Saturday, Nov 22nd
Last update09:21:52 AM GMT
The CIA has hired Xe Services, the private security firm formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide, to guard its facilities in Afghanistan and elsewhere, according to an industry source.
The previously undisclosed CIA contract is worth about $100 million, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the deal, which is classified.
"It's for protective services . . . guard services, in multiple regions," the source said.
The Helou family is so worried about getting expelled to Gaza by Israeli authorities that they're all but trapped in this West Bank town. They couldn't even leave to get their disabled son the best possible surgery to let him walk.
Some 20,000 Palestinians in the West Bank live under the same fear, because they hold residency papers from the Gaza Strip and Israeli authorities refuse to allow their papers to be updated - though they have lived in the West Bank for years.
People who sign petitions calling for public votes on controversial subjects don't have an automatic right to hide their names, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday as it sided against Washington state voters worried about harassment because of their desire to repeal that state's gay rights law.
The high court ruled against Protect Marriage Washington, which organized a petition drive for a public vote to repeal the state's "everything-but-marriage" gay rights law.
Belgian authorities have raided the offices of the country's most senior Catholic prelate as they investigate child sex abuse claims. A spokesman for the Brussels prosecutors' office confirmed that the palace of the Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels had been sealed off.
Officials were searching for evidence concerning abuse allegations, he said. Belgium is one of several countries in which a stream of abuse claims have shaken the Roman Catholic Church.
Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality, less efficiency and have the least equitable system, according to a report released on Wednesday.
The report looks at five measures of healthcare -- quality, efficiency, access to care, equity and the ability to lead long, healthy, productive lives.
The federal judge who overturned Barack Obama's offshore drilling moratorium reported owning stock in numerous companies involved in the offshore oil industry — including Transocean, which leased the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to BP prior to its April 20 explosion in the Gulf of Mexico — according to 2008 financial disclosure reports.
The controversy over adding sodium fluoride to water supplies in both the U.S. and the UK is intensifying as two separate stories out of India reveal that children are being blinded and crippled partly as a result of the neurotoxin being artificially added to drinking water.
A group of doctors who've tracked 9/11 rescue workers' illnesses urged the Obama administration to "prevent a repetition of costly mistakes" made after the terrorist attacks by protecting Gulf Coast oil spill workers from toxic exposure.
In a letter McClatchy obtained that was sent to health and safety officials earlier this month, 14 doctors said oil spill workers should get the maximum level of protection from exposure in an effort to avoid the problems that arose after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Imagine that the inauguration of President George W. Bush had sparked an explosive rise in African American militia groups. Suppose thousands of heavily armed black men began gathering at training camps in wooded areas throughout the country, devising military tactics for "taking back their country" after what they believed was an electoral coup.
Do you think Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would have reacted to a black militaristic buildup as coolly as President Obama has to the phenomenal growth of white militias?
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