The heads of Russia's oldest human rights groups have said they decided not to attend the meeting with the US president after it was rescheduled several times.

The three people whom the mass media call the symbols of the Russian HR movement - Lyudmila Alekseyeva of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Lev Ponomaryov of the For Human Rights Movement and Svetlana Gannushkina, the chairperson of the Citizen's Assistance Committee.

The planned meeting between the US President and Russian rights advocates will take place in St. Petersburg ahead of the G20 summit.

All three of the activists live and work in Moscow and they told reporters on Wednesday that they had to cancel their tickets and postpone various important events several times because the US side were dithering on the precise date of the meeting.

"It is not that I refused myself, I was forced to. I have been invited and I accepted the invitation with gratitude. I bought the tickets for September 6. A short time later they call me and say that everything was rescheduled on the 5th. I said that it was OK, again with gratitude, made changes in my own schedule and changed the tickets. On Wednesday morning they call me and say that everything will take place on the 6th. And this time I was simply unable to postpone my own Friday event," the Moskovsky Komsomolets daily quoted Lev Ponomaryov as saying.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power has criticized Russia for holding the United Nations Security Council "hostage" over Syria.

"Russia continues to hold the council hostage and shirk its international responsibilities, including as a party to the Chemical Weapons Convention," Power told reporters at the UN in New York on Thursday.

She added that the council "is not protecting the stability of the region; it is not standing behind, now, an internationally accepted ban on the use of chemical weapons."

The US official claimed that "the system has protected the prerogatives of Russia, the patron of a regime that would brazenly stage the world's largest chemical weapons attack in a quarter-century, while chemical weapons inspectors sent by the United Nations were just across town."

Power made the remarks as Washington has blamed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for the August chemical weapons attacks. An allegation denied by the Syrian government.

"We in the United States agree with the view that, at times like this, the Security Council should live up to its obligations and should act," Power said.

Comment: She means to say that 1% of the people of the USA are in favour of military action, which amounts to 3 million people. The world community consists of 7 billion people.

Should the 1% of people dictate world policy?

If Barack Obama is going to attack Syria, he is going to do it without the support of the American people, without the approval of Congress, without the approval of the United Nations, and without the help of the British. Now that the British Parliament has voted against a military strike, the Obama administration is saying that it may take "unilateral action" against Syria. But what good would "a shot across Syria's bow" actually do? A "limited strike" is not going to bring down the Assad regime and it is certainly not going to end the bloody civil war that has been raging inside Syria. Even if the U.S. eventually removed Assad, the al-Qaeda affiliated rebels that would take power would almost certainly be even worse than Assad. Even in the midst of this bloody civil war, the rebels have taken the time and the effort to massacre entire Christian villages. Why is Barack Obama so obsessed with helping such monsters? There is no good outcome in Syria. The Assad regime is absolutely horrible and the rebels are even worse. Why would we want the U.S. military to get involved in such a mess?

It isn't as if it is even possible for the U.S. military to resolve the conflict that is going on in that country. At the core, the Syrian civil war is about Sunni Islam vs. Shia Islam. It is a conflict that goes back well over a thousand years.

Assad is Shiite, but the majority of Syrians are Sunni Muslims. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been pouring billions of dollars into the conflict, because they would love to see the Assad regime eliminated and a Sunni government come to power in Syria. On the other side, Iran is absolutely determined to not allow that to happen.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar have no problem with using Sunni terrorists (al-Qaeda) to achieve their political goals. And as a very important ally of the Saudis, the U.S. has been spending a lot of money to train and equip the "rebels" in Syria.

But there was a problem. The Syrian government has actually been defeating the rebels. So something had to be done.

If it could be made to look like the Assad regime was using chemical weapons, that would give the U.S. government the "moral justification" that it needed to intervene militarily on the side of the rebels. In essence, it would be a great excuse for the U.S. to be able to go in and do the dirty work of the Saudis for them.

The United States has intercepted an order from an Iranian official instructing militants in Iraq to attack U.S. interests in Baghdad in the event the Obama administration launches a military strike in Syria, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

The American embassy in Baghdad was a likely target, according to unnamed U.S. officials quoted by the newspaper. The Journal said the officials did not describe the range of potential targets indicated by the intelligence.

In addition, the State Department issued a warning on Thursday telling U.S. citizens to avoid all but "essential" travel to Iraq.

A military strike on Syria could lead to a nuclear catastrophe if a missile were to hit a reactor containing radioactive uranium, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman warned. The remark comes as the US continues to push for a military strike on Syria.

"If a warhead, by design or by chance, were to hit the Miniature Neutron Source Reactor (MNSR) near Damascus, the consequences could be catastrophic," Aleksandr Lukashevich said in a Wednesday statement.

Russia's Foreign Ministry urged the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to complete a risk evaluation as the US continues to seek support for military action. It asked the agency to "react swiftly" and carry out "an analysis of the risks linked to possible American strikes on the MNSR and other facilities in Syria."

Lukashevich stated that the region could be at risk of "contamination by highly enriched uranium and it would no longer be possible to account for nuclear material, its safety and control." He added that such material could fall into the wrong hands.

San Jose, California -- Google's attorneys say their long-running practice of electronically scanning the contents of people's Gmail accounts to help sell ads is legal, and have asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit that seeks to stop the practice.

In a federal court hearing Thursday in San Jose, Google argued that "all users of email must necessarily expect that their emails will be subject to automated processing."

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of 10 individuals, is expected to be certified as a class action and is widely seen as a precedent-setting case for other email providers.

The plaintiffs say Google "unlawfully opens up, reads, and acquires the content of people's private email messages" in violation of California's privacy laws and federal wiretapping statutes. The lawsuit notes that the company even scans messages sent to any of the 425 million active Gmail users from non-Gmail users who never agreed to the company's terms.

"This company reads, on a daily basis, every email that's submitted, and when I say read, I mean looking at every word to determine meaning," said Texas attorney Sean Rommel, who is co-counsel suing Google.

It's now a given that the NSA works to grab data from sites like Facebook - but what about the stuff that's explicitly private, the websites guaranteed to be protected and secure? The New York Times reports that American spies have been decoding our scrambled online acts for years.

Aside from data-siphoning programs like PRISM and on-demand requests for personal profiles, the basic technology that prevents someone from eavesdropping on your internet banking or password-protected emails is compromised - that little padlock icon you see in your web browser, smashed to virtual bits.

Committee voted 10-7, with both Democrats and Republicans voting for and against resolution.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to authorize President Obama to use limited force against Syria Wednesday, after adopting amendments from Sen. John McCain designed to urge Obama to "change the military equation on the battlefield."

The Senate resolution would limit hostilities to 60 or 90 days, narrow military action to Syria's borders and prohibit U.S. troops on Syrian soil. McCain's proposal didn't change that scope but urged that the end goal should be "a negotiated settlement that ends the conflict and leads to a democratic government in Syria."

The vote was 10-7. Five Republicans and two Democrats voted against it. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., voted "present."

The Savings and Loan Scandal

Who is John McCain?

He passes himself off as a war hero even though fellow POWs in Vietnam say he collaborated with his captors.

So what else does he do?

He's a US Senator who is good at raising money...from anyone and that included financial criminals who needed him to run interference in Washington DC for them.

He did it during the Saving and Loan crisis of the 1980s and he did it during the Sub Prime Meltdown of the 2008.

And we're supposed to take this lying, thieving sack of s***'s word for anything as if he's some kind of statesman.

Are they serious?

Readers may recall an ugly story that broke earlier this summer, when New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman rebuked the news/business information firm Thomson Reuters for selling access to key economic survey data two seconds early to high-frequency algorithmic traders. The story strongly suggested that some Thomson Reuters customers were using their two-second head start (an eternity in the modern world of computerized trading) to front-run the markets.

"The early release of market-moving survey data undermines fair play in the markets," Schneiderman said, back in the second week of July. Thomson Reuters suspended the practice of selling two-second head starts after Schneiderman insisted upon a change. Still, the firm defiantly refused to declare the change permanent and insisted that it had the right to "legally distribute non-governmental data" to "fee-paying subscribers."

It turns out that there's more to the story.

Back in June, journalist Simone Foxman at the global economic site Quartz reported that in addition to the two-second head start some Thomson Reuters customers were getting on the release of the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers, other customers may have been getting their data even earlier, "nearly an hour in advance" in some cases.

Rolling Stone has since learned that a whistleblower complaint has been filed to the SEC identifying 16 of the world's biggest banks and hedge funds as the allegedly even-earlier recipients of this key economic data. The complaint alleges that this select group of customers received the data anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour ahead of the rest of the markets.