The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

"It's possible that he [von Brunn] might have been enticed to the Holocaust Museum," said Ghost Troop member William Fox. Fox said that Israeli intelligence agents could have shot security officer Stephen Johns, then shot von Brunn, then planted the rifle.

"Today's shootings at the DC Holocaust Museum bear some of the classic earmarks of a false flag operation," wrote conspiracy theorist Eric May on the Web site amfirstbooks.com.

"Mind you, I'm not asserting that this is a false flag operation, but neither am I discounting the possibility. I exhort Internet researchers to look into this carefully and publish results," May wrote.

George W. Bush personally ordered White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andy Card to visit an ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft in the hospital in March 2004 after Ashcroft’s deputy Jim Comey refused to certify the warrantless surveillance program

For the foreseeable future, there will be an aggressive hunt for two economic recoveries.

One is the technical improvement in economic indicators that signals the economy is growing again. That's the one economists care about, which is why they scour the numbers on retail sales, business inventories, purchasing manager sentiment, subatomic inflation, the mood in Shanghai, and anything else that could help pinpoint the exact inflection point for a turnaround.

The other recovery, the one that most consumers are waiting for, is the one in which companies stop firing and start hiring, banks return to normal lending, and families stop worrying about jobs and income. And that turnaround—the consumer recovery—is likely to take much longer to materialize than the technical recovery.

I’m told it is “reckless” to travel in international waters. It should, of course, be safe – and would be if the high and mighty Western allies, always talking big against terror, were to enforce maritime law and rid the Eastern Mediterranean of marauding Israeli pirates.

Have you received your thank-you note? I'm still waiting for mine.

More than a year into the Wall Street bailout, I've yet to get any sort of "thank you" from even a single one of the big banks that you and I propped up with $12 trillion in direct giveaways, indirect giveaways, government guarantees and sweetheart loans. You'd think their mommas would've taught them better. But I've begun to think that waiting on a simple gesture of banker gratitude is like waiting on Donald Trump to have a good hair day -- ain't gonna happen.

Sotomayor put procedure over innocence as a federal judge.

And here we are, almost 9 hrs later in Alexandria. Awaiting the day the Egyptian government releases those cars so that we can make our way into the hearts of the Gazans.

Because no matter how much they try to delay us or try to make it impossible for us to reach Gaza, we will continue to stand here waiting. Time of course is not on our hands on this journey, but we will continue to stand. Viva Palestina!

Children should be painting pictures of life…. not war and death, but the children of Gaza are still reliving the horrors of the Israeli blitzkrieg.

These children are talented, but their memories and nightmares have taken over their creativity.

Despite strong opposition from Fatah’s Executive Committee, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas has decided to hold the pivotal Fatah congress in the West Bank in the first week of August.

The decision, taken without consultation with the senior Fatah leadership, has already generated a lot of tension and confusion within the movement, raising fears that Fatah might fall victim to possible fragmentation and disintegration.

On December 22, 2007, there were 2,454 individual taxpayers in the IRS’ potentially collectible inventory who each owed more than $1 million in taxes, penalties, and interest. While the vast majority of these individuals (2,006 of 2,454) were being actively pursued for collection, we identified 448 accounts totaling approximately $1.2 billion that were in the Queue1 (357 accounts) or that had been shelved (91 accounts).

NYSE Euronext said its previously reported program-trading percentage of 48.6% for the week of June 22 to June 26 was correct because it included trades by Goldman Sachs & Co. even though the firm was left off the list of most active firms.

An error by the New York Stock Exchange caused Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to be left out of the exchange's weekly program trading data last week.

Goldman Sachs is regularly near the top of the NYSE's list, if not at the top. In the weekly report released last Thursday, however, even when program trading amounted to an all-time high of 48.6% of NYSE average daily volume, Goldman was absent from the NYSE's list.

Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use of the secret programs must be "carefully monitored."

CIA Director Leon Panetta has terminated a "very serious" covert program the spy agency kept secret from Congress for eight years, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a House Intelligence subcommittee chairwoman, said Friday.

Schakowsky is pressing for an immediate committee investigation of the classified program, which has not been described publicly.

After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations.

Yesterday president Barack Obama said the US will remain a strong partner to the Iraqi people. Is that the best we can do? How come Iraq can’t get an Israel-style, we’ll-support-you-unthinkingly-no-matter-what kind of pledge from the US president?

After all, Obama said this about Israel just a couple months ago:

“The United States was the first country to recognize Israel in 1948, minutes after its declaration of independence, and the deep bonds of friendship between the US and Israel remain as strong and unshakable as ever.”

And this a month ago:

“America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties.”

But when it comes to Iraq, we get nothing more than:

Oh hey, this is the part right before the MEMRI clip started. Okay, what he was doing just now was talking about America’s three main fears. Number one was China, and keeping China from becoming a military powerhouse by letting it become an economic powerhouse. Number two is weapons of mass destruction. And this is where the MEMRI clip starts.

In other words, MEMRI took his statement out of context and implied that he meant it in a way completely different from how he meant it. Big surprise.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has issued a call for a criminal probe in the wake of a major New York Times story with new evidence that the Bush Administration impeded at least three federal investigations into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan in 2002.

PHR is calling for the Department of Justice to investigate why the Bush Administration impeded an FBI criminal probe of the alleged Dasht-e-Leili massacre.

The Pentagon and its NATO allies have launched the largest combat offensive to date in their nearly eight-year war in South Asia - Operation Khanjar (Strike of the Sword) with 4,000 US Marines, attack helicopters and tanks and Operation Panchai Palang (Panther's Claw) with several hundred British engaged in airborne assaults - in the Afghan province of Helmand.

The American effort is the largest ground combat operation conducted by Washington in Asia since the Vietnam War.

In Massachusetts, a record number of families are being put up in motels due to high unemployment and the rising number of homes going into foreclosure, costing taxpayers $2 million per month but providing a lifeline for desperate families.

The most “popular” proposals, which could generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue for global purposes, involve taxes on greenhouse gas emissions and financial transactions such as stock trades.

The mortgage default crisis has an ominous new face. It's your neighbor with a traditional fixed-rate loan.

No longer is the real estate bust simply the result of exotic, subprime loans that doubled payments and blew up in homeowners' faces. As the Sacramento economy buckles, even the safest mortgages have become part of a new wave of loan defaults, experts say.

With capital-area job losses reaching 45,000 in the past year and unemployment at 11.1 percent, lenders, bankruptcy attorneys and debt counselors all say they're seeing rising delinquencies among prime borrowers with fixed-rate loans and good credit. Many of those slipping into trouble are state workers, the mainstay of Sacramento's economy.

Obama administration officials said Friday they had no grounds to investigate the 2001 deaths of Taliban prisoners of war who human rights groups allege were killed by U.S.-backed forces.

A former U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues, Pierre Prosper, told the Times that the Bush administration was reluctant to investigate the deaths, even though Dostum was on the payroll of the CIA and his soldiers worked with U.S. special forces in 2001.

Dostum was suspended from his military post last year on suspicion of threatening a political rival, but Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently rehired him, the Times reported.

How early is too early for Christmas marketing? Apparently it's not July for Sears Holdings Company.

The company owns Sears and Kmart. It has opened an online holiday store and Christmas boutiques at hundreds of stores.

Commercial fishermen struggling from catch restrictions and high fuel prices will get part of a $700,000 federal stimulus grant to retrieve lost crab pots now littering the ocean bottom, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday

The Army acknowledged in the announcement that it already has waged cyberattacks on enemy networks and communications platforms, but provided no details. But it wants to “leverage innovative technologies” to improve its cyberattacks “and prevent enemy forces from detecting and countering efforts directed against them,” according to the announcement. “Technologies designed to interrupt these modern networks must use subtle, less obvious methodology that disguises the technique used, protecting the ability whenever possible to permit future use.”

Israel has much to be proud of, but one dubious distinction it might prefer to do without is that the People of the Book have the highest proportion of hackers per Internet user in the world.

The United States sports the highest absolute number of denial of service attacks. But Israel boasts the most malicious mischief per surfer in the world.

President George W. Bush authorized other secret intelligence activities - which have yet to become public - even as he was launching the massive warrentless wiretapping program, the summary said. It describes the entire program as the "President's Surveillance Program."

The report describes the program as unprecedented and raises questions about the legal grounding used for its creation. It also says the intelligence agencies' continued retention and use of the information collected under the program should be carefully monitored.

A few decades ago, the FBI regularly conducted "black-bag jobs" that involved sneaking into homes, hotel rooms and offices with the cooperation of the building's owner or even a neighbor with a spare key. Locks were picked otherwise.

Because no judge had authorized the FBI's black-bag job, they were incredibly illegal. In the mid-1970s, the Church Committee famously disclosed the bureau's clandestine operations.

Now President Bush is backing a bill that seems to encourage the FBI to revert to some of its old habits.

The Federal Reserve warned yesterday that a congressional threat to curtail its independence would destabilise markets and raise the cost of servicing US debt for "current and future generations".

Ron Paul, the Texas Republican, has gathered the support of a majority of the House of Representatives for a bill that would audit the Fed's monetary policy decisions. He told a congressional hearing he wanted the power to prevent the central bank being "secret and clandestine and serving special interests".

Egyptian authorities on Friday said they planned to destroy a large amount of accumulated humanitarian aid bound for Palestinians in Gaza.

The aid expired at the Al-Ouja border crossing between Israel and Egypt while authorities awaited Israel's permission to transfer it through, they said.

U.S. military documents, obtained by ABC News, list the brother of Afghanistan president Karzai as a "problem maker" in the pay of drug lords.

Wali Karzai is described in the documents as "receives money from drug lords as bribe to facilitate their work and movement."

The documents, marked secret, appear to be part of a "U.S. military targeting assessment" produced in January 2005. The documents were downloaded from a computer flash disc sold at an Afghanistan street bazaar for $200.

In testimony before the US Senate Tuesday, legal representatives of the Obama administration not only defended the system of kangaroo military tribunals set up under Bush, but affirmed the government?s right to continue imprisoning detainees indefinitely, even if they are tried and acquitted on allegations of terror-related crimes.

This assertion of sweeping, extra-constitutional powers is only the latest in a long series of decisions by the Democratic administration demonstrating its essential continuity with the Bush White House on questions of militarism and attacks on democratic rights.

WMR has learned from well-placed sources that international hedge fund mogul and financier of “progressive” causes George Soros has been, for a number of years, infiltrating 9/11 “truth” organizations, groups advocating election reform, and so-called “independent journalism” enterprises in order to hijack agendas and, eventually, cause the groups to collapse from within or be absorbed into larger organizations servile to Soros and his agenda.

HFTs are computerized trading programs that make money two ways, in general. They offer bids in such a way so as to make tiny amounts of money from per share liquidity rebates provided by the exchanges. Or they make tiny per share long or short profits. While this might sound like small change, HFTs collectively execute billions of shares a day, making it an extremely profitable business.

Why should institutional or retail investors care? After all, aren’t HFTs adding liquidity? That’s what they and the exchanges, who court their business, say.

There’s a lot to worry about.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has pardoned five heroin smugglers, at least one of them a relative of a man who heads Karzai's campaign for re-election next month, a source and a government spokesman said.

"Judea and Samaria cannot be Judenrein," a Netanyahu confidant quoted him as telling Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Asked how Germany's top diplomat responded to hearing the Nazi Holocaust term for areas "cleansed of Jews," the confidant said, "What could he do? He basically just nodded."

New regulations are making it increasingly difficult for Palestinians from Gaza to see their relatives in the West Bank

According to previous analysis of MTA data, stimulant drugs do improve the social functioning and reduce symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity in children with ADHD for the first year of treatment. In the current analysis, however, researchers followed 485 children for eight years and found that children who remained on medication for that entire time showed no improvement in symptoms over those who had stopped taking the drugs.

One in three breast cancers detected by mammogram screening may actually be harmless, a study has suggested.

Data from five countries, including the UK, suggest some women may have had unnecessary treatment for cancers that were unlikely to kill them or spread.

Bloomberg reports that Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee are considering embracing a proposal put forth this week by Citizens for Tax Justice to apply the 1.45% Medicare tax to capital gains, dividends, and interest to fund health care reform, coupled with a 2.5% surtax on incomes over $200,000 (single) and $250,000 (joint):

Right now it looks like the government has got Boomslangs coming out of their ears and once they hit the ground they go into a mating frenzy with the Black Mambas. It’s looking like voodoo on steroids. Meanwhile they have only limited and temporary control over the financial horror show that they are propping up with two by fours and bullshit. From what I can see, the purpose of this is to loot the last bloody nickel from the thing before they bring it down on the heads of the public.

Remember when policymakers at the Federal Reserve told us in 2007 and 2008 that the credit problems were “contained” to the subprime mortgage sector? Or when then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson spouted the same line?

Oops.

The math in California housing simply does not add up. Given the amount of sales and monthly foreclosures over the past few months, it would appear that banks are sitting back while a gigantic backlog of foreclosures grows. A few in the media are calling attention to this obvious fraud but not many. The California housing market is reeling from an epic mulit-decade long real estate bubble. For the past few months, foreclosures have been hitting at a record pace yet the official MLS inventory is falling lower and lower. I have pulled up data for the largest California counties with MLS data from March and compared it to July and what you will see is simply astonishing.

The former speaker of the US House of Representatives has said that the US should "sabotage" Iran's oil and gas infrastructure as part of its efforts to bring down the government.

“It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on,” Hersh stated. “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.”

Campaigning for president, Barack Obama said repeatedly that any overhaul of the health care system should be negotiated publicly and televised for all to see. Throughout this year's negotiations, however, the big deals have been struck in secret.

Massachusetts voters were polled:

'When the Massachusetts state government wants to spend more money than it collects in taxes, how should it deal with the money gap? Raise taxes? Cut spending?'

12% answered, "raise taxes."

71% responded, "cut state government spending." (1)

Yet the Massachusetts legislature opposed voters - and raised taxes.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is poised to report the largest profit since it set earnings records in 2007, marking the return of a business model that was the envy of Wall Street before the financial crisis devastated competitors and spurred a government bailout.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown says the burden must be put on Iran, rather than the world, to prove its nuclear program is directed at civilian purposes.

Britain's Brown whose country possesses nuclear weapons told journalists present at the G8 summit in Italy that a tougher nuclear regime was needed, under which the countries that do not possess nuclear weapons, such as Iran, ought to shoulder the responsibility to prove the peaceful nature of their nuclear work.

U.S. President Barack Obama warned Iran on Friday the world will not wait indefinitely for it to end its nuclear defiance, saying Tehran had until September to comply or else face consequences.

Returning from China last month, U.S. Congressman Mark Kirk had a bearish take on a high-level visit by American officials.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner claimed the U.S.’s biggest creditor voiced great confidence in its debt. Kirk, an Illinois Republican, came back with the opposite impression.

“China is beginning to cancel Congress’s credit card,” he told Fox News on June 10. It “doesn’t want to lend much more money to the United States and especially is worried about the Fed’s policy of printing money to buy new debt.”

Iraq war veteran and ANSWER Coalition representative Michael Prysner reports on the Viva Palestina delegation’s journey to challenge the Israeli blockade of Gaza and deliver humanitarian supplies.

A proposal from a long-time congressional foe of the Federal Reserve that could give lawmakers sway over monetary policy has won the support of a majority in the House of Representatives, alarming officials at the U.S. central bank.

The Obama administration warned Americans on Thursday to be ready for an aggressive return of the swine flu virus in the fall, announcing plans to begin vaccinations in October and offering states and hospitals money to help them prepare.

Increases in mysterious underground tremors observed in several active earthquake fault zones around the world could signal a build-up of stress at locked segments of the faults and presumably an increased likelihood of a major quake, according to a new University of California, Berkeley, study.

London police say there is no need for a further investigation into claims that journalists at Rupert Murdoch's best-selling British newspaper conspired to hack into the phones of celebrities, MPs and public figures.

The News of the World has been accused of running a huge phone hacking operation to mine stories by listening in to private phone calls.

After its bonus payments ignited a firestorm of criticism earlier this year, American International Group Inc. is asking the federal government to weigh in on the insurer's plan to resume paying millions in promised retention incentives next week, according to media reports.

AIG, once the world's largest insurer, has asked the Obama administration's compensation czar, Kenneth R. Feinberg, to approve the payments in order to head off any public outrage, The Washington Post reported Thursday evening.

An aide to Israel's prime minister has said Israel must keep a large part of the Golan Heights, rejecting Syria's major demand for a peace deal.

Warns President Not to Let Peace Process Interfere With Measures Against Iran.

£1.5m national programme will train a teacher from every secondary school in England.

Excerpt of abstract of new scientific study proving that the mercurial compound used as vaccine preservative called ‘thimerosal’ induces neural damage similar to that seen in autism patients

This is “back to business as usual” with bells on. The financial crisis has been the best thing that could happen for these banks. Yes, even I can’t believe it.

Our watershed moment to change the world economic system has not just been squandered, we have inadvertently reinforced the same structures and institutions that have created the mess in the first place.

Firstly, in our rush to regulate our financial system we have created a system that is much worse than before.

Even as the U.S. Senate and the Group of 8 nations meeting in Italy continue their endless jabbering about greenhouse gases, nature is not cooperating.

The global climate has entered a phase of cooling and reduced solar activity, which some experts believe could bring on serious crop failures and food shortages. The serious fear now is that the continued low activity of the Sun forebodes an extended period of cooling, perhaps enough to bring on another Little Ice Age. Anyone who is not addressing that reality is blowing bubbles in the wind.

This week's cyber attacks on South Korea are believed to have been mounted from 16 different countries but North Korea was not among them, Seoul's spy agency was quoted as saying Friday.

The National Intelligence Service (NIS) told legislators the attacks were tracked to 86 Internet protocol addresses from 16 countries including the United States, Japan, China and Guatemala, the lawmakers said.

The lawmakers, quoting information from the NIS given in a closed briefing, said North Korea was not among the 16 countries.

There was a large dose of whimsy in the G8 leaders getting together in Berlusconi's Italy last week. Not only did it place the host's colourful private life at the centre of the world's stage but it was further enlivened by the world leaders' decision to adopt targets for emission levels 40 years into the future.

As a target date 2050 is ludicrously beyond the life expectancies of all the leaders adopting it, none would be held responsible for its failure.

This aside, the specific numbers adopted make no sense.

The F-22 isn't useful in Afghanistan or Iraq. Why would Congress order more?

The F-22 costs nearly $150 million per plane - twice what was projected at the outset of the program. Factoring in development costs, the price tag increases to about $350 million per plane for the current fleet of 187.