Puppet MastersS


Take 2

Iran to sue Hollywood over a series of films, including the Oscar-winning Argo

Saeed Kamali Dehghan
Guardian
Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:40 UTC
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© Martin Bureau/AFP/Getty ImagesIsabelle Coutant-Peyre, who said: 'I’ll be defending Iran against films that have been made by Hollywood to distort the country’s image, such as Argo.'
Tehran hires French lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre to bring case over Hollywood 'distorting image' of Islamic republic

Iran has hired a controversial French lawyer to file a lawsuit against Hollywood over a series of films, including Ben Affleck's Oscar-winning Argo, that have allegedly portrayed the Islamic republic in a distorted and unrealistic manner.

Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, described by the Iranian media as an "anti-Zionist" lawyer, has travelled to Tehran to meet the authorities in order to lodge a case in an international court against Hollywood directors and producers that officials say have promoted "Iranophobia".

Coutant-Peyre is the wife of the notorious Venezuelan-born terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as Carlos the Jackal, whom she is also representing. Ramírez, a self-styled international revolutionary, is serving a life sentence for the killings in 1975 of two French policemen and a suspected informant. Coutant-Peyre and Ramírez married in a ceremony held in jail in 2001 after she converted to Islam.

"I'll be defending Iran against films that have been made by Hollywood to distort the country's image, such as Argo," she said, according to quotes carried by the semi-official Isna news agency
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Dominoes

Venezuela to probe Chavez cancer poisoning accusation

Andrew Cawthorne
Reuters
Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:25 UTC
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© REUTERS/Carlos Garcia RawlinsVenezuela's acting President, Nicolas Maduro, gestures to supporters after he registered as a candidate for president in the April 14th election outside the national election board in Caracas March 11, 2013
Venezuela will set up a formal inquiry into claims that the late President Hugo Chavez's cancer was the result of poisoning by his enemies abroad, the government said.

Foes of the government view the accusation as a typical Chavez-style conspiracy theory intended to feed fears of "imperialist" threats to Venezuela's socialist system and distract people from daily problems.

Still, acting President Nicolas Maduro vowed to open an investigation into the claims, first raised by Chavez himself after he was diagnosed with the disease in 2011.

"We will seek the truth," Maduro told regional TV network Telesur. "We have the intuition that our commander Chavez was poisoned by dark forces that wanted him out of the way."

Foreign scientists will be invited to join a state committee to probe the accusation, he said.
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Airplane

EU unveils new air passenger rights


BBC
Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:59 UTC
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New rules should make it easier for passengers to complain about delays and cancellations
New rights for airline passengers have been unveiled by the European Commission.

They include rerouting travellers with rival carriers if a flight is delayed for more than 12 hours.

The rules also clarify what are considered exceptional circumstances for compensation.

For example, mechanical failures on board the aircraft do not count, but natural disasters and traffic control strikes do.

The Commission says the new rules, which are not likely to become law until 2014, will give a lot more certainty to airlines and passengers.

"It is very important that passenger rights do not just exist on paper," said EU transport commissioner Siim Kallas.

"We all need to be able to rely on them when it matters most - when things go wrong."
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Pistol

Washington gun control bill fails in State House


CBS Seattle
Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:39 UTC
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© KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images
A contentious proposal to expand background checks on Washington state gun sales failed Tuesday in the state House, where supporters said they were just a handful of votes short.

In a final effort to pick up a few extra votes, Rep. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, had proposed a referendum clause that would have allowed the public to vote on the measure. He initially believed that would draw enough support to corral the 50 votes needed to pass the bill but conceded Tuesday night that others had dropped their backing because of that shift.

"It was too big of a stretch for this year," Pedersen said.

Pedersen said he was disappointed by the result, and several Democrats departing for the night were emotional about the collapse of a bill they'd spent two days intensely working to finalize. The week had included lobbying from former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona Democrat who was wounded in a January 2011 mass shooting, and Gov. Jay Inslee.
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USA

Iraq war killed 116,00 civilians and cost $800 billion, study estimates


Raw Story
Fri, 15 Mar 2013 09:35 UTC
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© AFP Photo
At least 116,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 4,800 coalition troops died in Iraq between the outbreak of war in 2003 and the US withdrawal in 2011, researchers estimate.

Its involvement in Iraq has so far cost the United States $810 billion (625 billion euros) and could eventually reach $3 trillion, they added.

The estimates come from two US professors of public health, reporting on Friday in the British peer-reviewed journal The Lancet.

They base the figures on published studies in journals and on reports by government agencies, international organisations and the news media.

"We conclude that at least 116,903 Iraqi non-combatants and more than 4,800 coalition military personnel died over the eight-year course" of the war from 2003 to 2011, they said.

"Many Iraqi civilians were injured or became ill because of damage to the health-supporting infrastructure of the country, and about five million were displaced.
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Eye 2

Ann Coulter on Sen. Feinstein: 'Liberal women should not be able to hold office'

Stephen C. Webster
Raw Story
Fri, 15 Mar 2013 09:32 UTC
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© Screenshot via Foxnews.com
Reacting to Sen. Dianne Feinstein's (D-CA) blunt reply to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on gun control, Republican pundit and author Ann Coulter exclaimed on Thursday night that the whole conversation makes her think "liberal women should not be able to hold office" in the United States.

She explained that her shocking notion springs from her prior belief that women should not be allowed to vote, mainly because "as soon as they get a question they don't like, they start crying." She then compared Feinstein, one of the longest-serving Democrats in the Senate, to a college student failing to answer a question by a professor.

"He's absolutely right, he nailed her, so she said I'm offended," Coulter said. "I used to think women just shouldn't be able to vote. Now I think at least liberal women should not be able to hold office, and by woman I do not mean to limit that to the biological sense. That is not an answer, I'm offended."
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Snakes in Suits

FBI sources confirm grand jury investigation of Sen. Bob Menendez

David Martosko and Charles C. Johnson
Daily Caller
Fri, 15 Mar 2013 09:22 UTC
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An FBI agent in a supervisory position on the East Coast of the U.S. told The Daily Caller Thursday that he is aware of investigative reports sent from the bureau to the U.S. Attorney's office in Miami, Florida, in connection with a grand jury investigation into New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez.

A second law-enforcement source, a recently retired FBI agent, also confirmed the investigation and the grand jury.

The Washington Post reported Thursday evening that multiple sources confirmed the grand jury's existence, and said it was focused on his relationship with Dr. Salomon Melgen, a wealthy Florida donor whose relationship with the Democratic lawmaker has been at the center of several allegations of serious ethics lapses.

The senator has acknowledged Melgen provided him with free air travel to the Dominican Republic aboard his private jet on three occasions in 2010. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee reimbursed Melgen for one of those trips. Menendez himself wrote a $58,500 check for the other two in January 2013, nearly three years after the travel occurred.
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Cowboy Hat

U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan 'carried out without government's consent'

Owen Bowcott
Guardian
Fri, 15 Mar 2013 09:13 UTC
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© Kirsty Wigglesworth/APA US Predator drone, used for attacks in Afghanistan and the Pakistani border provinces, flies over Kandahar airfield.
US drone attacks on Pakistan's tribal districts are carried out without the consent of the government in Islamabad and are a violation of its sovereignty, a UN official has warned.

Returning from a three-day visit to the country's capital, Ben Emmerson QC, the UN's special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, said he had been given assurances that there was no "tacit consent by Pakistan to the use of drones on its territory".

His comments on Friday are a direct response to widespread suspicions that some parts of Pakistan's military or intelligence organisations have been providing clandestine authorisation to Washington for attacks by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on Taliban or al-Qaida suspects in provinces on the Afghan border.

Emmerson said he had been told that "a thorough search of Pakistani government records had revealed no indication of such consent having been given".

His statement said that Pakistan's foreign affairs ministry had confirmed "that since mid-2010 (and to date) it has regularly sent 'notes verbales' to the US embassy in Islamabad protesting the use of drones on the territory of Pakistan" and "requiring the US to cease these strikes immediately".
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Bad Guys

UK study: Violence more likely among vets, troops

Maria Cheng
Boston Globe
Fri, 15 Mar 2013 09:07 UTC
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© AP Photo/Altaf QadriIn this Monday, Feb. 15, 2010 file photo, a British soldier walks with his machine gun on the roof of a residential house in the village Qari Sahib, Nad Ali district, Helmend province, southern Afghanistan.
Young men who have served in the British military are about three times more likely than civilians to have committed a violent offense, researchers reported Friday in a study that explores the roots of such behavior.

The research found that merely being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan made no difference in rates of violent crime later on. Instead, a key predictor was violent behavior before enlisting. Combat duty also raised the risk, as did witnessing traumatic events during deployment or misusing alcohol afterward.

Still, the vast majority - 94 percent - of British military staff who return home after serving in a combat zone don't commit any crimes, researchers told reporters at a briefing.

The study found little difference in the lifetime rates of violent offenses between military personnel and civilian populations at age 46 - 11 percent versus almost 9 percent. Among younger men, however, being in the military seemed to make a difference: Nearly 21 percent of the military group under age 30 had a conviction for a violent offense in their lifetime compared to fewer than 7 percent of similarly aged men in the general population, according to British crime statistics.
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Laptop

Internal intelligence agencies hungry for deeper cooperation from Skype


RT
Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:45 UTC
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© AFP Photo / Mario Tama
While already giving intelligence services access to private data without a court order, some Russian experts say, Skype is still being pressured into registering as a telecom agency, allowing intelligence to operate around a series of legal loopholes.

Intelligence services have for years have been monitoring Skype communications, several participants in the Russian information security industry have told Russian newspaper Vedomosti. According to security experts, access to correspondence and Skype conversations within the Russian intelligence community does not always go through the court system - it is often obtained on a "simple request."

After Microsoft acquired Skype in May 2011, it updated its software with a technology allowing "legitimate wiretapping," Maksim Emm, CEO of Peak Systems, told the publication. Since then, any user account can be switched to a special mode in which the encryption keys that were previously generated on a user's mobile device or computer would be generated on Skype's server.
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