Puppet Masters
Outside the U.S. government, President Obama's order to kill American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki without due process has proved controversial, with experts in law and war reaching different conclusions. Inside the Obama Administration, however, disagreement was apparently absent, or so say anonymous sources quoted by the Washington Post. "The Justice Department wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting of Anwar al-Aulaqi, the American-born radical cleric who was killed by a U.S. drone strike Friday, according to administration officials," the newspaper reported. "The document was produced following a review of the legal issues raised by striking a U.S. citizen and involved senior lawyers from across the administration. There was no dissent about the legality of killing Aulaqi, the officials said."

Britain is to get its first 'hands-free' pedestrian crossing so that devout Jews do not have to break a religious law
The crossing is near a busy synagogue, and pressing a button to operate it is considered a breach of the strict rules that apply to Orthodox Jews.
Traffic will be held every 90 seconds from Friday evening until nightfall on Saturday, covering the Jewish Sabbath period.
The crossing will be situated on one of London's busiest roads - the North Circular at the Henlys Corner junction. But planners insist it will not cause traffic chaos.
The system will come into operation in December when the junction fully reopens after a massive ten-month upgrade costing £8 million.
The decision to include automatic crossings was taken after leaders at Finchley United Synagogue explained their predicament to staff at Transport for London, which is responsible for maintaining main roads in the capital. TfL says the 'hands-free' green man has not added to the cost of improvements.
As if there weren't enough strange rantings on the internet already, Google has just uploaded five of the Dead Sea Scrolls in super high resolution.
Of course, the Dead Sea Scrolls are strange rantings that - unlike your average YouTube contribution - are of great historic and religious significance. The scrolls were written 2,400 years ago by a desert-dwelling Jewish tribe, and recount important passages from the Old Testament as well other passages that aren't included in the Bible. Over 850 of them were discovered in 11 caves along the West Bank and are the oldest known surviving copies of Biblical and extra-biblical documents.
The five scrolls that will be uploaded by Google are: The Book of Isaiah, the War Scroll, the Temple Scroll, the Commentary on Habbukuk Scroll and the Community Rule Scroll.
The murder case, in which Reiser ultimately received a 15-to-life sentence, began with no body, no crime scene, no reliable eyewitness and virtually no physical evidence. It ended with Reiser convicted of killing Nina, his 31-year-old wife, after he took the stand and proceeded to slowly hang himself over the course of 11 days of testimony.
In a rambling, 117-page handwritten civil rights lawsuit penned from Mule Creek State Prison, Reiser - legendary in Silicon Valley as the creator of the ReiserFS file system - attacked his lawyer, the credibility of witnesses and even the trial judge. In seeking unspecified financial damages that "are large compared to the troubled state budget," Reiser said he could not get a fair trial because the "hive mind" of the state's judicial system suffers from a collective mental illness.
Wanted for shutting down Web sites as high-profile as that of the CIA, a recently released DHS bulletin said the group "will continue to exploit vulnerable publicly available Web servers, computer networks and other digital information mediums for the foreseeable future."
While the DHS warning doesn't mention Wall Street protests in particular, it did say that "publicized events" like Occupy Wall Street may motivate the group.
Muslim news organisation the Ahlul Bayt News Agency reported Brigadier General Ali Shadmani, head of the Operations Department of the Iranian Armed Forces, as saying that any cyber attack on Iran would be "risky" and met with swift reprisals.
Shadmani is reported as saying that Western allies have been trying to destabilise Iran for decades, backing "anti-revolutionary terrorist organisations" such as MKO.
The footage, which has been widely circulated, depicted a white shirted police officer who casually walked up to a group of protestors, many of whom were women and penned in behind orange netting, and sprayed them in the face before walking away.
Hacktivist groups TeaMp0isoN and Anonymous have teamed up with an independent artist to release a rap song which they hope will storm the music charts.
Proceeds from the #OpCensorThis digital activism project, a collaboration between TeaMp0isoN and Lyricist Jinn - will go to the East Africa Crisis Appeal. A slick professionally produced video was released to accompany the tune, which enjoyed a delayed release via iTunes and YouTube on Wednesday.
Computer scientists have demonstrated a hack that uses off-the-shelf hardware to tamper with electronic voting machines that millions of Americans will use to cast ballots in the 2012 presidential elections.
The attack on the Diebold AccuVote TS electronic voting machine, which is now marketed by Election Systems & Software, relies on a small circuit board that an attacker inserts between the components connecting the touch screen of the device to its microprocessor. The $10.50 card then controls the information flowing into the machine's internal processor, allowing attackers to change votes with almost no visible sign of what's taking place.
In a video demonstration, researchers from the Vulnerability Assessment Team at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois showed how the card could be used to briefly kill the power to the voting machine's touch screen to temporarily black out what's displayed so voters can't see their choices being modified. Using optional hardware costing about $15, they showed how attackers can remotely tamper with machines from distances as far away as half a mile.









Comment: Is this an example of the British government kowtowing to and wasting £millions of taxpayers money on absurd Jewish rituals? Or is that just our opinion?