cryptogon.com

Stephen Payne, who claims to have raised more than $1m for the president’s Republican party in recent years, said he would arrange meetings with Dick Cheney, the vice-president, Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, and other senior officials in return for a payment of $250,000 (£126,000) towards the library in Texas.

Payne, who has accompanied Bush and Cheney on several foreign trips, also said he would try to secure a meeting with the president himself.

The revelation confirms long-held suspicions that favours are being offered in return for donations to the libraries which outgoing presidents set up to house their archives and safeguard their political legacies.

Unlike campaign donations, there is no requirement to disclose the donors to the libraries, no limit on the amount that can be pledged and no restrictions on foreigners contributing.

During an undercover investigation by The Sunday Times, Payne was asked to arrange meetings in Washington for an exiled former central Asian president. He outlined the cost of facilitating such access.

“The exact budget I will come up with, but it will be somewhere between $600,000 and $750,000, with about a third of it going directly to the Bush library,” said Payne, who sits on the US homeland security advisory council.

He said initially that the “family” of the Asian politician should make the donation. He later added that if all the money was paid to him he would make the payment to the Bush library. Publicly, it would appear to have been made in the politician’s name “unless he wants to be anonymous for some reason”.

Payne said the balance of the $750,000 would go to his own lobbying company, Worldwide Strategic Partners (WSP).

Asked by an undercover reporter who the politician would be able to meet for that price, Payne said: “Cheney’s possible, definitely the national security adviser [Stephen Hadley], definitely either Dr Rice or . . . I think a meeting with Dr Rice or the deputy secretary [John Negroponte] is possible . . .

“The main thing is that he [the Asian politician] comes, and he’s well received, that he meets with high-level people . . . and we send positive statements made back from the administration about ‘This guy wasn’t such a bad guy, many people have done worse’.”

Payne said that he would use the services of Mark Pritchard, a Conservative MP who chairs the House of Commons all-party Russia group and was last week on the brink of signing as a paid “adviser” to WSP. Pritchard issued a statement saying that he had not done any work for WSP.

When confronted, Payne said that there would be “no quid pro quo” for any donation and added that his firm was “always above board”.

For the past 18 months, immigration officials at border entries have been searching and seizing some citizens’ laptops, cellphones, and BlackBerry devices when they return from international trips.

In some cases, the officers go through the files while the traveler is standing there. In others, they take the device for several hours and download the hard drive’s content. After that, it’s unclear what happens to the data.

The Department of Homeland Security contends these searches and seizures of electronic files are vital to detecting terrorists and child pornographers. It also says it has the constitutional authority to do them without a warrant or probable cause.

But many people in the business community disagree, saying DHS is overstepping the Fourth Amendment bounds of permissible routine searches. Some are fighting for Congress to put limits on what can be searched and seized and what happens to the information that’s taken. The civil rights community says the laptop seizures are simply unconstitutional. They want DHS to stop the practice unless there’s at least reasonable suspicion.

Legal scholars say the issue raises the compelling and sometimes clashing interests of privacy rights and the need to protect the US from terrorists and child pornographers. The courts have long held that routine searches at the border are permissible, simply because they take place at the border. Opponents of the current policy say a laptop search is far from “routine.”

“A laptop can hold [the equivalent of] a major university’s library: It can contain your full life,” says Peter Swire, a professor of law at Ohio State University in Columbus. “The government’s never gotten to search your entire life, so this is unprecedented in scale what the government can get.”

In recent court challenges, lower courts have ruled that laptop searches at the border are reasonable, just like searches of a person’s baggage or other physical property. But the courts have drawn the line at personal, invasive searches, ruling that things like “strip searches, body-cavity searches, and involuntary X-ray searches” are nonroutine, according to Nathan Sales, a professor of law at George Mason University in Arlington, Va., who recently testified before Congress.

Thus, they require reasonable suspicion, probable cause, or a warrant.

Advocates of the current practice say that the contents of a laptop are like the contents of a suitcase, and as such, customs officials have every right to go through them. They also argue that requiring probable cause for laptop searches would create huge delays at the border and give criminals and terrorists an easy way to bring dangerous things into the country.

“The idea that we would create some kind of sanctuary for criminals and terrorists to carry things across the border to me is absolutely ludicrous,” says James Jay Carafano, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “It’s also unrealistic to require probable cause when you think about the millions of people a day who come in and go out of the country.”

People who’ve had their laptops and other electronic devices searched and seized believe that it’s reasonable and constitutional to expect a higher level of suspicion before customs officials take their laptop.

Amir Khan, an information technology consultant from the San Francisco area, has had his laptop searched twice on returning to the US from business abroad. Once, a customs official took it away for more than two hours.

“I don’t know what he did with it. He could have planted malicious software or copied files,” Mr. Khan says. “It was very intrusive and I think unreasonable. The Fourth Amendment makes it clear you can’t just stop anybody in the street and start searching them and their things.”

Many people, particularly in the business community, also say that a laptop is more like a virtual office than a piece of baggage. In addition, they believe the government should be required to tell people what it does with the information it copies.

“Right now, [DHS] seems to believe that it can hold anything it wants from your laptop, BlackBerry, or cellphone indefinitely,” says Susan Gurley, executive director of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives in Alexandria, Va. “There are no limits on what they can do with it or whether they can share it with any third party.”

Ms. Gurley and others in the business community would like DHS to be required to come up with a set of rules that determine what can be done with the information and how long it can be held. Civil rights advocates would like to see Congress go even further and determine that a search of an electronic device is invasive and requires probable cause.

“We treat our laptops, BlackBerrys, and cellphones as an extension of our brains. They can contain our most intimate thoughts,” says Tim Sparapani, senior legislative counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union.

As for creating a “sanctuary” for terrorists to bring in lethal plans, Mr. Sparapani counters: “Any terrorist worth his or her salt would send that stuff in an encrypted file from a remote location to a remote server somewhere in the United States.”

Exactly how it works is classified, but we have established some details. The first part of the weapon is an artillery round – or as the army puts it, “a non-lethal personal suppression projectile” – fired from a 155mm howitzer, with a range of 28km. It scatters 152 small non-explosive submunitions over a 1-hectare area; as each parachutes down, it sprays a chemical agent. Development was overseen by the US Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Centre (Ardec).

Citing a massive run on deposits, regulators shut its main branch three hours early, leaving customers stunned and upset. One woman leaned on the locked doors, pleading with an employee inside: “Please, please, I want to take out a portion.” All she could do was read a two-page notice taped to the door.

The bank’s 33 branches will be closed over the weekend, but the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will reopen the bank on Monday as IndyMac Federal Bank, said the Office of Thrift Supervision in Washington. Customers will not be able to bank by phone or Internet over the weekend, regulators said, but can continue to use ATMs, debit cards and checks. Normal branch hours, online banking and phone banking services were to resume Monday.

Based on a preliminary analysis, federal authorities said the takeover of IndyMac, which had $32 billion in listed assets, would cost the FDIC between $4 billion and $8 billion. Regulators said deposits of up to $100,000 were safe and insured by the FDIC.

The report, carried also by Iranian news outlets, claimed that recently massive nocturnal activity by IAF craft was noted in several American held airbases, including measures by the US army to increase security around the bases.

The Jerusalem Post could not confirm the veracity of the report.

According to the sources, former military officers in the Anbar province said IAF jets arrive during the night from Jordanian airspace, enter Iraq’s airspace and land on a runway near the city of Hadita. The sources estimated the jets were practicing for a raid on Iran’s nuclear sites.

The sources also said the American bases in Iraq might serve as a platform for the IAF from which to attack Iran. If Israeli warplanes will take off from Iraq, they can reach Bushehr in five minutes – a “record time,” the sources said.

After reports of a massive IAF exercise over the Mediterranean surfaced several weeks ago, an Israeli official told the times that the drill was “the dress rehearsal” for an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites.

The companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have been hit hard by the mortgage foreclosure crisis. Their shares are plummeting and their borrowing costs are rising as investors worry that the companies will suffer losses far larger than the $11 billion they have already lost in recent months. Now, as housing prices decline further and foreclosures grow, the markets are worried that Fannie and Freddie themselves may default on their debt.

Under a conservatorship, the shares of Fannie and Freddie would be worth little or nothing, and any losses on mortgages they own or guarantee — which could be staggering — would be paid by taxpayers.

The government officials said that the administration had also considered calling for legislation that would offer an explicit government guarantee on the $5 trillion of debt owned or guaranteed by the companies. But that is a far less attractive option, they said, because it would effectively double the size of the public debt.

The officials also said that such a step would be ineffective because the markets already widely accept that the government stands behind the companies.

The officials involved in the discussions stressed that no action by the administration was imminent, and that Fannie and Freddie are not considered to be in a crisis situation. But in recent days, enough concern has built among senior government officials over the health of the giant mortgage finance companies for them to hold a series of meetings and conference calls to discuss contingency plans.

A conservatorship or other rescue operation would be the second time in four months that the Bush administration has stepped in to engineer a rescue to prevent the financial system from collapsing. Last March, it forced the sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase to avert a bankruptcy of that venerable investment house.

Anger in the workplace — employees and employers who are grumpy, insulting, short-tempered or worse — is shockingly common and likely growing as Americans cope with woes of rising costs, job uncertainty or overwhelming debt, experts say.

“It runs the gamut from just rudeness up to pretty extreme abusive behaviors,” said Paul Spector, professor of industrial and organizational psychology at the University of South Florida. “The severe cases of fatal violence get a lot of press but in some ways this is more insidious because it affects millions of people.”

Nearly half of U.S. workers in America report yelling and verbal abuse on the job, with roughly a quarter saying it has driven them to tears, research has shown.

Other research showed one-sixth of workers reported anger at work has led to property damage, while a tenth reported physical violence and fear their workplace might not be safe.

“It’s a total disaster,” said Anna Maravelas, author of “How to Reduce Workplace Conflict and Stress.” “Rudeness, impatience, people being angry — we used to do that kind of stuff at home but at work, we were professional. Now it’s almost becoming trendy to do it at work.

“It was something we did behind closed doors,” she said. “Now people are losing their sense of embarrassment over it.”

Contemporary pressures such as rising fuel costs fan the flames, said John Challenger, head of Chicago’s Challenger, Gray & Christmas workplace consultants.

“People are coming to work after a long commute, sitting in traffic watching their discretionary income burn up. They’re ready for a fight or just really upset,” he said.

Reports at the time said that 20 people were killed in the airstrike in Nangarhar province. The US military said they were militants.

But local people said the dead were wedding party guests.

…

Mr Karzai set up a nine-man commission to look into Sunday’s incident.

The commission is headed by Senate deputy speaker, Burhanullah Shinwari whose constituency is in Nangarhar province. He told the BBC: ”Our investigation found out that 47 civilians (were killed) by the American bombing and nine others injured.