General Michael V. Hayden is favourite to step up to take the head position at the CIA after the resignation of Porter J Goss who stepped down in advance of the revelations that he and a top aide may have attended Watergate poker parties where bribes and hookers were provided to corrupt congressmen.

Hayden is National Intelligence Director John Negroponte’s senior deputy.

“Such a move would bring further power to Mr Negroponte, a rising star of the administration.” reports the London Independent.

Negroponte’s job is to coordinate the work of 16 different intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the giant National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on international communications, as well as the Energy Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The role was created immediately after 9/11 and ties in with the Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness Program, which seeks to gather a “lifetime paper trail” of all citizens and centralize the information on a giant database.

The co-ordination of all intelligence gathering services by Negroponte is the first step of this nightmarish Orwellian program. The excuse for all this is of course the war on terror.
prisonplanet.com

The Spy Master Cracks the Whip
How John Negroponte won control of the CIA, and what he plans next to consolidate rival agencies and his power.

CIA Nominee Hayden Linked to MZM
Hayden, President Bush’s pick to replace Porter Goss as head of the CIA, contracted with MZM Inc. for the services of Lt. Gen. James C. King, then a senior vice president of the company, the sources say. MZM was owned and operated by Mitchell Wade, who has admitted to bribing former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham with $1.4 million in money and gifts. Wade has also reportedly told investigators he helped arrange for prostitutes to entertain the disgraced lawmaker, and he continues to cooperate with a federal inquiry into the matter.

King has not been implicated in the growing scandal around Wade’s illegal activities. However, federal records show he contributed to some of Wade’s favored lawmakers, including $6000 to Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) and $4000 to Rep. Katherine Harris (R-FL).

Before joining MZM in December 2001, King served under Hayden as the NSA’s associate deputy director for operations, and as head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.

ATHENS – A double anger erupted out of the European Social Forum on to the streets of Athens Saturday. Anti-globalization protesters attacked police and multinational targets, alongside local groups protesting injustice to immigrants.

The two came together naturally at the European Social Forum (ESF) that began Thursday. ESF participants had planned a large demonstration through Athens for Saturday afternoon. The police were expecting trouble, but were still caught off guard.

The center of Athens was cordoned off all afternoon by heavy police contingents. Government buildings and the embassies of the United States and Britain were under visibly heavy protection.

It was a small group from the demonstration, believed to be the Anarchists. The police said at the end of the day that two of their vehicles were damaged by petrol bombs. Petrol bombs also damaged a Citibank building, the police said.

The attacks had clearly been planned beforehand. Other groups emerged from the side streets on Ermou street, the most fashionable shopping center in Athens. They attacked stores, particularly those of multinational chains such as McDonald’s and Lacoste. Several glass panes were smashed along the street in hit and run attacks.

Anti-globalization anarchists picked their predictable targets, but the demonstrators’ anger was clearly fueled by the government’s anti- immigration policies that keep close to a million people in a population of 10 million without rights and without status.
commondreams.org

The World Bank warned donors on Sunday that the financial crisis gripping the Palestinian Authority since Hamas won election was deeper than it first thought and could render the West Bank and Gaza ungovernable.
haaretz.com

‘Ungovernable’ by the Palestinians, anyway. Now we see the set-up that was the ‘Palestinian Authority’: the West pulls the strings and now they can choke Palestine to death.

The Knesset will mark a special day dedicated to Theodor Herzl on Monday evening, in accordance with a law passed two years ago. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said during a speech that “we must ensure that there will be a proven Jewish majority in the State of Israel, otherwise the term Jewish state becomes empty of meaning. The obligation of the national leadership is to be responsible to the vision of Herzl and to ensure a Jewish majority in the State.”
ynetnews.com

A militia group with immense power in Iraq has issued names of 461 intellectuals which it says it has ordered its armed men to assassinate.

The name list is distributed across the country and copies are not hard to obtain in Baghdad.

Several Iraq-related websites have issued the names.

The list includes some of the brightest Iraqi authors, journalists, doctors and scientists.

Azzaman obtained the list from the Iraqi Writers Union which declined to reveal the name of the factional group calling for the killing of the 461 intellectuals, citing security concerns.

…’The list is part of an organized, foreign-backed campaign to terrorize Iraqi brains,’ a source at the union said.
azzaman.com

Jack Straw’s fate was sealed in a phone call from the White House to Tony Blair last month, according to the former foreign secretary’s friends.

They say President George Bush was furious that Mr Straw said it was “nuts” to use nuclear weapons against Iran, an option reported to be under active consideration in Washington.

Downing Street had already warned Mr Straw repeatedly to tone down his complete rejection of the military route as “inconceivable”, insisting it was important to keep all options on the table.
prisonplanet.com

…A bruising battle looms in New York at a dinner of foreign ministers of the five UN Security Council veto-holding members, plus Germany, over UN plans to compel Iran to abandon uranium enrichment. The high-stakes talks at the Waldorf hotel will be the first official duty for Margaret Beckett, who replaced Jack Straw as Foreign Secretary on Friday, and could result in an embarrassing climb-down for Britain.
independent.co.uk

…”The Taliban and Al-Qaida are everywhere,” a shopkeeper, Haji Saifullah, told the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, as he strolled through Tirin KotŐs bazaar to talk to people. “It is all right in the city, but if you go outside the city, they are everywhere and the people have to support them. They have no choice.”
paktribune.com

Invisible “smog”, created by the electricity that powers our civilization, is giving children cancer, causing miscarriages and suicides and making some people allergic to modern life, new scientific evidence reveals.

The evidence – which is being taken seriously by national and international bodies and authorities – suggests that almost everyone is being exposed to a new form of pollution with countless sources in daily use in every home.
commondreams.org

This is not new information.

Global warming is rapidly melting the ice-bound roof of the world, and turning it into desert, leading scientists have revealed.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences – the country’s top scientific body – has announced that the glaciers of the Tibetan plateau are vanishing so fast that they will be reduced by 50 per cent every decade. Each year enough water permanently melts from them to fill the entire Yellow River.

They added that the vast environmental changes brought about by the process will increase droughts and sandstorms over the rest of the country, and devastate many of the world’s greatest rivers, in what experts warn will be an “ecological catastrophe”.

The plateau, says the academy, has a staggering 46,298 glaciers, covering almost 60,000 square miles. At an average height of 13,000 feet above sea level, they make up the largest area of ice outside the polar regions, nearly a sixth of the world’s total.
commondreams.org