November 3, 2013

Saudi Arabia eyes buying five German Type 209 submarines

Saudi Arabia wants to buy five German submarines for around 2.5 billion euros ($3.4 billion) and more than two dozen more in the future, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Citing unidentified government sources, Sunday's Bild newspaper said Riyadh had its eye initially on buying the five Type 209 submarines, followed long-term by up to 25 submarines in a 12-billion-euro deal.

It said the chancellery had, in a letter to Saudi Arabia in the summer, indicated a swift and sympathetic examination of Riyadh's weapons plans as soon as the new German government was established following September elections.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives are currently locked in negotiations with the centre-left Social Democrats on forming a grand coalition.

A German government spokeswoman declined to comment and would not confirm or deny the reported letter.

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=62360

November 3, 2013

Kerry in Egypt on first visit since Morsi ouster

Source: USA Today

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was in Cairo on Sunday pressing for reforms during the highest-level American visit to Egypt since the ouster of the country's first democratically elected president.

The Egyptian military's removal of Mohammed Morsi in July followed by a harsh crackdown on his protesting supporters led the U.S. to suspend hundreds of millions of dollars in aid.

At a joint news conference following a meeting with Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy, Kerry said that the suspension of aid to Egypt is not a punishment but a legal requirement after the Egyptian military in July toppled the democratically elected government.

Kerry said the topic was mentioned only briefly in his meeting with Fahmy and that he believed Egyptian authorities understood that rationale.


Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/11/03/kerry-egypt-us-morsi/3410737/

November 3, 2013

What's bugging the head of the NSA? (MSM respect for "The Weasel" turns to contempt.)

General Keith Alexander seems to be running out of friends.

Around the CIA's executive suites a few years ago, General Keith Alexander was known as "The Weasel." Not a weasel, The Weasel.

"He'd leave the room after some briefing or meeting or whatever and we'd all look at each other," a former denizen of the spy agency's seventh floor told me. "Sometimes we'd just laugh. We knew he'd just lied to us, or been less than truthful about something we were supposedly working on together."

Now everybody in the world knows Alexander can be a proficient liar, thanks to Edward Snowden's dripping spigot of top-secret NSA documents.

Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, got a taste of the NSA director's "weaseliness" this summer when he learned that Alexander's claim that the agency's massive data collection programs had thwarted 54 terrorist plots was a big fat lie. "The American people are getting left with the inaccurate impression of the effectiveness of NSA programs," Leahy told Alexander.

When Google and Yahoo, who've made billions tracking our shopping habits, are upset about the NSA breaking into their servers, as was reported by The Washington Post this week, you know the agency is out of control.

http://mag.newsweek.com/2013/11/01/whats-bugging-head-nsa.html

"Oversight obviously hasn't work very well...." Fenn said, ticking off all the House and Senate committees - armed services, intelligence, homeland security - not to mention the secret surveillance court, supposedly keeping the spy agencies in line. "They tend to go native. There is a plethora of people with fingers in the pie."

November 3, 2013

Denver scales back proposed pot rules, would allow back yard smoking

Denver has scaled back a proposed law against open and public consumption of marijuana after an earlier version would have banned even the smell of pot from people's backyards.

A new draft of the law to be introduced to City Council on Monday would allow people to smoke in their backyards, would let them possess marijuana in parks and on the 16th Street Mall, and would make violations petty offenses that carry a maximum $100 fine and/or 24 hours of community service.

"Compromise is alive and well in the city and county of Denver," said Councilman Chris Nevitt, who worked with Mayor Michael Hancock's office to draft the proposed law.

Initially, the law would have forbidden people from smoking marijuana in their backyards, made it illegal to possess pot in parks and on the 16th Street Mall, and levied penalties of up to $999 and a year in jail.

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_24412660/denver-scales-back-proposed-pot-rules-would-allow

November 3, 2013

Israel ‘furious’ with White House for leak on Syria strike

Jerusalem considers administration’s confirmation of Israeli air attack on missile stores to be ‘scandalous’; TV analyst warns US risks starting ‘major flare-up’

Israel is fuming with the White House for confirming that it was the Israeli Air Force that struck a military base near the Syrian port city of Latakia on Wednesday, hitting weaponry that was set to be transferred to Hezbollah.

Israel has not acknowledged carrying out the strike, one of half a dozen such attacks widely ascribed to Israel in recent months, but an Obama administration official told CNN on Thursday that Israeli warplanes had indeed attacked the Syrian base, and that the target was “missiles and related equipment” set for delivery to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Israel’s Channel 10 TV on Friday night quoted Israeli officials branding the American leak as “scandalous.” For Israel’s ally to be acting in this way was “unthinkable,” the officials were quoted as saying.

A second TV report, on Israel’s Channel 2, said the leak “came directly from the White House,” and noted that “this is not the first time” that the administration has compromised Israel by leaking information on such Israeli Air Force raids on Syrian targets.

It said some previous leaks were believed to have come from the Pentagon, and that consideration had been given at one point to establishing a panel to investigate the sources.

Channel 2?s military analyst, Roni Daniel, said the Obama administration’s behavior in leaking the information was unfathomable.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-furious-with-white-house-for-leak-on-syria-strike/

November 1, 2013

NSA spying may have gone too far: Kerry

In the clearest sign yet of a growing chasm between the U.S. intelligence community and the Obama administration, Secretary of State John Kerry this week admitted that the covert global surveillance programmes of the National Security Agency (NSA) may have gone “too far” and some of this spying happened “on autopilot”.

Mr. Kerry, who delivered the remarks during a teleconference broadcast from London, suggested that the NSA’s tapping of Internet and phone communications worldwide, including of allies such as Germany and France, may have been conducted without the knowledge of senior administration officials “because the technology is there and the ability is there”.

“We are going to try to make sure it doesn’t happen in the future,” he said, days after a wave of anger engulfed U.S.-Germany relations following revelations that the NSA may have been tapping German Chancellor Angela Merkel’sphone since 2002.

With France and Italy joining the chorus of sharp criticism, Mr. Kerry’s remarks came days after President Barack Obama appeared to put distance between the White House and the spying programmes.

Earlier this week White House Spokesperson Jay Carney said, “The concerns raised by our allies cause us concern too,” adding that Mr. Obama was “supportive of the idea that we need to make some reforms”, and that he hoped to “provide greater oversight and greater transparency as well as more constraints on the authorities that exist”.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/world/in-some-cases-us-spying-has-reached-too-far-kerry/article5304234.ece

November 1, 2013

Kerry: Some of NSA's Actions 'reached Too Far'

November 1, 2013

Should there be more marijuana genome projects?

It would have been inconceivable only a few years ago, but the United States is embracing marijuana in a big way.

Legal pot is the new gay marriage: Polls are showing that public approval of legalization is hovering around 50%, mirroring the rapid rise in approval for legal same-sex unions. The New York Times just published a long piece reporting pot’s relatively benign effects in California, where it has been medically legal for 17 years and is easily available to the healthy as well.

As California goes, historically speaking, so goes the nation. Eventually. Marijuana is legal for medical uses in 20 states, legal for any use in 2, and the subject of active lobbying in the others. The federal government still declares marijuana illegal, but also says it will permit states to regulate it themselves. With the threat of federal prosecution gone, more states are likely to legalize.

Ignorance about marijuana’s genetic properties

Despite this rapid revisionism, we remain remarkably ignorant about pot’s properties, including its genetic properties. There are anecdotes galore about the medical effects of marijuana, but not much actual data. Politics has made research on real medical applications—for example pain, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer—next to impossible, as neuroscientist David Nutt and his colleagues complained in a Nature journal last June.

http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2013/10/29/should-there-be-more-marijuana-genome-projects/#.UnP0_ZG9VS9

November 1, 2013

Ski Slopes Split on Marijuana Use

Two weeks into ski season, Colorado's 22 ski resorts leasing land from the federal government are split over whether or not to allow marijuana consumption on the slopes. While the state's voters legalized the drug last year, the Forest Service does not tolerate marijuana in ski areas. While some resorts are enforcing a zero-tolerance policy regarding toking on the slopes, others will accept it.

On opening week, Arapahoe Basin began enforcing a zero-tolerance policy.

"Already I have kicked several people out of here and taken their ski passes for smoking in public," Chief Operating Officer Alen Henceroth wrote on A-Basin's blog. "Those passes will be gone for a very long time."

But not all slopes are enforcing federal substance prohibition laws. Last year Wolf Creek Ski Area decided to overlook marijuana use among patrons as long as it did not pose a safety hazard; that policy returns this year.

As Wolf Creek CEO Davey Pitcher put it to the Denver Post: "Our patrol's job is not to bird-dog everybody when they smell marijuana."

http://www.outsideonline.com/news-from-the-field/Ski-Slopes-Split-on-Marijuana-Use.html?230214731&utm_campaign=googlenews&utm_source=googlenews&utm_medium=xmlfeed