Russia formally declares South Ossetia independent
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced Tuesday he had signed a decree under which Russia formally recognises the rebel Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states.
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China to Limit Web Access During Olympic Games
The International Olympic Committee failed to press China to allow fully unfettered access to the Internet for the thousands of journalists arriving here to cover the Olympics, despite promising repeatedly that the foreign news media could “report freely” during the Games, Olympic officials acknowledged Wednesday.
Since the Olympic Village press center opened Friday, reporters have been unable to access scores of Web pages — among them those that discuss Tibetan issues, Taiwanese independence, the violent crackdown on the protests in...
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"Terrorist" Watch List Hits One Million Names
A watch list of suspected and known terrorists, compiled by the US authorities, has ballooned and contains more than one million names, the American Civil Liberties Union said Monday.
The ACLU said it derived that figure from a Justice Department report on the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center, which consolidates terrorist watch list information.
The Center "had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month," according to a report by the Justice Department...
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House to probe shady Pentagon contract given to 22-year-old
A lengthy investigation published Thursday reveals that the Pentagon gave an inexperienced 22-year-old a $300 million contract to provide ammunition to Afghanistan. The shady deal resulted in decades old, substandard munitions being delivered to US and Afghan troops fighting on the front lines of the war on terror.
Following publication of a lengthy New York Times article, the House Oversight Committee announced it would investigate AEY Inc., a fledgling company that thrived after 2003 as the US government began handing out billions of...
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Who is Really Paying With Their Lives in Iraq?
Casualties of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 have come in many forms, and the accuracy of the information available on different types of casualties varies greatly.
Opinion Research Business: 1,033,000 violent deaths - August 2007
Iraqi Health Ministry survey: 151,000 violent deaths out of 400,000 excess deaths due to the war - June 2006
Lancet survey: 601,027 violent deaths out of 654,965 excess deaths - June 2006
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Bush asks for $6 billion to fight the terrorists online
After 37,258 cyber attacks against government and private networks last year, President Bush and Department of Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff say they need $6 billion to stop attacks on Wall Street and nuclear power plants. (Here's a hint: Don't run a nuclear plant on Microsoft Windows.) The president would also like to install government sensors on private company networks...
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1 in 5 soldiers returning from Iraq with brain injuries
On The Chris Matthews show, Richard Stengel, the managing editor of TIME gives us a chilling new report that the Pentagon is releasing about the serious head injuries our troops are sustaining in Iraq.
Stengel: When we got into the Iraq war we didn’t know how long it would last. When we got into the Iraq war we didn’t know how much it would cost. It’s lasted longer, it’s cost more than we ever expected. The real toll is coming out now. The Pentagon is releasing a report saying, one in five American serviceman and women who have been...
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White House reused e-mail tapes
The White House has acknowledged recycling its backup computer tapes of e-mail before October 2003, raising the possibility that many electronic messages — including those pertaining to the CIA leak case — have been taped over and are gone forever.
The disclosure came minutes before midnight Tuesday under a court-ordered deadline that forced the White House to reveal information it has previously refused to provide.
Among the e-mails that could be lost are messages swapped by any White House officials involved in discussions about...
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Santa Delivers 37,000+ Copies of Constitution to Bush
This morning, Santa Claus (in the person of noted constitutional lawyer Bill Goodman) drove his sleigh to the White House to deliver thousands of copies of the U.S. Constitution to President Bush.
Americans from all over the country - more than 37,000 of them - asked that a copy of the Constitution be delivered to the President in their name and cordially requested that he make time in his busy schedule to read it.
"While I was going over the list of who's been naughty and nice," Mr. Claus said, as he prepared for his visit to 1600...
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Israel Officials in US to Discuss Iran's nuclear threat despite U.S. intelligence report
Israeli intelligence officials are in the U.S. trying to convince the Bush administration that Iran is still trying to develop nuclear weapons — contrary to the findings of a recent U.S. intelligence report, security officials said.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, however, scolded a Cabinet minister on Sunday for his harsh, public criticism of the U.S. report.
The U.S. assessment, released earlier this month, concludes Iran halted its weapons development program in 2003 and that the program remained frozen at least through the middle of...
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