After a long break caused by serious health problems, Venezuela's H. Chavez resumed on November 15 the practice of televised addresses on key policy issues. As a key message prompted by the recent developments, the Venezuelan leader sent to his nation and to the international community a strong warning about the threat of a nuclear conflict currently brewing in the Middle East... "There's a nuclear war threat...The most guilty [of this risk] is the United States government and its allies such as Israel, who have many nuclear bombs," said Chavez in a voice full of emotion.

The US propaganda campaign built around the myth of Iran's nuclear-arms ambitions has been unfolding for years, growing increasingly hysterical in the process. Chavez at all times reiterated Venezuela's support for Iran, expressing confidence in the civilian character of the country's nuclear program. The statements invariably drew Washington's ire or even allegations of the Venezuelan regime's complicity with Ahmadinejad in secretly building nuclear weapons. Among other groundless claims, the US information warfare forces floated the fictitious story of uranium mining in Venezuela in the interests of the Iranian nuclear program and even fed to the media photographs of the Venezuelan uranium mine which, as it transpired shortly, actually showed a bicycle-assembling factory which used Iranian-supplied components. No apologies followed, as for the Empire lies are a normal instrument employed to influence the world around. The world is used to hearing lies from US presidents, secretaries of state, defense secretaries, bankers, journalists, diplomats, and intelligence operatives. The intensity of alarmist call for a global war on terror, ostensibly to counter the terrorist threat targeting the US at all angles, peaked in the wake of the September 11, 2001 drama when the Trade Center in NY was blown up on the order from the US "shadow government". A tide of US special operations immediately swept across the world from Afghanistan and Iraq to Russia.

America must stop night raids and house searches and close its military prisons in return for keeping troops in the country after 2014, Hamid Karzai told a national assembly.

The Afghan president told 2,000 elders and power brokers he wanted to maintain close ties with Nato and America after their deadline to handover security duties to Kabul - "but with conditions".

Mr Karzai told the loya jirga, or grand council, convened to discuss America's future in Afghanistan that he wanted a new strategic pact between "independent countries".

In a speech rich in nationalist rhetoric, he told the audience: "We want our national sovereignty, and an end to night raids and to the detention of our countrymen." He continued: "Yes, America is rich, strong, and has more population than we do, has bigger territory than we do, but we are lions. A lion is a lion even if even it gets old... America should treat us as a lion.

"We are ready to sign a strategic treaty between a lion and America. A lion does not like when somebody enters his house." he added.

Nato officials have suggested they would be reluctant to cut back on night-time "kill or capture" raids against insurgent suspects which have become the coalition's favoured tactic for battling the Taliban.

Israel's military chief of staff warned Tuesday that the repeated rounds of escalated violence in the south would eventually require Israel to carry out another large-scale military operation in Hamas-controlled Gaza.

"We cannot continue with one round after another," the official, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, told a closed meeting of the Parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. He said the point at which a military operation would become necessary was "drawing closer."

General Gantz's assessment came during a routine security briefing to the parliamentary committee. The military later released a summary of his remarks.

Any such operation would have to be ordered by the political leadership, not the military. Nevertheless, the comments raised the prospect of another armed conflict in Gaza, where a fierce three-week Israeli military campaign in the winter of 2008-2009 drew international opprobrium.

Israel's government said Tuesday it will invite tenders for the construction of more than 800 new homes in east Jerusalem, in a move to punish the Palestinians for joining UNESCO.

The Housing Ministry said it had published formal notice of its intention to invite tenders for 749 housing units in Har Homa and 65 in Pisgat Zeev, both settlement neighbourhoods in occupied and annexed east Jerusalem.

The Palestinians roundly condemned the move.

"Israel responded to Quartet attempts to relaunch the negotiations and meetings yesterday with a new settlement building declaration in east Jerusalem," said Saeb Erekat, their chief negotiator.

"Quartet attempts to create an atmosphere suitable to relaunch negotiations and convince Israel to stop building in settlements have failed."

A source close to Iran's clerical regime claims to have "information" that the Israeli Mossad is behind the explosion at a Tehran base.

After previously claiming that the mysterious explosion that took place on Saturday at a military base south of Tehran was an accident, the Iranians might have changed their minds.

A source close to Iran's clerical regime told Britain's The Guardian on Monday that the blast was a result of an operation by the Mossad, the Israeli international intelligence agency.

The source, a former director of an Iranian state-run organization with close links to the regime, spoke to The Guardian on condition of anonymity. He said, "I believe that Saturday's explosion was part of the covert war against Iran, led by Israel."

The former official compared the incident to a similar blast in October 2010 at a Revolutionary Guards missile base near the city of Khorramabad.

"I have information that both these incidents were the work of sabotage by agents of Israel, aimed at halting Iran's missile program," he told The Guardian.

If the infrastructure of a police state is created, it's only a matter of time before those aggressive powers are used.


What happens when a government builds a massive, unaccountable police apparatus to thwart infiltration by a foreign menace, only to see the society it's supposed to protect take to the streets for entirely different reasons?

It looks as though we may be about to find out. The Occupy protests have been mostly peaceful, with a few fairly dramatic exceptions. But the sight of a huge police presence in riot gear is always startling, and tactics that have been honed in Europe (such as "kettling") against anarchist actions have not been as common in the United States as elsewhere. More standard forms of crowd control, such as the aggressive use of pepper spray and "rubber" bullets have so far been the outer limits of the police use of force. But it is hardly the outer limits of the possibilities.

The US has actually been militarising much of its police agencies for the better part of three decades, mostly in the name of the drug war. But 9/11 put that programme on steroids.

The French utility company EDF has been fined €1.5 million (more than $2 million) for hacking into the computer networks of Greenpeace.

The world's biggest nuclear energy supplier, the mostly-state-owned EDF (Électricité de France S.A) was charged with concealing stolen documents and illegal computer intrusion after hiring a Paris-based detective agency in 2006 to snoop on Greenpeace's computers in an effort to investigate, and ultimately thwart, the environmental group's plan to block EDF from building new nuclear plants in the United Kingdom.

A senior figure in the Iranian government has revealed that the Duqu malware has infected machines in the region, although he claimed that the attack is under control, according to reports.

Civil defence minister Brigadier General General Gholamreza Jalali reportedly told the state-run Islamic Republican News Agency that IT experts are "in the initial phase of fighting the virus", although he did not reveal whether the Trojan had managed to infect systems at the country's nuclear facilities.

"The final report that says which organisations the virus has spread to and what its impacts are has not been completed yet," he is reported as saying.

"All the organisations and centres that could be susceptible to being contaminated are being controlled."

Online services like Twitter and Facebook spend a lot of time on their privacy policies, and Facebook in particular has spent the past couple of years tweaking its settings, trying to find a balance between convincing users to share information and allowing them to keep some private. But a recent U.S. court decision involving the Twitter accounts of several WikiLeaks supporters shows when push comes to shove, users of social networks and most online services have virtually no expectation of privacy whatsoever - at least, not if the entity trying to get access to their personal information happens to be the U.S. Justice Department.

The case in question involves the Justice Department's repeated attempts to get personal account data from three WikiLeaks supporters, in order to bolster its espionage case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for the release of diplomatic cables last year that were stolen (allegedly) by Army intelligence agent and whistleblower Bradley Manning. The three who were targeted are Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir - an early supporter of WikiLeaks who helped produce the Collateral Murder video that showed a U.S. military attack on civilians in Iraq - as well as computer-security expert Jacob Appelbaum and Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp.

Embattled Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, speaking in an interview with the BBC (excerpted on The Takeaway radio program - audio of Quan starts at the 5:30 mark), casually mentioned that she was on a conference call with leaders of 18 US cities shortly before a wave of raids broke up Occupy Wall Street encampments across the country. "I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation. . . ."

Mayor Quan then rambles about how she "spoke with protestors in my city" who professed an interest in "separating from anarchists," implying that her police action was helping this somehow.