Ahmadinejad given ultimatum by Ayatollah

As much as many in the west would like to see Ahmadinejad gone, who knows how good or bad the next person would be? Any new person in that role will still have to answer to the ayatollah and please him. The Guardian:

A member of the Iranian parliament, Morteza Agha-Tehrani – who is described as "Ahmadinejad's moral adviser" – told a gathering of his supporters on Friday that a meeting between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei had recently taken place, in which the president was given a deadline to resign or to accept the decision of the ayatollah.

The extraordinary confrontation came to light after Ahmadinejad declined to officially support Khamenei's reinstatement of a minister whom the president had initially asked to resign.

The rift between the two men grew when the president staged an 11-day walkout in an apparent protest at Khamenei's decision. In the first cabinet meeting since ending his protest, the intelligence minister at the centre of the row, Heydar Moslehi, was absent and in the second one on Wednesday, he was reportedly asked by Ahmadinejad to leave.

Read the rest of this post...

US has spent $3 trillion in fight against bin Laden

Now that he's dead and now that we see how well our money is being spent in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, it's time to start shifting that money to the US again. We need jobs, we need teachers, we need roads and bridges and infrastructure. The only people who are against shifting money back to America are the ones who love the gravy train spending on war. It's in the financial best interest of the military industrial complex to keep us at constant war. It's in the financial best interest of many in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq as well to keep the war going. Once the hype of war dies down, so will the unquestioned budget money. It has to end but many are going to spend heavily to block change.

Is anyone in charge interested in building a better USA?

As we mark Osama bin Laden's death, what's striking is how much he cost our nation—and how little we've gained from our fight against him. By conservative estimates, bin Laden cost the United States at least $3 trillion over the past 15 years, counting the disruptions he wrought on the domestic economy, the wars and heightened security triggered by the terrorist attacks he engineered, and the direct efforts to hunt him down.

What do we have to show for that tab? Two wars that continue to occupy 150,000 troops and tie up a quarter of our defense budget; a bloated homeland-security apparatus that has at times pushed the bounds of civil liberty; soaring oil prices partially attributable to the global war on bin Laden's terrorist network; and a chunk of our mounting national debt, which threatens to hobble the economy unless lawmakers compromise on an unprecedented deficit-reduction deal.

All of that has not given us, at least not yet, anything close to the social or economic advancements produced by the battles against America's costliest past enemies. Defeating the Confederate army brought the end of slavery and a wave of standardization—in railroad gauges and shoe sizes, for example—that paved the way for a truly national economy. Vanquishing Adolf Hitler ended the Great Depression and ushered in a period of booming prosperity and hegemony. Even the massive military escalation that marked the Cold War standoff against Joseph Stalin and his Russian successors produced landmark technological breakthroughs that revolutionized the economy.

Read the rest of this post...

Coffee, sex, exercise or blowing your nose can trigger a stroke

What the? Even straining while on the toilet, drinking cola, being angry and being surprised made it on the list.

The study on 250 patients identified eight risk factors linked to bleeding on the brain.

They all increase blood pressure which could result in blood vessels bursting, according to research published in the journal Stroke.

The Stroke Association said more research was needed to see if the triggers caused the rupture.

Read the rest of this post...

Is Pope John Paul II really worthy of sainthood?

If you're ignorant and happy to ignore reality, sure he is.

As the dissident Swiss theologian Hans Kung told the Frankfurter Rundschau: "John Paul II is universally praised as someone who fought for peace and human rights. But his preaching to the outside world was in total contrast with the way he ran the church from inside, with an authoritarian pontificate which suppressed the rights of both women and theologians.... Wojtyla and Ratzinger are the people most responsible for the chronic sickness of today's Catholic Church."

Part of that sickness, of course, stems from the sexual abuse scandals that continue to be revealed in one country after another, and to flare anew. There is little doubt that John Paul II was obtuse and derelict in his handling of the crisis, perhaps because, as his defenders argue, sexual misconduct charges were so frequently fabricated against clerics by communist authorities in his native Poland. Still, difficult questions remain about his close association — and that of members of his household — to moneyed sexual predators like the now-disgraced founder of the Legionaries of Christ.

Equally troubling are continuing attempts to bring the church's theologians and more outspoken bishops to heel, an effort that began under John Paul II with the repression of Latin America's leading liberation theologians. Many Catholics worry about a Vatican that fires an Australian bishop for speaking in favor of ordaining women and married men, but declines to act against a Belgian prelate who unapologetically admits to molesting young boys. Many are troubled too by the U.S. Catholic bishops — all conservatives appointed by the last two popes — who attempt to force theologians to resume the old practice of submitting their work to the local prelate for approval before publication.

Read the rest of this post...

Obama demands names of Pakistan agents who helped hide bin Laden

There's no doubt that the ISI has many factions, both pro and anti-American. But after finding bin Laden there's little doubt that people in the ISI had to know something. NY Times:

Pakistani officials say the Obama administration has demanded the identities of some of their top intelligence operatives as the United States tries to determine whether any of them had contact with Osama bin Laden or his agents in the years before the raid that led to his death early Monday morning in Pakistan.

The officials provided new details of a tense discussion between Pakistani officials and an American envoy who traveled to Pakistan on Monday, as well as the growing suspicion among United States intelligence and diplomatic officials that someone in Pakistan’s secret intelligence agency knew of Bin Laden’s location, and helped shield him.

Read the rest of this post...

Report: CIA monitored bin Laden for months

What is especially interesting is that for the same reasons that made Abbottabad the ideal hiding spot for bin Laden to hide, it made it just as easy for the CIA to slip in without too much notice. It also sounds like the (expensive) drones may help collect data, but they also scare people off into hiding because everyone knows that they're there. Maybe bin Laden is the exception, but you have to wonder if they cause similar issues elsewhere.

The CIA maintained a safe house in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad for a small team of spies who conducted extensive surveillance over a period of months on the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. Special Operations forces this week, U.S. officials said.

The secret CIA facility was used as a base of operations for one of the most delicate human intelligence gathering missions in recent CIA history, one that relied on Pakistani informants and other sources to help assemble a “pattern of life” portrait of the occupants and daily activities at the fortified compound where bin Laden was found, the officials said.

Read the rest of this post...

Activists claim 30 more killed by Syrian government

If only Syria had oil, then the world response would be so much different. Al Jazeera:

Activists claim that up to 30 people have been killed in Syria where thousands have taken to the streets for another day of anti-government rallies, dubbed a "day of defiance".

Human rights group Insan said that at least 16 people had been killed in the central city of Homs, six in Hama and two in Jableh. It said the total death toll was 26 but didn't specify where the other two deaths occurred.

A human rights activist told the Associated Press news agency that 30 people had died, while Syrian state television said an army officer and four police were killed in Homs by a "criminal gang".

Security forces killed four protesters in the city of Deir al-Zor, a local tribal leader told Reuters.

And today, Syrian tanks have moved into to Baniyas, which does not sound like good news for civilians. Read the rest of this post...

The Pretenders - The Adultress

Our Sushi boy has been taking his hyper-thyroid medicine without problem and the results have been fairly positive. One of the two pills that he's taking is a bit large and he's not thrilled about it, but he's used to chomping down on big bits of mice and birds so it's really not as bad as we thought it would be. After losing a lot of weight, he's now eating everything and is back on the right path. We started feeding him some of the moist cat food but wow does that stuff stink.

It's another sunny weekend day over here so it's time to jump on the bike again. After a pleasant ride out to Versailles last week, I think I'm going to do it again today. Read the rest of this post...

More trouble in euro-land as debt restructuring talks begin

Between the debt related problems and the new border controls, new Europe is increasingly looking like the old Europe. The Guardian:

Finance ministers from an inner core of eurozone countries were holding secret talks in Luxembourg tonight to discuss a possible debt restructuring for crisis-ridden Greece.

The single currency's leading creditor nations – Germany, France, Finland and the Netherlands – all attended the meeting, called amid concerns that Greece's problems were nearing breaking point.

Sources said negotiations centred on the mounting eurozone debt crisis, and included not just Greece but the terms of Portugal's bailout and Ireland's demands for easier repayment terms on its loans. But they denied reports coming out of Germany that Athens had floated the idea of leaving the single currency altogether.

Read the rest of this post...

CEO pay better than ever

Economic crisis? What economic crisis? HuffingtonPost:

CEOs at the nation's largest companies were paid better last year than they were in 2007, when the economy was booming, the stock market set a record high and unemployment was roughly half what it is today.

The typical pay package for the head of a company in the Standard & Poor's 500 was $9 million in 2010, according to an analysis by The Associated Press using data provided by Equilar, an executive compensation research firm. That was 24 percent higher than a year earlier, reversing two years of declines.

Executives were showered with more pay of all types – salaries, bonuses, stock, options and perks. The biggest gains came in cash bonuses: Two-thirds of executives got a bigger one than they had in 2009, some more than three times as big.

Read the rest of this post...