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UK: Tony Blair's Wife Cherie Sues News Corp., Convicted Phone-Hacker Mulcaire

Erik Larson and Robert Hutton
Bloomberg
Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:01 UTC
Tony Balir, Cherie Blair
© unknown
Tony Blair with wife Cherie Blair
Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair's wife Cherie sued News Corp. (NWSA) and a former private investigator for its now-defunct News of the World tabloid for hacking into her phone.

The lawsuit, filed Feb. 21 against the company's U.K. unit and Glenn Mulcaire, comes as News Corp. prepares for the first civil trial over the scandal, scheduled to start next week in London. The company has already settled phone-hacking claims by Blair's former press chief, Alastair Campbell, and former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch shuttered the News of the World in July in a bid to contain public anger after it was revealed the tabloid hacked into the voice mails of a murdered schoolgirl. While most of the current lawsuits have settled, the company may face claims by more than 800 possible victims identified by police.

"If it is true that a former prime minister's family have been targeted by Rupert Murdoch's hackers, then it is clearly a significant moment in the scandal," Tom Watson, a Labour Party lawmaker who is on a parliamentary committee investigating the scandal, said in an e-mail.

A message left with the press office of News Corp.'s U.K. unit, News International, wasn't immediately returned. Mulcaire's lawyer, Sarah Webb, didn't immediately return a call seeking comment. Mulcaire was jailed in 2007 for hacking phones of members of Britain's royal family.
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Bomb

Journalists Among Dozens Killed as Bombing Continues in Syrian city of Homs

Alice Fordham
The Washington Post
Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:51 UTC
Image
© unknown
 French photographer Remi Ochlik and American journalist Marie Colvin were killed in Homs, activists and a French government spokeswoman said.
Syrian forces continued to bombard the city of Homs on Wednesday, as international outrage at the growing death toll increased pressure on the government of President Bashar al-Assad ahead of a meeting of world leaders Friday to discuss the crisis.

Ignoring the International Committee of the Red Cross's call for daily two-hour cease-fires to allow medicine and food into civilian areas that are increasingly deprived of basic supplies, Syrian authorities defiantly asserted Wednesday that terrorist groups and sanctions were responsible for any lack of medical care.

Among dozens of people reported killed Wednesday in Homs, a center of opposition to Assad and a target of intermittent heavy artillery fire for almost three weeks, were journalist Marie Colvin of Britain's Sunday Times and photojournalist Remi Ochlik from France.

The two, who had traveled into Syria without official permission, were killed and three other reporters were injured when a hail of missiles hit the house in which they were working Wednesday morning. Their deaths came less than a week after the demise of award-winning New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid, from an apparent asthma attack, in northern Syria and a little more than a month after French journalist Gilles Jacquier died in violence in Homs.

Comment: To get a better picture of what's really going on in Syria, please read the Sott Focus "Syria's Bloody CIA Revolution - A Distraction?"

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Health

Venezuela's Chavez Says His Cancer is Likely Back


The Indian Express
Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC
Hugo Chavez
© Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Hugo Chavez
President Hugo Chavez has raised serious doubts about whether he'll have the stamina for a successful re-election bid, revealing that he needs to return to Cuba to have a lesion removed that is probably malignant.

Chavez was meeting with top aides today to plan for his absence while expressions of support poured in from his allies around the region.

Venezuela's foreign ministry said Chavez had received messages of concern from Presidents Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Francisco Mujica of Uruguay, Evo Morales of Bolivia and Cristina Fernandez of Argentina.

Chavez told Venezuelans yesterday that doctors in Cuba had over the weekend found a two-centimetre (less than an inch) lesion is in the same place where they removed a cancerous tumour last year.

The socialist president, who hopes to extend his 13 years in power with another six year term in the October 7 elections, said he will likely need radiation therapy.
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Attention

Assassination Attempt on Abkhazia President Fails


San Francisco Chronicle
Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC
Alexander Ankvab
© The Associated Press/Mikhail Metzel
Alexander Ankvab
Unidentified assassins tried Wednesday to kill the president of Abkhazia, a Russian-backed rebel Georgian enclave, employing automatic rifles, grenade launchers and a powerful roadside bomb in an assault that raised fresh questions about Moscow's ability to preserve order there.

The president, Alexander Ankvab, survived the attack without injury, but at least one bodyguard died and two more were seriously wounded. It was the sixth attempt on Ankvab's life in less than a decade, a testament to the volatility of Abkhazia.

Reached by telephone at his office in Abkhazia's capital, Ankvab's voice was faint and shaky.

"I'm sorry, I can't talk right now, especially about this topic," he said. The attack was likely to provoke new anxiety in Moscow, which has been struggling to damper recent political tremors in Abkhazia and another breakaway Georgian enclave, South Ossetia.

Officials in Abkhazia had no immediate information on possible suspects in the attack. Ankvab took office in August and immediately began a campaign against criminal groups that he alleged had infiltrated government agencies.
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Evil Rays

Britain at Risk From EMP Attack From Space, MPs Warn

Matthew Holehouse
The Telegraph, UK
Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:17 UTC
Russian Topol-12M mobile nuclear missile
© Reuters
A Russian Topol-12M mobile nuclear missile.
Britain's critical national infrastructure could be crippled in a high-altitude space attack by a rogue state or terrorists, MPs have warned.

A nuclear device detonated up to 500 miles above the earth's surface could generate an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) with a "devastating" effect on power supplies, telecommunications and other vital systems, the Commons Defence Committee said.

It warned that countries such as Iran - which is resisting international pressure to end its nuclear programme - and even eventually some "non-state actors" could acquire the technology to mount such an attack, in a scenario akin to the plot of the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye.

Terrorists could also build a "crude" non-nuclear EMP weapon, with the power to cause disruption over a more limited area.

But despite the vulnerability of the UK to such an attack, the committee accused the Ministry of Defence of appearing "complacent" and "unwilling to take these threats seriously".

It said ministers should start work on "hardening" the infrastructure to protect against an EMP attack "as a matter of urgency".
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Chess

Russia Warns Against 'Hasty Conclusions' Over Iran

George Jahn
The Associated Press
Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© The Associated Press/Ronald Zak
Herman Nackaerts, Deputy Director General and Head of the Department of Safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, is interviewed as he arrives after his flight from Iran at Vienna's Schwechat airport, Austria, on Wednesday Feb. 22, 2012.
Russia said Wednesday the world should not draw "hasty conclusions" over Iran's most recent rebuff of U.N. attempts to investigate allegations the Islamic Republic hid secret work on atomic arms, but the U.S. and its allies accused Tehran of nuclear defiance.

Under international pressure to show restraint, Israel, which has warned repeatedly that it may strike Iran's nuclear facilities, pointedly urged major world powers to mind their own business, saying it alone would decide what to do to protect the Jewish state's security.

France said Iran's continued stonewalling of the International Atomic Energy Agency "is contrary to the intentions" expressed by Tehran in its recent offer to restart talks over its nuclear activities.

In Washington, White House spokesman Jay Carney said while world powers have not yet reached a decision on those talks, Iran's refusal to cooperate with the investigation "suggests that they have not changed their behavior when it comes to abiding by their international obligations."

The IAEA's acknowledgment of renewed failure came early Wednesday at the conclusion of the second trip in less then a month aimed at investigating suspicions of covert Iranian nuclear weapons work.

The IAEA team had hoped to speak with key Iranian scientists suspected of working on the alleged weapons program, break down opposition to their plans to inspect documents related to nuclear work and secure commitments from Iranian authorities to allow future visits.
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Propaganda

Mom Visits Amir Hekmati, Former US Marine Sentenced to Death in Iran

Lee Ferran
ABC News
Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© ABC News
Mom Visits Amir Hekmati, Former US Marine Sentenced to Death in Iran
The mother of the former U.S. Marine sentenced to death in Iran was allowed to visit her son, who she said looked gaunt and terrified on death row.

Amir Hekmati's mother, Benhaz, went to Tehran in late January, according to a report posted late Tuesday by The New York Times, three weeks after an Iranian court sentenced the 28-year-old Arizona-raised Iranian-American to death for "cooperating for a hostile country... and spying for the CIA."

"While he is disappointed by the circumstances he finds himself in, he is hopeful that the truth will be known and he will be able to come home very soon," Hekmati's mother said in a statement, according to The Times. She described the Iranian officials she met as "hospitable" and "respectful," but said her son looked thinner and shocked by his ordeal.

Hekmati's family has publicly maintained Hekmati's innocence, as first voiced by his father to ABC News in an exclusive interview before the death sentence came down.

"My son is no spy. He is innocent. He's a good fellow, a good citizen, a good man," Hekmati said in December. "These are all unfounded allegations and a bunch of lies."
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Bad Guys

US: New York Police Department monitored Muslim students all over Northeast

Chris Hawley
Associated Press
Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:57 UTC
Image
© Ted Shaffrey - Associated Press
This Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012 photo shows Jawad Rasul near the City College of New York where he is a student. Rasul’s name ended up in a New York Police Department report after an undercover officer accompanied him and other Muslim students on a whitewater rafting trip in upstate New York.
New York - One autumn morning in Buffalo, N.Y., a college student named Adeela Khan logged into her email and found a message announcing an upcoming Islamic conference in Toronto.

Khan clicked "forward," sent it to a group of fellow Muslims at the University at Buffalo, and promptly forgot about it.

But that simple act on Nov. 9, 2006, was enough to arouse the suspicion of an intelligence analyst at the New York Police Department, 300 miles away, who combed through her post and put her name in an official report. Marked "SECRET" in large red letters, the document went all the way to Commissioner Raymond Kelly's office.

The report, along with other documents obtained by The Associated Press, reveals how the NYPD's intelligence division focused far beyond New York City as part of a surveillance program targeting Muslims.

Police trawled daily through student websites run by Muslim student groups at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers and 13 other colleges in the Northeast. They talked with local authorities about professors in Buffalo and even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip, where he recorded students' names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed.

Asked about the monitoring, police spokesman Paul Browne provided a list of 12 people arrested or convicted on terrorism charges in the United States and abroad who had once been members of Muslim student associations, which the NYPD referred to as MSAs. They included Jesse Morton, who this month pleaded guilty to posting online threats against the creators of the animated TV show South Park. He had once tried to recruit followers at Stony Brook University on Long Island, Browne said.
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Eye 1

US: McCain to Introduce Cybersecurity Legislation Giving Even More Domestic Control to NSA, Military

Madison Ruppert
End The Lie
Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:11 UTC
McCain
© n/a
During the Senate's major hearing on cybersecurity last week, Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, announced that the Republicans in the Senate would introduce a bill to compete with S. 2105, also known as the Cybersecurity Act of 2012.

McCain seeks to give the NSA and the military previously unimaginable powers over civilian networks, even further expanding the ludicrous power over American citizens given to the military under the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA).

This is similar to the conclusions drawn by a study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which unsurprisingly had a long list of corporate "advisers" who would directly benefit from such a centralization.

Although, even the legislation as it is currently being considered follows the study's recommendations by putting the power in the hands of DHS. McCain would apparently rather see that power in the military's hands.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2012 is currently being supported by the chairmen of not only the Senate's Homeland Security committee but also the chairs of the commerce and intelligence committees as well.
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Vader

Silencing The Critics

Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
Mon, 20 Feb 2012 19:23 UTC
Image
© N/A
In 2010 the FBI invaded the homes of peace activists in several states and seized personal possessions in what the FBI - the lead orchestrator of fake "terrorist plots" - called an investigation of "activities concerning the material support of terrorism."

Subpoenas were issued to compel antiwar protestors to testify before grand juries as prosecutors set about building their case that opposing Washington's wars of aggression constitutes giving aid and comfort to terrorists. The purpose of the raids and grand jury subpoenas was to chill the anti-war movement into inaction.

Last week in one fell swoop the last two remaining critics of Washington/Tel Aviv imperialism were removed from the mainstream media. Judge Napolitano's popular program, Freedom Watch, was cancelled by Fox TV, and Pat Buchanan was fired by MSNBC. Both pundits had wide followings and were appreciated for speaking frankly.
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