Tuesday, Jul 01st
Last update06:23:34 AM GMT
A man purporting to be one of the Taliban's most senior commanders convinced both Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the NATO officials who flew him to Afghanistan's capital for meetings, but two senior Afghan officials now believe the man was a lowly shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta.
His daring ruse has flummoxed those attempting to start a peace process with a determined Taliban adversary. "He was a very clever man," one of the officials said.
A majority of Americans want the Congress to keep the new health care law or actually expand it, despite Republican claims that they have a mandate from the people to kill it, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll.
The post-election survey showed that 51 percent of registered voters want to keep the law or change it to do more, while 44 percent want to change it to do less or repeal it altogether.
Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told TPM in an exclusive interview that he was aware of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques used against suspected terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
"What I can say is that, yes I was aware of the techniques, I did have knowledge, and I know that a number of lawyers worked to look to see whether it could be administered in a way that was consistent with the anti-torture statute and guidance was given by the Department of Justice while I was in the White House about how these techniques could be implemented to gather important information, in a dangerous period for our nation, to gather information from the enemy that would be in America's favor," Gonzales told me.
Top AIPAC officials visited prostitutes, regularly watched porn at work: claim
Is US's most influential advocate for Israel about to implode?
A former foreign policy chief for the largest Israeli lobby in the US is threatening to provide evidence members of the organization regularly trafficked in classified US government information.
A retired teacher from Lansing, Michigan, says he had to walk through an airport and board a plane covered in urine after TSA agents tore open his urostomy bag during a pat-down.
“One agent watched as the other used his flat hand to go slowly down my chest. I tried to warn him that he would hit the bag and break the seal on my bag, but he ignored me. Sure enough, the seal was broken and urine started dribbling down my shirt and my leg and into my pants.”
WikiLeaks' next release will be seven times the size of the Iraq war logs, already the biggest leak in U.S. intelligence history, the website said Monday.
The organization made the announcement in a brief message posted to its followers on Twitter, giving no information about the content of the coming release or its exact timing - although it did refer to "the coming months" in a separate tweet sent about an hour later.
Israel's parliament has passed a bill setting stringent new conditions before any withdrawal from the Golan Heights or East Jerusalem.
The bill requires a two-thirds majority in the Knesset before any withdrawal could be approved.
Failing that, the proposal would be subject to a national referendum. Analysts say the move could complicate peace efforts by making it more difficult for any Israeli government to make territorial withdrawals.
On September 24th, the FBI raided the homes of 14 peace activists in Minneapolis and Chicago, ostensibly searching for possible "material support" to terrorist organizations.
Nearly two months later, a coalition of 45 civil rights, human rights, peace and environmental groups have mounted a campaign to press Congress for an investigation of federal law enforcement's conduct, claiming the raids violated constitutional protections and could reflect a growing politicization of law enforcement.
For only the second time, the Food and Drug Administration approved a company's request to test an embryonic stem cell-based therapy on human patients. Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), based in Marlborough, Mass., will begin testing its retinal cell treatment this year in a dozen patients with Stargardt's macular dystrophy, an inherited degenerative eye disease that leads to blindness in children. In July, the FDA released its hold on the first trial of an embryonic stem cell based treatment, for spinal cord injury.
ACT's trial will involve injecting retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells, which nurture the retina, into volunteers with the most advanced forms of Stargardt's, in an attempt to replace dying and no longer functioning photoreceptor cells. In animals, the infusion of healthy cells improved vision and rescued the function of some diseased cells.
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