Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on Friday Israel's diplomatic presence in Turkey was being cut to second secretary level, effectively expelling Israeli diplomats in protest over an Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound ship that killed nine Turks.

"Turkey-Israel diplomatic relations have been reduced to a second secretary level. All personnel above the second secretary level will return to their countries by Wednesday at the latest," Davutoglu told a news conference. Israel's ambassador Gabby Levy was currently in Israel and cancelled plans to return to Turkey on Thursday.

A long-awaited U.N. report on the raid, made public on Thursday, declared that Israel's naval blockade of the Gaza Strip was legal, but that the Jewish state used unreasonable force.

Bulletin from feds highlights group's Occupy Wall Street, Operation Facebook, Project Mayhem campaigns

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security today issued a somewhat unusual bulletin warning the security community about the planned activities of hacking collective Anonymous over the next few months.

The bulletin, issued by the DHS National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC), warns financial services companies especially to be on the lookout for attempts by Anonymous to "solicit ideologically dissatisfied, sympathetic employees" to their cause.

Anonymous has recently used Twitter to try and persuade dissatisfied employees within the financial sector to give them information and access. Though such attempts appear to have been largely unsuccessful so far, "unwilling coercion through embarrassment or blackmail may be a risk to personnel," the bulletin warned.

Earlier this year, ThinkProgress obtained 75,000 private emails from the defense contractor HBGary Federal via the hacktivist group called Anonymous. The emails led to two shocking revelations. First, that an assortment of private military firms collectively called "Team Themis" had been tapped by Bank of America to conduct a cyber war against reporters sympathetically covering the Wikileaks revelations. And second, that late in 2010, the same set of firms began work separately for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a Republican-aligned corporate lobbying group, to develop a similar campaign of sabotage against progressive organizations, including the SEIU and ThinkProgress.

In presentations obtained by ThinkProgress from the e-mail dump detailing the tactics potentially used against progressives, HBGary Federal floated the idea of using "fake insider personas" to infiltrate left-leaning groups critical of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's policies. As HBGary Federal executive Aaron Barr described in several emails, his firm could work with partner companies Palantir and Berico Technologies to manipulate fake online identities, using networks like Facebook, to gain access to private information from his targets. Other presentations are more specific and describe efforts to use social media to hack computers and find vulnerabilities among even the families of people who work at organizations critical of the Chamber.

Files found in Tripoli show strong cooperation between US and British intelligence agencies and Muammar Gaddafi's government, including shipping terror suspects to Libya for interrogation, media reports say.

The Central Intelligence Agency, under the administration of then-president George W. Bush, brought terror suspects to Libya and suggested questions Libyan interrogators should ask them, The Wall Street Journal said on Friday, citing documents found at the headquarters of Libya's External Security agency.

Meanwhile, British daily The Independent said the secret documents also show that Britain passed details of exiled opponents to Gaddafi's spies.

At the close of business on Aug. 31--for the first time in the history of the country--the publicly held debt of the federal government topped $10 trillion, according to data released by the U.S. Treasury Department at 4:00 p.m. yesterday.

During Obama's presidency, debt held by the public has now increased by $3.71694 trillion--or almost 59 percent from the $6.3073 trillion in debt held by the public that the government owed to its creditors on Jan. 20, 2009, when Obama was inaugurated.

Also, according to the most recent reports available from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, approximately $6.1 trillion of that debt - or about 61 percent of it - is owned by foreign interests (led by the Chinese and the Japanese) and by the Federal Reserve.

At the close of business on Aug. 30, as reported by the Treasury Department's Bureau of the Public Debt, the federal government's debt held by the public equaled $9,990,126,772,846.86. By the close of business on Aug. 31, it was $10,024,253,354,407.07.

The Treasury divides the debt of the U.S. government into two general categories: "debt held by the public" and "intragovermental" debt.

One reason I supported President Obama is because he said we must protect clean air, water and lands. But what good is it to say the right thing unless you act on it?

Since early August, three administration decisions -- on Arctic drilling, the Keystone XL pipeline and the ozone that causes smog -- have all favored dirty industry over public health and a clean environment. Like so many others, I'm beginning to wonder just where the man stands


For months, the Environmental Protection Agency has been poised to issue new ozone rules to reduce the smog that causes asthma attacks and other respiratory ills. We badly need these new standards, which the EPA estimates could prevent 12,000 premature deaths a year.

On Friday, though, the White House put the new rules on ice. The result: these vital protections will be delayed until at least 2013 - conveniently after next year's presidential election.

The CIA and other Western intelligence agencies worked closely with the ousted regime of Moammar Gadhafi, sharing tips and co-operating in handing over terror suspects for interrogation to a regime known to use torture, according to a trove of security documents discovered after the fall of Tripoli.

The revelations provide new details on the West's efforts to turn Libya's mercurial leader from foe to ally and provide an embarrassing example of the U.S. administration's collaboration with authoritarian regimes in the war on terror.

The documents, among tens of thousands found in an External Security building in Tripoli, show an increasingly warm relationship, with CIA agents proposing to set up a permanent Tripoli office, addressing their Libyan counterparts by their first names and giving them advice. In one memo, a British agent even sends Christmas greetings.

The agencies were known to co-operate as the longtime Libyan ruler worked to overcome his pariah status by stopping his quest for weapons of mass destruction and renouncing support for terrorism. But the new details show a more extensive relationship than was previously known, with Western agencies offering lists of questions for specific detainees and apparently the text for a Gadhafi speech.

They also offer a glimpse into the inner workings of the now-defunct CIA program of extraordinary rendition, through which terror suspects were secretly detained, sent to third countries and sometimes underwent the so-called enhanced interrogation tactics like waterboarding.

The documents mention a half dozen names of people targeted for rendition, including Tripoli's new rebel military commander, Abdel-Hakim Belhaj.

Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch, which helped find the documents, called the ties between Washington and Gadhafi's regime "A very dark chapter in American intelligence history."

On September 1, dozens of predator states met in Paris to pick apart Libya's bones even though it's breathing, if barely.

We've seen it before, notably in Iraq under Paul Bremer's 100 orders that turned the country into a cutthroat capitalist laboratory. Baghdad was open for business at fire sale prices with US and other Western firms having first dibs on everything.

Emergency powers to relocate terrorism suspects from London to other parts of the country have been prepared, despite a pledge earlier this year that the measure would be scrapped.

The police are understood to be worried at the number of terrorism suspects who could return to the capital ahead of the Olympics.

Last night, the Home Office published draft legislation which will be put before Parliament in "exceptional circumstances."

Turkey has suspended all its military ties with Israel and has expelled Israel's envoy from Ankara over Tel Aviv's refusal to apologize for last year's deadly attack on a Gaza-bound flotilla, Press TV reports.


The Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu made the announcement in a press conference on Friday and said, "The time has come for Israel to pay for its stance that sees it above international laws and disregards human conscience."