Three car bombings close to security buildings in Tripoli are the first deadly attacks since Muammar Gaddafi's fall last year

At least two people were killed when three car bombs exploded near interior ministry and security buildings in the Libyan capital on Sunday, the first lethal attack of its kind since Muammar Gaddafi's fall last year, security sources said.

Ambulances and firefighters rushed to the scenes of the blasts and large numbers of police cordoned off the sites before starting to remove the damaged vehicles.

The first bomb blew up near the interior ministry's administrative offices in Tripoli but caused no casualties, the sources said. On arriving at the site of the explosion, police found another car bomb that had not blown up.

Minutes later, two car bombs exploded near the former headquarters of a women's police academy, which the defence ministry has been using for interrogations and detentions, the sources said, killing two people, both civilians, and wounding two.

Several federal agencies have purchased an advanced software application that allows administrators to see every single action, item, mouse click and more performed on their employees' computers. Some say it's being implemented to end whistleblowing.

In the midst of a witch-hunt that has targeted anyone accused of leaking documents, the US federal government has been linked to a massive acquisition of spyware that allows the higher ups to get ahold of essentially any communiqué and comment made by its employees on any electronic device. Some agents with the Food and Drug Administration insist that their personal conversations were unlawfully monitored by their higher-ups using the program, citing their superiors' fears that whistleblowers will continue to come to lawmakers to voice concern over dangerous practices within the FDA.

"We are looking for what we call indicators of compromise," Joy Miller, deputy assistant secretary for security at the Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA's parent agency, says to the Washington Post. "We're monitoring a system, not everybody in that environment."

Journalists with the Post penned an article this week that examines the use of Spector 360, monitoring software made by the SpectorSoft group, within the FDA and other agencies.

The US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy when carrying cell phones, allowing police to track GPS signals without a warrant or probable cause.

The decision came the court ruled in United States v. Skinner that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) abided by the Constitution by using a drug runner's cellphone data to track his location and determine his identity.

Melvin Skinner, also known by his false name as "Big Foot," was a drug mule with more than 1,100 pounds of marijuana in his Texas motorhome.

The throwaway mobile phone he was using was registered under a false name, so agents did not know the identity of the drug trafficker.

By using GPS data from his disposable phone, police learned that "Big Foot" was planning to deliver a large shipment of marijuana from Arizona to Tennessee in his mobile home.

For those feeling down in the dumps, the US military now has a solution: an anti-suicidal nasal spray that delivers antidepressant chemicals to the brain.

­The US Army has awarded a scientist at the Indiana University School of Medicine $3 million to develop a nasal spray that eclipses suicidal thoughts. Dr. Michael Kubek and his research team will have three years to ascertain whether the nasal spray is a safe and effective method of preventing suicides.

The research grant comes after the Army lost 38 of its soldiers to suspected suicide in July, setting a record high. So far in 2012, the Army has confirmed 66 active duty suicides and is investigating 50 more, making a total of 116 cases.

The Army's suicide rate is at the highest level in history, with more American soldiers taking their own lives than being killed by the Taliban. The Pentagon reported in June that suicides among soldiers averaged one per day this year, surpassing the rate of combat fatalities.

But the naturally occurring neurochemical thyrotropin-releasing hormone (TRH) could slow the rising suicide rate. The chemical has a euphoric, calming, antidepressant effect. TRH has been shown to decrease suicidal ideas, depression and bipolar disorders.

The feds have asked a judge to strike from the public record the most "scandalous" details of a bombshell sexual-discrimination lawsuit against Janet Napolitano and the Department of Homeland Security that refer to oral sex and an odd bathroom prank.

The lewd details are included in senior law-enforcement official James Hayes' suit claiming retaliation anti-guy bias.

The filing claims top immigration aide Suzanne Barr "humiliated" a male employee by calling him in his hotel room and screaming that she wanted his "c--k in the back of [her] throat."

It also states that Barr, a close adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano, who went on leave this week after the suit appeared, "rewarded those male employees who would play along with her sexually charged games."

Islamabad - At least five people were killed in a US drone strike launched early Sunday morning in Pakistan's northwest tribal area of North Waziristan, said media reports.

Xinhua, citing Urdu TV channel Dawn, said two drones fired four missiles at two vehicles suspected of carrying militants in the Shawal area in Miranshah, a town in North Waziristan, early Sunday morning, killing at least five people on the spot.

This is the second strike launched by US drones in the same area since Saturday noon, when drones launched a strike in the same area, in which four missiles were fired at two targets of a house and a vehicle, killing at least six suspected militants and wounding two others.

US drones have launched a total of 25 strikes in Pakistan this year, killing at least 182 people.

Source: IANS

Blind eye allegedly turned toward smuggling, trade, financial flow
When President Obama announced last month that he was barring a Baghdad bank from any dealings with the American banking system, it was a rare acknowledgment of a delicate problem facing the administration in a country that American troops just left: for months, Iraq has been helping Iran skirt economic sanctions imposed on Tehran because of its [alleged] nuclear program.

The little-known bank singled out by the United States, the Elaf Islamic Bank, is only part of a network of financial institutions and oil-smuggling operations that, according to current and former American and Iraqi government officials and experts on the Iraqi banking sector, has provided Iran with a crucial flow of dollars at a time when sanctions are squeezing its economy.

The Obama administration is not eager for a public showdown with the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki over Iran just eight months after the last American troops withdrew from Baghdad.

Still, the administration has held private talks with Iraqi officials to complain about specific instances of financial and logistical ties between the countries, officials say, although they do not regard all trade between them as illegal or, as in the case of smuggling, as something completely new. In one recent instance, when American officials learned that the Iraqi government was aiding the Iranians by allowing them to use Iraqi airspace to ferry supplies to Syria, Mr. Obama called Mr. Maliki to complain. The Iranian planes flew another route.

A senior Iranian legislator reiterated that the visits and collaboration between the ringleaders and members of the terrorist Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO, also known as MEK, NCR and PMOI) and the so-called Free Syrian Army display the real face and goals of insurgents in Syria.

"The invitation of the deputy commander of the so-called Free Syrian Army, the armed forces who are opposed to the Damascus government, to the terrorist Monafeqin (hypocrites as MKO members are called in Iran) grouplet shows that they themselves are terrorists," member of the parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Ebrahim Aqa-Mohammadi said on Saturday.

He added that the invitation of the Syrian group to the MKO to visit Damascus displays that the terrorist MKO is a role model for the Syrian insurgents.

In related remarks earlier this month, a commander of the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA) also described the terrorist MKO as a role model for Syrian insurgents.

Compared to, say, ten years ago, a lot of people today are aware of and talking about psychopaths. On the one hand this is encouraging, but on the other, it's a little troubling. It is heartening to see awareness of psychopathy breach the mainstream frequency fence here and there, but the signal-to-noise ratio, as with all knowledge relevant to the growth and survival of decent human beings, remains high on the 'noise' side. We see ridiculous studies in the news portraying psychopaths as curable and articles making the rounds about how not having a Facebook account may indicate that someone is a psychopath. We've also seen Twitter being touted as a tool for 'spotting psychopaths' and, just today, news that the US justice system is considering acceptance of biological evidence that someone is a genetic psychopath in court with a view to using it to mitigate the sentences of criminal offenders. The reasoning being that psychopaths can't help being psychopaths, that they lack free will and therefore they bear diminished responsibility for their crimes.

Well, yeah, that's exactly why they need to be held under lock and key permanently.

Perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised that the burgeoning awareness of psychopathy has been vectored away from the truth of the matter in this way. This is an information war after all, so if the psychopaths in positions of power gauge that the 'psychopath awareness train' has left the station, they would naturally be working around the clock to load it with nuclear capabilities in the hope of derailing it, or at least sending it down the wrong track. The name of their game is to misinform people about what psychopaths are really like by trivialising and obscuring the issue: hence the proliferation of junk science that claims psychopaths can be cured, that psychopathology is a harmless evolutionary adaptation, or that psychopaths can be spotted based on analyses of their Twitter feed and Facebook page (or the lack thereof).

Mitt Romney says "every year I've paid at least 13 percent [of my income in taxes] and if you add in addition the amount that goes to charity, why the number gets well above 20 percent."

This is supposed to be in defense of not releasing his tax returns.

Assume, for the sake of the argument, he's telling the truth. Since when are charitable contributions added to income taxes when judging whether someone has paid his fair share?

More to the point, Romney admits to an income of over $20 million a year for the last several decades. Which makes his 13 percent - or even 20 percent - violate the principle of equal sacrifice that lies at the core of our notion of tax fairness.

Even Adam Smith, the 18th century guru of free-market conservatives, saw the wisdom of a graduated tax embodying the principle of equal sacrifice. "The rich should contribute to the public expense," he wrote, "not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more in proportion."

Equal sacrifice means that in paying taxes people ought to feel about the same degree of pain regardless of whether they're wealthy or poor. Logically, this means someone earning $20 million a year should pay a much larger proportion of his income in taxes than someone earning $200,000, who in turn should pay a larger proportion than someone earning $50,000.

But Romney's alleged 13 percent tax rate is lower than that of most middle class Americans who earn a tiny fraction of what he earns.

At a time when poverty is increasing, when public parks and public libraries are being closed and when public schools are shrinking their offerings and their hours, when the nation's debt is immense, and when the 400 richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together - Romney's 13 percent is shameful.

Robert B. Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. http://robertreich.org