WASHINGTON, May 4 – Federal agents arrested a Pentagon analyst today, accusing him of illegally disclosing a highly classified document about possible attacks on American forces in Iraq to two employees of a pro-Israel lobbying group.

The military analyst, Lawrence A. Franklin, turned himself in to authorities this morning and was scheduled to make an initial appearance in federal court in Alexandria, Va., later in the afternoon. If convicted, he could be sentenced to a maximum of 10 years in prison.

The investigation into a midlevel career employee at the Pentagon has stirred anxious debate in some political circles in the capital. The investigation has cast a cloud over Aipac, which has close ties to senior policymakers in the Bush administration, among them Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is expected to appear later this month at the group’s annual meeting.

Moreover, the case has proven awkward for a group of conservative Republicans in civilian jobs at the Pentagon who were also close to Aipac. They were led by Paul D. Wolfowitz, formerly the deputy defense secretary, who is soon to become president of the World Bank. Mr. Franklin once worked in the office of one of Mr. Wolfowitz’s allies, Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary for policy at the Pentagon, who is also expected to be leaving soon.

According to a 10-page F.B.I. affidavit accompanying the complaint, Mr. Franklin divulged the secret information about attacks on American forces in Iraq at a lunch on June 26, 2003, attended by two senior staff members at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Four days later, F.B.I. agents who searched Mr. Franklin’s office found the top-secret document that contained the classified information.

The two Aipac employees were not identified in the complaint, but officials said the men were Steven Rosen, formerly the group’s policy director, and Keith Weissman, formerly its deputy director for foreign policy issues, who have long been under scrutiny in the case.

Aipac has denied any wrongdoing in the matter and a person who has been briefed on legal deliberations in the case said the group was not a target of the inquiry. The organization had recently taken action to distance itself from the two men. Two weeks ago the group said it had dismissed Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman after months of defending them.

Mr. Franklin was suspended last year, along with his security clearance, but he had been rehired in recent months in a nonsensitive job. He has been employed by the Defense Department since 1979 and is a colonel in the Air Force reserve.

Associates of the civilian group at the Pentagon said they had been unfairly attacked by critics from inside the country’s intelligence agencies with whom they have clashed since before the war in Iraq. They believe there have been other attempts to embarrass them, including last year when American officials said that Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress and longtime ally of Pentagon conservatives, had told Iranian intelligence officials that the United States had broken its communications codes.

The government said today that the investigation into the disclosure of classified documents was continuing, and officials said that Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman remained under scrutiny, although their lawyers have said that they have done nothing wrong.

Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman had regular discussions with Israeli officials about the Middle East and investigators have long said that they believed the Aipac employees turned over classified information to Israeli intelligence, although the government documents disclosed today made no mention of it.

During the June 2003 lunch at a restaurant in Arlington, Va., which was apparently held under F.B.I. surveillance, Mr. Franklin disclosed the information related to the potential attack on American forces in Iraq, according to the affidavit. It said that Mr. Franklin told the two men “that the information was ‘highly classified’ and asked them not to ‘use’ it.”

The affidavit, signed by Catherine M. Hanna, an F.B.I. agent, said Mr. Franklin had engaged in other illegal acts. The complaint said he had disclosed government information to an unidentified foreign official and to journalists. In addition, investigators found 83 classified documents in his home in West Virginia. The documents had dates that spanned more than three decades.
Full:nytimes.com

The M35 bus at night is a place of weary faces and empty pockets. It runs from Spanish Harlem to the largest men’s homeless shelter in the city. Every night, men file on to get to a place to sleep. Sometimes they pay the $2 fare; sometimes they pay just a penny.

In recent years, other riders have appeared, just as scruffy but with a different goal. These are undercover police officers, aboard to arrest fare-beaters.

The arrests are part of a policy that began in the 1990’s, when the New York Police Department took aim at minor crimes, like unlicensed street peddling and fare-beating. Since then, violent crime has fallen sharply, but arrests for minor crimes remain high. Misdemeanor arrests are up by 60 percent from 1990.

Arrests for minor crimes, the city says, lead to people the police are already looking for and deter more serious crimes.
nytimes.com

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) – After an alternately comic and fiery debate – punctuated by several lawmakers waving pompons – the state House on Tuesday approved a bill to restrict “overtly sexually suggestive” cheerleading to more ladylike performances.

The bill would give the state education commissioner authority to request that school districts review high school performances.
“Girls can get out and do all of these overly sexually performances and we applaud them and that’s not right,” said Democratic Rep. Al Edwards, who filed the legislation.

Edwards argued bawdy performances are a distraction for students resulting in pregnancies, dropouts and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
Full: apnews.myway.com Wow. That’s some powerful cheerleading.

FORT HOOD, Texas (AP) – A military judge on Wednesday threw out Pfc. Lynndie England’s guilty plea to prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, saying he was not convinced that she knew her actions were wrong at the time.

Col. James Pohl entered a plea of not guilty for England to a charge of conspiring with Pvt. Charles Graner Jr. to maltreat detainees at the Baghdad-area prison.

The mistrial for the 22-year-old reservist, who appeared in some of the most notorious photographs from the 2003 abuse scandal, kicks the case back to the military equivalent of a grand jury proceeding.

The action came after Graner, the reputed ringleader of the abuse, testified as a defense witness at England’s sentencing hearing that pictures he took of England holding a naked prisoner on a leash at Abu Ghraib were meant to be used as a legitimate training aid for other guards.
Full: apnews.myway.coma real testament to the calibre of the American soldier

An Italian website that published a photo montage of Pope Benedict XVI dressed in a Nazi uniform was told to suspend its activities on Wednesday for offending the Roman Catholic religion, court officials said.

Rome prosecutors accuse the Indymedia Italia site, which is part of a network of alternative media websites, of causing offense to the Catholic religion by publishing the photo montage alongside the caption “Nazi pope”.

Under Italian law, the offense is punishable by up to one year in jail.

The website, which is registered under the name of a Brazilian-based company, Indipendent Media Center, was still online Wednesday evening and showing the controversial image despite the court ruling.

Italy’s largest press union, FNSI, slammed the decision as an “unacceptable attack on critical and satirical freedom”.

“Indymedia publishes without any form of censorship any kind of electronic message — that is the basis of its editorial policy,” said the FNSI’s secretary general, Paolo Serventi Longhi.
Full: news.yahoo.com

On Dec. 14, 2004, in the predawn hours, a large convoy of U.N. troops entered the Port-au-Prince slum of Cite Soleil. They began firing. Esterlin Marie Carmelle was in bed with her 2-year-old son, Herlens. Her husband got out of bed to get ready for work. The shooting intensified, and she remained in bed beside her child. According to a Harvard Law School report the following occurred:

“Ms. Carmelle recalled, she `felt something warm’ on her arm and said to her husband, ‘I feel like I got hit with a bullet.’ She told us that she realized that ‘it wasn’t me who had been shot,’ as her boy lay limp and lifeless beside her, his ‘blood and brain matter were sliding down my arm.’ Though Ms. Carmelle said that she then passed out, her husband told us that a stray bullet had entered their shack with such force that it had removed part of their child’s head, leaving Herlens to die in his mother’s arms.”

When U.N. troops are not engaged in these kinds of incursions, they can usually be found providing support for the Haitian National Police as they execute peaceful demonstrators demanding the return of their democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Just last week, five Haitians were killed by the Haitian National Police while U.N. troops stood by watching. The Haitians’ crime was that they were peacefully demonstrating for the release of political prisoners in Haiti.

On Feb. 28, 2005, demonstrators met the same fate and were executed by the Haitian National Police while peacefully protesting. Amnesty International has also reported ”incidents in which individuals dressed in black . . . and traveling in cars with Haitian National Police markings have cost the lives of at least 11 people.”.”

Just this week, Amnesty condemned the Haitian police for their ”use of lethal and indiscriminate violence” to “disperse and repress demonstrators.”

The Bush administration’s response has been to place more weapons in the hands of these police. During Haiti’s democratic administrations, the U.S. government imposed a full-scale arms embargo on nonlethal as well as lethal weapons to the Haitian Police. They could not even buy bullet-proof vests or tear gas to disperse crowds.

In November 2004, however, John Bolton, as under secretary for arms control in the Department of State, signed off on providing the current police, under a nondemocratic government, more than 3,635 M14 rifles, 1,100 Mini Galils, several thousand assorted 0.38-caliber pistols, 3,700 MP5s and approximately one million rounds of ammunition, according to the Small Arms Survey, an authoritative resource published by the Graduate Institute of International Studies, located in Geneva.

It is no surprise that Bolton is at the center of this controversy as well. He has been one of the hard-liners in the State Department who sought the overthrow of Aristide and who bullied intelligence analysts on Haiti who were trying to provide a more-balanced picture. Even his cohort in overthrowing Aristide, Otto Reich, was quoted as stating that they both rightfully went after an intelligence analyst who gave the ”benefit of the doubt” to Aristide as the democratically elected president.
Full: counterpunch.org

Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If he were alive today, he would consider US policy toward Colombia insane.

Last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Colombia, the region’s largest recipient of US aid, where she praised Plan Colombia as “very successful.” In 2000, Congress passed “Plan Colombia” with the stated purpose of reducing the supply of cocaine to the US. Five years and $4 billion later (80 percent, or $3.2 billion, of which went to Colombian military), Plan Colombia is set to expire. But the Bush Administration has already requested $600 million in the budget to continue funding it. As Rice said on her visit to Colombia, “You don’t stop in midstream on something that has been very effective.”

But exactly how “effective” has Plan Colombia been? Before the American people are asked to continue spending $2 million a day on aid to Colombia, they should take a closer at the Plan.

If Plan Colombia was intended to reduce the supply of cocaine, raise its cost, and therefore, cut the numbers of users, then the program has been a costly failure. After five years, the price of cocaine is lower, and the number of cocaine users is growing. According to a recent unclassified report from the National Drug Intelligence Center, “key indicators of domestic cocaine availability show stable or slightly increased availability in drug markets throughout the country.”

Plan Colombia’s failure to reduce the supply of cocaine to the US should not be surprising. We have years of experience and mountains of studies that should lead us to not expect otherwise. Since 1980, the US has spent nearly $45 billion on stemming the flow of illicit drugs into the country. Illicit drug prices have dropped dramatically over that period.

…the US has funded war in Colombia, exacerbating the human rights and humanitarian crisis there. In February, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights reported that, “the human rights situation continued to be critical. There was an increase in reports of extrajudicial executions attributed to members of the security forces and other public officials. High levels of torture and forced disappearances continued.”

After years of US training and military build up, last year, the Colombian army launched the largest military operation in modern Colombian history, which, according to the New York Times, was designed “to make potentially oil-rich regions safe for exploration by private companies and the government-run oil company.” Civilians bore the brunt of that operation as evidenced by a startling 38 percent increase in the number of Colombians forcibly displaced, from 207,607 in 2003 to 287,581 in 2004, according to the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement.
Full:zmag.org

Parents would certainly deny it, but Canadian researchers have made a startling assertion: parents take better care of pretty children than they do ugly ones.

Researchers at the University of Alberta carefully observed how parents treated their children during trips to the supermarket. They found that physical attractiveness made a big difference.

The researchers noted if the parents belted their youngsters into the grocery cart seat, how often the parents’ attention lapsed and the number of times the children were allowed to engage in potentially dangerous activities like standing up in the shopping cart. They also rated each child’s physical attractiveness on a 10-point scale.

The findings, not yet published, were presented at the Warren E. Kalbach Population Conference in Edmonton, Alberta.

When it came to buckling up, pretty and ugly children were treated in starkly different ways, with seat belt use increasing in direct proportion to attractiveness. When a woman was in charge, 4 percent of the homeliest children were strapped in compared with 13.3 percent of the most attractive children. The difference was even more acute when fathers led the shopping expedition – in those cases, none of the least attractive children were secured with seat belts, while 12.5 percent of the prettiest children were.
Full: nytimes.com

Seems when I least expect it I am just struck by the sickness of Western ‘culture.’ I don’t even know what an ‘ugly’ child is! In fact, human beings in general are beautiful to me. Somebody actually paid for this ‘study’. Amazing.

FORT HOOD, Texas (AP) – Defense lawyers sought leniency for Pfc. Lynndie England at a hearing Tuesday to determine her punishment in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, with a psychologist testifying that the reservist was oxygen-deprived at birth, speech impaired and had trouble learning to read.
West Virginia school psychologist Dr. Thomas Denne – the first defense witness – said England’s learning disabilities were identified when she was a kindergartner – and though she made progress in school, she continued needing special help.
Full: apnews.myway.com

How did she get into the military then? You have to have a diploma and pass the ASVAB test. Of course, I had a kid come to me and tell me the recruiter sat down next to him and did the test for him. He also is ‘learning impaired.’ Anyway, people like this make the ideal soldier, and when the sh** hits the fan, they can take the fall too. Perfect.

Empathy allows us to feel the emotions of others, to identify and understand their feelings and motives and see things from their perspective. How we generate empathy remains a subject of intense debate in cognitive science.

Some scientists now believe they may have finally discovered its root. We’re all essentially mind readers, they say.

The idea has been slow to gain acceptance, but evidence is mounting.

Mirror neurons

In 1996, three neuroscientists were probing the brain of a macaque monkey when they stumbled across a curious cluster of cells in the premotor cortex, an area of the brain responsible for planning movements. The cluster of cells fired not only when the monkey performed an action, but likewise when the monkey saw the same action performed by someone else. The cells responded the same way whether the monkey reached out to grasp a peanut, or merely watched in envy as another monkey or a human did.

Because the cells reflected the actions that the monkey observed in others, the neuroscientists named them “mirror neurons.”

Later experiments confirmed the existence of mirror neurons in humans and revealed another surprise. In addition to mirroring actions, the cells reflected sensations and emotions.

“Mirror neurons suggest that we pretend to be in another person’s mental shoes,” says Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine. “In fact, with mirror neurons we do not have to pretend, we practically are in another person’s mind.”
Full:livescience.com