A senior Palestinian official says Abbas leaning toward waiting until after the U.S. vote, in line with a U.S. request, to avoid further strain to his relationship with the Obama administration.

The Palestinians are bracing for possible punitive reactions by the United States and Israel if they go ahead with plans to seek UN General Assembly recognition of "Palestine" as a non-member observer state, according to an internal document obtained yesterday.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, backed by the Arab League, is ready in principle to take this step, but hasn't decided whether to submit the request when the General Assembly convenes in September or to wait until after the U.S. presidential election in November.

A senior Palestinian official said Abbas leans toward waiting until after the U.S. vote, in line with a U.S. request, to avoid further strain to his relationship with the Obama administration.

However, some members of Abbas' inner circle are pushing for a September bid, arguing that the Palestinians have gained nothing by trying to appease the U.S.

"We have nothing to lose from the Americans," said Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the PLO Executive Committee. "What we need is to move fast."

The final decision is up to Abbas.

The Spanish government said on Thursday that it had arrested three men suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and believed to have been planning attacks in Europe.

The Spanish Interior Ministry released photographs of the three but offered only minimal details. The Associated Press, quoting the Spanish police, said that one was Russian, the second a Russian of Chechen descent and the third a Turk. They were arrested as part of a 24-hour police operation carried out between Tuesday night and Wednesday.

The Spanish interior minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, said in an interview by telephone that the men had been in Spain for about two months and under close surveillance for several weeks. "We have clear indications that an attack was being planned, whether in Spain or another European country or even both," Mr. Fernández Díaz said.

He would not discuss the suspects' likely targets, but said that they had received military-style training and were "clearly not acting as lone wolves." Among the evidence gathered by the police was "documentation about flying ultralight aircraft," he said.

The Turk, who appeared to be acting as a facilitator, was arrested in La Línea de la Concepción, a town in southern Spain just north of Gibraltar, in a rented home where the police also found explosives, officials said. The two others were intercepted while traveling by bus near Valdepeñas in central Spain on their way from southern Spain to the northeastern border with France. At least one fiercely resisted arrest, although the minister said that no gun was fired.

He said it was apparently their effort to leave Spain that set off the operation.

Citing the Syrian government's intractability, increasing violence and the international community's lack of consensus, former U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan announced his resignation. He says there is still a chance for Syria to avoid the worst, 'if the international community can show the courage and leadership necessary.'

The resignation of Kofi Annan, the point man for international efforts to bring peace to Syria, emphatically confirmed what events on the ground had already been making clear: The country's fate is far more likely to be decided by force than by negotiations.

The former U.N. secretary-general's announcement Thursday that he was ending his attempt to negotiate an end to the conflict came amid a sharp increase in fighting that began after a bomb killed four top security aides to President Bashar Assad last month.

While government forces subsequently pushed insurgent bands out of the capital, Damascus, they are now locked in what could be a decisive battle for the northern city of Aleppo, Syria's commercial hub and most populous urban center.

The former deputy director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has left the agency in the wake of the fallout from the Fast and Furious gun walking scandal. William Hoover was no longer employed at the agency as of Aug, 1, 2012, according to an ATF spokesman. Officials declined to comment further, citing the Privacy Act.

Hoover had served as the deputy director of the bureau since February 2007 and was in that position during the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal. Prior to being the No. 2 at the ATF, Hoover had served as the assistant director for field operations. He joined the ATF in 1987 after having worked in Virginia at several law enforcement agencies. He had also served as special agent in charge of Boston and Washington field offices before going to ATF headquarters.

Under Fast and Furious, ATF agents recorded and tracked straw purchases of weapons, which eventually "walked" across the U.S. border into Mexico. ATF agents were tracking the purchases in a failed effort to locate major weapons traffickers, rather than catching low-level buyers. The ATF operation took a tragic toll when two guns linked to the operation were found near slain U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry on Dec. 14, 2010.

Hoover had been briefed on Fast and Furious by ATF agent William Newell, the special agent in charge overseeing the case. In March 2010 Hoover became concerned about the number of guns involved in the case and ordered ATF agents in Phoenix to wrap the case up in 90 days.

Lawmakers will adjourn for a summer break without passing a cyber security bill which legislators warned is imperative to pass due to an "imminent threat" of more sophisticated cyber attacks facing the country.

In recent days the Obama administration ratcheted up the fear, warning that without this legislation the nation's security is at risk, vulnerable to a far-reaching cyber attack, a sentiment echoed throughout this week's debate in the Senate.

"We don't want a cyber 9/11," Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., said, "right now, our adversaries are watching us. We're debating, protecting America from cyber attacks, and it looks like we're doing nothing, that when all is said and done, more gets said than gets done. Our adversaries don't have to spy at us. They can just look at the senate floor and say 'what the heck are they doing'?"

But today the legislation failed to move through a procedural vote in the senate by a vote of 52-46. The bill would have established security standards to prevent cyber attacks on control systems and cyber systems that control the nation's electric supply, financial transactions, transportation system and telecommunications system.

Placing eyewitness statements and police radio recordings side by side, the following video plainly shows that there is more to the Aurora Shooting than we've been led to believe.

A suspected Syrian spy who was arrested in Germany earlier this year once tried to infiltrate the country's intelligence services, officials said Tuesday.

The German federal prosecutors' office said 35-year-old Akram O. was employed by Syria's embassy in Berlin but not officially registered with German authorities when he applied in late 2010 for a post with the Interior Ministry.

The application was made "at the behest of his intelligence agency handlers," prosecutors said in a statement.

O., whose full name wasn't disclosed by prosecutors because of privacy rules, said at the time that he wanted to work for Germany's domestic intelligence agency or electronic surveillance office - both overseen by the ministry - but his application was turned down.

The Syrian national applied for German citizenship in 2009, making false claims about his personal and economic circumstances, but never obtained it, prosecutors said.

German intelligence estimates that "around 90" terror attacks that "can be attributed to organizations that are close to al-Qaeda or jihadist groups" were carried out in Syria between the end of December and the beginning of July, as reported by the German daily Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). This was revealed by the German government in a response to a parliamentary question.

In response to the same question, the German government admitted that it had received several reports from the German foreign intelligence service, the BND, on the May 25 massacre in the Syrian town of Houla. But it noted that the content of these reports was to remain classified "by reason of national interest", Like many other Western governments, Germany expelled Syria's ambassador in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, holding the Syrian government responsible for the violence.

Translation by Sott.net

Germany's federal government is being criticized by its left faction over its stance regarding the violence in Syria. The cause was a parliamentary enquiry to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Houla massacre. Furthermore, German intelligence agents are involved in Syria.

The left faction has strongly criticized the federal government's position regarding what it knows about the Syrian Hula massacre on May 25th. Representative Sevim Dagdelen criticised how on the one hand the federal government repeated the view of an international investigative commission that "powers close to regime", i.e. militia close to president Assad, were "responsible" for the majority of victims' deaths, but on the other hand the government stated it doesn't have "incriminating information" when asked about the details of the massacre's circumstances.

The representative referred to replies of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to a parliamentary enquiry. The federal government's reply stated: "From the point of view of the federal government, the primary threat to the civilian population comes through the continued military violence of the Syrian regime." Over the period July 5th until 15th July the government has been repeatedly briefed about the massacre in Houla by the Federal Intelligence Service.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) claimed Tuesday in an interview that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney refuses to release additional tax returns because he didn't pay taxes for 10 years.

The interview, published Tuesday by The Huffington Post, includes several swipes by the Senate leader at the GOP candidate.

"His poor father must be so embarrassed about his son," Reid said in reference to George Romney's decision to turn over 12 years of tax returns when he ran for president in 1968.

Reid suggested that Romney's decision to withhold tax information would bar him from ever earning Senate confirmation to a Cabinet post. Then, Reid recalled a phone call his office received about a month ago from "a person who had invested with Bain Capital," according to The Huffington Post.

Reid said the person told him: "Harry, he didn't pay any taxes for 10 years."