Puppet MastersS


Chess

Al-Qaida figure Said al-Shehri killed by air strike, Yemen says

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© ReutersDeputy leader of al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, Said al-Shehri, a Saudi national identified as Guantanamo prisoner number 372, speaks in a video posted on Islamist websites, in this 2009 file image.
Yemeni armed forces have killed Said al-Shehri, a man seen as the second-in-command of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a government website said on Monday.

The Ministry of Defense website said Shehri was a Saudi national who was killed, along with six other militants, in an army operation in the Wadi valley in south-east Yemen. It gave no more details.

The United States has used unmanned drones to target AQAP, which has planned attacks on international targets including airliners and is described by Washington as the most dangerous wing of al-Qaida.

A Yemeni security source said Shehri was killed in an operation last Wednesday which was thought to have been carried out by a U.S. drone, rather than the Yemeni military. The source said another Saudi and an Iraqi national were among the others killed.

Comment: "..AQAP, which has planned attacks on international targets including airliners and is described by Washington as the most dangerous wing of al-Qaida."

Lots of evidence, wouldn't you say the evidence here is enough?

The following will hopefully add some perspective:




Ambulance

Aleppo Death Toll Rises to 30 in Syria Explosion

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© ReutersMembers of the Free Syrian Army trying to recover the body of their comrade from the rubble of a building, which was destroyed by a jet's strike in Aleppo's Al-Shaar district September 9, 2012.
The death toll from a car bomb in Syria's largest city has risen to 30, state media said Monday, as the new international envoy to the country said the Syrian people are desperate to see peace and stability.

The Sunday night blast ripped through the northern city of Aleppo, which has become one of the main battlegrounds of the country's civil war. Activists say at least 23,000 people have been killed since the conflict erupted in March 2011.

On Monday, the new U.N.-Arab League envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, said he will travel to Syria this week to meet with regime officials as well as civil society.

"I answer to no one except the Syrian people," Brahimi told reporters in Cairo, where he was meeting with Arab League officials and Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi. "Syrians aspire to peace, stability and to realizing their goals of freedom and political progress."

Laptop

Want to make international friends and fight crime? Join German FBI!

FBI, Germany, Bundesnachrichtendienst
© Agence France-Presse/John MacdougallView of a logo of Germany's intelligence agency the Bundesnachrichtendienst.
Germany's equivalent of the FBI has put out a notice inquiring about highly-trained computer professionals who know how to exploit windows, speak different languages, and fight the bad guys. In short, Germany is developing its own spyware.

­Although the Bundeskriminalamt's (BKA) job offer is not overt, it is neither by any means secret. Germany is seeking to develop its own state brand of spyware in an effort to fight crime and curb terrorism. According to the advert, job applicants must "demonstrate a sound knowledge of C++...have a very good knowledge of low-level programming and the security mechanisms of Windows," and exhibit a "high degree of creativity."

Also, if selected, the applicant will be "tenured", meaning that he or she can only be fired through a difficult mutual decision, essentially guaranteeing the applicant a long career with the agency.

In keeping with Germany's equal opportunity laws, female candidates will "be strongly considered."

Bad Guys

Greek coalition leaders fail to agree on crucial cuts

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© Agence France-Presse/Louisa GouiamakiAntonis Samaras (C), Fotis Kouvelis (L) and Evangelos Venizelos
The leaders of the three parties in Greece's coalition government have failed to agree on a package of spending cuts worth 11.5 billion euro, which the Prime Minister says are crucial to restoring the country's financial credibility.

On Sunday conservative Premier Antonis Samaras, socialist Evangelos Venizelos and Fotis Kouvelis of the Democratic Left, disagreed on cuts on pensions and wages and decided to meet again Wednesday.

Venizaelos and Kouvelis asked international creditors to give them more time to implement austerity measures, AP says.

"We haven't finished and there hasn't been a specific decision. One thing is certain, I'm pushing for the measures to be just and not uneven," Democratic Left's Kouvelis told reporters.

"We cannot touch the disability benefits. We cannot make what we call horizontal cuts in pensions," Venizelos said.

Attention

Attacking Iran would be 'disastrous' Russia warns

iran israel flag
© Unknown
As Iranians reel under the pressure of international sanctions, a Russian Deputy Foreign Minister said Washington's unilateral sanction regime against Iran is a violation of international law.

­Saying that Russia has found no evidence that Iran is intent on developing a weapon, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov warned the United States and Israel on the "disastrous" consequences of attacking Iran.

"We warn those who are no strangers to military solutions...that this would be harmful, literally disastrous for regional stability," Ryabkov told reporters on Thursday.

A military attack on Iran "would set off deep shocks in the security and economic spheres that would reverberate far beyond the boundaries of the Middle East region," he said.

Saying there were no indications of a weapon component to Tehran's nuclear program, Ryabkov pushed for continuing monitoring by the UN nuclear agency was a strong guarantee.

"As before, we see no signs that there is a military dimension to Iran's nuclear program. No signs," Ryabkov, the head of Russia's delegation on Iran, as saying.

Meanwhile, as Iranians reel under the pressure of international sanctions, the Russian diplomat said Washington's unilateral sanction regime against Iran is a violation of international law.

Bomb

Car Bombs in Baghdad Kill 32, Injure Over 100

A series of car bombs in six mainly Shia districts around the Iraqi capital Baghdad has killed at least 32 people and injured more than 100 others, police and hospital officials say.
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Security forces inspect the scene of a car bomb attack in Basra, 550 kilometers southeast of Baghdad, on September 9, 2012.
The late Sunday bombings were part of a wave of terrorist attacks that swept across Iraq since Saturday, leaving at least 88 people dead, and more than 400 injured, AFP reported.

According to an interior ministry official and a medical source, a car bomb killed at least 13 people and injured about 32 in northern Baghdad, another in Shuala left five dead and 22 wounded , while a third in Urr killed four and wounded 13 and a fourth in Hurriyah killed three and injured at least 14 people.

In the west of Baghdad, a car bomb killed seven people and wounded at least 21.

Violence has increased in Iraq since December 2011, when an arrest warrant was issued for fugitive Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, who has been charged with running a death squad targeting Iraqi officials and Shia Muslims.

Bizarro Earth

In Arctic oil battle, Shell starts preliminary drilling

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© ShellShell's Noble Discoverer drilling rig sits above an oil field in Alaska's Chukchi Sea on Saturday, Sept. 8.
More than 20 years after the last drill bit went into the Chukchi Sea floor off northern Alaska, a Shell drilling rig on Sunday began work that the company hopes will lead to a bonanza that adds to its bottom line and extends Alaska's oil economy.

"Today marks the culmination of Shell's six-year effort to explore for potentially significant oil and gas reserves, which are believed to lie under Alaska's Outer Continental Shelf," Shell Alaska Vice President Pete Slaiby said in a statement.

Welcomed by the Obama administration, the exploration in Alaska's Arctic waters has become a major battleground for environmental groups, which fear oil spills in the pristine area already threatened by warming temperatures and reduced sea ice.

"The melting Arctic is a dire warning, not an invitation to make a quick buck," said Dan Howells, a campaign director for Greenpeace.

Shell has paid the U.S. $2.8 billion for lease rights to areas in the Chukchi and neighboring Beaufort Sea, and the U.S. estimates those waters hold 26 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 130 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Comment: So are they making an "effort to explore for potentially significant oil and gas reserves," or drilling at a "known petroleum reservoir?"

Inquiring minds want to know. Perhaps it's like this:

There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that, we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. - there are things we do not know, we don't know." - Donald Rumsfeld


Display

Uncle CyberSam Prepares To Defend Your Internet For You

cyber security graphic
© MyOpera
There was a time when the NSA would not know the content of this sentence minutes (or depending on the speed of typing, hours) ahead of our general readership. Those days are now gone, primarily thanks to the Patriot Act, which however merely accelerated the inevitable Orwellian destination to which American society was otherwise headed and which made constant "supervision" and "vigilance" of every US citizen a necessity (for some eyewatering details read "We Are This Far From A Turnkey Totalitarian State" - Big Brother Goes Live September 2013). There was, however, one aspect of society over which the US government did not have Chinese-type "firewall" supreme authority: the Internet. Now, as a result of an Executive Order being quietly drafted, the president of this once great country, together with the Department of Homeland Security formed in response to the events of September 11, is about to grasp supreme control over this last bastion of New Normal expression and content dissemination, naturally under the guise of protecting the people. Because as Bloomberg reports, President Obama's administration is drafting an executive order that would create a program protecting vital computer networks from cyber attacks.

The premise: the US government needs to defend the feeble and defenseless private sector from all enemies, foreign and domestic, because, it would appear, the private sector is incapable of defending itself. And Uncle Sam is more than happy to supervise and take charge of said "defense." "An executive order is one of a number of measures we're considering as we look to implement the president's direction to do absolutely everything we can to better protect our nation against today's cyberthreats," White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in an e-mailed statement today. "We are not going to comment on ongoing internal deliberations." Also, did we mention that the US president's decision for the greater private good would be unilaterally imposed, without the benefit of a democratic vote: after all executive orders, of the type Obama has issued 134 so far, do just that: circumvent the popular vote. We did? Good.

Cut

Copyright trolls censor internet content with false claims of infringement

copy rights
© Unknown
The battle over free speech on the Internet has been uphill for those who are victimized by the US government and professional trolls.

The entertainment industry, namely the RIAA and MPAA have been at the frontlines, claiming copyright infringement as they have employed Internet providers as spies to look for potential violators.

As cited by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, SOPA and PIPA came together to create the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) which "effectively creates a 'cybersecurity' exemption to all existing laws".

This big brother legislation would have given the power to the corporations to allege copyright infringement which would empower them to spy on users online activity, personal data, ISPs, search engines, social networks, text messages, phone calls, emails and all other digital correspondence.

CISPA inspired protests across the nation while over 3 million corporations in the domestic US supported the bill.

Just last month, the Department of Homeland Security was central in the taking of domain names for websites without due process or explanation - simply using the blanket claim of copyright infringement.

US Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano received correspondence from several members of the House of Representatives who were in protest of the domain name seizures, citing that the copyright claims were questionable and that the websites were clearly being censored for alternative reasons.

The letter stated that:
Our concern centers on your Department's methods, and the process given, when seizing the domain names of websites whose actions and content are presumed to be lawful, protected speech.
Fraudulent claims of copyright infringement are rampant across the Internet. During the Hugo Awards, the Ustream video of the show was censored by a digital restriction management (DRM) robot that shut down the broadcast of the Hugo Awards due to "copyright infringement" of material displayed during the show. The DRM robot was "incorrectly programmed" to interpret the show as a violation of copyright and disrupted the broadcast.

Magic Wand

Dollar Deception: How Banks Secretly Create Money

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It has been called "the most astounding piece of sleight of hand ever invented." The creation of money has been privatized, usurped from Congress by a private banking cartel. Most people think money is issued by fiat by the government, but that is not the case. Except for coins, which compose only about one one-thousandth of the total U.S. money supply, all of our money is now created by banks. Federal Reserve Notes (dollar bills) are issued by the Federal Reserve, a private banking corporation, and lent to the government.1 Moreover, Federal Reserve Notes and coins together compose less than 3 percent of the money supply. The other 97 percent is created by commercial banks as loans.2

Don't believe banks create the money they lend? Neither did the jury in a landmark Minnesota case, until they heard the evidence. First National Bank of Montgomery vs. Daly (1969) was a courtroom drama worthy of a movie script.3 Defendant Jerome Daly opposed the bank's foreclosure on his $14,000 home mortgage loan on the ground that there was no consideration for the loan. "Consideration" ("the thing exchanged") is an essential element of a contract. Daly, an attorney representing himself, argued that the bank had put up no real money for his loan. The courtroom proceedings were recorded by Associate Justice Bill Drexler, whose chief role, he said, was to keep order in a highly charged courtroom where the attorneys were threatening a fist fight. Drexler hadn't given much credence to the theory of the defense, until Mr. Morgan, the bank's president, took the stand. To everyone's surprise, Morgan admitted that the bank routinely created money "out of thin air" for its loans, and that this was standard banking practice. "It sounds like fraud to me," intoned Presiding Justice Martin Mahoney amid nods from the jurors. In his court memorandum, Justice Mahoney stated: