Former press secretary for President Johnson and venerable journalist Bill Moyers, the author of Moyers on Democracy, discusses Barack Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright and the strength of democracy on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG, HOWARD L. ROSENBERG and ARIANE de VOGUE report on ABC News:In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency.A handful of top advisers — Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft — signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.The high-level discussions about these
'Newsweek examines Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's promises to make change happen—and how effective reform-minded presidential candidates were in the past. Often, the piece notes, change has less to do with the individual than you might think.
As part of the rigorous review that has defined the detention program, the Office of General Counsel examined the tapes and determined that they showed lawful methods of questioning.
The ability of Google Inc's map service to put detailed street-level images on the Internet could raise concerns in Europe if it was introduced there, the EU's data protection agency said on Thursday.Google's Street View offers ground-level, 360-degree views of streets in 30 U.S. cities. It has become popular among drivers but courted controversy over potential privacy invasion.
Ben Halpern's research team at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has created a global map to track marine ecosystem damage by fishing, pollution, global warming and other possible causes. The project found that more of the marine ecosystem was damaged than earlier models had predicted, which highlights the difficulties in the approximations and modeling of complex adaptive systems.
The first cases of cholera and an alarm over deaths from hunger. But in the area of Yangon, the officials of the regime are permitting aid for the victims of the cyclone only in exchange for a favourable vote on tomorrow's referendum on the new constitution. The regime clarifies: yes to aid from abroad, but no to aid workers.
'MOSCOW - Though more than a dozen parties are on the ballot for Russia's parliamentary election Sunday, one would hardly know it. The pro-Kremlin United Russia (UR) party, whose standing has jumped more than 25 percent since President Vladimir Putin announced he would head its candidate list last month, could fairly win up to two-thirds of votes for the 450-seat State Duma, according to most polls. 'But in what some experts say may be the least democratic election since the USSR co...
Paul and Obama cheated out of 3rd and 1st by voting machines, hand count fraud. There were several major vote fraud issues to arise out of the New Hampshire primary revolving mainly around Ron Paul and Barack Obama, who were both seemingly cheated out of third and first places respectively as a result of rigged Diebold voting machines and deliberate malfeasance in the counting of hand-written paper ballots.
Tom Burghardt writes on Dissident Voice: Call it COINTELPRO 2.0.Crafted by former House Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Jane Harman (D-CA), the legislation would create a domestic commission, a university-based “Center of Excellence” that would study and then, target domestic “radicalization” as a “threat” to the “homeland.”David Price, a professor of anthropology at St. Martin’s University who studies state surveillance and the harassment of dissident scholars, told Jessica Lee of New York’s Indypendent newspaper last year that Harman’s bill “is a shot over the bow of environmental activists, animal-rights activists, anti-globalization activists and scholars who are working in the Middle East who have views that go against the administration.”Evoking disquieting memories of political witchhunters ensconced in the House Committee on Un-American Activities and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, the anti-radicalization commission would be empowered to “hold hearings and sit and act at such times and places, take such testimony, receive such evidence, and administer such oaths as the Commission considers advisable to carry out its duties.”
'Beijing - Last Thursday morning, five law-enforcement agents marched into Zhai Minglei's Shanghai apartment, seized his computer hard disk and copies of the small magazine he used to publish, and ordered him to report for questioning the next day. 'It was the latest blow in what one leader of a nongovernmental organization here calls a
Why should we be happy and complacent about the 2008 Beijing Olympics? Now, just as in 1936 at the Berlin Olympics in Germany, nobody minds participating in such an important international event. The countries that took part in that event later regretted the mistake they had made – in the years which followed the Games, a war took place which caused over 50 million deaths: World War II.Let’s take a look back. The Berlin Wall fell in 1990. The Cold War was over. The Soviet Union “fell apart.” The Western democracies had virtually won the ideological challenge against the communist regimes, whose champion was the USSR.What’s happening now? In 2001 the Western democracies, headed by the United States, shit in their pants from fear and, following the tragic event of the World Trade Center, in December of the same year they gave an enormous, incredible gift to China. Something to put under the Christmas tree.
The Vatican has updated its list of mortal sins, those grave sins for which believers will go to hell if they have not confessed and received forgiveness. The list, published yesterday in the Vatican newspaper, now includes pollution, drug-dealing, social injustice (which impoverishes many while creating extreme wealth for a few), and genetic/stem cell experiments. Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, a Church spokesman, said that sin, in the era of globalization, now has
'In the alternate universe of comic books, there's a crisis brewing between the U.S. and Russia. America is being threatened by a former Soviet general and his Nazi partner. Sounds like a job for Captain America. 'But Captain America died last year, shot by assassins on the steps of the federal courthouse in New York City. 'On Wednesday, a new issue of Captain America hits comic book stores and with it comes a new Captain America. It's not the same character ... he's still dead. But the comic didn't die with him.'
After being accused of terrorist activities, Hasan Elahi decided to create a website — trackingtransience.net — documenting his daily activities. Stephen Colbert interviews Elahi, who makes some very intriguing arguments about how to deal with an impossible situation, and what offices within the U.S. government have viewed his website (hint: someone soon to be out of office works in that part of the White House):
S. Afonin. (2010)cite arxiv:1004.3142
Comment: 6 pages, paper contribution to "Excited QCD 2010", to be published in
Acta Phys. Pol. B (Proc. Suppl.).