Karen Hughes Quits

Reuters - State Department's image guru Karen Hughes quits

The U.S. State Department's public diplomacy chief and image guru Karen Hughes, one of the last survivors of President George W. Bush's original inner circle, said on Wednesday she would quit and return to Texas.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Hughes would step down in mid-December but the former television reporter would remain a consultant for the State Department.

Call for Surveillance Cameras in Terror Suspect’s Home

AP - Canadian officials call for surveillance cameras to be placed in terror suspect's home

Canadian officials took the unprecedented step of asking a judge to install closed-circuit video cameras inside a terrorism suspect's home.

Government lawyer Donald MacIntosh said Monday that he hopes the Federal Court will approve the heightened surveillance for Mahmoud Jaballah, an Egyptian asylum-seeker who Canadian officials have accused of being a "communications link" in al-Qaeda's 1998 African embassy bombings.

MacIntosh said he knows of no jurisdiction that has tried installing closed-circuit cameras in a suspect's home, but he intends to submit a formal argument before a hearing next month.

Jaballah, who already lives under extremely strict house arrest, has never been charged with a criminal offense but spent nearly all of 1997 to 2007 in a Canadian jail. Attempts to deport him to Egypt, a country known to torture fundamentalists, failed on humanitarian grounds.

He is being held under Canada's controversial "security certificate" system, which allows the government to detain and deport foreign-born terrorist suspects without charging them or providing them with evidence of their allegations. Aspects of the certificate system were ruled unconstitutional by Canada's Supreme Court in February.

Jaballah recently agreed to live under extraordinary surveillance, in return for being let out of jail in April.

Past measures have included having suspects submit to being followed by federal agents during their few weekly excursions, having their calls monitored, staying away from computers and having video cameras installed outside the home. Never before has any Canadian prisoner on bail been known to have had to countenance cameras inside their house.

Prosecutors in the Jaballah case argued last week in court that surveillance in his home is critical for reasons of national security.

Lawyers acting for Jaballah are resisting added surveillance and fighting for increased liberties.

The Federal Court is currently weighing a motion for Jaballah, a former principal at a Toronto Islamic school, to be let out of his Toronto home to teach school lessons to Muslim children. He currently lives at home with his wife and five children.

It’s insane how a person in this country can be detained for such a ridiculous amount of time and have basic freedoms taken away without ever being convicted and in this case, without even being charged.

Drug Firms Bribing Doctors

The Guardian - Drug firms try to bribe doctors with cars

Multinational drug companies are targeting doctors in developing countries with dinners and lavish gifts, such as air conditioners, washing machines and down-payments on cars, as incentives to prescribe their drugs, a report reveals today.

The report from Consumers International (CI) says that self-regulation by the multinational drug giants has failed, citing drug adverts by companies such as Glaxo-SmithKline, Wyeth, Novartis and Pfizer that would be considered misleading in Europe, as well as the heavy promotion by all companies of products to doctors.

Here is a related post: Bristol-Myers Squibb to Pay $515 Million for Doctor Kickback Scheme

Water Shortage

AP - Many states seen facing water shortages

An epic drought in Georgia threatens the water supply for millions. Florida doesn't have nearly enough water for its expected population boom. The Great Lakes are shrinking. Upstate New York's reservoirs have dropped to record lows. And in the West, the Sierra Nevada snowpack is melting faster each year. Across America, the picture is critically clear — the nation's freshwater supplies can no longer quench its thirst.

The government projects that at least 36 states will face water shortages within five years because of a combination of rising temperatures, drought, population growth, urban sprawl, waste and excess.

Photographer Was Told Diana Was to Announce Engagement or Pregnancy

Daily Express - GET TO RITZ FAST...DIANA ANNOUNCING PREGNANCY

PAPARAZZI photographers had been told to expect Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed to announce their engagement or a pregnancy on the night they died, the inquest heard yesterday.

Thierry Orban, a photo-reporter with the Sygma photo agency, told the police his duty chief editor Guillaume Vall­abreque had phoned him at home between 9pm and 9.30pm to ask him to go the Ritz Hotel specifically because news was expected.

“He told me that there was a rumour of an announcement that Diana was getting married or having a baby and he asked me to go to the Ritz to take a few photos of Diana with Dodi Al Fayed,” he said in a statement read to the jury.

Mr Orban, however, said he initially refused because he was having dinner at home with friends.

He was called again at around 11pm by his colleague Jacques Langevin, who asked him to take over from him outside the Ritz, but he again refused.

Around two hours later, he was told there had been a crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. He went there and found Mr Langevin and other paparazzi near the wreckage of Diana and Dodi’s Mercedes.

He said he stayed at the scene until a police van carrying a group of photographers and an ambulance taking the stricken Princess to hospital left the tunnel.

Mr Orban, 52, followed the ambulance, taking a photograph when it stopped just a short distance from the Pitie Salpetriere Hospital, where Diana eventually died.

“The ambulance stopped, the driver got out and got into the back. That was when I took the only photograph of the ambulance, which in any case was blurry,” he said.

“It was rocking as if they were doing a cardiac massage.”

“Then the ambulance carried on to the Pitie Salpetriere Hospital. From there, I turned back.”

The inquest jury also heard parts of a statement made by hire car chauffeur Eric Li-Falandry, who was driving past the tunnel shortly after the crash and stopped to help.

He told the police he approached the car and saw people tending to the front seat passenger, bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones – now known as Trevor Rees – and a woman passenger in the back, although he did not realise at the time that the woman was Princess Diana

Mr Li-Falandry, 47, described the moment Diana opened her eyes.

“I looked in the back of the car and saw a woman sitting on the floor with her back against the rear right-hand door as someone attended to her,” he said.

“I noticed her open her eyes. I said to myself that she was alive and therefore went on to the driver.

“I saw his white hand and knew that he was dead. I could not see his face.

“As I was about to help the person tending to the woman, I noticed the police arrive. Not wanting to hinder the emergency services and, upset by what I had just seen, I decided to return to my vehicle. It was only later, on listening to the radio, that I found out that it was the Princess.”

A British solicitor told crash investigators he saw two cars he believed were fleeing the area around the Alma tunnel at high speed about the time of the crash.

Extracts from statements made by Gary Hunter, now dead, were read to the jury yesterday.

He said he saw a small black car followed by a larger white car travel beneath his hotel window.

British police officers suggested the two cars could have had nothing to do with the crash because, if they had emerged from the tunnel and followed the proper traffic signals, they would have had to travel one-and-a-half miles, to get to the position where Mr Hunter saw them, in around one minute.

However, Michael Mansfield QC, for Dodi’s father Mohamed Al Fayed, asked whether the Scotland Yard team working for former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Stevens had investigated if the cars could have come from the slip road beside the tunnel.

The court was told the Scotland Yard team, which spent £3.69million of taxpayers’ money investigating conspiracy theories around the crash, had not. The police agreed to look into it yesterday.

The inquest continues.

Other posts about the inquest can be seen here.

Witness at Diana Inquest: I Saw a Flash

Daily Express - ANOTHER WITNESS: I SAW BLINDING FLASHES

AN American businessman who was in a taxi overtaken by Princess Diana’s Mercedes described last night seeing a “significant flash of light” a second before the crash.

Brian Anderson said he saw the Mercedes being pursued by at least three motorcycles a few hundred yards before it reached the Alma tunnel.

And then suddenly, after they disappeared from view, there was a “pretty significant flash of light”. He said the light appeared to come from towards the front and left of his car – perhaps from boats on the River Seine – as it sped along the riverside expressway.

“I saw the flash of light, which again didn’t strike me at the time because it’s where the illumination of the boats takes place, but a pretty significant flash of light,” he said.

Asked whether it had come from the boats on the Seine, he replied: “Yes, it came from that vicinity.”

A second later, he heard what sounded like an explosion. Describing the sequence, he said: “Flash. Explosion. Audio noise. It was a very large noise that sounded like an explosion. There was a half second between them.”

Mr Anderson, 53, who was giving evidence by video link from California, told the inquest his car stopped between 40 and 100 yards from the tunnel entrance.

“We came to a rapid stop and I saw an object passing in front of us and into the right side of the tunnel. It was the black Mercedes,” he said.

Seconds earlier, he had seen the Mercedes driving rapidly in the left lane of the carriageway down the expressway with three motorbikes just behind. In a statement to police, he said: “The bikes were in a cluster, like a swarm, around the Mercedes.” One of the motorcycles had two riders and the others had just one, he told the hearing.

Driving past the wreckage, Mr Anderson said he thought he saw one of the motorbikes parked in front of the mangled Mercedes.

On Monday, Francois Levistre told the hearing he had seen a bright flash of light in the tunnel.

Mr Anderson was interviewed by Scotland Yard officers between 2004 and 2006. He said he had also given an interview to French police but they claimed they had never spoken to him.

Ian Burnett, QC, for the coroner, said that Mr Anderson had given differing accounts of what he saw in five interviews with US media organisations in 10 years. He had not previously mentioned seeing a bright flash of light from the river and he had described seeing only two motorcycles.

Asked why his accounts varied, Mr Anderson, an international management consultant, said that thinking about what he had seen over the years had triggered further memories.

Other posts about the inquest can be seen here.

Iran Wins Neighbors' Pledge Not to Help U.S. Attack

Bloomberg - Iran Wins Neighbors' Pledge Not to Help U.S. Attack

Iran, facing U.S. pressure over its nuclear program, secured a pledge from Russia and the other three nations that surround the Caspian Sea not to allow America or its allies to launch an attack on it from their soil.

The presidents of Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan signed a joint declaration in Tehran today to prohibit third countries from using their territory for attacks on one another "under any circumstances.''

Secret Cremations Hide Burma Killings

The Sunday Times - Secret cremations hide Burma killings

THE Burmese army has burnt an undetermined number of bodies at a crematorium sealed off by armed guards northeast of Rangoon over the past seven days, ensuring that the exact death toll in the recent pro-democracy protests will never be known.

Other related posts can be seen here.

Diana Crash Witness Statements

Daily Mail - Diana witness had to swerve to avoid slow moving 'light-coloured' car seconds before the crash

A driver has told how he was forced to avoid a 'light-coloured' car driving 'extremely slowly' into the Alma tunnel just seconds before the crash which claimed Princess Diana's life.

David Laurent claimed the car, possibly a Fiat Uno, was travelling at little more than 18mph, forcing him to pull at speed into another lane.The limit in the underpass is 31mph.

Other posts about the inquest can be seen here.

Richard Tomlinson to Make Statements at Diana Inquest

Daily Express - DRIVER 'MET MI6 SPY' ON CRASH NIGHT

Renegade spy Richard Tomlinson will tell the Princess Diana inquest that he believes Ritz hotel security chief Henri Paul met an MI6 handler on the night she died.

Today we also reveal a French spy chief allegedly seen chatting to Paul on the night of the crash is refusing to give evidence at the inquest.

Mr Tomlinson, a former MI6 officer once jailed for leaking Government secrets, will make sensational claims via a videolink from his bolthole in France to the inquest in London.

He is refusing to return to Britain to give evidence in person because he fears he will be arrested and jailed. Cambridge-educated Mr Tomlinson, 40, will give evidence supporting the claim by Harrods tycoon Mohamed Al Fayed that there was an Establishment plot to kill Diana to stop her marrying his son, Dodi, a Muslim.

Private testimony that Mr Tomlinson gave earlier caused ructions within MI6, leading to him being closely monitored by the British security services. Mr Tomlinson told the French examining magistrate Herve Stephan that a Frenchman working in the security department at the Paris Ritz was on MI6’s books.

He added: “I cannot claim that I remember from reading this file that the name of the person was Henri Paul but I have no doubt with the benefit of hindsight that it was he.”

In 2001 he claimed: “Henri Paul, who was the driver at the time of the accident, was an MI6 informer and, rather interestingly, he was missing for about half an hour before the accident.

“No one knows where he was and then when he was killed he was found with a very high alcohol level in his blood and a very substantial amount of money in his pocket.

“Now putting those three pieces of circumstantial evidence together, I suspect that shortly prior to his death he was in a meeting with his MI6 handler.

“I think that MI6 should hand over his personal file as a witness statement because clearly in an inquest into his death, knowing where he was for that missing half hour, who he was with and how much alcohol he had drunk are very important factors.

“What I am saying is that there is important information in MI6 files and I think that they should be handed over to the judge in charge of the inquest.”

Speaking exclusively to the Sunday Express from his home in France, Mr Tomlinson said he will reveal discussions he had within MI6 in May 1992 with a colleague about an assassination plot.

The Sunday Express has been given the identity of the MI6 man he spoke to but we are not publishing his name on the grounds that his security may be compromised.

Mr Tomlinson said: “I was having a serious discussion with a colleague on developing and targeting operations in the Balkans. These were known as P/40s. He handed me a Y-file, identified as most restricted by the yellow stripe on the front. Inside was a document, two typed pages long, with a small yellow card attached to signify it was an accountable account rather than a draft proposal.

“Accountable meant it was in a ready to act state. It was entitled ‘The Need to Assassinate President Milosevic of Serbia’. I distributed it to senior MI6 officers.

“There were detailed discussions and the consensus was that a stun device could be used to dazzle the driver’s gaze of Milosevic’s car as it passed through the Geneva tunnel, forcing him to crash.”

Milosevic was to attend an international conference on the former Yugoslavia.

Mr Tomlinson added: “What later struck me about the deaths of Diana and Dodi was that the claims how they had died mimicked what was in the document on how to assassinate Milosevic.

“I will testify that the Y-file document shows Henri Paul could have been blinded as he drove through the Paris underpass by a high-powered flashlight.

“The Y-file proves this was a technique which, at the time of Diana and Dodi’s deaths, was consistent with MI6 methods.”

The inquest into the death of Diana and Dodi has seen CCTV footage of the couple in and around the Ritz Hotel in Paris on the night of August 30, 1997.

But the inquest has been told there were gaps in the movements of Henri Paul, the hotel’s acting head of security. He left the hotel between 7pm and 10pm, thinking his duties were over, but returned when Diana and Mr Fayed unexpectedly returned to the hotel for a meal.

Where Mr Paul went during those crucial three hours has never been fully explained. There is also a period when he went missing for eight and a half minutes from 10.22pm when he was not picked up on any CCTV cameras.

The investigation into the crash carried out by former Metropolitan Police chief Lord Stevens decided that Mr Tomlinson was unreliable and that he had embellished his accounts.

Scotland Yard detectives working for Lord Stevens carried out detailed investigations at MI6. They discovered that an MI6 officer, codenamed Fish, did write a proposal in 1993 to assassinate an extremist Balkans leader, but it was not Milosevic, and senior officers in the service said the man was acting alone and the plan would not have been sanctioned.

Mr Tomlinson said: “The two Stevens’ detectives said in their own inquiries at MI6 that it became very clear that what I had told them, and which they had confirmed in the MI6 files, would have an important influence on how the Stevens inquiry finally reported.

“There is no doubt at all there was a major intelligence presence in events leading up to the death of Princess Diana and Dodi.”

New Zealand born Mr Tomlinson joined MI6 as agent D/813317 in 1991. He worked as a “targeting officer”, serving in the Balkans and Moscow. Later he served in the East European Controllerate, one of the most important departments in the Secret Intelligence Service. It gave him access to the highly restricted Y-files.

He was sacked in 1995 and was jailed for a year in December 1997 for breaching the Official Secrets Act, a sentence which has left him with bitter memories.

He says he does not know why he was sacked, but admits he was depressed when he finished working in Bosnia because of the dreadful sights he witnessed. Last March the Crown Prosecution Service announced that it would not be prosecuting Mr Tomlinson for offences under the Official Secrets Act.

The then Attorney General Lord Goldsmith decided it would not be in the public interest to continue legal action against him.

It was alleged that Mr Tomlinson had committed blackmail offences by threatening to make more disclosures because Scotland Yard would not return computers seized from him.

Other posts about the inquest can be seen here.

Terror Charges for Owning a Book

BBC - Boy in court on terror charges

A British teenager who is accused of possessing material for terrorist purposes has appeared in court.

The 17-year-old, who was arrested in the Dewsbury area of West Yorkshire on Monday, was given bail after a hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court.

It is alleged he had a copy of the "Anarchists' Cookbook", containing instructions on how to make home-made explosives.

His next court hearing has been set for 25 October.

The teenager faces two charges under the Terrorism Act 2000.

The first charge relates to the possession of material for terrorist purposes in October last year.

The second relates to the collection or possession of information useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism.

He stood in the dock wearing a baggy, blue hooded top and only spoke to confirm his name and date of birth.

After the 40-minute hearing, the teenager was released on bail under several conditions.

A second 17-year-old who is facing similar charges has already been remanded in custody and will also appear at the Crown Court on 25 October.

The Anarchist Cookbook

Bombshock archives

National Guard Troops Denied Benefits

NBC - National Guard Troops Denied Benefits After Longest Deployment Of Iraq War

When they came home from Iraq, 2,600 members of the Minnesota National Guard had been deployed longer than any other ground combat unit. The tour lasted 22 months and had been extended as part of President Bush's surge.

1st Lt. Jon Anderson said he never expected to come home to this: A government refusing to pay education benefits he says he should have earned under the GI bill.

"It's pretty much a slap in the face," Anderson said. "I think it was a scheme to save money, personally. I think it was a leadership failure by the senior Washington leadership... once again failing the soldiers."

Anderson's orders, and the orders of 1,161 other Minnesota guard members, were written for 729 days.

Had they been written for 730 days, just one day more, the soldiers would receive those benefits to pay for school.

"Which would be allowing the soldiers an extra $500 to $800 a month," Anderson said.

That money would help him pay for his master's degree in public administration. It would help Anderson's fellow platoon leader, John Hobot, pay for a degree in law enforcement.

"I would assume, and I would hope, that when I get back from a deployment of 22 months, my senior leadership in Washington, the leadership that extended us in the first place, would take care of us once we got home," Hobot said.

Both Hobot and Anderson believe the Pentagon deliberately wrote orders for 729 days instead of 730. Now, six of Minnesota's members of the House of Representatives have asked the Secretary of the Army to look into it -- So have Senators Amy Klobuchar and Norm Coleman.

Klobuchar said the GI money "shouldn't be tied up in red tape," and Coleman said it's "simply irresponsible to deny education benefits to those soldiers who just completed the longest tour of duty of any unit in Iraq."

Anderson said the soldiers he oversaw in his platoon expected that money to be here when they come home.

"I had 23 guys under my command," Anderson said. "I promised to take care of them. And I'm not going to end taking care of them when this deployment is over, and it's not over until this is solved."

The Army did not respond questions Tuesday afternoon.

Senators Klobuchar and Coleman released a joint statement saying the Army secretary, Pete Geren, is looking into this personally, and they say Geren asked a review board to expedite its review so the matter could be solved by next semester.

Minnesota National Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Kevin Olson said the soldiers are "victims of a significant injustice."

Princess Diana Inquest

Yorkshire Post - Prince Philip 'told MI6 to murder Diana and lover'

SENSATIONAL claims that Princess Diana was murdered on the instructions of the Duke of Edinburgh after she expressed fears of an attempt on her life dominated the opening of the inquest into her death yesterday.

The jury heard allegations that Prince Philip was at the heart of a conspiracy to murder Diana and her lover, Dodi Fayed, after ordering MI6 to prepare a report on them for the Royal Family. The car crash that killed them both in Paris on August 31, 1997 was then engineered, the jury heard.

The claim of murder by Dodi's father, Harrods owner Mohamed al-Fayed, was at the heart of coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker's opening statement to the jury at the inquest at the High Court in London yesterday.

And the jury was told how Diana had expressed fears that she would be the victim of an arranged accident if, as she believed, the Queen abdicated and Prince Charles succeeded to the throne, saying that would create a need to "get rid of her, via some accident in her car such as prepared brake failure".

The judge told the jury of six women and five men that many had come to believe something "sinister" may lie behind the crash in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in which Diana, 36, and 42-year-old Dodi were killed with their driver, Henri Paul.

He added that Mr al-Fayed also believes MI6 had been commissioned to write a special report on his family to be presented to the Royal Family.

The judge said: "It is his belief that a decision was taken at that time to kill Diana and Dodi. He places Prince Philip at the heart of the conspiracy, you will have to listen carefully to the witnesses you hear to see whether there is any evidence to support this assertion."

Mr al-Fayed believes that Diana was carrying Dodi's child and that they would have announced their engagement on September 1 that year, the day after the crash, but the Royal Family "could not accept that an Egyptian Muslim could eventually be stepfather to the future King of England".

He is convinced that Henri Paul was in the pay of MI6 and French secret services, and the crash was caused by a combination of a collision with a mystery white Fiat Uno and a blinding flash from a stun gun deliberately fired. Two official inquiries concluded that Paul had been drinking and lost control of the car whilst driving too fast. But the inquest heard that Diana had written a note to her ex-butler, Paul Burrell, saying Prince Charles wanted her dead so he could marry their nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke. Diana also claimed Ms Legge-Bourke had undergone an abortion.

The jury was told of a note written by one of Diana's lawyers, Lord Mishcon, following a meeting at Kensington Palace in October 1995.

In the note, Lord Mishcon said: "Her Royal Highness said that she had been informed by reliable sources whom she did not wish to reveal ... that (a) The Queen would be abdicating in April and the Prince of Wales would then assume the throne and (b) efforts would be made if not to get rid of her (be it by some accident in her car such as prepared brake failure or whatever) between now and then."

Lord Justice Scott Baker also said Mr al-Fayed had claimed Diana had told him she believed her life was in danger.

He said: "Mohamed al-Fayed says during the summer holiday she often told him she would be murdered by the Royal Family.

"She would go up in a helicopter and never come down alive."

He went on: "It is clear that there are many members of the public who are concerned that something sinister may have caused the collision in which Diana and two others died.

"One of the purposes of the inquest is to investigate the incident thoroughly so that the public suspicion is either dispelled or substantiated."

He said there would be a "vigorous and searching" investigation of the evidence to find the truth.

Lord Justice Scott Baker told the jury: "Most, if not all, of you will remember where you were when you heard about the subsequent death of the Princess of Wales.

"None of you would for a moment have thought that over 10 years later you might be in a jury investigating the events related to that tragic August night."

The inquest is set to continue for up to six months.

Other related posts:

6000 Page Diana Legal Dossier Disappears

Diana Inquest Coroner Steps Down

Spy Banned From Diana Inquest

Diana Inquest Will Be Heard By Jury

$850 Billion Debt Increase

My previous post: $850 Billion Debt Increase?

It has been approved.

The Miami Herald - U.S. $10 trillion in the red

For the fifth time since 2001, Congress is raising the debt limit, increasing it by $850 billion to $9.815 trillion. The Senate approved the plan on a 53-42 vote Thursday. That's $9,815,000,000,000.00.

Thousands Killed in Burma?

The Daily Mail - Burma: Thousands dead in massacre of the monks dumped in the jungle (UPDATE - October 12, 2007. 6:45 pm: This article originally appeared in the Daily Mail at this link. I see that it has been totally rewritten. What the article was originally about is pretty much buried in nonsense about some suits having a meeting that won’t solve anything and propaganda like "Normalcy has now returned in Myanmar," Foreign Minister Nyan Win told the UN General Assembly in New York, adding that security forces acted with restraint for a month but had to "take action to restore the situation." The original article still appears on the London Lite website, it can be seen here.)

Thousands of protesters are dead and the bodies of hundreds of executed monks have been dumped in the jungle, a former intelligence officer for Burma's ruling junta has revealed.

The most senior official to defect so far, Hla Win, said: "Many more people have been killed in recent days than you've heard about. The bodies can be counted in several thousand."

Mr Win, who spoke out as a Swedish diplomat predicted that the revolt has failed, said he fled when he was ordered to take part in a massacre of holy men. He has now reached the border with Thailand.

My previous posts about what is going on can be seen here.

John Bolton: Attack Iran

The Jerusalem Post - Bolton: Attack Iran, 'remove' its leader

Former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told Tory delegates in Britain Sunday that efforts by the UK and the EU to negotiate with Iran had failed and that he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities in the country.

Bolton said that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was "pushing out" and "is not receiving adequate push-back" from the West.
"I don't think the use of military force is an attractive option, but I would tell you I don't know what the alternative is.

"Because life is about choices, I think we have to consider the use of military force. I think we have to look at a limited strike against their nuclear facilities."

He added that any strike should be followed by an attempt to remove the "source of the problem", Ahmadinejad.

"If we were to strike Iran it should be accompanied by an effort at regime change ... The US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments. I wish we could get it back," he said.

Bolton said that the fact that only partial intelligence about Iran's nuclear activity existed should not be used as an excuse not to act.

"Intelligence can be wrong in more than one direction... Responding after they (nuclear devices) are used is unacceptable."
Bolton also said the UN was "fundamentally irrelevant".

The former envoy criticized Britain's "softly softly" approach to Iran's imprisonment of 15 British sailors in April.

They were released after Ahmadinejad announced he was making a "gift" to the British people. "They [Iran] got no response from the UK or the US. If you were the Iranian leader, what conclusion do you draw?"

Give this guy a gun and put him on the first plane there.

Here is another guy that can join him:

The Sunday Times - Neocon 'godfather' Norman Podhoretz tells Bush: bomb Iran

ONE of the founding fathers of neoconservatism has privately urged President George W Bush to bomb Iran rather than allow it to acquire nuclear weapons.

Norman Podhoretz, an intellectual guru of the neoconservative movement who has joined Rudolph Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign as a senior foreign policy adviser, held an unpublicised meeting with Bush late last spring at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York.

The encounter reveals the enduring influence of the neoconservatives at the highest reaches of the White House, despite some high-profile casualties in the past year.

Karl Rove, who was still serving in the White House as Bush’s deputy chief of staff, took notes. But the meeting, which lasted 45 minutes, was not logged on the president’s schedule.

“I urged Bush to take action against the Iranian nuclear facilities and explained why I thought there was no alternative,” said Podhoretz, 77, in an interview with The Sunday Times.

Bristol-Myers Squibb to Pay $515 Million for Doctor Kickback Scheme

The Boston Globe - Bristol-Myers Squibb to pay $515 million for doctor kickback scheme

Bristol-Myers Squibb Company and its subsidiary, Apothecon, have agreed to pay more than $515 million to settle a broad array of federal and state civil allegations involving their drug marketing and pricing practices, US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan said today.

The government alleged that from 2000 to mid-2003, BMS paid illegal remuneration to physicians and other healthcare providers to get them to promote BMS drugs. The payments were in the form of consulting fees and other programs, some of which involved travel to luxurious resorts.

The prosecutors also said that from 2002 through 2005 BMC promoted the sale and use of Abilify, an atypical antipsychotic drug, for pediatric use and to treat dementia-related psychosis, both of which were "off-label'' uses. The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the drug to treat adult psychiatric disorders but not for use in children, teenagers, or for dementia-related illnesses.

Doctors are allowed to prescribe drugs "off-label,'' but companies are not allowed to promote drugs for those uses.

Sullivan said his office is not bringing criminal charges and that the company cooperated with the investigation, which was prompted by information from whistleblowers.

In a statement posted on its website, the company said the settlement agreement will not affect the company's ongoing business with any customers, including the government.

"Bristol-Myers Squibb is pleased to have resolved these matters from the past and is proud of its commitment to conduct business with the highest standards of integrity in its mission to extend and enhance human life,'' the company said.