¡Cuba RebelióN!

http://hotair.com/archives/2007/11/07/video-%c2%a1cuba-rebelion/

Conservative Ann Coulter vs. Liberal Donny Deutsch

Burmese riot police attack monks

Burmese riot police attack monks

Thousands of Burmese Buddhist monks and other protesters have been marching in Rangoon despite a crackdown that has reportedly killed at least one monk.
Monks’ shaved heads stained with blood could be seen at the Shwedagon Pagoda where police charged against protesters demanding the end of military rule.
Some marchers started for the city centre while others headed for the home of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Security forces reportedly ringed six monasteries on the ninth day of unrest.
This is a battle of wills between Burma’s two most powerful institutions, the military and the monk-hood, and the outcome is still unclear, the BBC’s South East Asia correspondent, Jonathan Head, reports.
Hospital sources in Rangoon told the BBC that at least one monk had been killed and that two others were in intensive care.
The monks were beaten with the back of rifles. Taxi drivers are transporting the injured to nearby medical facilities, said the source, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Other reports differ on the number killed with a monastery official telling Reuters news agency two monks had died while Burmese officials told AFP three monks had been killed.
Analysts fear a repeat of the violence in 1988, when troops opened fire on unarmed protesters, killing thousands.
The UN Security Council has called a meeting for 1900 GMT on Wednesday to discuss the clashes, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said.
Earlier, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for talks with a view to sending an envoy to the country. He vowed there would be “no impunity” for human rights violators.
‘Human shield’
A clampdown on the media by Burma’s military government, which has banned gatherings of five people or more and imposed a night-time curfew, makes following the exact course of the protests difficult.
It is known that several thousand monks and opposition activists moved away from Shwedagon Pagoda, heading for Sule Pagoda in the city centre.
They are marching down the streets, with the monks in the middle and ordinary people either side – they are shielding them, forming a human chain Unnamed eyewitness quoted by Reuters
Reports suggest they were prevented from reaching it but other demonstrators did gather at Sule to jeer soldiers.
Troops responded by firing tear gas and live rounds over the protesters’ heads, sending people running for cover.
Monks marching to the home of Aung San Suu Kyi reportedly urged civilians not to join them.
“We monks will do this, please don’t join us, don’t do anything violent,” they were quoted by AFP as saying.
One witness quoted by Reuters said civilians were shielding the marching monks.
“They are marching down the streets, with the monks in the middle and ordinary people either side – they are shielding them, forming a human chain,” the witness said.
At Shwedagon Pagoda, riot police charged against the protesters, leaving a number of monks and nuns covered in blood, some of them apparently seriously injured.
British embassy sources say at least 100 monks were beaten and arrested. Demonstrators were dragged away in trucks.
One BBC News website reader in Rangoon says armed and plainclothes police can be seen at key sites across the city. At City Hall, police are holding photos of the monks leading the protests, the reader says.
Two prominent dissidents, U Win Naing and popular comedian Zaganar, were arrested overnight.
‘Different situation’
The protests were triggered by the government’s decision to double the price of fuel last month, hitting people hard in the impoverished nation.
Aung Naing Oo, a former student leader who was involved in the 1988 uprising and who now lives in exile in the UK, believes the junta cannot stop the protesters.
“There was only very little information about the killings. Now with the internet and the whole world watching I think it’s a totally different story… monks are highly revered in the country.”
US President George W Bush has announced a tightening of US economic sanctions against Burma.
The US already has an arms ban on Burma, a ban on all exports, a ban on new investment and a ban on financial services.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7013638.stm

Democrat NASA scientist who accused Bush Administration of censorship received $720,000 from Democrat George Soros

The Soros Threat To Democracy
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Monday, September 24, 2007 4:20 PM PT
Democracy: George Soros is known for funding groups such as MoveOn.org that seek to manipulate public opinion. So why is the billionaire’s backing of what he believes in problematic? In a word: transparency.
How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely “NASA whistleblower” standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros’ Open Society Institute , which gave him “legal and media advice”?
That’s right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros’ flagship “philanthropy,” by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI’s “politicization of science” program.
That may have meant that Hansen had media flacks help him get on the evening news to push his agenda and lawyers pressuring officials to let him spout his supposedly “censored” spiel for weeks in the name of advancing the global warming agenda.
Hansen even succeeded, with public pressure from his nightly news performances, in forcing NASA to change its media policies to his advantage. Had Hansen’s OSI-funding been known, the public might have viewed the whole production differently. The outcome could have been different.
That’s not the only case. Didn’t the mainstream media report that 2006’s vast immigration rallies across the country began as a spontaneous uprising of 2 million angry Mexican-flag waving illegal immigrants demanding U.S. citizenship in Los Angeles, egged on only by a local Spanish-language radio announcer?
Turns out that wasn’t what happened, either. Soros’ OSI had money-muscle there, too, through its $17 million Justice Fund. The fund lists 19 projects in 2006. One was vaguely described involvement in the immigration rallies. Another project funded illegal immigrant activist groups for subsequent court cases.
So what looked like a wildfire grassroots movement really was a manipulation from OSI’s glassy Manhattan offices. The public had no way of knowing until the release of OSI’s 2006 annual report.
Meanwhile, OSI cash backed terrorist-friendly court rulings, too.
Do people know last year’s Supreme Court ruling abolishing special military commissions for terrorists at Guantanamo was a Soros project? OSI gave support to Georgetown lawyers in 2006 to win Hamdan v. Rumsfeld — for the terrorists.
OSI also gave cash to other radicals who pressured the Transportation Security Administration to scrap a program called “Secure Flight,” which matched flight passenger lists with terrorist names. It gave more cash to other left-wing lawyers who persuaded a Texas judge to block cell phone tracking of terrorists.
They trumpeted this as a victory for civil liberties. Feel safer?
It’s all part of the $74 million OSI spent on “U.S. Programs” in 2006 to “shape policy.” Who knows what revelations 2007’s report will bring around events now in the news?
OSI isn’t the only secretive organization that Soros funds. OSI partners with the Tides Foundation, which funnels cash from wealthy donors who may not want it known that their cash goes to fringe groups engaged in “direct action” — also known as eco-terrorism.
On the political front, Soros has a great influence in a secretive organization called “Democracy Alliance” whose idea of democracy seems to be government controlled solely of Democrats.
“As with everything about the Democracy Alliance, the strangest aspect of this entire process was the incessant secrecy. Among the alliance’s stated values was a commitment to political transparency — as long as it didn’t apply to the alliance,” wrote Matt Bai, describing how the alliance was formed in 2005, in his book “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.”
Soros’ “shaping public policies,” as OSI calls it, is not illegal. But it’s a problem for democracy because it drives issues with cash and then only lets the public know about it after it’s old news.
That means the public makes decisions about issues without understanding the special agendas of groups behind them.
Without more transparency, it amounts to political manipulation. This leads to cynicism. As word of these short-term covert ops gets out, the public grows to distrust what it hears and tunes out.
The irony here is that Soros claims to be an advocate of an “open society.” His OSI does just the legal minimum to disclose its activities. The public shouldn’t have to wait until an annual report is out before the light is flipped on about the Open Society’s political action.
http://ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=275526219598836

Report finds that Democracy in retreat around the world

Democracy in retreat around the world
By Daniel Dombey in Washington
Published: September 24 2007 22:00 Last updated: September 24 2007 22:00
Democracy and good governance are on the retreat in a number of countries around the world, a wide-ranging report says on Tuesday.
The report, compiled by Freedom House, a US government-supported campaigning organisation, concludes that human rights and governance have worsened in Russia and Iran, arguing that corruption in Iran has intensified in spite of the campaign promises of President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad.
It also indicates that states across the world are attempting to follow the model of China and Russia by seeking to modernise parts of their economy while keeping a central grip on power.
Among the countries that have achieved economic success while maintaining or intensifying what the report identifies as political repression are Libya, Tunisia and Algeria. It adds that Egypt has been both economically unsuccessful and politically repressive and that democratic developments have been stopped in their tracks by coups in Thailand and Bangladesh.
The survey of 30 countries comes as President George W. Bush prepares to address the United Nations on his “freedom agenda” for the world on Tuesday.
On taking office for the second time, Mr Bush pledged that America would seek to end “tyranny in our world”, and he prides himself on being a “dissident president”.
The White House says that “interrelated aspects of human freedom” will be at the heart of the president’s efforts during his time at the UN – whether the issue is Darfur, governance in Africa more generally, or the Middle East peace process.
But in an introductory essay to its survey, Freedom House highlights what it calls “the durability of a 21st century authoritarian capitalist model” pioneered by China.
It argues that Russia has followed a similar path of exploiting economic growth to minimise pressure for political reform and claims that Russia “has come to resemble the autocratic regimes of central Asia more than the consolidated democracies of eastern Europe”.
For the past two years “Russia could no longer be considered a democracy at all according to most metrics”, and is less democratic today than it was in 2005.
It highlights the high threshold for parties to be elected to the Russian parliament, opacity in the award of broadcasting licences, corruption, the rareness of jury trials and uneven enforcement of property rights.
“Civil society has been a clear target of the Russian government over the past two years,” Freedom House says.
On Iran, the report says that corruption has increased – as highlighted by cut-rate privatisations for favoured buyers and a failure to deposit billions of dollars in oil revenues in the national treasury on schedule.
It adds that restrictions on freedom of expression have worsened since Mr Ahmadi-Nejad was elected president in 2005.
“Journalists, particularly younger and less well-known ones, have little protection from arbitrary arrest and detention,” it says, adding that academics and non- governmental organisations with foreign contacts have increasingly been accused of breaking the law by committing “political offences”.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/692acca6-6ad8-11dc-9410-0000779fd2ac.html

US Spy Chief Says China and Russia Spying on US at Near Cold War Levels

Spy chief: China, Russia spying on US
By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer Mon Sep 17, 8:33 PM ET
WASHINGTON – China and Russia are spying on the United States nearly as much as they did during the Cold War, according to the top U.S. intelligence official.
Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, says in testimony prepared for a Tuesday congressional hearing that a law passed last month expanding the U.S. government’s eavesdropping power is needed to protect not just against terrorists but also against more traditional potential adversaries, such as those two Cold War foes.
“China and Russia’s foreign intelligence services are among the most aggressive in collecting against sensitive and protected U.S. systems, facilities and development projects, and their efforts are approaching Cold War levels,” McConnell says in his testimony. “Foreign intelligence information concerning the plans, activities and intentions of foreign powers and their agents is critical to protect the nation and preserve our security.”
The new law will also enable the intelligence agencies to identify “sleeper cells” of terrorists in the United States, according to McConnell’s statement to the House Judiciary Committee.
Congress last month hastily adopted the Protect America Act just before it went on summer vacation, propelled by McConnell’s warnings of a need to close a dangerous gap in U.S. intelligence law.
Some lawmakers are now having second thoughts as the complicated law — intended to make it easier for the government to intercept foreign calls and e-mails — has come under attack by civil liberties and privacy advocates who contend it gives the government broader powers than intended.
The Protect America Act allows the government to listen in, without a court order, on all communications conducted by a person reasonably believed to be outside the United States, even if an American is on one end of the conversation.
Such surveillance was generally prohibited under the original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and it is one of the more controversial aspects of the new law.
But McConnell’s prepared testimony says one of the most important new powers granted by the law is the possibility of obtaining a call or e-mail “from a foreign terrorist outside the United States to a previously unknown ’sleeper’ or coconspirator inside the United States.”
While some Democrats are angling to roll back what they consider the excesses of the new law, McConnell and Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Wainstein are pushing Congress to make even more changes to FISA.
Among the changes they seek is a new definition for “electronic surveillance.” The legal definition includes not just which technologies are used to conduct the surveillance, but also whom is targeted, what communications are collected, where the target is and where the eavesdropping takes place. The definition is critical because it limits the government’s power. FISA generally requires court orders for any activity deemed to be “electronic surveillance.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070918/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/spying_on_us_1