Before Eliot Spitzer's infamous resignation as governor of New York in March 2008, he was one of our fiercest champions against Wall Street corruption, in a state that had some of the toughest legislation for controlling the banks. It may not be a coincidence that the revelation of his indiscretions with a high-priced call girl came less than a month after he published a bold editorial in the Washington Post titled "Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime: How the Bush Administration Stopped the States from Stepping in to Help Consumers." The editorial exposed the collusion between the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and Wall Street in deregulating the banks in the guise of regulating them, by taking regulatory power away from the states. It was an issue of the federal government versus the states, with the Feds representing the banks and the states representing consumers.

Five years later, Spitzer has set out to take some of that local regulatory power back, in his run for New York City comptroller. Mounting the attack against him, however, are not just Wall Street banks but women's groups opposed to this apparent endorsement of the exploitation of women. On August 17^th, the New York Post endorsed Spitzer's opponent and ran a scathing cover story attempting to embarrass Spitzer based on the single issue of his personal life.

Lynn Parramore, who considers herself a feminist, countered in an August 8^th Huffington Post article that it is likely to be in the best interests of the very women who are opposing him to forgive and move on. His stand for women's reproductive rights and other feminist issues is actually quite strong, and his role as Wall Street watchdog protected women from predatory financial practices. As New York Attorney General, he was known as the "Sheriff of Wall Street." He is one of the few people with not only the insight and experience to expose Wall Street corruption but the courage to go after the perpetrators.

Tensions are high in New Zealand over a new bill that would allow the country's GCSB agency to conduct warrantless NSA-style spying on citizens. Prime Minister John Key, who was grilled on the bill at a presser, cut the meeting short and left early.

The country's top official on Monday was showered with questions on the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) amendment bill, answering some of them, and effortlessly evading others. However, after less than 14 minutes of the presser, Key appeared to have lost patience with the journalists and walked off, leaving a question on privacy completely unanswered.

"Prime Minister, numerous legal jurors have informed us publicly that they disagree with you wholeheartedly, that you are taking broad powers, which would allow you to invade privacy...and you are saying that all those people are wrong..." a journalist said to Key.

"Correct," the Prime Minister said before immediately interrupting the rest of the question by asking, "Is this a question buddy?"

He then indicated that the question contains the answer, thanked everyone, and left.

The New Zealand Law Society has published a submission opposing the GCSB amendment bill, in which it summarized citizens' concerns and provided a detailed analysis of the absence of clear justification for several changes in the law.

The document particularly highlighted that "The Bill empowers the GCSB to spy on New Zealand citizens and residents, and to provide intelligence product to other government agencies in respect of those persons, in a way not previously contemplated," saying that this is "inconsistent with the rights to freedom of expression and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 (NZBORA) and with privacy interests recognized by New Zealand law."

Top US lawmakers have quietly agreed to temporarily suspend most military aid to Egypt, indicating that behind the scenes Washington is starting to treat the military's ouster of President Morsi as a coup, according to a new report.

The Obama administration has temporarily halted the delivery of weapons to the Egyptian military as well as some forms of economic aid to the government, despite deciding not to officially describe the military takeover as a coup. The office of Senator Patrick Leahy, the head of the Appropriations State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee, told The Daily Beast on Monday that the administration has implemented these changes over the past month as it formulates an official determination on the coup.

UK authorities reportedly raided the Guardian's office in London to destroy hard drives in an effort to stop future publications of leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger revealed in a Monday article posted on the British newspaper's website that intelligence officials from the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) told him that he would either have to hand over all the classified documents or have the newspaper's hard drives destroyed.

After more talks, two "security experts" from GCHQ - the British version of the National Security Agency - visited the Guardian's London offices.

Rusbridger wrote that the government officials then watched as computers, which contained classified information passed on by Snowden, were physically destroyed in one of the newspaper building's basements.

"We can call off the black helicopters," Rusbridger said one of the officials joked.

In the never-ending quest to get computers to process, really understand and actually reason, scientists at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency want to look more deeply into how computers can mimic a key portion of our brain.

The military's advanced research group recently put out a call, or Request For information, on how it could develop systems that go beyond machine learning, Bayesian techniques, and graphical technology to solve "extraordinarily difficult recognition problems in real-time."

Current systems offer partial solutions to this problem, but are limited in their ability to efficiently scale to larger more complex datasets, DARPA said. "They are also compute intensive, exhibit limited parallelism, require high precision arithmetic, and, in most cases, do not account for temporal data. "

What DARPA is interested in is looking at mimicking a portion of the brain known as the neocortex which is utilized in higher brain functions such as sensory perception, motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought and language. Specfically, DARPA said it is looking for information that provides new concepts and technologies for developing what it calls a "Cortical Processor" based on Hierarchical Temporal Memory.

Mohamed Badie, the organisation's supreme leader, is arrested in Cairo apartment, state TV reports.

Egyptian security forces have arrested the top leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Badie, state media has reported.

Badie, 70, the supreme leader of the Brotherhood, was detained on Tuesday at a residential flat in Nasr City in northeast Cairo, the state news agency said.

"That was after information came to the security apparatus locating his place of hiding," it said.

ONTV, a private, pro-military satellite channel, aired pictures purporting to show Badie upon his detention.

Virginia State Police used license plate scanners to record information about people who legally attended at least three political rallies in 2008 and 2009.

According to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the state police recorded license plate data for every vehicle leaving Virginia and going to Washington D.C. during President Obama's first inauguration ceremony in January 2009.

In October 2008, police recorded the license plates of attendees at separate campaign rallies in Leesburg, Virginia held by Obama and Sarah Palin.

The Virginia State Police were ordered by the U.S. Secret Service "to capture and store the plate images as an extra level of security for the inauguration."

1000 dead and counting in Egypt

Watching the White House squirm over the on-going massacres in Egypt one doesn't know whether to laugh, cry or resort to the vaudevillian method and throw rotten vegetables at them.

President Obama's "condemnation" of the Egyptian military's massacre of civilians sounded like obligatory ass-covering. Then there was the slippery boiler-plate verbiage spouted by the White House's new spokesman with the wonderfully apropos name of Josh Earnest. I wouldn't josh you, that's his name. And trust me, he's the personification of earnestness.

The sense of absurdity in the air takes one back to the halcyon days of Richard Nixon and his "credibility gap," which now seems like child's play. Incredibly, even John McCain has a more critical analysis of the Egyptian coup.

On the 60th anniversary of the 1953 military coup in Iran that overthrew the government of radical nationalist Mohammad Mossadegh, the US has declassified documents detailing how the CIA's secret operation brought the country's Shah back to power.

"American and British involvement in Mossadegh's ouster has long been public knowledge, but today's posting includes what is believed to be the CIA's first formal acknowledgement that the agency helped to plan and execute the coup," the US National Security Archive said.

Monday's publication under the US Freedom of Information Act came as something of a surprise, since most of the materials and records of the 1953 coup were believed to have been destroyed by the CIA, the Archive said. The CIA said at time that its "safes were too full."

The newly-revealed documents declassify documents about CIA's TPAJAX operation that sought regime change in Iran through the bribery of Iranian politicians, security and army high-ranking officials, and massive anti-Mossadegh propaganda that helped to instigate public revolt in 1953.

The targeting of Kurdish civilians in Syria by US-supported armed thugs is part of a deliberate attempt to galvanize the Kurds and pit them in a resurgent struggle against the non-Kurd regions.

The Kurdish Democratic Union Party and other sources are now reporting that Kurdish men, women, and children are systematically being tortured, raped, and executed. Fighting has broken out between Syrian Kurds and the insurgent forces supported by the US, UK, France, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the Iranian Parliament have condemned the targeting of Syrian Kurds while the Obama Administration and its cohorts have remained mostly silent. Lavrov's insistence that the United Nations Security Council condemns the violence has also been to no avail.

One of the reasons that the Obama Administration has been silent is because they are supporting the butchers behind the massacre and are trying to avoid more embarrassment. The US and its allies, however, will make supportive noise for the Kurds once they get the result they are seeking.