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Agence France Presse, October 18, 2012
WASHINGTON: The United States posted a reward of up to $12 million on Thursday for help in tracking down two Iran-based al Qaeda financial backers, accused of funneling money to extremists in Syria.
The State Department named the men as Muhsin al-Fadhli and his deputy Adel Radi Saqr al-Wahabi al-Harbi, saying both “facilitate the movement of funds and operatives through Iran on behalf of the al Qaeda terrorist network.”
“Al Qaeda elements in Iran, led by Fadhli, are working to move fighters and money through Turkey to support al Qaeda-affiliated elements in Syria,” the department said in a statement. “Fadhli also is leveraging his extensive network of Kuwaiti jihadist donors to send money to Syria via Turkey.” Fadhli, 31, was among the few al Qaeda leaders who was given advance notice that the group planned to strike the United States on September 1, 2001.
He is also alleged to have raised money to fund the October 2002 attack on the French ship [....]
Also see, with links to State & Treasury announcements:
US puts $12M bounty on Iran-based al Qaeda money men, freezes their assets
By Julian Pecquet, The Hill, October 18, 2012
The U.S. State Department on Thursday announced a $12 million bounty for information on the precise location of two Iran-based al Qaeda money-men. [....]
Separately, the Treasury Department announced Thursday that it was freezing any assets al-Harbi may hold under U.S. jurisdiction and prohibiting Americans from engaging in transactions with him. Al-Fadhli's assets were frozen in 2005 on suspicion he provided support to Iraqi insurgents fighting U.S. and multinational forces. [....]
By Scott Shane, New York Times, October 19/20, 2012
Home page lede:
A Biker, a Blonde, a Jihadist and Piles of C.I.A. Cash: A man says he arranged a marriage for the Qaeda affiliate leader Anwar al-Awlaki as part of efforts by Danish and American intelligence officials to hunt him down.
Interesting article, especially this little tidbit ...
" ... It is essential to recognize that there is only one significant benchmark of performance for a financier: internal rate of return (I.R.R.), which is basically the rate at which a particular investment grows. An investor who invests in a private equity transaction only wants to know how the investment did. When it comes to the means employed, ignorance is bliss. Unlike in the more public corporate world, where boards, shareholders, customers and sometimes public activists scrutinize the social implications of what a business does, a financier’s performance is measured by one question: what was the I.R.R.? ... "
All those years worried that a gay could end up a scoutmaster, recruiting for the Apocalypse...
Turns out the Scouts were already stock full of perverted pedophiles. Good thing they didn't tell us - we might have kept our kids out and kept them away from that All American experience.
In related news, Sandusky appeals conviction, including the note that after 30 years of cover-up, he's now an old man, so any time served would be a "life sentence". A new cardinal example of "chutzpah".
Not because they have any love for Obama but because they see something so much worse coming if the Republicans take over.
DINESH D'SOUZA was fired for dipping his pen in the ink, so to speak.
This lying bastard is now found out to have NEWT'd his wife of 20 years by this Christian excuse for a college.
hahahahahahah
Pew Global Attitudes Project, October 16, 2012
OVERVIEW: As China prepares for its once-in-a-decade change of leadership, the Chinese people believe their country faces serious and growing challenges. In particular, the side effects of rapid economic growth, including the gap between rich and poor, rising prices, pollution, and the loss of traditional culture are major concerns, and there are also increasing worries about political corruption. While the Chinese have consistently rated their national and personal economic situations positively over the last few years, they are now grappling with the concerns of a modern, increasingly wealthy society.
The Chinese public also increasingly expresses reservations about relations with the United States. Over the last two years, ratings for the U.S. and President Obama have declined significantly, and the percentage of Chinese who characterize their country’s relationship with the U.S. as one of cooperation has plummeted from 68% to 39%. Still, many Chinese embrace aspects of America’s soft power [....]
By Naureen Kahn, National Journal, October 17, 2012
If there was any doubt that the tidal wave of enthusiasm among young voters that fueled President Obama’s 2008 run has long since receded, a new poll on the millennial generation’s political leanings in the upcoming election cements it.
The Harvard Institute of Politics’ national survey of 18- to 29-year-olds, released on Wednesday, found that while likely young voters favor Obama by a 19-point margin—55 percent to Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s 36 percent—only 48 percent say that they definitely plan to vote next month.
On every issue, from the economy to immigration to health care to foreign affairs, young voters said they trust the president more than Romney. Nonetheless, the Romney supporters appear to be more enthusiastic, with 66 percent who support the former Massachusetts governor saying they will definitely vote, compared to 55 percent of Obama backers [....]
BBC News, October 18, 2012
World-famous Turkish pianist Fazil Say has appeared in court in Istanbul charged with inciting hatred and insulting the values of Muslims.
He is being prosecuted over tweets he wrote mocking radical Muslims, in a case which has rekindled concern about religious influence in the country. Mr Say, who denies the charges, said recently he was "amazed" at having to appear before judges.
Rejecting an acquittal call, the court adjourned the case until 18 February [....]
More @:
Agence France Presse, October 18, 2012
KABUL: Afghan President Hamid Karzai called on Islamabad on Thursday to join him in an “honest” fight against extremism, which he said was threatening both neighbouring nations equally.
Karzai said he hoped the shooting of 14-year-old Pakistani activist by the Taliban would convince Islamabad that “using extremism as a tool” against others was not in its interest. Karzai said that the shooting of schoolgirl Malala Yousufzai, who campaigned for the right of girls to an education, showed that Islamabad’s strategy was hurting Pakistan too. “I hope this very bitter truth… has convinced our brothers and sisters, the officials in Pakistan… that using extremism as a tool against others is not in the interest of Pakistan,” Karzai said.
The Afghan president’s blunt words came during a joint press conference with visiting Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen here in Kabul [....]
By Darren Dahl, New York Times/Small Business, October 17/18, 2012
[....] “AdWords can bleed many a small business dry,” said Sharon Geltner, an analyst at the Small Business Development Center at Palm Beach State College in Boca Raton, Fla. [....]
“It hit me like a brick, because I finally understood how you get better search results by creating content around the keywords people are searching for,” he said. “As we become more relevant to Google, our quality score improves in our AdWords campaigns. This enables us to bid lower, yet because we’re more relevant, we pay less per click.” [....]
In March 2011, Mr. Telford started blogging through HubSpot about topics like where to find the best fishing holes, and despite fears of a devastating loss of traffic, he reduced his pay-per-click budget to $100,000. By the beginning of 2012, some six months after he began blogging roughly five times a week, his organic traffic was up 91 percent over the previous year. And the number of conversions, or visitors who took an action on the site, had increased 37 percent [....]
Bill LuMaye, host, WTPF: “What is it like for you to hear the president of the United States call your dad a liar? How do you react to that?”
Tagg Romney: “Well, jump out of your seat and you want to rush down to the debate stage and take a swing at him. But you know you can’t do that because, well, first there’s a lot of secret service agents between you and him…”
The Romneys - less class than the Palins. Not easy to do. Although they do have the cute one syllable names,. Tagg, if someone calls you a liar, you prove them wrong, you don't fight them. And you don't hit the President because he is the President you punk. You wanna fight? Sign up for Afghanistan, or Iran if your Dad gets elected. ThinkProgress connected Tagg Romney and Mitt Romney with the $8.5 billion Stanford Ponzi scheme late last year, in the hiring of former Stanford brokers who sold fraudulent CD's for the Stanford fund.
Income inequality has soared to the highest levels since the Great Depression, and the recession has done little to reverse the trend, with the top 1 percent of earners taking 93 percentof the income gains in the first full year of the recovery.
The yawning gap between the haves and the have-nots — and the political questions that gap has raised about the plight of the middle class — has given rise to anti-Wall Street sentiment and animated the presidential campaign. Now, a growing body of economic research suggests that it might mean lower levels of economic growth and slower job creation in the years ahead, as well.
..........
Annie Lowery, yesterday's Grey Lady.
The yawning gap between the haves and the have-nots — and the political questions that gap has raised about the plight of the middle class — has given rise to anti-Wall Street sentiment and animated the presidential campaign. Now, a growing body of economic research suggests that it might mean lower levels of economic growth and slower job creation in the years ahead, as well.
By Moise Secret and William K. Rashbaum, New York Times, October 17/18, 2012
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged a 21-year-old Bangladeshi man with conspiring to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, saying he tried to remotely detonate what he believed was a 1,000-pound bomb in a van he parked outside the building in Lower Manhattan on Wednesday.
But the entire plot played out under the surveillance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department as part of an elaborate sting operation, according to court papers.
The man, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, who arrived in the United States in January on a student visa, tried to make contacts and recruit people to form a terrorist cell to help him carry out an attack, according to a criminal complaint in the case. But one of these recruits was an F.B.I. informer, who later introduced him to an undercover F.B.I. agent who helped him with the plot. [....]
Within the borders of Cambridge, Massachusetts, are 17,000 rooftops, or 17,000 individual surfaces on which it might make sense one day to install photovoltaic cells. Of course, these roofs are not all equally fit for solar power. Some of them have weird chimneys or sloping architecture or tree shade. Some buildings are oriented in the wrong direction (for the sun’s purposes, at least), or they’re boxed in by even taller structures that block out natural daylight.
... "When an owner uses the map, they get a very good evaluation of how good the solar potential of their roof is,” says Christoph Reinhart, an MIT associate professor working on the project. Modern Development Studio’s web platform can even translate that solar potential into a financial cost, a payback period, a carbon emissions reduction and equivalent calculations for how many trees you’d have to plant or fewer miles you’d have to drive to achieve the same effect. “But we’d like to now say, what does it mean for the city?” Reinhart asks. “Where should we support putting photovoltaics on roofs?”
Robert Borosage, Campaign for America's Future website, today, mostly praising Obama's efforts to expose Romney and get him on the defensive, but concluding with the last 3 paragraphs of this excerpt (in a point consistent, I believe, with what Michael W wrote near the current end of his "Live-Blogging the Debates" thread), first sentence below being Borosage's lead:
This was the debate that finally exposed Mitt Romney as an empty suit running a campaign that is disingenuous at its core.
........
But Obama didn’t end where he started. He began the debate by ticking off an agenda for the future: promoting manufacturing, creating good schools, capturing the energy future, and asking the wealthy to pay a bit more.
Much more of this – and much bolder policies – are vital both for the country and for his re-election. Obama is vulnerable because the economy is in such lousy shape. His campaign has been weakened by its apparent strategic decision not to seek a mandate for bold policies that will work to make this economy work for working people again. Instead the president has seemed intent on trying to sell the progress we’ve made, while exposing how Romney would take the country in the wrong direction.
The President succeeded last night – as his campaign has effectively done earlier – in exposing just how empty a suit Romney is. This is the Bain candidate of, for and by the 1 percent. Romney’s plan is preposterous. But people are looking for change. Romney wants voters to decide if they want more of the same. If they vote on that question, he’ll win. Obama must make this a choice – between Romney’s wrong-headed agenda and not more of the same, but on giving him a mandate for bold reform. The president’s campaign has done a good job of exposing Romney, but has done little to demand a mandate for the change vital to our future.
The App uses data gathered by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism -- a not-for-profit organization established in April 2010 and based at City University, London -- which uses reporting from government, military and intelligence officials as well as credible media and academic sources for its database of drone attacks.
By Jeremy W. Peters, The Caucus @ nytimes.com, October 16, 2012,
Mitt Romney’s campaign, in an effort to appeal to women who hold more moderate views on reproductive issues, is releasing a new commercial that highlights his support for contraception and abortion in limited circumstances.
“You know, those ads say Mitt Romney would ban all abortions and contraception seemed a bit extreme, so I looked into it,” says a woman identified as Sarah Minto, who is shown on camera searching on Google for “Romney on abortion.”
Ms. Minto adds: “It turns out Romney doesn’t oppose contraception at all. In fact, he thinks abortion should be an option in cases of rape, incest or to save a mother’s life.” [....]
My neighbor, Glenn Kessler, Washington Post's factchecker, this morning. Romney earned 4 "pinnochios" for these claims, which the Post's ratings scale defines as "whoppers". This is the maximum number of stars a candidate for public office can earn for efforts to stretch, fold, spindle, mangle, and mutilate facts and reality. So, truly a breathtaking, stellar performance by the Mittster on this one.
Romney’s 12-million-jobs promise has garnered a lot of attention.
........
But the specifics — 7 million plus 3 million plus 2 million — mentioned by Romney in the ad are not in the white paper. So where did that come from?
We asked the Romney campaign, and the answer turns out to be: totally different studies … with completely different timelines.
For instance, the claim that 7 million jobs would be created from Romney’s tax plan is a 10-year number, derived from a study written by John W. Diamond, a professor at Rice University.
This study at least assesses the claimed effect of specific Romney policies. The rest of the numbers are even more squishy.
For instance, the 3-million-jobs claim for Romney’s energy policies appears largely based on a Citigroup Global Markets study that did not even evaluate Romney’s policies. Instead, the report predicted 2.7 million to 3.6 million jobs would be created over the next eight years, largely because of trends and policies already adopted — including tougher fuel efficiency standards that Romney has criticized and suggested he would reverse.
The 2-million-jobs claim from cracking down on China is also very suspicious.
This figure comes from a 2011 International Trade Commission report, which estimated that there could be a gain of 2.1 million jobs if China stopped infringing on U.S. intellectual property rights. The estimate is highly conditional and pegged to the job market in 2011, when there was high unemployment. “It is unclear when China might implement the improvement in IPR protection envisioned in the analysis, and equally unclear whether the United States will face as much excess labor supply then as it does today,” the report says.
The Romney campaign has already used this study, in a misleading way, to claim that Obama’s China “policies cost us 2 million jobs.” Now the campaign has just taken the same figure and credited the claimed job gain to itself, even though the report does not examine any of Romney’s proposed policies.
“The big point is the 3+7+2 does not make up the 12 million jobs in the first four years (different source of growth and different time period),” Hubbard acknowledged in an e-mail.
By Peter Lee, Asia Times Online, October 13, 2012
Recently the US House of Representatives Intelligence Committee took a meat-ax to Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, and its little brother ZTE in a 60-page report on national-security issues posed by the two companies.
The conclusion:
The United States should view with suspicion the continued penetration of the US telecommunications market by Chinese telecommunications companies. [1]Specifically, the committee recommended that the government [....]
Also see:
Panetta Warns of Dire Threat of Cyberattack on U.S.
By Elisabeth Bumiller and Thom Shanker, New York Times, October 11/12, 2012
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned Thursday that the United States was facing the possibility of a “cyber-Pearl Harbor” and was increasingly vulnerable to foreign computer hackers who could dismantle the nation’s power grid, transportation system, financial networks and government.
In a speech at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York, Mr. Panetta painted a dire picture of how such an attack on the United States might unfold. He said he was reacting to increasing aggressiveness and technological advances by the nation’s adversaries, which officials identified as China, Russia, Iran and militant groups [....]
By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani, Asia Times Online via IPS, October 17, 2012
Home page lede: Predictions that the ascendancy of the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi in Egypt would herald a new era for relations with Iran have faltered due to the objections of powerful Salafist elements and divergent positions on the Syrian crisis. Egypt is also loathe to risk ties with Gulf countries, international finance bodies and the US that could prove crucial for economic revival. -