Tuesday, April 15, 2008

SPB News for Tuesday.


Lieberman: It's ‘a good question’ to ask if Obama is ‘a Marxist.’ — In his New York Times column today, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol claimed that Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) now-infamous “bitter” remarks sound like Karl Marx's “famous statement about religion.”

War in Iraq wrong for 62% of Americans Many adults in the United States regret their government’s decision to launch the 'coalition' effort, according to a poll by CBS News and the New York Times. 62 per cent of respondents think the U.S. should have stayed out of Iraq.


US and Iran holding 'secret' talks on nuclear programme Iran and the United States have been engaged in secret "back channel" discussions for the past five years on Iran's nuclear programme and the broader relationship between the two sworn enemies, The Independent can reveal.


Israel refused to guard Carter, sources say --Ex-president tours rocket-hit Israeli town Israel's secret service has declined to assist U.S. agents guarding former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit in which Israeli leaders have shunned him, U.S. sources told Reuters on Monday.

Tomato pickers feeling spied on --Aide says infiltrators have been at meetings What’s this? Who would spy on a couple of nonprofit human rights groups? Who would hire a professional infiltrator to sit in on the organizations’ planning sessions? Who would attack them on the Web for their efforts to improve the lives of workers who pick produce for the world’s largest fast food chains? That’s something the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Student/Farmworker Alliance would like to know. In recent months, they’ve been vilified online and in e-mails that can be traced to the Miami headquarters of Burger King, a company that’s opposed the groups’ efforts. The alliance also identified a spy in its ranks.


Co-Payments Go Way Up for Drugs With High Prices --Burden of expensive health care can now affect insured people Health insurance companies are rapidly adopting a new pricing system for expensive drugs, asking patients to pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars for prescriptions for medications. With the new pricing system, insurers abandoned the traditional arrangement that has patients pay a fixed amount, like $10, $20 or $30 for a prescription. Instead, they are charging patients a percentage of the cost of certain high-priced drugs, usually 20 to 33 percent, which can amount to thousands of dollars a month.


Fourth-largest US bank resorts to emergency fundraising America's fourth-largest bank, Wachovia, is raising $7bn (£3.52bn) through emergency fundraising as the subprime mortgage crisis in the US continues to reverberate through the banking sector. Wachovia is raising the funds through public offerings of common and convertible preference stock after incurring a surprise $350m loss in the first quarter of 2008 compared with $2.3bn in profit a year earlier.


US State Department Peyman Online covert Iran project funding This file has not been released publicly. This file [25 April 2007] provides budgetary information regarding a specific covert new media initiative funded by the US State Department that targets Iran. This document was leaked because the man who is in charge of the initiative has strong ties to Israeli Intelligence and subcontracts portions of the work to Israeli intel fronts such as MEMRI using US tax dollars. It is currently not known if this project is still being funded by the US State Department.

1 comment:

airJackie said...

Isreal has shown itself now as they refuse to protect a US President. Now it's time for the Palestinians to show they are more respectable and honor their guest. I think it's a great idea to meet with the party that won the election. It was funny how the Bush team demanded a fair election in Palestine then got made because the people picked Hamas. I guess if the person Bush wants in office isn't picked he wants a do over. Now the smart think to do would have been to send in Karl Rove to run the election as he's good at fixing elections. That plan worked twice in the US who knows it might have worked there too.