So they are naturally furious with us. How dare we continue to kill our enemies that they are harboring?

PESHAWAR, Pakistan – A US drone strike on a house in northern Pakistan killed at least four suspected militants, and is suspected to have killed Al Qaeda’s Pakistani leader Badar Mansoor, Fox News reports.

The attack is the second in 24 hours. A strike Wednesday in the same area killed at least 10 and several others were injured.

The back-to-back strikes could be an indication the drone program is picking up steam again after a slowdown caused by tensions with Pakistan over accidental American airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last year.

The U.S. held off on carrying out drone strikes for over six weeks after the deadly accident on Nov. 26. There have been a handful of attacks since they resumed in January, but the last two are the first consecutive strikes since the border incident.

DAMASCUS, Syria – The U.S. and its allies were considering giving military aid to the Syrian opposition battling the regime of President Bashar al Assad in an 11-month uprising that activists say has killed more than 6,000 people.

The Pentagon had drawn contingency plans that could include supplying the Free Syrian Army (FSA) with weapons and establishing a humanitarian corridor to deliver aid to civilians, The (London) Times reported Thursday, citing a U.S. official.

While U.S. officials said they were “scoping out” military options, any plans at the moment were purely “academic.”

Several nations have already been aiding the rebels, with Saudi Arabia providing financial assistance and Qatar supplying them with 3,000 satellite phones. Qatar was also deliberating giving the FSA night-vision equipment and anti-tank missiles.

The FSA’s logistical coordinator Sheikh Zuheir Abassi told The Times the rebels wanted the West to provide no-fly zones and a haven from which they could safely operate.

“If we were given these two, most of the army would desert and join us,” Abassi said. “We are not asking the West to intervene but to give us weapons. We can do the rest.” Some 40,000 soldiers have deserted the regular army to date, the opposition said.

No better description than this….

The White House appears to have foot in email disease…..

What were we thinking ?

By Steven Mufson

In the confusion following the earthquake and tsunami that damaged Japan’s Fukushima nuclear complex last March, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it was standing by to help.

But a trove of e-mails posted on the NRC’s Web site shows an agency struggling to figure out how to respond and how to deal with the American public while cutting through what one official called “the fog of information” coming out of Japan.

“THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” said an e-mail from the NRC operations center early on March 11, hours after the quake. “This may get really ugly in the next few days,” said one NRC official later in the day after a report that Tokyo Electric Power Co. was venting gas from a containment building.

Three days later, another official said, “It’s frustrating, but we have very little factual info as an agency.”

Now, as the first anniversary of the Fukushima catastrophe approaches, the initial response by regulators still holds lessons for the nuclear industry and policymakers.

The NRC e-mails reveal disagreement about how to advise the Japanese. The NRC staff chafed at some un­or­tho­dox advice coming from an ad hoc group of scientists assembled by Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Famed physicist Richard Garwin, one of Chu’s group, proposed setting off a controlled “shaped” explosion to break through the concrete shield around the primary steel containment structure to allow cooling water to be applied from the outside. One NRC scientist called the idea “madness.”

Another idea from the Chu group was to attempt a “junk shot” — a variation on what some engineers proposed to stop the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — to plug leaks of radioactive water from Fukushima’s nuclear reactors into the sea. When using a mixture of sawdust, newspapers and other junk failed, Japan’s Tepco ultimately used a compound known as liquid glass.

“The e-mails provide a candid picture of the level of uncertainty and confusion within the U.S. government and indicates that even U.S. experts had major divisions about what was going on and how to best mitigate the crisis,” said Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist and nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

One of the e-mails said that during the first week after the earthquake, a major U.S. company, Bechtel, offered to provide desperately needed equipment to pump sea water to cool the Fukushima reactors, but the price of $9.6 million came in at more than a dozen times what the e-mail called the “original price.” Bechtel says that it did not provide an initial estimate, nor did it make a profit, and that the price included the cost of equipment only, not time spent on design or delivery. The Energy Department stepped in to provide “a couple of million,” the e-mail said, and instead of three or four sets of pumps and hoses, only one was delivered.

While assuring Americans publicly that there was no danger, the NRC did not disclose one worst-case scenario, which did not rule out the possibility of radiation exceeding safe levels for thyroid doses in Alaska, the e-mails show. “Because things were uncertain, we considered it but the data that was available . . . did not support that very pessimistic scenario so no, it was not discussed publicly at that point,” NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said. In the end, Alaska was not affected.

Read the rest here.

Neighbors want his ass in jail where it can be abused….

WASHINGTON, Feb 6 (Reuters) – The IMF’s chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, said on Monday it looks like the ‘haircut’ on Greek private debt will be “very large” as negotiations between bondholders and the government drag on to cut Greece’s debt burden.

“With respect to private creditors at this stage it looks like the haircut will be very large,” Blanchard told an event at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Read the rest here.

What can one say of such insanity?

Cairo (CNN) — Violent clashes near Egypt’s Interior Ministry on Monday left at least one person dead and 72 injured, a health ministry official said.

The man died of a gunshot wound, said Dr. Hisham Shiha, deputy health minister. Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim denied that officers were using anything but tear gas in confrontations with demonstrators.

Among those injured Monday was Salma Said, a prominent pro-democracy blogger who was reportedly shot in the face with bird shot by a police officer. Images of Said, her face and leg appearing to be bloodied, were circulating on the Internet.

Mona Seif, an activist and founder of the No to Military Trials for Civilians group, said officers dressed in civilian clothes infiltrated protest lines and arrested dozens of protesters. There was no immediate word from authorities about arrests on Monday. At least 40 people were arrested on Sunday, officials said.

A parliamentary committee visited the site to gather information and file a report on Monday’s clashes, an Interior Ministry spokesman said.

More than 80 people died in a riot at a soccer stadium in Port Said on Wednesday. As rival fans battled with rocks and chairs, some people suffocated as crowds tried to escape but were blocked by a locked gate.

On Monday, 120 members of Egypt’s parliament called for Ibrahim to be tried on charges that he failed to properly handle the riot, making him responsible for the deaths, speaker Mohamed Saad el-Katatni said in a televised session. He said he had ordered a report on the incident to prepare for questioning of Ibrahim by parliament.

Some shippers are renting vessels for just the fuel costs….

By Marcus Bensasson, Maria Petrakis and Natalie Weeks

Greece’s efforts to win a second bailout from international creditors teetered in the balance as negotiations in Athens failed to clinch an agreement.

“The distance between success and failure, which could come from misfortune or misunderstanding, is very small,” Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos told reporters in Athens yesterday after consultations with euro area finance ministers. “We are on razor’s edge.”

Venizelos said while agreement had been found on issues such as bank recapitalization and state asset sales, the government and the so-called troika of international creditors were still at odds over labor reforms and fiscal measures for this year. The talks with euro-area finance ministers were “very difficult,” he said.

With the country’s stability at stake, the government is racing to clinch agreement on a plan that’s been in the works since July, with talks between international monitors and Greek officials running in parallel with discussions among caretaker Prime Minister Lucas Papademos’s coalition members and Greece’s government and its private creditors.

Read the rest here.

You should be angry over this story; but then again it seems the new motto in society is get away with what you can, deny, and pay out a fraction without admitting guilt…great message to the younger generations.

Full article 

By David Ignatius

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has a lot on his mind these days, from cutting the defense budget to managing the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But his biggest worry is the growing possibility that Israel will attack Iran over the next few months.

Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June — before Iran enters what Israelis described as a “zone of immunity” to commence building a nuclear bomb. Very soon, the Israelis fear, the Iranians will have stored enough enriched uranium in deep underground facilities to make a weapon — and only the United States could then stop them militarily.

Read the rest here.

Never have been in or eaten Taco Bell….

LISBON, Portugal (AP) – In a six-room Lisbon office where until last year more than a dozen people worked, engineer Joao Paulo Lopes sits alone in silence amid dark computer screens, patiently waiting for a bankruptcy lawyer to shut the company’s doors and send him home.

Small firms with fewer than 50 workers, like the gas and water installation company where Lopes works, make up more than 99 percent of Portuguese businesses. They are the bedrock of the country’s economy. And they’re collapsing at an alarming rate.

“We’re witnessing a daily deluge of small companies going under,” says Raul Gonzalez, president of the national association of bankruptcy owners. His organization logged more than 10,000 company insolvencies last year — a startling 60 percent jump from the previous year.

Portugal’s economy appears locked in a death spiral. The debt-crippled eurozone country is choking amid grinding austerity measures enacted in return for a €78 billion ($102 billion) bailout package last April, a steep recession, an acute shortage of cash, and record unemployment.

That has put Portugal back into the crosshairs of Europe’s two-year-old debt crisis. The country looks as though it will follow Greece in needing another bailout and debt restructuring. And its ordeal could bring another spasm of financial distress for the 17-nation bloc sharing the euro.

The three major international ratings agencies have downgraded Portugal’s credit worthiness to junk status over the past year. Their decisions reflect a lack of market faith in the country’s short-term prospects. In recent days, interest rates on the country’s bonds — a weather vane of investor sentiment — have climbed to highs not seen since the European single currency was introduced.

Mo’ money and politics don’t mix well for the 99%

By David Benoit

It has been over three years since the infamous Autumn of 2008, and for much of that time calls have rung out from Congress, media members and activists to criminally charge the Wall Streeters that seemed to have taken advantage of what was, in hindsight at least, an incredibly gullible mortgage system.

Though there have been earlier charges filed, like the case that failed against Bear Stearns hedge fund executives and other charges against smaller banks, those clamoring for penalties have wanted bigger fish reeled in.

Today, prosecutors are about to deliver some fish that carry the brand-name cache many have wanted.

Read the rest here.