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Eye 1

Report: Israel, Saudis working on Iran strike plans


upi.com
Sun, 17 Nov 2013 06:35 UTC
Israel and Saudi Arabia are working on contingency plans for a possible military strike on Iran, a Sunday Times report said.

The British newspaper reported the two countries are working on plans for a possible strike on Iran's nuclear facilities if a a deal struck by the P5 plus1 countries in Geneva later this week fails to significantly curb Iran's nuclear program. Israel's intelligence agency Mossad is reportedly working with Saudi officials on the plans.

"Once the Geneva agreement is signed, the military option will be back on the table. The Saudis are furious and are willing to give Israel all the help it needs," a diplomatic source told the newspaper.

In the framework of cooperation between the two countries, Riyadh has given Jerusalem a green light to use its airspace in the event of a military strike on Iran, the newspaper said.

Both countries are alarmed by Iran's nuclear ambitions, the report added.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been appealing to Western audiences to oppose an agreement with Iran, Haaretz said.
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Magnify

Syria has changed

Thierry Meyssan
Voltairenet.org
Mon, 04 Nov 2013 13:58 UTC
Damascus
© UnknownDamascus, the oldest inhabited city in the world
The media coverage of the war in Syria examines only military, diplomatic and humanitarian action. It ignores profound transformation. However, one does not survive a sea of ​​violence without changing profoundly. From Damascus, where he has lived for two years, Thierry Meyssan describes this evolution.

While in Damascus, the Special Envoy of the Secretaries General of the Arab League and the UN, Lakhdar Brahimi, presented "his" draft peace conference project, Geneva 2. A conference whose objective would be to end the "civil war". This terminology rehashes the analysis of one side against another, of those who argue that this conflict is a logical continuation of the "Arab Spring" against those who argue that it has been manufactured, fueled and manipulated from the outside.
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Video

CBS will stream four days of its 1963 live coverage of President Kennedy's assassination

Dante D'Orazio
The Verge
Sat, 16 Nov 2013 13:06 UTC
Next week will mark 50 years to the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. To mark the anniversary, CBS will stream four days of its live coverage from 1963, covering the first reports of the assassination to the president's funeral. Legendary anchor Walter Cronkite is as tied to the assassination as the famous "Zapruder film," but the brief clip showing Cronkite announce the president's death is typically all you see today.

Comment: Read Laura Knight-Jadczyk's JFK series to learn more about how America's hope was assassinated. Also, watch Evidence of Revision - a six part documentary containing historical, original news footage revealing that the most seminal events in recent American history have been deeply and purposefully misrepresented to the public. Footage and interviews provide an in-depth exploration of events ranging from the Kennedy assassinations to the Jonestown massacre, and all that lies between. The footprints left in this archival footage reveal the coordinated, clandestine sculpting of the America we know today. Evidence of Revision proves once and for all that history has been revised even as it was written!

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Mr. Potato

Chase's Twitter gambit devolves into all-time PR fiasco

Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
Sat, 16 Nov 2013 13:30 UTC
JPMorgan Chase headquarters
© Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesJPMorgan Chase headquarters in New York City.
I almost couldn't believe it when I heard that JP Morgan Chase was going to do a live Twitter Q&A with the public - you know, all those people around the world they've been bending over and robbing for, oh, the last decade or so. On the all-time list of public relations screw-ups, it's hard to say where this decision by America's most hated commercial bank (with apologies to Bank of America, which probably finishes a 49ers-like very close second this year) to engage the enraged public on Twitter ranks. For sure, anyway, it's right up there with Abercrombie and Fitch's rollout of thong underwear for 10 year-olds and the $440,000 afterparty AIG executives threw for themselves at the St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, California after securing a federal bailout.

Chase execs probably thought they were going to be inundated with questions, like, "What steps can I take to try to become as totally awesome as all of you?" This one can infer from the self-satisfied language of their announcing Tweet, which read:
What career advice would you ask a leading exec at a global firm? Tweet a Q using #AskJPM. On 11/14 a $JPM leader takes over @JPMorgan
Only on Wall Street would a bank that's about to pay out the biggest settlement in the history of settlements unironically engage the public, expecting ordinary people to sincerely ask one of their top-decision makers for career advice. The notion that this was their idea of reaching out to the public in a moment of public relations crisis - we'll take questions now on how you can become just as successful as us! - was doomed to be hilarious, and it turned out to be that and more.
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Heart - Black

Oops: Western sponsored Al-Qaeda-linked rebels mistakenly cuts head off fellow terrorist

Richard Spencer
The Telegraph
Sat, 16 Nov 2013 10:20 UTC
Terrorist Mohammed Fares
© UnknownTerrorist Mohammed Fares, left, who was mistakenly decapitated by fellow terrorists from Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham.
Militant Islamist rebels in Syria linked to al-Qaeda have asked for "understanding and forgiveness" for cutting off and putting on display the wrong man's head.

In a public appearance filmed and posted online, members of Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, one brandishing a knife, held up a bearded head before a crowd in Aleppo. They triumphantly described the execution of what they said was a member of an Iraqi Shia militia fighting for President Bashar al-Assad.

But the head was recognised from the video as originally belonging to a member of Ahrar al-Sham, a Sunni Islamist rebel group that often fights alongside ISIS though it does not share its al-Qaeda ideology.

After inquiries, an ISIS spokesman admitted he was Mohammed Fares, an Ahrar commander reported missing some days ago. This could not be independently confirmed, but in an earlier video of a speech by Mr Fares he bears a close resemblance to the severed head in the later video.

The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, which monitors deaths in the Syrian conflict, and several activists on social media said that ISIS fighters misunderstood comments Mr Fares made referring to the Imams Ali and Hussein, the founding fathers of Shiism.


Comment: The western sponsored terrorists in Syria are so fragmented that they act like headless roosters. That the West talks about a Syrian opposition with whom a dialogue can be made is meaningless as there are hundreds and hundreds of militant groups, one more radical than the other. This story only confirms that they don't even know each other. But even if they did know each other the very act of a quick public execution only shows that they have no humanity and that democracy will never come along with them either.

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USA

Top U.S. Navy Intelligence officers suspended as bribery scandal widens


Guardian
Fri, 08 Nov 2013 10:34 UTC
Image
© Heng Sinith/APMichael Misiewicz, the first officer charged.
Vice-Admiral Ted Branch and Rear Admiral Bruce Loveless have also been cut off from access to classified material

Two of the US navy's top intelligence officials had their access to classified materials suspended on Friday over their ties to a widening bribery scandal involving a Singapore-based defence contractor, the navy said.

Vice-Admiral Ted Branch, director of naval intelligence, and Rear Admiral Bruce Loveless, the director of intelligence operations, were also put on temporary leave because of allegations of "inappropriate conduct".

"There is no indication, nor do the allegations suggest, that in either case there was any breach of classified information," Rear Admiral John Kirby, the navy's chief of information, said in a statement.

Branch and Loveless are the most senior navy officials so far linked to a case involving Leonard Glenn Francis, whose company Glenn Defense Marine Asia helped arrange maintenance and resupply visits for navy ships to Asian ports.
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Bullseye

Best of the Web: RFK Jr: My father was convinced 'rogue CIA' killed his brother

Ralph Lopez
Digital Journal
Fri, 08 Nov 2013 07:18 UTC
Image
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Rory Kennedy and Charlie Rose at the event at Winspear Opera House, Dallas earlier this year where RFK's son dropped the hint that the CIA murdered his uncle JFK.
In the year of the 50th anniversary of the day which many Americans say broke their hearts, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, to virtually no media coverage, that his father Bobby believed that Oswald did not act alone, and neither does he.

RFK Jr.'s comments mirror the conclusion of the 1976 official government commission on the assassination of the 35th president, which stated that:
"The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy."
Although the 1976 commission's evidence and conclusions are still hotly disputed, acoustics analysts Professor Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy of Queens College concluded that "with the probability of 95% or better, there was indeed a shot fired from the grassy knoll."
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Bad Guys

Best of the Web: Increasing exploitation of labor: The United States in the last forty years

Harold Meyerson
The American Prospect
Fri, 15 Nov 2013 15:53 UTC
Image
From 1947 to 1974, American workers brought home most of the wealth they produced. Since 1974, they've steadily lost power-- and they're getting just a fraction of the wealth that they produce today.

1974 The steady stream of Watergate revelations, President Richard Nixon's twists and turns to fend off disclosures, the impeachment hearings, and finally an unprecedented resignation - all these riveted the nation's attention in 1974. Hardly anyone paid attention to a story that seemed no more than a statistical oddity: That year, for the first time since the end of World War II, Americans' wages declined.

Since 1947, Americans at all points on the economic spectrum had become a little better off with each passing year. The economy's rising tide, as President John F. Kennedy had famously said, was lifting all boats. Productivity had risen by 97 percent in the preceding quarter-century, and median wages had risen by 95 percent. As economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted in The Affluent Society, this newly middle-class nation had become more egalitarian. The poorest fifth had seen their incomes increase by 42 percent since the end of the war, while the wealthiest fifth had seen their incomes rise by just 8 percent. Economists have dubbed the period the "Great Compression.


Comment: The important thing to remember is that it didn't have to be like this. The historical trend was not the result of some sort of natural economic law but of decisions made and policies taken. The economic elite tell us that this is the result of technological progress, globalization, etc., etc., but those very things could have led to better lives for the majority of people if different policies were followed. But that would only happen in a world where the leaders have the best interests of all at heart and we don't live in such a world.

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Dollar

Mormon Church purchases 2% of the state of Florida for half a billion dollars


RT
Fri, 08 Nov 2013 22:52 UTC
Mormons
© Unknown
A sect of the Mormon Church is poised to become the largest private landowner in the state of Florida after spending more than half a billion dollars to purchase hundreds of thousands of acres across three counties.

Representatives from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints announced Thursday they had bought most of the real estate owned by the St. Joe development company for $565 million. Municipalities in Bay, Calhoun, Franklin, Gadsden, Gulf, Jefferson, Leon, Liberty and Wakulla counties are included in the nearly 400,000 acres of land. The land, much of which is rich with timber, is located along the Florida panhandle.

The St. Joe Co. has owned the land for more than a dozen years and originally planned to profit from so-called master-planned communities in the region. That plan went sour when the real estate bubble bust, costing the company $330 million in 2011 alone.
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Snakes in Suits

George W. Bush raising funds for group that converts Jews to bring about second coming of Christ

Sarah Posner
Mother Jones
Thu, 07 Nov 2013 11:51 UTC
George W. Bush
© UnknownFormer U.S. President George W. Bush is speaking this Thursday at a fundraiser for Jews for Jesus, which is devoted to converting Jews to Christianity. Once his talk was uncovered by an investigative journalist, any mention of Bush's involvement has been pulled from the website.
Next week, former President George W. Bush is scheduled to keynote a fundraiser in Irving, Texas, for the Messianic Jewish Bible Institute, a group that trains people in the United States, Israel, and around the world to convince Jews to accept Jesus as the Messiah. The organization's goal: to "restore" Israel and the Jews and bring about about the second coming of Christ.

Messianic Jews have long been controversial for Jews of all major denominations, who object to their proselytizing efforts and their message that salvation by Jesus is consistent with Jewish theology. Last year, Abraham Foxman, president of the Anti-Defamation League, told Politico that former Sen. Rick Santorum's appearance at an event hosted by another Messianic Jewish organization, the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America, was "insensitive and offensive." And Commentary magazine, which bills itself as a "conservative American journal of politics, Judaism, social and cultural issues," noted, "it must be understood that the visceral distaste that the overwhelming majority of Jews have for the Messianics is not to be taken lightly." Many Messianic Jews are Christians who have adopted aspects of Jewish ritual observance; others are Jews who share the Christian belief that Jesus is the Messiah.
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