Time running out for US troops in violent Mosul

(Compiler's note: Any bets as to where this is headed as a result of our pre-published actions?)

By LARA JAKES

MOSUL, Iraq (AP) - Grenades lie unattended next to a west Mosul bazaar. Garbage bags throughout the city are searched daily for bombs. At a sprawling sheep market, Iraqi army soldiers are careful not to kick over rocks for fear of setting off hidden explosives.

War has ebbed in most parts of Iraq, but not in Mosul, the third-largest city and al-Qaida's last stronghold in the fragile new democracy. And time is running out on the around-the-clock U.S. military patrols of Mosul. U.S. troops must vacate cities by June 30 under an agreement with the Iraqis, and President Barack Obama is ending all American combat operations after August 2010.

The Iraqi security forces are not sure they'll be ready.

"If you don't have the Americans, this is not going to be good," said an Iraqi army captain who gave his name only as Ahmed to protect his family from insurgents. "I cannot take care of it."

Even so, "some people don't like coalition forces here," Ahmed added as his soldiers joined U.S. troops at the sheep market in west Mosul last week. "Iraqi people will come together, and it will be better."

Whether they will be safe in Mosul is anyone's guess.

In poverty-stricken Mosul, a Sunni-dominated city of about 2 million where the unemployment rate has risen even higher than the many trash piles, the U.S. military has long fought to contain al-Qaida from resurging in the rest of Iraq.

Still, al-Qaida is only one of the military's worries.

On Monday, gunmen opened fire on a checkpoint in the western New Mosul neighborhood, killing two policemen and wounding one civilian.

Explosives are part of the daily cacophony in Mosul; the U.S. Army reported six bombs either found or detonated in the city last Thursday and Friday, one of which wounded an Iraqi soldier. Iraqi security forces themselves pose a threat: three American soldiers have been killed in Mosul since November by gunmen wearing Iraqi army or police uniforms.

The problems in Mosul "can put us off track and cause violence to really re-ignite in a greater way," Lt. Gen. Lloyd Austin, the No. 2 U.S. general in Iraq, told reporters Monday.

But the military's main military focus in Mosul is al-Qaida, where efforts to obliterate the terror group and other Sunni militants have failed over the years.

Only recently have additional troops and intelligence gatherers from both the U.S. and Iraqi governments been sent to the capital city of Ninevah province, about 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, to keep al-Qaida from spreading. About 5,000 U.S. troops and 36,000 Iraqi army and police officers currently are stationed in Mosul.

It was also only recently that U.S. officials recognized al-Qaida's ability to survive after repeated military assaults, said Lt. Col. Tom Cipolla, a 1st Calvary Division battalion commander stationed at the U.S. Army's Marez base just outside Mosul.

"I'm not sure we really understood the level of the problem here early on," Cipolla said in an interview last week. "And I'm not sure we really understood how embedded al-Qaida was becoming. ... Al-Qaida in Iraq has proved to be a very resourceful enemy, capable of regenerating at a time when we thought it didn't have that capability."

Cipolla took his post three weeks ago after his predecessor, Lt. Col. Gary Derby, was killed Feb. 5 by a suicide car bomber. "I think we understand now that it is a fight that doesn't stop. It is part of the environment here that will have to be dealt with for a very long time."

Much of the renewed assault on al-Qaida has focused on finding out where the militants are in Mosul and where they will strike next - a task the U.S. is trying to hand off to Iraqis.

In the New Mosul neighborhood, Iraqi security forces have painted their telephone numbers on building walls. Walking the streets and getting to know the community also are part of the Iraqi plan to persuade residents to call with tips about insurgents or other suspicious activity.

Iraqi army Col. Aydan al-Jibouri, Mosul's deputy command, said the number of tips has risen by at least 50 percent over the last 10 months. It's a risk for Sunnis especially, since the majority of Mosul's insurgents likely come from the same tribes.

But since most security forces in the city are from other areas in Iraq, some locals said they feel comfortable talking to officials who can't easily identify them.

"We see the national police help us," said Nabil Ali Fawzi, wearing a black fez and standing on his doorstep last week. "We see any problems in our area, we call the national police."

A few minutes later, gunfire broke out several alleys away, spooking troops and sending residents back inside their homes. The shooters, whether threatening or merely firing celebratory rounds, were never found.

Neither were the attackers who lobbed a pair of rusty Russian-made grenades on top of an Iraqi army observation post in the city's Nablus section a few days earlier. When the grenades didn't explode, the Iraqi soldiers merely threw them back down on the street, where they lay next to a local bazaar for two days until a platoon of U.S. soldiers safely detonated them at the Iraqis' request.

The grenades incident made clear that despite ongoing training and advising by U.S. troops, Iraqi security forces are nowhere near to securing Mosul by themselves. It is not uncommon, for example, for as many as two-thirds of Iraqi soldiers or policemen to be on leave from their jobs and return home at any given time since very few of them are from Mosul.

How long the U.S. will stay in the Mosul fight is unknown - even to U.S. military officials.

By the end of June, U.S. combat troops are supposed to vacate bases inside Mosul and other Iraqi cities. Although they will continue to patrol the streets from camps outside the cities, troops will no longer be living among the civilian population - a tactic that proved effective in reducing violence in Baghdad.

Under a Jan. 1 security agreement with the Iraqi government, all U.S. troops will leave the country by the end of 2011 - including the roughly 50,000 who will be left behind after the combat troops withdraw next year. Unless the Iraqis ask for continued help, that date is nonnegotiable, U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. David Perkins said Monday.

"There's no intent, nor will there be any fudging of the agreement," Perkins told reporters at a Baghdad news conference when asked about Mosul's security situation.

Cipolla thinks Iraq will ask U.S. combat forces to stay as long as al-Qaida remains a threat in Mosul. By nearly all accounts, that will take years.

"I have a hard time believing anybody will make a decision to scale back the efforts before it's actually the right time to do so, because everybody understands how dangerous al-Qaida has been in the past," Cipolla said. "Nobody wants to go back to that."

Warren Buffett: Economy Has 'Fallen Off a Cliff'

from FoxNews

Billionaire Warren Buffett said the economy has "fallen off a cliff" over the past six months and consumers have changed their habits in remarkable ways.

Buffett said Monday during a live appearance on CNBC that current economic turmoil has basically followed the worst-case scenario he envisioned.

"It's fallen off a cliff," Buffett said. "Not only has the economy slowed down a lot, but people have really changed their habits like I haven't seen."

Buffett said the changes are reflected in the results of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s subsidiaries. He said Berkshire's jewelry companies have suffered, but more people have been willing to switch to Geico to save money on car insurance.

He predicted that unemployment will likely climb a lot higher before the recession is done, but he also reiterated his optimistic long-term view: "Everything will be all right. We do have the greatest economic machine that's ever been created."

Fear and confusion have been driving consumer and investor behavior in recent months, Buffett said.

The nation's leaders need to clear up the confusion before anyone will become more confident, and he said all 535 members of Congress should stop the partisan bickering about solutions.

Buffett said he believes patriotic Republicans and Democrats will realize the nation is engaged in an economic war.

"What is required is a commander in chief that's looked at like a commander in chief in a time of war," Buffett said.

A little over a week ago, Buffett released his annual letter to shareholders describing the worst of his 44 years at the helm of Berkshire. The Omaha, Neb.-based company reported sharply lower profit because of its largely unrealized $7.5 billion investment and derivative losses.

Overall, Berkshire's 2008 profit of $4.99 billion, or $3,224 per Class A share, was down 62 percent from $13.21 billion, or $8,548 per share, in 2007.

Berkshire's fourth-quarter numbers were even worse. Buffett's company reported net income of $117 million, or $76 per share, down 96 percent from $2.95 billion, or $1,904 per share, a year earlier.

Buffett said he doesn't regret writing an editorial last fall encouraging people to buy U.S. stocks, but he joked that in hindsight he wishes he'd waited a few months to publish the piece. Since that editorial appeared on Oct. 17, the Dow Jones industrial average has fallen from 8,852.22 to close at 6,626.94 on Friday.

Buffett stands by his overall advice that over time owning stocks will be better than so-called safe investments.

"Overall, equities are going to do far better than U.S. government bonds at these prices," he said.

Buffett said he doesn't regret investing $8 billion of Berkshire's money in investment bank Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and conglomerate General Electric Co. last fall. Both companies gave Berkshire preferred shares paying 10 percent interest that Buffett said he doesn't think he could get now.

Berkshire owns a diverse mix of more than 60 companies, including insurance, furniture, carpet, jewelry, restaurants and utility businesses. And it has major investments in such companies as Wells Fargo & Co. and Coca-Cola Co.

Saudi court sentences 75-year-old woman to lashes

By MAGGIE MICHAEL

CAIRO (AP) - A 75-year-old widow in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to 40 lashes and four months in jail for mingling with two young men who are not close relatives, drawing new criticism for the kingdom's ultraconservative religious police and judiciary.

The woman's lawyer told The Associated Press on Monday that he would appeal the verdict against Khamisa Sawadi, who is Syrian but was married to a Saudi. The attorney, Abdel Rahman al-Lahem, said the verdict issued March 3 also demands that Sawadi be deported after serving her sentence.

He said his client, who is not serving her sentence yet, was not speaking with the media, and he declined to provide more details about the case.

The newspaper Al-Watan said the woman met with the two 24-year-old men last April after she asked them to bring her five loaves of bread at her home in al-Chamil, a city north of the capital, Riyadh.

Al-Watan identified one man as Fahd al-Anzi, the nephew of Sawadi's late husband, and the other as his friend and business partner Hadiyan bin Zein. It said they were arrested by the religious police after delivering the bread. The men also were convicted and sentenced to lashes and prison.

The court said it based its ruling on "citizen information" and testimony from al-Anzi's father, who accused Sawadi of corruption.

"Because she said she doesn't have a husband and because she is not a Saudi, conviction of the defendants of illegal mingling has been confirmed," the court verdict read.

Saudi Arabia's strict interpretation of Islam prohibits men and women who are not immediate relatives from mingling. It also bars women from driving, and the playing of music, dancing and many movies also are a concern for hard-liners who believe they violate religious and moral values.

Complaints from Saudis have been growing that the religious police and courts are overstepping their broad mandate and interfering in people's lives, and critics lambasted the handling of Sawadi's case.

"How can a verdict be issued based on suspicion?" Laila Ahmed al-Ahdab, a physician who also is a columnist for Al-Watan, wrote Monday. "A group of people are misusing religion to serve their own interests."

Sawadi told the court she considered al-Anzi as her son, because she breast-fed him when he was a baby. But the court denied her claim, saying she didn't provide evidence. In Islamic tradition, breast-feeding establishes a degree of maternal relation, even if a woman nurses a child who is not biologically hers.

Sawadi commonly asked her neighbors for help after her husband died, said journalist Bandar al-Ammar, who reported the story for Al-Watan. In a recent article, he wrote that he felt the need to report the case "so everybody knows to what degree we have reached."

The woman's conviction came a few weeks after King Abdullah fired the chief of the religious police and a cleric who condoned killing owners of TV networks that broadcast "immoral content." The move was seen as part of an effort to weaken the hard-line Sunni Muslim establishment.

The Patriot Act isn’t broken

(Compiler's note: This is certainly a must read article.)

By Nathan A. Sales

Remember when the USA Patriot Act was seen as a common-sense counterterrorism tool? Congress enacted the law shortly after the 9/11 attacks by large bipartisan majorities. It wasn't even close.

And for good reason: The Patriot Act made relatively modest changes to the law as it stood on Sept. 11, 2001. The act simply let terrorist- and spy-hunters use some of the same tools regular cops have had in their arsenal for decades. And it updated existing laws to make them more effective against terrorist threats.

As President Obama forges new security policies, let's hope he keeps the Patriot Act intact. The act works. According to the Justice Department, the Patriot Act helped take down Al Qaeda cells in Buffalo, N.Y. and Portland, Ore. Prosecutors used it to convict a Floridian who pled guilty to raising money for a terrorist group called Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And The act led to the conviction of a man who threatened to torch a Texas mosque.

Despite those successes, the act has become a civil libertarian bugaboo. We've all heard how the act poses a dire threat to liberty and privacy. Federal agents can search your house without ever telling you. The feds can force the phone company to reveal whom you've been calling, and they can rummage through library records to find out what books you've been reading. They can even brand you a terrorist and throw you in jail if you get in an argument with a flight attendant.

The daily reality is much less dramatic – and much less frightening.

Let's start with the flight attendants. It's been illegal to interfere with airline crews since JFK was president. The Patriot Act made it a crime to attempt or conspire to do what the law already barred.

The basic idea behind the change is prevention. We shouldn't have to wait for a passenger to take a crew member's life before we throw the book at him. We should be able to prosecute the steps he takes along the way – ignoring an order to return to his seat, pulling a box cutter from his pocket, and so on.

The Patriot Act's "sneak and peek" authority is also pretty long in the tooth. For decades, federal courts recognized special circumstances in which police may hold off on notifying a suspect that they've searched his house.

As the Supreme Court stressed in 1967, immediate notice could "provoke the escape of the suspect or the destruction of critical evidence." The Patriot act merely codified these judicial decisions and adopted a uniform, nationwide standard.

Police still need a warrant before conducting a search, and they can't decide to delay notice by themselves. On both counts, a judge has to give the go ahead first. Plus, cops ordinarily have to tell the suspect about the search within 30 days.

Then there's the much-maligned "libraries" provision. In garden-variety criminal cases, grand juries are able to subpoena all kinds of documents from banks, phone companies, gas stations, and other businesses. The Patriot Act established a similar tool for terrorism investigations. And the terrorism rules are actually more protective of civil liberties.

Federal prosecutors can issue grand jury subpoenas basically unilaterally, but the Patriot Act requires the FBI to get a court order first. Also, the act expressly protects First Amendment rights – a topic about which the grand jury rules are conspicuously silent.

It's true that the Patriot Act conceivably could be applied to libraries and bookstores. But that's a lot less alarming than it might sound. Grand juries issued subpoenas to a half-dozen libraries in the Unabomber investigation. And a grand jury in New York demanded library records during the 1990 Zodiac gunman investigation. If subpoenas are good enough for domestic criminals, they ought to be good enough for foreign terrorists.

That's not to say The Patriot Act is perfect. As with any law, there's always a risk of abuse.

In March 2007, an internal Justice Department audit found that the FBI had misused its power under the Patriot Act to gain access to terrorism suspects' telephone records. And newspapers have reported that relatively minor in-flight disturbances have led to passengers facing federal charges of interfering with flight crew. Abuses like these are not to be taken lightly.

But the solution is not to neuter the Patriot Act. The act remains a vital weapon in the struggle against global terrorism.

Perhaps the best way to ensure that the act remains faithful to fundamental American values is to insist on greater transparency and oversight: More hearings on Capitol Hill; more audits; and, above all, more disclosures to the public.

Policymakers in the new administration and in Congress – and ordinary Americans like us – should keep tabs on counterterrorism agents to see that they don't abuse the powers they've been given. But we also need to make sure agents keep the tools they need to get the job done. Al Qaeda hasn't given up and neither should we.

Nathan A. Sales is a law professor at George Mason University. He previously served at the Department of Justice (where he helped write the Patriot Act) and the Department of Homeland Security.

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Yadlin: 'Iran crossed nuclear tech threshold'

(Compiler's note: Must read)

By HERB KEINON

In a chilling indication that Iran's arms program is advancing steadily, Israel acknowledged for the first time that Teheran had mastered the technology to make a nuclear bomb on the same day that the Iranians announced they

Publish Post

had successfully tested a new air-to-surface missile.

Yadlin: Iran has crossed the technological nuclear threshold

Iran has "crossed the technological threshold," and its attainment of nuclear military capability is now a matter of "incorporating the goal of producing an atomic bomb into its strategy," OC Military Intelligence Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin told the cabinet on Sunday.

"Iran is continuing to amass hundreds of kilograms of low-enriched uranium, and it hopes to exploit the dialogue with the West and Washington to advance toward the production of an atomic bomb," he said.

Yadlin said the Islamic republic hoped to use the expected dialogue with the Obama administration to buy time to procure the amount of high-enriched uranium needed to build a bomb.

RELATED

• 'Israel seriously considering Iran military op'
• Analysis: How much time is left?

"Iran's plan for the continuation of its nuclear program while simultaneously holding talks with the new administration in Washington is being received with caution in the Middle East," the intelligence chief said. "The moderates are worried that this approach will come at their expense and will be used by the radical axis to continue to carry out terror activities and rearm. In contrast, those in the radical axis are saying that despite the change in the Americans' stance, they will continue to act against them."

Yadlin's assessment brought him into line with a similar assessment made last week by Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said Teheran had enough fissile material to build a bomb now.

But in an indication of just how subjective the question of Iran's progress toward a bomb has become, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates took issue with Mullen, saying the Iranians were not "close to a weapon at this point."

The UN's International Atomic Energy Agency also said last week that it had been mistaken in earlier reports and now had evidence that Iran had enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon.

Yadlin's rather dramatic statement was not made in public, but was part of the security briefing he gave at Sunday's cabinet meeting. One government official said that the point of releasing the information now seemed to be to impress upon the international community the urgency of the matter.

"He wanted to ring the alarm bells, to make it clear that everyone understood that Iran was continuing with its enrichment," the official said.

The official pointed out that Yadlin had used the phrase "mastered the technology" in regards to Iran, not that it had reached a "point of no return."

Israel made a decision a few years ago not to talk anymore about a "point of no return," since that implied that Iran could not be stopped - an impression the Iranians were keen on making, but which Israel did not want to play into, the official said.

Even though the Iranians have apparently mastered the technology for creating a nuclear weapon, it has still not done so and is probably still a couple of years away from that, he said. Consequently, Teheran could still be stopped.

The Iranians were clearly overcoming certain technological issues, and it was a matter of time before they would be able to enrich the uranium needed for a weapon, the official said.

"The idea behind Yadlin's statement was to shake people up, to show that the Iranians were still making progress," the official speculated.

Two weeks ago, Iran's nuclear chief, Vice President Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, announced that 6,000 centrifuges were now operating at the enrichment facility in Natanz. He said Teheran hoped to install more than 50,000 centrifuges there over the next five years.

With the amount of centrifuges it is using in the enrichment process, Iran could add about 100 kg. of uranium to its stockpile each month, or even more, considering that it is setting up additional ready-to-go centrifuges every day.

Even 100 kg. would give it an estimated low-enriched uranium stockpile of just over 1,100 kg. - the minimum experts believe is required to yield the 25 kg. of highly enriched weapons-grade uranium needed to build a bomb. But unless the Iranians have a nuclear facility that is completely hidden from the world's view, the international community would know when Teheran began to create the high-grade uranium needed for a nuclear weapon, because it would have to kick the IAEA inspectors out of the country to do so.

Reuters, meanwhile, quoted Iran's Fars News Agency on Sunday as saying the Islamic republic had test-fired a new air-to-surface missile, in the country's latest display of military power. According to the report, the missile - produced domestically and with a range of 110 km. - was designed for use by military aircraft against naval targets.

"Now these jet fighters have acquired a new capability in confronting threats," Reuters quoted the semi-official news agency as saying.

The missile has a far shorter range than the surface-to-surface Shihab and is believed to be meant to disrupt sea traffic in the strategic Straits of Hormuz, through which 40 percent of the world's oil must travel.

Cybersecurity Chief Resigns

By SIOBHAN GORMAN

WASHINGTON -- The government's coordinator for cybersecurity programs has quit, criticizing what he described as the National Security Agency's grip on cybersecurity.

Rod Beckstrom, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur, said in his resignation letter that the NSA's central role in cybersecurity is "a bad strategy" because it is important to have a civilian agency taking a key role in the issue. The NSA is part of the Department of Defense. (Read Mr. Beckstrom's resignation letter.)

The power battles Mr. Beckstrom describes in his resignation letter illustrate the challenges ahead for the Obama administration as it plans its defense against governments and terrorists who might try to disrupt U.S. computer systems, cybersecurity specialists said. One issue is what part or parts of the government should lead the effort.

The Bush administration last year started a cybersecurity initiative to protect government networks, which was estimated to cost at least $6 billion in 2009 and $30 to $40 billion over the next several years. The Obama administration is conducting a 60-day review of that effort and related policies. The reviewers, led by the official who started the cyber initiative for the Bush administration, are expected to issue recommendations next month.

Mr. Beckstrom's National Cybersecurity Center, created last March to coordinate all government cybersecurity efforts, answered to the secretary of homeland security.

In reality, "NSA currently dominates most national cyber efforts," Mr. Beckstrom wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Thursday. "While acknowledging the critical importance of NSA to our intelligence efforts, I believe this is a bad strategy on multiple grounds."

He added that "the threats to our democratic processes are significant if all top level government network security and monitoring are handled by any one organization (either directly or indirectly)." That echoed the view of some privacy advocates who worry about a government agency having too much information on individuals.

NSA spokeswoman Marci Green declined to comment on the resignation letter. Mr. Beckstrom declined to comment.

Some Homeland Security officials said Mr. Beckstrom's criticism stemmed from personality clashes and an inability to adapt to the way business is done in Washington.

Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said that the Department of Homeland Security has "a strong relationship" with the NSA. Homeland Security "continues to work in close collaboration with all of our federal partners on protecting federal civilian networks, and is fully engaged in the 60-day cybersecurity review," she said.

Ms. Kudwa declined to respond to Mr. Beckstrom's specific critiques. "We thank Rod for his service, and regret his departure," she said.

In his letter, Mr. Beckstrom said his office was funded for just five weeks out of the past year and had just five people working in it. During the rest of the period, he borrowed staff and office space from other agencies.

Despite the lack of funding, Mr. Beckstrom said his center delivered a number of cybersecurity tools, The White House's Office of Management and Budget declined to comment.

Wikipedia scrubs Obama eligibility

Mention of citizenship issues deleted in minutes, 'offending' users banned

By Aaron Klein

Wikipedia, the online "free encyclopedia" mega-site written and edited entirely by its users, has been deleting within minutes any mention of eligibility issues surrounding Barack Obama's presidency, with administrators kicking off anyone who writes about the subject, WND has learned.

A perusal through Obama's current Wikipedia entry finds a heavily guarded, mostly glowing biography about the U.S. president. Some of Obama's most controversial past affiliations, including with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and former Weathermen terrorist Bill Ayers, are not once mentioned, even though those associations received much news media attention and served as dominant themes during the presidential elections last year.

Also completely lacking is any mention of the well-publicized concerns surrounding Obama's eligibility to serve as commander-in-chief.

Where's the proof Barack Obama was born in the U.S. or that he fulfills the "natural-born American" clause in the Constitution? If you still want to see it, join more than 300,000 others and sign up now!

Indeed, multiple times, Wikipedia users who wrote about the eligibility issues had their entries deleted almost immediately and were banned from re-posting any material on the website for three days.

In one example, Wikipedia user "Jerusalem21" added the following to Obama's page:

"There have been some doubts about whether Obama was born in the U.S. after the politician refused to release to the public a carbon copy of his birth certificate and amid claims from his relatives he may have been born in Kenya. Numerous lawsuits have been filed petitioning Obama to release his birth certificate, but most suits have been thrown out by the courts."

As is required on the online encyclopedia, that entry was backed up by third-party media articles, citing the Chicago Tribune and WorldNetDaily.com

The entry was posted on Feb. 24, at 6:16 p.m. EST. Just three minutes later, the entry was removed by a Wikipedia administrator, claiming the posting violated the websites rules against "fringe" material.

According to Wikipedia rules, however, a "fringe theory can be considered notable if it has been referenced extensively, and in a serious manner, in at least one major publication, or by a notable group or individual that is independent of the theory."

The Obama eligibility issue has indeed been reported extensively by multiple news media outlets. WorldNetDaily has led the coverage. Other news outlets, such as Britain's Daily Mail and the Chicago Tribune have released articles critical of claims Obama may not be eligible. The Los Angeles Times quoted statements by former presidential candidate Alan Keys doubting Obama is eligible to serve as president. Just last week, the Internet giant America Online featured a top news article about the eligibility subject, referencing WND's coverage.

When the user "Jerusalem21" tried to repost the entry about Obama's eligibility a second time, another administrator removed the material within two minutes and then banned the Wikipedia user from posting anything on the website for three days.

Wikipedia administrators have the ability to kick off users if the administrator believes the user violated the website's rules.

Over the last month, WND has monitored several other attempts to add eligibility issues to Obama's Wikipedia page. In every attempt monitored, the information was deleted within minutes and the user who posted the material was barred from the website for three days.

Angela Beesley Starling, a spokeswoman for Wikipedia, explained to WND that all the website's encyclopedia content is monitored by users. She said the administrators who deleted the entries are volunteers.

"Administrators," Starling said, "are simply people who are trusted by the other community members to have access to some extra tools that allow them to delete pages and perform other tasks that help the encyclopedia."

According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia is the seventh most trafficked website on the Internet. A Google search for the words "Barack Obama" brings up the president's Wikipedia page in the top four choices, following two links to Obama's official websites.

Ayers, Wright also missing in Obama's bio

The entire Wikipedia entry on Obama seems to be heavily promotional toward the U.S. president. It contains nearly no criticism or controversy, including appropriate mention of important issues where relevant.

For example, the current paragraph on Obama's religion contains no mention of Wright, even though Obama's association with the controversial pastor was one of the most talked about issues during the presidential campaign.

That paragraph states: "Obama explained how, through working with black churches as a community organizer while in his twenties, he came to understand 'the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change.' He was baptized at the Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988 and was an active member there for two decades."

Ayers is also not mentioned, even where relevant.

WND monitored as a Wikipedia user attempted to add Ayers' name to an appropriate paragraph. One of those additions, backed up with news articles, read as follows:

"He served alongside former Weathermen leader William Ayers from 1994 to 2002 on the board of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which in 1985 had been the first foundation to fund the Developing Communities Project, and also from 1994 to 2002 on the board of directors of the Joyce Foundation. Obama served on the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995 to 2002, as founding president and chairman of the board of directors from 1995 to 1991. Ayers was the founder and director of the Challenge."

Within two minutes that Wikipedia entry was deleted and the user banned from posting on the website for three days, purportedly for adding "Point of View junk edits," even though the addition was well-established fact.

What does one TRILLION dollars look like?

All this talk about "stimulus packages" and "bailouts"...

A billion dollars...

A hundred billion dollars...

Eight hundred billion dollars...

One TRILLION dollars...

What does that look like? I mean, these various numbers are tossed around like so many doggie treats, so I thought I'd take Google Sketchup out for a test drive and try to get a sense of what exactly a trillion dollars looks like.

We'll start with a $100 dollar bill. Currently the largest U.S. denomination in general circulation. Most everyone has seen them, slighty fewer have owned them. Guaranteed to make friends wherever they go.

A packet of one hundred $100 bills is less than 1/2" thick and contains $10,000. Fits in your pocket easily and is more than enough for week or two of shamefully decadent fun.

Believe it or not, this next little pile is $1 million dollars (100 packets of $10,000). You could stuff that into a grocery bag and walk around with it.

While a measly $1 million looked a little unimpressive, $100 million is a little more respectable. It fits neatly on a standard pallet...

And $1 BILLION dollars... now we're really getting somewhere...

Next we'll look at ONE TRILLION dollars. This is that number we've been hearing so much about. What is a trillion dollars? Well, it's a million million. It's a thousand billion. It's a one followed by 12 zeros.

You ready for this?

It's pretty surprising.

Go ahead...

Scroll down...

Ladies and gentlemen... I give you $1 trillion dollars...

(And notice those pallets are double stacked.)

So the next time you hear someone toss around the phrase "trillion dollars"... that's what they're talking about.

President Barack Obama declares America should be ready to talk to the Taliban

By Ben Farmer in Kabul

American forces are prepared to make overtures to moderate Taliban commanders using an approach that saw insurgents in Iraq turn against al-Qaeda, President Barack Obama has said.

President Obama said the military was not winning the counter insurgency war in Afghanistan as he opened the door for peace negotiations.

By persuading Iraqi Sunni insurgents to turn on al-Qaeda extremists, US commanders engineered a sharply drop in violence in Iraq.

President Obama said deals similar to those implemented by General David Petraeus in Iraq could be cut in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"If you talk to General Petraeus, I think he would argue that part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of al-Qaeda in Iraq." "There may be some comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and the Pakistani region, but the situation in Afghanistan is, if anything, more complex," he told the New York Times.

Coalition military commanders have repeatedly stressed the increasingly violent insurgency in Afghanistan cannot be solved by military means.

Hamid Karzai, president of Afghanistan, has called for peace talks with members of the country's former Taliban regime and offered Mullah Omar, it's fugitive leader, safe passage for negotiations.

The Saudi Arabian royal family has also attempted to sponsor talks between insurgents and the Afghan government, but little public progress has been made.

Analysts say the insurgency of disparate groups of Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, foreign fighters, former jihadi commanders, alienated tribal leaders, drug barons and common bandits could be too fractured for negotiations.

Last year was the bloodiest since the Taliban government fell in 2001.

President Obama conceded that conditions had deteriorated and fighting is expected to be heavier this year as the first of 17,000 US reinforcements enter the fight.

"The Taliban is bolder than it was. I think ... in the southern regions of the country, you're seeing them attack us in ways that we have not seen previously," President Obama said. "The national government still has not gained the confidence of the Afghan people. And so it's going to be critical for us to not only, get through these national elections to stabilize the security situation, but we've got to recast our policy so that our military, diplomatic and development goals are all aligned to ensure that al-Qaeda and extremists that would do us harm don't have the kinds of safe havens that allow them to operate."

N. Korea warns intercepting 'satellite' will prompt counterstrike+

PYONGYANG/BEIJING, March 9 (AP) - (Kyodo)—North Korea warned Monday that any move to intercept what it calls a satellite launch and what other countries suspect may be a missile test-firing would result in a counterstrike against the countries trying to stop it.

"We will retaliate (over) any act of intercepting our satellite for peaceful purposes with prompt counterstrikes by the most powerful military means," the official Korean Central News Agency quoted a spokesman of the General Staff of the Korean People's Army as saying.

If countries such as the United States, Japan or South Korea try to intercept the launch, the North Korean military will carry out "a just retaliatory strike operation not only against all the interceptor means involved but against the strongholds" of the countries, it said.

"Shooting our satellite for peaceful purposes will precisely mean a war," it added.

North Korea earlier announced it is preparing to put a communications satellite into space, but outside observers suspect it may in fact be a test-firing of a long-range ballistic missile.

The United States, Japan and South Korea have said that even if Pyongyang calls the launch a missile test, it would violate existing U.N. Security Council resolutions.

The same North Korean statement said the country's military will cut off communications with its South Korean counterparts during the U.S.- South Korean exercises for the duration of the exercises beginning Monday.

A separate, more rare statement by the KPA's Supreme Command was quoted by the KCNA as saying that its soldiers are under orders to be "fully combat-ready" during U.S.-South Korean military exercises beginning Monday.

The North's armed forces have been ordered to "deal merciless retaliatory blows" should there be any intrusion "into the sky and land and seas of the DPRK even an inch."

DPRK stands for Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Korea's official name.

North Korea has demanded a stop to this month's U.S.-South Korean exercises, and said earlier it cannot guarantee the security of South Korean civilian airplanes flying through its territorial airspace while they are under way.

Mexican cartels infiltrate Houston

By DANE SCHILLER

Recent arrests in a mistaken killing point to the perilous presence of gangs

The order was clear: Kill the guy in the Astros jersey.

But in a case of mistaken identity, Jose Perez ended up dead. The intended target — the Houston-based head of a Mexican drug cartel cell pumping millions of dollars of cocaine into the city — walked away.

Perez, 27, was just a working guy, out getting dinner late on a Friday with his wife and young children at Chilos, a seafood restaurant on the Gulf Freeway.

His murder and the assassination gone awry point to the perilous presence of Mexican organized crime and how cartel violence has seeped into the city.

Arrests came in December when police and federal agents got a break in the 2006 shooting as they charted the relationship and rivalries between at least five cartel cells operating in Houston. A rogue’s gallery of about 100 names and mug shots taken at Texas jails and morgues offers a blueprint for Mexican organized crime.

Houston has long been a major staging ground for importing illegal drugs from Mexico and shipping them to the rest of the United States, but a recent Department of Justice report notes it is one of 230 cities where cartels maintain distribution networks and supply lines.

At Chilos, the real crime boss was sitting at another table, as were two spotters. The hitman waited in the parking lot for Perez to leave the restaurant.

“I just remember that guy coming up to us and he started shooting and shooting and shooting and never stopped,” said Norma Gonzalez, Perez’s widow. He was hit twice.

“I know they will pay for what they have done, maybe in the next life,” she said of Perez’s killers. “I don’t know what is going to happen to them in this life.”

Problem ‘far-reaching’

The gangster — captured on surveillance video — blended in with other customers as they gawked at the aftermath. A few months later, he was dead too, gunned down two miles from the restaurant.

“It is here and it has been here, but people don’t want to listen,” Rick Moreno, a Houston police homicide investigator working with the Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI, said of the cartels’ presence in Houston. "It is so far-reaching>"

Washington is taking notice, even if the toll on U.S. streets is nowhere near as pervasive as in Mexico, where cartels are locked in a war against one another and with the government.

“International drug trafficking organizations pose a sustained, serious threat to the safety and security of our communities,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said. “We can provide our communities the safety and the security that they deserve only by confronting these dangerous cartels head-on without reservation,” he said.

When it comes to tearing into the cartels in Houston, an investigation later code-named Operation Three Stars got quietly under way three years ago, as an undercover DEA agent stood in line at a McDonald’s in north Houston. He listened to a drug trafficker using a two-way radio to set up delivery of $750,000; the man was with his wife and kids, ordering Happy Meals while making the deal.

Shifting alliances

Since then, more than 70 people in Houston have been prosecuted as a result of the ongoing operation and more than $5 million has been seized, as well as about 3,000 pounds of cocaine, according to court documents and law enforcement officers.

How many people are involved in cartel business is unknown, authorities said. Alliances shift quickly, as can the need to shut down to evade the law. Federal agents concede that numbers garnered by the operation pale compared to the cash and drugs pumped through Houston, but contend they’ve headed off countless crimes.

“The public never gets the full picture, they don’t understand these murders, these kidnappings, these violent crimes are directly tied to these organizations,” said Vio­let Szeleczky, spokeswoman for the DEA regional office in Houston. “A lot of these guys are just real dirtbags.”

Hard to spot connections

In the murky underworld, it takes time and luck to connect dots.

The accused mastermind of the Chilos attack, Jaime Zamora, 38, is charged with capital murder. He lived modestly, worked for Houston’s Parks and Recreation Department and was a Little League volunteer. State prosecutor Colleen Barnett said in court that such a profile was how he avoided detection.

Paul Looney, Zamora’s lawyer, contends the government can’t prove his client has ever touched drugs or drug money, or that he is a crime boss. He added that Zamora had never before been arrested.

“I don’t think there is a chance in hell (the prosecutor) is right about her theory of the case,” Looney said.

Court documents indicate Steven Torres, 26, one of the men charged with helping Zamora with the 2006 killing, confessed “his part involving arranging the murder.” In 2002, he was sentenced to 10 years probation after being convicted of a murder he committed when he was 16.

His lawyer could not be reached.

Authorities, saying it’s tough to spot cartel connections because the gangsters work in several jurisdictions, point to at least seven homicides in the Houston area since 2006, as well as nine home invasions and five kidnappings tied to cartels. They believe there are many more.

Among the unsolved local killings is the death of Pedro Cardenas Guillen, 36, whose last name is considered trafficking royalty. He was shot in the head and left in a ditch off Madden Road, near Fort Bend County.

His uncle is Osiel Cardenas Guillen, reputed head of the powerful Gulf Cartel. He was extradited from Mexico and awaits trial in Houston on charges of drug trafficking, money laundering and threatening to kill federal agents.

Third attempt succeeded

Other victims of what authorities believe are cartel-related murders include a husband and wife who were tortured and shot in the head on Easingwold Drive, in northwest Houston. About 220 pounds of cocaine were later found in their attic.

Some victims were in the drug business and may have owed money; others could be relatives of criminals or innocent victims, authorities say. Santiago “Chago” Salinas, 28, the crime boss who escaped death at Chilos, was killed six months later.

High on cocaine as he answered the door of a room at the Baymont Inn on the Gulf Freeway, he was shot three times in the head.

It was the third and final attempt on the life of the man who’d once been shot in the neck and left for dead in Mexico. His killing may have been the latest payback between rivals slugging it out.

Chago’s brother-in-law was killed in Mexico, as was Zamora’s younger brother, who was known as “Danny Boy” and who was a lieutenant in a trafficking organization, according to authorities. Danny Boy’s boss, a major player in the Sinaloa cartel, also was murdered in Mexico.

Survivors remember

Those who survive the wrath of cartel gangsters don’t forget.

“I thought I was going to die for sure,” recalled David DeLeon, a used-car dealer who was kidnapped on Airline Drive and severely beaten while being held for ransom, also in 2006. He was rescued by Houston police, but not before he was punched, kicked and thrown across a room so much that his face was unrecognizable.

Authorities say the kidnappers were low-ranking thugs working for a cartel cell.

In another instance, men armed with assault rifles attacked a Houston home. The resident used a handgun to kill one and wound another before the survivors left.

Norma Gonzalez, whose husband was killed at Chilos, said she believes he used his body to shield his 4-year-old daughter and infant son. Leaning over her husband in the parking lot, she whispered, “Everything is going to be OK.”

He died minutes later.

Malmö, Sweden: Muslims riot over Israeli player in Davis Cup Match

by Robert Spencer

"Davis Cup, pro-arabic anti-israeli demonstration, riots and hate," by Ted Ekeroth, March 7 (thanks to Kasper):

The demonstration against the tennis game between Israel and Sweden took place today in Malmö. Well, it wasnt just about tennis of course it was about hating everything Israel is, lying through their teeth about what Israel has done and hasn’t done, advocating for Hamas and in general hating Israel.

Around 5000 people showed up; leftwingers and muslims side by side once again. They first started with some speeches at Stortorget (where the arabic mob chased and attacked a peaceful pro-israeli rally a month before). The speakers said the normal jibberish; lies about the Gaza war, lies about “international law” and who breakes it, lies about numbers and totally insane logic in their reasoning. Nothing new about that....

Read it all. And Pamela has much more: details, photos, more video.

Vaccine maker's snafu sparks pandemic scare

By Drew Zahn

An Illinois-based vaccine manufacturer is being investigated after an experiment gone very wrong led scientists to discover the company had released a contaminated product feared capable of starting a world-wide avian flu pandemic.

The Canadian Press reports that Baxter International's European research facility in Orth-Donau, Austria, supplied materials contaminated with the deadly avian H5N1 influenza virus to a research company that then sent portions to labs in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany.

The labs thought they were receiving the less deadly, but more readily communicable, human H3N2 virus. When the Czech facility, however, injected a group of ferrets with the virus, the animals died – something that does not happen with H3N2 – prompting scientists to realize an error.

What the scientists were dealing with, in fact, was something far more dangerous.

Make an informed decision about your family's health by watching "Vaccines: The Risks, The Benefits, The Choices."

Baxter's Austrian lab had sent a mix of H3N2 seasonal viruses and unlabeled, live H5N1 viruses. H3N2 is highly communicable, but less harmful. H5N1 is less easily transmitted to humans, but often lethal. If both strains, scientists fear, were to incubate in a single subject, a hybrid virus could be birthed capable of both sweeping the globe and killing in its wake.

Baxter International

, which is based in Deerfield, Ill., said the contamination was the result of an error in its Austrian research facility.

Christopher Bona, Baxter's director of global bioscience communications, explained it as the result of a combination of "just the process itself, (and) technical and human error in this procedure."

As for the feared mixing of the viruses, called reassortment, an official of the World Health Organization's European operation believes the potential disaster was contained.

"We have no evidence of any reassortment, that any reassortment may have occurred," said medical officer Roberta Andraghetti. "And we have no evidence of any increased transmissibility of the viruses that were involved in the experiment with the ferrets in the Czech Republic."

The Canadian Press reports the 36 or 37 people exposed to the virus have received medical attention and do not appear to be infected.

Bona further told reporters that Baxter assisted in destroying the contaminated material and cleaning up the European laboratories where it was distributed. He says his company has determined where the error occurred and has taken steps to ensure it doesn't happen again.

"For this particular incident," said Dr. Angus Nicoll of the European Center for Disease Control, "the horse did not get out (of the barn)."

Dr. Nicoll, however, also pledged that the ECDC and WHO are taking the matter "seriously."

The Canadian Press reports investigations are ongoing in each of the four countries where the viruses were shipped, all under the watch of the ECDC and WHO.

The Press also reports that a number of biosecurity experts have expressed dissatisfaction with the explanation of simple error. As a biosafety level 3 facility (out of a maximum of four established safety levels, each requiring different safety precautions), the experts insist, the co-mingling of human H3N2 and avian H5N1 viruses should not be allowed to happen.

The H5N1 virus, Reuters reports, has infected over 400 people in 15 countries since 2003, killing 254 of them and leading to the culling of millions of birds around the world to contain it.

Baxter International makes flu vaccines – including a human H5N1 vaccine in process of being approved – at a facility in the Czech Republic.

Deception at Core of Obama Plans

(Compiler's note: This man is "spot on" in this must read article.)

By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.

All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.

The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:

"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The "day of reckoning" has now arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.

Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

Egyptian cleric: The Jews "are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing."

(Compiler's note: An interesting must read item.)

from Jihad Watch

They keep telling us that it isn't about "stolen land," and that land concessions and even the creation of a Palestinian state will not end the conflict. And we keep refusing to believe it.

"Egyptian Cleric Muhammad Hussein Ya’qoub: The Jews Are the Enemies of Muslims Regardless of the Occupation of Palestine," from MEMRI TV, January 17 (just posted), with thanks to Sr. Soph:

Following are excerpts from a speech delivered by Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Ya’qoub, which aired on Al-Rahma TV on January 17, 2009.

Muhammad Hussein Ya’qoub: If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. We will never love them. Absolutely not. The Jews are infidels – not because I say so, and not because they are killing Muslims, but because Allah said: “The Jews say that Uzair is the son of Allah, and the Christians say that Christ is the son of Allah. These are the words from their mouths. They imitate the sayings of the disbelievers before. May Allah fight them. How deluded they are.” It is Allah who said that they are infidels.

That's Qur'an 9:30.

Your belief regarding the Jews should be, first, that they are infidels, and second, that they are enemies. They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing. Allah said: “You shall find the strongest men in enmity to the disbelievers [sic] to be the Jews and the polytheists.”

Qur'an 5:82.

Third, you must believe that the Jews will never stop fighting and killing us. They [fight] not for the sake of land and security, as they claim, but for the sake of their religion: “And they will not cease fighting you until they turn you back you’re your religion, if they can.”

Qur'an 2:217.

This is it. We must believe that our fighting with the Jews is eternal, and it will not end until the final battle – and this is the fourth point. You must believe that we will fight, defeat, and annihilate them, until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth.

It is not me who says so. The Prophet said: “Judgment Day will not come until you fight the Jews and kill them. The Jews will hide behind stones and trees, and the stones and tree will call: Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him – except for the Gharqad tree, which is the tree of the Jews.” I have heard that they are planting many of these trees now. [...]

That Hadith can be found at Sahih Muslim 6985.

As for you Jews – the curse of Allah upon you. The curse of Allah upon you, whose ancestors were apes and pigs.

That's Qur'an 2:62-65; 5:59-60; and 7:166.

You Jews have sown hatred in our hearts, and we have bequeathed it to our children and grandchildren. You will not survive as long as a single one of us remains.

[...]

Oh Jews, may the curse of Allah be upon you. Oh Jews... Oh Allah, bring Your wrath, punishment, and torment down upon them. Allah, we pray that you transform them again, and make the Muslims rejoice again in seeing them as apes and pigs. You pigs of the earth! You pigs of the earth! You kill the Muslims with that cold pig [blood] of yours.

And now the learned analysts will turn to one another and repeat once again that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has nothing to do with theology, nothing to do with Islam.

Companies Seek H-1B Foreign Worker Primarily Because of Age Discrimination

By Norm Matloff

Ever since 1992, when I started writing about H-1B, I've been stressing that not only is H-1B centrally about cheap tech labor, cheap tech labor is in turn centrally about age. Younger workers are cheaper than older ones, both in wages and health insurance costs. Of course, in addition, the younger H-1Bs are even cheaper than the younger Americans. Result: An employer may hire a 24-year-old H-1B instead of a 24-year-old American, and usually will hire that 24-year-old H-1B instead of a 35-year-old American.

651,000 jobs cut in FEB -- Reid, Pelosi, Obama & Chamber of Commerce insist on importing more foreign workers

(Compiler's note: Must read.)

By Roy Beck

Another month has passed. Another half-million (or more) jobs have been lost. And our federal leaders continue to do nothing about auto-pilot programs that are flooding our country with foreign workers.

Nothing has changed since last year when 138,000 new foreign workers were added to the U.S. each month on average.

Here are the latest government facts that can't seem to soften the hardened hearts of our leaders . . . .

• The official unemployment rate has soared to 8.1% (highest since 1983)
• U.S. employers cut 651,000 jobs in February
• That is on top of 655,000 jobs lost in January and 681,000 jobs cut in December.
• 4.4 million -- Total jobs eliminated since the recession began in December of 2007.

The number of Americans reeling from the bad job market is staggering:

• 12.5 million Americans are actively looking for a job and cannot find even part-time employment.
• Another 8.6 million Americans want a full-time job and have been forced to work part-time.

American workers in nearly every part of the economy were under seige in February:

• Construction companies cut 104,000 jobs.
• Factories cut 168,000.
• Retailers cut nearly 40,000.
• Professional and business services cut 180,000, with 78,000 jobs lost at temporary-help agencies.
• Financial companies cut 44,000 jobs.
• Leisure and hospitality firms chopped 33,000 positions.

BUT FEDERAL LEADERS SAY MORE FOREIGN WORKERS NEEDED

Following the lead of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Pres. Obama, Senate Majority Leader Reid and House Speaker Pelosi refuse to respond to the plight of unemployed American workers and consider a suspension of most immigration and foreign worker programs.

We at NumbersUSA have said since November that the national jobs disaster requires an immediate suspension of all immigration and temporary foreign work programs except for spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens, a controlled number of emergency refugees and a few thousand truly extraordinary skilled workers for whom no American substitute is available.

With no sign of federal leaders tightening the flow, another approximately 280,000 foreign workers have been allowed to enter U.S. job markets since the first of this year alone.

Not only that, but the leaders have continued to try to protect as many U.S. jobs as possible for illegal aliens. Sen. Reid until today has refused to even allow a vote on a 5-year extension of a VOLUNTARY E-Verify program that allows businesses to make sure jobs go to legal workers.

And in the nation's top newspapers, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, ivory tower editorial writers are continuing to argue that we need more foreign workers in order to turn our economy around!

I wish they and our political leaders could have a chance to say that while looking in the eyes of the 12.5 million officially unemployed Americans.

ROY BECK is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA

CRC Open-Source Intelligence Briefs

(Compiler's note: A must read)

Maj. W. Thomas Smith Jr., Director of the Counterterrorism Research Center

SCHENECTADY, NEW YORK: Sixty-year-old Steven C. Raucci has been charged with terrorism. According to the Times Union:

“Authorities allege that on or about Nov. 30, 2006, Raucci placed a quarter stick of dynamite on the windshield of a 2004 Jeep Cherokee parked at a private home in Clifton Park with a burned cigarette attached to the fuse planning for it to explode, according to the criminal complaint.

The court document alleges he did so ‘with the intent to influence a policy of the unit of government, the Schenectady City School District by intimidation or coercion.’ Raucci is already facing felonies for bombings or attempted bombings in Rotterdam, Schodack, and Clifton Park.”

DENVER, COLORADO TO SUDAN: Black September terrorist Khalid Al-Jawary has been released from prison.

According to the AP: “[Al-Jawary] convicted of placing three powerful car bombs in New York City in 1973 has been sent to Sudan after completing his sentence and being deported by the U.S. government.”

Al-Jawary, who was captured in 1991 and convicted in 1993, was flown out of Denver, Thursday, and arrived in Khartoum, Tuesday. According to the report, “A hardened terrorist, he never cracked in prison and refused to give up information.” Yet he only served “about half of his 30-year sentence.”

THE NETHERLANDS: Hizballah operatives may have recently photographed “the area where the headquarters of the international tribunal is located in The Hague,” according to a February 28th Naharnet report:

“‘Deduce the political conclusions you want,’ [France's Le Monde] quoted the court's registrar, Robin Vincent, as saying.

“Vincent noted that Dutch security services registered three such incidents.”

Le Monde also quoted a Lebanese source who said Hizballah had “rejected a request” by the international tribunal's chief prosecutor, Daniel Bellemare, to “interrogate eight ‘Hizballah personalities.’”

According to Naharnet: A Hizballah source has denied the report, adding“such a request” is “in the author's imagination.”

Typical Hizballah response.

Then according to a follow-up report on March 3rd, Bellemare purportedly met with Hizballah “before traveling to the Hague for the start of the court's operations.”

The Lebanese Arabic-language newspaper As Safir “quoted sources from the UN commission investigating ex-Premier Rafik Hariri's assassination as saying that last week's meeting was ‘fruitful and very positive,’”praising the terrorist group’s “cooperation.”

As Safir added the sources described reports that Dutch intelligence services had arrested several Hizballah members who took photographs of the headquarters of the international tribunal” as “untrue.”

Our own sources tell us, As Safir is “an Arab nationalist daily, anti-West, and in recent years they have received financial support from Iran.'"

IRAN: Speaking of Iran, Christopher Holton at Shariah Finance Watch is reporting more on companies tied to Iran’s Bank Melli.

SOUTH AMERICA: The RAND Institute has issued a release stating the so-called “tri-border area of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay” has emerged as “the most important financing center for Islamic terrorism outside of the Middle East, channeling $20 million annually to Hizballah. At least one transfer of $3.5 million was made to Hizballah by known DVD pirate Assad Ahmad Barakat, who received a thank-you note from the Hiz­ballah leader. Barakat was labeled a ‘specially designated global ter­rorist’ by the U.S. government in 2004.”

LEBANON: Shariah Finance Watch also is reporting: “A private research firm [Info-Prod Research] has issued a report indicating that Hizballah has received an infusion of $1 Billion in cash in recent months, with $600 million coming from Iran and the rest coming from other sources, among which Qatar was mentioned prominently, donating $300 million to Hizballah. The final $100 million was reported to have come from Muslim ‘tycoons.’

“Most ominously, the report indicated that all of the major Jihadist groups–HAMAS, Hizballah and Al Qaeda–have stepped up their fundraising efforts as Muslim investors have withdrawn from Western financial markets due to the financial crisis.”

North Korea warns South's airliners during drills

SEOUL, March 5 (Reuters) - North Korea warned on Thursday it might shoot down South Korean commercial airliners flying near its territory during annual U.S.-South Korean military drills next week, ratcheting up threats against it capitalist neighbour.

"Security cannot be guaranteed for South Korean civil airplanes flying through the territorial air of our side and its vicinity ... above the East Sea of Korea (Sea of Japan) in particular, while the military exercises are under way," the North's KCNA news agency quoted a statement from a government official as saying. .....

Execute Rush Limbaugh for treason?

from WorldNetDaily

Radio

talker Stephanie Miller, outraged that Rush Limbaugh wants Barack Obama's policies to fail, has called for the nation's top talk host to be charged with treason and executed.

She made the call, not on her rather obscure radio program but on CNN's "Larry King Live" show Tuesday.

King seemed unfazed by the suggestion, neither following it up with a challenge or a question.

"To me that seems treasonous," Miller said. "If I could say something tonight that gets me that kind of attention, like maybe Rush Limbaugh should be executed for treason. How about that?"....

Bill Seeks to Let FDIC Borrow up to $500 Billion

By DAMIAN PALETTA

WASHINGTON -- Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd is moving to allow the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to temporarily borrow as much as $500 billion from the Treasury Department.

The Connecticut Democrat's effort -- which comes in response to urging from FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner -- would give the FDIC access to more money to rebuild its fund that insures consumers' deposits, which have been hard hit by a string of bank failures. ....