US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has expressed support for protesters in Iran, saying they "deserve the same rights as they saw being played out in Egypt".
Puppet Masters
Comment: Detroit attorneys Kurt and Lori Haskell witnessed the bizarre incident at Amsterdam's Schipol airport in which the so-called "Underwear Bomber", 16 year old Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was led through the gates and onto Flight 253 to Detroit without either an airline ticket or a passport, by a "well-dressed man" of Indian complexion and an American accent, who reassured the airline's flight desk officer that "we do this all the time". Abdulmutallab's trial is coming up soon and the Haskells are confident their story will be heard. We pray for their safety in the meantime...
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"For all its positive impact, the Internet has also unfortunately created a new way for child predators to commit their inexcusable crimes," said Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the DOJ in a statement. "The production and distribution of child pornography wreak havoc on innocent lives. With these domain seizures, we are taking our fight against child pornography to websites that facilitate the exchange of these abusive images."
The press release did not contain the names of the ten domains that were seized. However, the domain mooo.com, a part of the DNS provider FreeDNS was shut down in the process, with sites using the domain to host their pages displaying a banner reading as follows:
"Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution."
© AP
Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., sponsor of the amendment.
Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., sponsor of the amendment.
With a 244-181 vote, Republican leaders succeeded in attaching an amendment to a sweeping spending bill that would bar the FCC from using government money to implement its new "network neutrality" regulations.
The rules prohibit phone and cable companies from favoring or discriminating against Internet content and services, including online calling services like Skype and Web video services like Netflix that could compete with their core operations. The FCC's three Democrats voted to adopt the regulations late last year over the opposition of the agency's two Republicans.
The rules are already facing court challenges from Verizon Communications Inc. and Metro PCS Communications Inc. Republicans in both chambers of Congress have introduced legislation to try to repeal the rules outright.
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The act was passed in 1994 and requires telecommunication companies to design their equipment and services to ensure that law enforcement and national security officials can monitor telephone and other communications whenever necessary.
"Over the years, through interpretation of the statute by the Federal Communications Commission, the reach of CALEA has been expanded to include facilities-based broadband internet access and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services that are fully inter-connected with the public switched telephone network," FBI General Counsel Valeria Caproni told the subcommittee.
"Although that expansion of coverage has been extremely helpful, CALEA does not cover popular Internet-based communications modalities such as webmail, social networking sites or peer-to-peer services."
"As a result, although the government may obtain a court order authorizing the collection of certain communications, it often serves that order on a provider who does not have an obligation under CALEA to be prepared to execute it," she explained. "Such providers may not have intercept capabilities in place at the time that they receive the order."
© Sergey Ponomarev / AP
Members of the Stal youth group picketing the Japanese Embassy with signs reading "The Kurils are our land."
Members of the Stal youth group picketing the Japanese Embassy with signs reading "The Kurils are our land."
Russia, which occupied the four islands off Japan at the end of World War II, has pressed its claim to the territory with plans to boost investment and its military presence.
"The division will be given a brigade of air defense troops," the news agency quoted the General Staff source as saying.
The air defense systems will consist of short- and long-range weapons, possibly including the Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile defense system, he said.
Interfax quoted a General Staff source as denying the report. A spokesman for the Defense Ministry refused to confirm or deny it.
The Russian-made S-400 can intercept and destroy airborne targets at a distance of up to 400 kilometers, meaning that they could hit aircraft, cruise missiles or ballistic missiles over Japan, RIA-Novosti said.
© Reuters
An Iranian warship and speed boats take part in a naval war game in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, southern Iran on April 22, 2010.
An Iranian warship and speed boats take part in a naval war game in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, southern Iran on April 22, 2010.
The Israeli Navy will be tracking the two warships as they cross the Suez Canal for the Mediterranean Sea, according to defense officials.
Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in a statement that it had alerted "friendly nations" about the warships, Reuters reports.
Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman says that "Israel cannot ignore these provocations," according to ynetnews.com.
"Unfortunately, the international community is not ready to deal with Iran's repeated provocations," Lieberman said, according to the Jerusalem Post.
Lieberman added that the warships were "a provocation that proves Iran's nerve and self-esteem is growing from day to day."
The Egyptian body that runs the Suez Canal denied the claim.
Ahmed el-Manakhli, head of the canal operations room, said warships must get permission 48 hours before crossing, and "so far, we have not been notified."
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in an e-mailed statement that "Israel is closely following the movements of the Iranian ships and has updated friendly states on the issue. Israel will continue to follow the ships movements."
Up three percent from last year's budget, the DHS allocation is just the start of the Obama administration's efforts to have 1,275 naked body scanners installed in airports by the end of 2012. The plan disregards the numerous testimonies from security experts who have dubbed the machines "useless," and say they fail to detect explosive materials any better than conventional scanners.
"I don't know why everybody is running to buy these expensive and useless machines," said Rafi Sela, former chief of security at the Israel Airport Authority and expert in airport security. "I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747. That's why we haven't put them in our airport."
The machines are also a huge health threat, as they bombard travelers with low intensity radiation in a way that spreads it across the skin of the entire body. This full-body radioactive blast has not been fully investigated and nobody knows for sure what the long-term consequences of exposure will be.
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Tortures including sensory deprivation, forced nudity, and painful body positions were "routinely applied to detainees in U.S. custody in at least three theaters of operation and an unknown number of (CIA) 'black sites,'" the article states. The U.S. did this "despite the fact that each EIT was considered torture by the United Nations and the United States (had) recognized them as such in its reports on human rights practices."
Entitled, "Bad Science Used to Support Torture and Human Experimentation," the Science article was written by noted physicians Vincent Iacopino, Scott Allen, and Allen S. Keller. Dr. Iacopino is a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine; Dr. Keller is director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture; and Dr. Scott Allen, associate professor of medicine and co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Alpert Medical School, Brown University. All three are consultants to Physicians for Human Rights, of Cambridge, Mass.
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With protests rocking the Middle East, the Obama administration is reaching out to King Abdullah II of Jordan, trying to reassure a badly shaken ally of its support even as it calls for greater political freedom across the Arab world.
Abdullah has been among the leaders alarmed by the popular uprising that toppled Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia's President Zine el Abidine ben Ali, expressing his anxiety to Washington over the steadiness of U.S. support for its friends in the region.
Seeking to ease those fears, President Obama called the king over the weekend and has dispatched a procession of top officials to Jordan to reassure him of Washington's support. The emissaries included the State Department's No. 3 official, William J. Burns, and the top U.S. military officer, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael G. Mullen.
Jordan's royal family is facing popular demands for more open government while also coming under pressure from the nation's tribal leaders, traditional supporters of the government. At the same time, the Obama administration is pressing for changes that could discomfit the king and his aides.
"You can't maintain power through coercion.... At some level, in any society, there has to be consent," Obama said at a Tuesday news conference, adding that people armed with nothing more than "a smart phone and Twitter account can mobilize hundreds of thousands."
Comment: The Underwear Bomber - Crushing Freedom With Phony Arab Terrorism
Underwear Bomber Redux - Was Mutallab An Israeli "Secret Weapon"?
Haskell Blows Whistle on Underwear Bomber, Government Op