The Obama administration has abandoned its effort to persuade Israel to renew a settlement construction freeze, which U.S. diplomats had hoped would invigorate moribund peace talks with thehttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/07/AR2010120707310.html Palestinians.
WASHINGTON — The website of the Swedish prosecutor's office pursuing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange came under cyber attack on Tuesday in the latest salvo by his online supporters.
PandaLabs, the malware detection laboratory for computer security firm Panda Security, said the prosecutor's website, aklagare.se, was brought down by members of the "cyber hacktivist" group called "Anonymous."
Attempts by AFP to connect to the aklagare.se website around 5:00 pm (2200 GMT) were unsuccessful.
The attack on the Swedish prosecutor's website came as Assange was refused bail on Tuesday by a British judge over charges of sex crimes in Sweden.
Sean-Paul Correll, a threat researcher at PandaLabs, said the group called Anonymous launched the attack on the Swedish prosecutor's website and others against PayPal and the Swiss Post Office bank.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/swedish-prosecutors-website-cyber-attack/
TSA refusal to release radiation inspection reports raises concern among workers
Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
Monday, Dec 7th, 2010
TSA workers are complaining about the amounts of radiation they are being exposed to on a daily basis in the wake of the mass introduction of body scanners to airports around the country.
USA Today reports that TSA agents are unhappy with the fact that they are being kept in the dark by their employers, despite repeated requests for information.
“We don’t think the agency is sharing enough information,” said Milly Rodriguez, occupational health and safety specialist at the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents TSA workers.
“Radiation just invokes a lot of fear.” she added.
According to the USA Today report, several TSA employees have expressed their concerns to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):
…a TSA employee at an unidentified airport asked CDC in June to examine concerns about radiation exposures from standing near the new full-body X-ray scanners for hours a day. The CDC said it didn’t have authority to do a hazard assessment unless three or more current employees at one location made a joint request, according to a September letter from the CDC to the unnamed worker. The CDC provided the letter to USA TODAY.
Despite claiming that the body scanners and baggage scanners emit safe doses of radiation and are routinely inspected, the TSA has refused to release its radiation inspection records.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/tsa-agents-complain-over-body-scanner-radiation-exposure.html
ZHUHAI, China—A year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a cash-strapped Kremlin began selling China a chunk of its vast military arsenal, including the pride of the Russian air force, the Sukhoi-27 fighter jet.
For the next 15 years, Russia was China's biggest arms supplier, providing $20 billion to $30 billion of fighters, destroyers, submarines, tanks and missiles. It even sold Beijing a license to make the Su-27 fighter jet—with imported Russian parts.
![[cams]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AY507_cams_DV_20101205194003.jpg)
Associated PressChinese fighter jets, believed to be J-11Bs, train over Tibet in July.
Today, Russia's military bonanza is over, and China's is just beginning.
After decades of importing and reverse-engineering Russian arms, China has reached a tipping point: It now can produce many of its own advanced weapons—including high-tech fighter jets like the Su-27—and is on the verge of building an aircraft carrier.
Not only have Chinese engineers cloned the prized Su-27's avionics and radar but they are fitting it with the last piece in the technological puzzle, a Chinese jet engine.
In the past two years, Beijing hasn't placed a major order from Moscow.
Pregnant women who regularly use mobile phones could increase the risk of their children behaving badly, claims a startling survey.
If their offspring then start using the devices at an early age, the chance of problems climbs to 50 per cent, according to researchers.
They found those exposed to mobile phones in the womb had a 30 per cent rise in behavioural difficulties at the age of seven.
Pregnant pause: Researchers suggest that pregnant women who regularly use mobile phones are putting their babies at risk of developing behavioural problems
But those exposed before birth and in their childhood, were 50 per cent more likely to have behavioural problems than those exposed to neither.
Children who used mobiles, but were not exposed in the womb, were 20 per cent more likely to display abnormal behaviour.
The findings by researchers in California are likely to reinforce warnings that children should not use mobile phones.
By Paul Craig Roberts
The Intel Hub
Western Civilization no longer upholds the values it proclaims, so what is the basis for its claim to virtue?
For example, the U.S. print and TV media and the U.S. government have made it completely clear that they have no regard for the First Amendment. Consider CNN’s Wolf Blitzer’s reaction to the leaked diplomatic cables that reveal how the U.S. government uses deceptions, bribes, and threats to control other governments and to deceive the American and other publics. Blitzer is outraged that information revealing the U.S. government’s improprieties reached the people, or some of them. As Alexander Cockburn wrote, Blitzer demanded that the U.S. government take the necessary steps to make certain that journalists and the American people never again find out what their government is up to.
The disregard for the First Amendment is well established in the U.S. media, which functions as a propaganda ministry for the government. Remember the NSA leak given to the New York Times that the George W. Bush regime was violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and spying on Americans without obtaining warrants from the FISA court? The New York Times spiked the story for one year and did not release it until after Bush’s reelection. By then, the Bush regime had fabricated a legal doctrine that “authorized” Bush to violate U.S. law.
Glenn Greenwald writing at Salon has exposed the absence of moral standards among WikiLeaks’ critics. WikiLeaks’ critics could not make it clearer that they do not believe in accountable government. And to make certain that the government is not held accountable, WikiLeaks’ critics are calling for every possible police state measure, including extra-judicial murder, to stamp out anyone who makes information available that enables the citizenry to hold government accountable.
The U.S. government definitely does not believe in accountable government. Among the first things the Obama regime did was to make certain that there would be no investigation into the Bush regime’s use of lies, fabricated “intelligence,” and deception of the American public and the United Nations in order to further its agenda of conquering the independent Muslim states in the Middle East and turning them into U.S. puppets. The Obama regime also made certain that no member of the Bush regime would be held accountable for violating U.S. and international laws, for torturing detainees, for war crimes, for privacy violations or for any of the other criminal acts of the Bush regime
http://theintelhub.com/2010/12/07/western-civilization-has-shed-its-values/
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) pushed back on Monday against a contention by a Democratic FCC commissioner that the government should create new regulations to promote diversity in news programming.
Barton was reacting to a proposal made last week by FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, who in a speech suggested that broadcasters be subject to a new "public values test" every four years.
"I hope … that you do not mean to suggest that it is the job of the federal government, through the [FCC], to determine the content that is available for Americans to consume,” Barton wrote Monday in a letter to Copps.
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/132195-fcc-proposal-to-regulate-news-draws-fire
