I spent most of the day today working on a new design for disgrunt and it is just about ready to go. I intend to launch it sometime tomorrow, on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. I will also be digging up some of the more notorious stories regarding 9/11 tomorrow, so stay tuned for that!

Despite polls suggesting Democrats have their best chance in years to regain control of the House of Representatives, Bush told the newspaper in an interview he was confident a power shift was “not going to happen.”

To many of President Bush’s allies, it is time to free intelligence officials from “legislative purgatory” and get the CIA back in the business of effective interrogations of suspected terrorists.Through omissions and legal definitions, the proposal could authorize harsh techniques that critics contend potentially violate the Geneva Conventions, which govern the treatment of war prisoners. These methods include hypothermia, stress positions and “waterboarding,” a practice of simulated drowning. (more…)

Arab MK arrives in Damascus with his party members, sends alarming message that ‘Israel may launch onslaught in bid to restore deterrence’

National Democratic Assembly chairman, Knesset Member Azmi Bishara, arrived in Damascus on Friday and immediately began making public statements condemning the Israeli occupation of the territories.

Bishara joined his party members, MKs Jamal Zahalka and Wasil Taha, as well as former MKs Muhammad Kanan and Mohammed Miari, who have been in the city since Thursday.

In the course of his meeting with senior members of the ruling Baath party, Bishara warned Syria of the possibility that “Israel launch a preliminary offensive in more than one place, in a bid to overcome the internal crisis in the country and in an attempt to restore its deterrence capability.” (more…)

Yacoub Sarraf, its Environment Minister, speaking exclusively to The Independent on Sunday, said last week that a highly poisonous cloud spread over a third of the country - an area that is home to half its people - from a fire in a bombed fuel tank that burned for 12 days.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced an important visit to Shiite neighbor Iran, as a debate over a plan to divide Iraq into autonomous regions fuelled sectarian tension at home.

In the fourth of a series of speeches aimed at fueling public fears of terrorism to boost his administration’s failing political standing, President Bush appeared before an audience of right-wing policy experts in Atlanta, Georgia Thursday. The speech was focused on the demand that Congress move quickly to legalize the program of warrantless wiretapping of Americans, the existence of which was revealed late last year. (more…)

An Israeli diplomat was released from the Columbia County Detention Center on $50,000 bond Wednesday within hours of pleading not guilty to charges that he tried to entice what he thought was a child on the Internet with pornography. (more…)

FORT EUSTIS, Va. - Long before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists to develop plans for securing a postwar Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said Thursday. (more…)

The acknowledgement of a global network of ‘black sites’ has revealed the existence of a sinister two-tier system of interrogation

Labor Day, the long weekend holiday that marks the end of summer, is usually the quietest of times in America and its various small corners around the world. Not so, however, last Monday at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where 445 terrorist suspects are held. (more…)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who first exposed the horrors of the Stalinist gulag, is now attempting to tackle one of the most sensitive topics of his writing career - the role of the Jews in the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet purges. (more…)

Two words: Jacob Schiff