated and unfounded stories for many years based on an engineered plan and in line with their psychological propaganda. Coughlin then converted them into first hand and breaking stories by publishing them in the Sunday and Daily Telegraph."
Indymedia: "Campaign Iran has pointed out that the current media spin about Iran, some of which appears to originate from MI6, bears more than a passing resemblance to the WMD hype that preceded the ongoing slaughter of 650,000+ Iraqis. So are we on the verge of a massive escalation of the criminal US-UK imperial war?"
11:17:09 AM
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MN: "In 2004, the FBI retired Carnivore, rather, DCS1000. Only, it developed a still-unnamed surveillance system to replace it that's far more comprehensive than Carnivore ever was, but that has received near-zero media attention. (And why not? The Oscars are coming up!)
In what I'll call 'Son-of-Carnivore', the FBI doesn't focus on a particular suspect, but assembles the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, which can subsequently be 'data mined' for names, e-mail addresses or keywords. And, according to a presentation made last month at Stanford University's law school, Son-of-Carnivore has become the FBI's 'default method' for Internet surveillance.
Son-of-Carnivore is like a vacuum cleaner, and it's designed to get around the technological hurdles that eavesdropping on Internet traffic poses. Like Carnivore, the FBI uses it only after obtaining a court order, and the Internet Service Provider on which it's served doesn't have the technical ability to isolate the targeted person or IP address (a series of numbers that can identify an individual computer).
With Son-of-Carnivore, everything - e-mail communications, Web browsing records, chat sessions, and everything else you do online - gets swept up. The FBI then searches the resulting database to retrieve the information it wants and discards what's irrelevant. Essentially, the FBI monitors everyone, and uses that information to choose its targets."
10:50:44 AM
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© Copyright 2008.
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