Home » Archives by category » News (Page 9203)
Protests and clashes as Egypt votes for parliament

Tweet – Violence and charges of irregularities marred voting in Egypt’s election on Sunday, with the ruling party certain to boost its domination of parliament at the expense of the harried Islamist opposition. Violent clashes took place at several polling stations, with witnesses saying police fired tear gas at voters in the Nile Delta, north of Cairo, and in Qena, southern Egypt. Police officials said several policemen and Brotherhood supporters were wounded in the Nile Delta city of Samanud in a clash that started when Islamists threw rocks at police guarding a polling station. The Brotherhood said its candidates’ representatives were kicked out of polling stations and attacked by…

Continue reading …
Beijing proposes emergency talks on Korea crisis

Tweet – China called for emergency talks on resolving a crisis on the Korean peninsula on Sunday, and Seoul and Tokyo said they would study the proposal, as the US and South Korean militaries started a massive drill. Beijing’s move to bring the two Koreas to the negotiating table comes after global pressure on China to take a more responsible role in the standoff and try to rein in ally Pyongyang. China made clear that the talks would not amount to a resumption of six-party disarmament discussions which North Korea walked out of two years ago and declared dead. South Korea said it would carefully consider China’s suggestion. Both Beijing and Pyongyang have been…

Continue reading …
iPhone 3G, 3GS get iOS 4.2.1 unlock, using risky ultrasn0w workaround

Can’t wait another minute for your iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS to be carrier-unlocked once more? If and only if you’re already running the latest firmware, you can actually pilfer a bit of iPad code to pick the requisite locks — though there are some serious risks in doing so. The iPhone Dev Team has a new version of PwnageTool that uses the 6.15.00 baseband from iPad firmware 3.2.2, which which just so happens to run perfectly on the iPhone 3G and 3GS since both phones and tablets of that era use the same Infineon radio chip . If you know your way around an IPSW and regularly bench-press SHSH blobs, you can download all the software you need right now — but if you don’t, you might want to steer clear of the proceedings for the time being. We spoke about risks a moment ago, and in this case there are quite a few — like the inability to downgrade from baseband 6.15 or ever do a full restore again, and it’s fairly likely that Apple won’t look kindly on your warranty if they find you running iPad software. Them’s the breaks, kid. iPhone 3G, 3GS get iOS 4.2.1 unlock, using risky ultrasn0w workaround originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 28 Nov 2010 17:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

Continue reading …
Reagan Biographer Refutes Woodward’s Claim Obama’s Too Busy to be Effective: Reagan Was Just as Busy

Bob Woodward on Sunday tried to excuse Barack Obama's ineffectiveness by claiming his “day is crazy” with “so many meetings, so many outings, so many handshakes, and so many trips to Ohio and here.” Having previously scolded “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer for asking a “bulls–t question,” Ronald Reagan biographer Edmund Morris countered, “Yeah, but presidents have plenty of spare time” (video follows with transcript and commentary): read more

Continue reading …
Lindsey Graham, Liz Cheney want WikiLeaks leakers prosecuted

Click here to view this media WikiLeaks hasn’t even released the latest round of US government documents and already politicians and pundits are calling for prosecutions. The latest release from the WikiLeaks website is expected to include as many as 250,000 secret diplomatic cables. The Obama administration warned Wednesday that the documents could damage US relations with friends and allies. “Leaking the material is deplorable,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Fox News’ Chris Wallace Sunday. “I agree with the Pentagon’s assessment that the people at WikiLeaks could have blood on their hands.” “I don’t know what the cables may say but it’s just a — we’re at war. I mean the world is getting dangerous by the day and the people who do this are really low on the food chain as far as I’m concerned. If you can prosecute them, let’s try.” Sen. Clair McCaskill (D-MO) agreed. “Lindsey’s right,” she said. “The people who are leaking these documents need to a gut check about their patriotism and I think they’re enjoying the attention they’re getting but, frankly, it’s coming at a very high price in terms of protecting our men and women in uniform.” “I hope that we can figure out where this is coming from and go after them with the force of law,” McCaskill said. Also appearing on Fox News Sunday , former State Department official Liz Cheney called for the government to go after the leakers. “I think, once again, the government of Iceland ought to shut down that [WikiLeaks] website,” Cheney said. “I think they ought to stop allowing the stuff to come out of the website in Iceland. I think that the administration ought to be focused very much on prosecuting those responsible.” The State Department sent a letter Saturday to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Publication of documents of this nature at a minimum would: * Place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals — from journalists to human rights activists and bloggers to soldiers to individuals providing information to further peace and security; * Place at risk on-going military operations, including operations to stop terrorists, traffickers in human beings and illicit arms, violent criminal enterprises and other actors that threaten global security; and, * Place at risk on-going cooperation between countries – partners, allies and common stakeholders — to confront common challenges from terrorism to pandemic diseases to nuclear proliferation that threaten global stability. “Despite your stated desire to protect those lives, you have done the opposite and endangered the lives of countless individuals. You have undermined your stated objective by disseminating this material widely, without redaction, and without regard to the security and sanctity of the lives your actions endanger,” State Department legal advisor Harold Hongju Koh wrote. “If you are genuinely interested in seeking to stop the damage from your actions, you should: 1) ensure WikiLeaks ceases publishing any and all such materials; 2) ensure WikiLeaks returns any and all classified U.S. Government material in its possession; and 3) remove and destroy all records of this material from WikiLeaks’ databases.” Assange told reporters Sunday that Washington had “contacted the governments of almost every nation on earth to brief them about what some of these embarrassing revelations will do.” “They’re in a rather unusual difficult position where it is not sure precisely what is going to be revealed,” he said.

Continue reading …
Russia to Israel: Technology for canceling S-300 deal

Russia promised Israel $1 billion, scrapping of Iran missile deal in exchange for drone technologies

Continue reading …
B’tselem hands Naalin shooting tape to police

Video of 2008 incident will undergo forensic testing after legal team disputes its authenticity

Continue reading …
ABC’s Amanpour Trumpets ‘Tax Us More’ Liberal Democratic Quartet

At a time when the American mood has turned against excessive government spending, Christiane Amanpour devoted Sunday’s This Week to four liberal Democratic billionaires, though she failed to identify their political orientation, who want higher income tax rates on the wealthy. Unmentioned during the pre-taped interviews with Warren Buffett, Bill and Melinda Gates, Ted Turner and Tom Steyer revolving around their participation in “The Giving Pledge” – the promise to give away at least half their wealth: how they are free now to give all the money they want to the federal government. Amanpour began by touting: “Warren Buffett has been practically begging the country, begging Congress to tax him more. In fact, many of the richest Americans like Buffett, Bill and Melinda Gates and Ted Turner say that they should pay higher tax.” In between letting Buffett expound at length on why taxes should be hiked, she fretted to Bill Gates: “If people aren't going to pay for the services that they need, how are those services going to get funded, do you think?” read more

Continue reading …
The Country’s Wealthiest Men:  No, Really, Tax Us More!

Not that this will matter to the congressional Republicans, whose agenda is not actually improving the economy nor listening to economists, the wealthiest 2%, or any other American, come to that. But the country’s wealthiest men, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, dismiss the calls of Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans and say that the wealthy SHOULD pay more taxes . Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, said that the rich should be paying more taxes and that the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy should be left to expire at the end of December. “If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further,” Buffett said. “But I think that people at the high end — people like myself — should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we’ve ever had it.” The billionaire brushed aside Republican arguments that letting tax cuts expire for the wealthy would hurt economic growth. “They say you have to keep those tax cuts, even on the very wealthy, because that is what energizes business and capitalism,” anchor Amanpour said. “The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we’ll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on,” Buffett explained. It’s the simplest of messages and yet sadly not on the tongues of any Democratic politicians (including the President): if tax cuts worked, why isn’t the economy better right now? Gates also expressed disappointment in the failure of the ballot initiative 1098 that his father, Bill Gates Senior, was very publicly endorsing, to raise taxes on the wealthiest citizens in Washington state, showing once again how easily the majority of Americans will vote against their own interests, especially in the face of big money advertising persuasions.

Continue reading …
WikiLeaks unleashes flood of confidential US cables

By Joseph Krauss 8:08 AM Monday Nov 29, 2010 Share Email Print Expand Shrink WASHINGTON – WikiLeaks has unleashed a torrent of more than a quarter of a million confidential US cables detailing a wide array of potentially explosive diplomatic episodes, the New York Times said. The newspaper reported details of a tense standoff with Pakistan over nuclear fuel, plans to reunite the Korean peninsula after the North’s eventual collapse, bazaar-like bargaining over the repatriation of Guantanamo Bay detainees and a Chinese government bid to hack into Google. The cables detail fresh suspicions about Afghan corruption, Saudi donors financing Al-Qaeda, and the US failure to prevent Syria from…

Continue reading …