By Neeta Lal in New Delhi, Asia Times Online, Jan 19, 2013

Home page lede: Uttar Pradesh authorities have pulled out all the stops for a successful Maha Kumbh Mela, the largest religious gathering of people on the planet which started this week and expected to draw millions of pilgrims of all creeds for ritual bathing in the Ganges. As well as posing a logistical nightmare, the 55-day event is also a great social lubricant and a boon for businesses.

My comment: all infidels!

Nominated spy chief John Brennan reported to have agreed exemption over extra-judicial assassinations

By Ed Pilkington in New York, guardian.co.uk, 20 Jan. 2013

John Brennan, the counter-terrorism adviser nominated by President Obama to be the next head of the CIA, has reportedly agreed to exempt agency strikes in Pakistan from a new set of rules that attempts to justify and codify the use of drones to assassinate leaders of al-Qaida and other terrorist groups around the world, including US citizens.

The dispensation to allow so-called targeted killing to continue without restrictions in Pakistan removes from the new set of guidelines the most important and controversial target of drone strikes. In the past few weeks the frequency of US strikes in the tribal areas of northern Pakistan, where many al-Qaida and Taliban leaders are hiding out, has been stepped up.

The Washington Post reports that the CIA is close to finalizing the new guidelines on drone strikes, known as the "playbook". But a multi-agency committee of national security officials led by Brennan agreed to remove Pakistan from its terms [....]

Also see:

US drone strike kills 2 Saudi AQAP fighters in central Yemen
By Bill Roggio, The Long War Journal, Jan. 20, 2013

The US killed eight people, including two Saudi al Qaeda fighters, in a drone strike yesterday in Marib province in central Yemen. The strike is the first recorded in Yemen in 16 days. [....] Two of those killed "were known al Qaeda militants of Saudi nationality," AP reported. One of the Saudis is thought to be Ismail bin Jamil. Tribesmen blocked the road from Marib to the capital of Sana'a to protest the strikes, according to Reuters.

Today's strike is the second this year [....]

[For more information on the US airstrikes in Yemen, see LWJ report, Charting the data for US air strikes in Yemen, 2002 - 2013.]

More in the case that James Holmes was doped out of his mind.

If Mullah Omar married Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and they had a kid in Algeria, and trained him in Afghanistan, and he took further lessons from the examples of John Gotti, and he named his own son after Osama Bin Laden ....

Jihad ‘Prince,’ a Kidnapper, Is Tied to Raid
By Steven Erlanger from Paris, Adam Nossiter from Bamako, Mali., Harvey Morris contributing from London, and Eric Schmitt from Washington, New York Times, Jan 17/18, 2013

PARIS — His entourage calls him “the Prince,” and after the militant Islamist takeover of a town in northern Mali last year, he liked to go down to the river and watch the sunset, surrounded by armed bodyguards.
Others call him “Laaouar,” or the One-Eyed, after he lost an eye to shrapnel; some call him “Mr. Marlboro” for the cigarette-smuggling monopoly he created across the Sahel region to finance his jihad. And French intelligence officials called him “the Uncatchable” because he escaped after apparently being involved in a series of kidnappings in 2003 that captured 32 European tourists, an undertaking which is thought to have earned him millions of dollars in ransoms.

Mokhtar Belmokhtar, 40, born in the Algerian desert city of Ghardaïa, 350 miles south of Algiers, is now being called the mastermind of the hostage crisis at an internationally run natural-gas facility in eastern Algeria [....]

The Florida Governor whose ratings are in the dumpster has recently denied any attempt to disenfranchise voters in his state.

He told some civil rights group that the 2012 voting debacle was not his fault--even though HE SIGNED THE DAMN LEGISLATION.

Now he is proposing re-enfranchisement? 

This just caught my eye.

Rick Scott is one of those pricks who purchased his gubernatorial throne with millions he scammed off our capitalist system.

But this 'move' of his intrigues me.

Maybe, just maybe, the peasants won a battle by joining together in some campaign to get their vote back! 

Olivier Know, Yahoo! News The Ticket, yesterday.

Blunt-speaking New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, thought to be eyeing a 2016 run for the Republican presidential nomination, blasted an NRA ad that mentions President Barack Obama's daughters as "reprehensible" and warned it "demeans" the powerful gun-rights group.

"To talk about the president’s children, or any public officer’s children, who have—not by their own choice, but by requirement—to have protection, and to use that somehow to try to make a political point is reprehensible," Christie said.

"The president doesn’t have a choice, and his children don’t have a choice, of whether they’re going to be protected or not," the governor said. "It’s awful to bring public figures' children into the political debate. They don’t deserve to be there."

He added that "for any of us who are public figures, you see that kind of ad, and you cringe, you cringe."

Christie's remarks are unlikely to endear him to those conservatives he already annoyed by praising Obama for the federal government's response to superstorm Sandy.

..........

If Christie wants the nomination, then, put bluntly, he'd probably help his prospects by losing some weight.  He's a very shrewd politician, though, and I think he has what looks now to be the most promising formula, and perhaps skill set as well, although not necessarily the personality and temperament, for a successful GOP seeker of the presidency in 2016.  

Saying totally reasonable things like the above helps him with those who don't identify with the hard right GOP base, by distancing himself from some of the more symbolically objectionable and damaging values and behavior patterns (harsh and extreme partisanship as a governing MO, and thuggish resorts to intimidation, respectively) of that crowd.  As he has now done, very publicly, twice, in praising Obama's handling of Sandy and now criticizing the NRA over this latest.  

He'd try to win enough red-meat GOP base support with the sort of blistering issue-based attacks and confrontational tactics he's been delivering all along.  

The smooth southerner Bill Clinton wasn't nearly as in-your-face aggressively confrontational as the New Jersey barroom brawler Christie is.  But he followed a similar formula coming from the other side of the partisan aisle.  If Christie does run, we might in hindsight view this NRA attack as similar to Clinton's "Sister Souljah" moment.  Romney just didn't have the skill, or whatever, to pull off this kind of approach of being able to appeal sufficiently to his party's base, plus enough others, to prevail.  From the outside, it didn't look as though he was following some discernible strategy to attempt to do that.

Agence France Presse, Jan .17, 2013

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey: Turkish jets have pounded Kurdish rebel hideouts in northern Iraq in the fiercest aerial campaign in years, military sources said Wednesday, the same day the bodies of three female Kurdish activists who were killed in Paris were due home.

Sixteen F-16 fighter jets took off from their base in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, a Kurdish minority stronghold, around 10 p.m. (2000 GMT) Tuesday and bombed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) bases in the Qandil mountains, 90 kilometers from the border, a military source said.

“More than 50 targets were hit in the three-hour operation” targeting the leadership of the outlawed separatist group using its bases in northern Iraq as a springboard for attacks inside Turkey, he added.

The military source did not provide any casualty tallies.

The operation came hours before a plane carrying the bodies of three PKK affiliate activists who were slain in Paris last week arrived in Diyarbakir [....]

Six attackers shot dead after detonating car bomb in assault on Kabul spy compound close to foreign embassies

By Emma Graham-Harrison in Kabul, guardian.co.uk, 16 Jan 2013  

A six-strong suicide squad has attacked a heavily-fortified spy compound at the heart of the Afghan capital, killing at least one commando and wounding dozens of civilians in the first major Taliban attack on Kabul this year.

An attacker detonated a huge car bomb at the gate of the compound, then five men wearing suicide vests and armed with assault rifles and grenades jumped out of a nearby minivan and tried to race inside. All were shot dead before they detonated their explosives. [....]

In a worrying sign of evolving insurgent tactics, the explosives were gel-based, a kind not seen before in Kabul, said Shafiqullah Tahiri, spokesman for the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan intelligence agency.

The attack, for which the Taliban claimed responsibility, came just a few weeks after a suicide attacker with explosives hidden in his underwear nearly killed the country's spy chief, NDS head Assadullah Khalid. He is now recovering from severe internal injuries in the US, and it may be months before he can return to work, official sources say.

The spy compound attacked on Wednesday lies [....]

The pharmaceutical industry and organized psychiatry act as if the greatest challenge today is to identify new psychiatric disorders, to promote the supposedly high prevalence of existing disorders, and to find new blockbuster drugs, all the while heavily promoting current moneymakers. Even the United Nations is involved in "World Mental Health Day," announcing that depression is a "global health crisis."

Destroying any last vestige of hope for a demonstrable showing of the allegedly buff-to-the-max Hebraic Lobby, Senator Chuck Schumer, Jew of Jews and Senior Senator of Jew (I mean New) York, announced that he would support Chuck Hagel--the newly-minted BFF for all real progressive Americans.  A Jew-led revolt against a major American presidential nominee in the foreign policy realm  appears to be another might-have-been.  Stephen Walt and MJ Rosenberg were seen weeping outside of the ADL offices in Washington after learning that that zionist entity just wanted to be left alone and would have nothing further to say about the president's nomination.

And now, once again, we are left with hollow attacks from the really, really brave folks--attacks on Jews crying anti-semitism notwithstanding the undisputed truth that outside of certain little pockets on the internets-- like Commentary and Weekly Standard (oh my heavens) ain't too many Jews squawkin' about this one.  For heck sake, AIPAC has put a sock in it.

Gosh, one might say the Jooz been stifled in this here debate!  How could that be?

By Suzanne Goldenberg, guardian.co.uk, 15 Jan 2013

Cities on the United States east coast are "sitting ducks" for the next big storm because of the destruction wrought by hurricane Sandy, one of Barack Obama's top scientists warned on Tuesday.

Marcia McNutt, who last week announced her resignation as director of the US Geological Survey, told a conference that Sandy had left coastal communities dangerously exposed to future storms of any size.

"Superstorm Sandy was a threshold for the north-east and we have already crossed it," McNutt told the National Council for Science and the Environment conference in Washington. "For the next storm, not even a super storm, even a run-of-the-mill nor'easter, the amount of breaches and the amount of coastal flooding will be widespread."

McNutt, a professor of marine geophysics, was careful to preface her public remarks by saying she spoke as a scientist and not an Obama Administration official. But the unusually stark warning from a departing Obama official indicates the challenges ahead in protecting American population centres from the extreme storms of a changing climate.

"Before Sandy, someone asked me what my climate change nightmare was  [....]