US Defense Secretary designate Robert Gates said Tuesday he no longer favors military action to stop North Korea from producing more nuclear weapons.
Gates said he believes Washington’s current diplomatic strategy of engaging Pyongyang through six party talks is the best course of action.

“I’ve changed my view on how to deal with North Korea. I believe that clearly at this point the best course is the diplomatic one,” he said in his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Senator Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Committee, quoted from a 1994 paper in which Gates argued that the only option was to destroy North Korea’s plutonium reprocessing facility to keep its nuclear arsenal from growing larger. (more…)

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, who flaunts his ideological fervour, has been accused of undermining Iran’s Islamic revolution after television footage appeared to show him watching a female song and dance show.
The famously austere Mr Ahmadinejad has been criticised by his own allies after attending the lavish opening ceremony of the Asian games in Qatar, a sporting competition involving 13,000 athletes from 39 countries. The ceremony featured Indian and Egyptian dancers and female vocalists. Many were not wearing veils.

Women are forbidden to sing and dance before a male audience under Iran’s Islamic legal code. Officials are expected to excuse themselves from such engagements when abroad but TV pictures showed Mr Ahmadinejad sitting with President Bashar Assad of Syria and Ismail Haniya, the Palestinian prime minister, during last Friday’s ceremony in Doha. (more…)

President George W. Bush, facing growing public discontent over the Iraq war, admitted on Monday his parents are worried about him but insisted he rarely talks policy with his father.

Bush acknowledged, however, he did consult with the 41st president before nominating Robert Gates, CIA director under his father, to replace Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary. But he said the elder Bush had no advance knowledge of the appointment.

In a rare glimpse of his relationship with the former president after recent signs of possible strains between the two men, Bush said he calls his parents every two weeks.

“I love to talk to my dad about things between a father and a son, not policy,” he said. (more…)

Hannity & Colmes did some PR last night (12/4/06) for a new FOX News “pundit,” Greg Gutfeld, host of a “web show” on FOXNews.com. Gutfeld was obviously trying to make a good impression by showing off just how snide and mean-spirited he could be, sort of an Ann Coulter wannabe without the glassy eyes – at least as far as I could tell. Like Coulter, he seemed to be his own biggest fan, and delighted in his own malice, even when it made no sense.

The excuse for rolling out Gutfeld on prime time was an attack on actress Gwyneth Paltrow for making what Sean Hannity called “anti-American” remarks, as quoted by the European press. The TV screen showed those remarks: “The British are much more intelligent and civilized than the Americans. I love the English lifestyle… I’m not as capitalistic as America. People talk about interesting things at dinner – not about work and money.”

Hannity acknowledged that Paltrow told People that she had been misquoted and claimed to have never said anything against the US. “I felt so upset to be completely misconstrued and I never, ever would have said that,” Paltrow reportedly said.

“I suspect that she said it,” Hannity said, as though it made a difference. (more…)

The family of shot Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes are due at court to fight the decision not to prosecute police officers over his death.
The Brazilian was shot after police mistook him for a suicide bomber on a London Tube train on 22 July last year.

Fifteen officers were investigated, but the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was “insufficient evidence” to bring individual prosecutions. (more…)

One minute he was going about his business, the next he was looking at a vision from the depths of hell. Still reeling from a blast which rocked the World Trade Center, William Rodriguez could hardly believe what he was seeing.”A man came running into the office shouting ‘explosion, explosion!’” Mr Rodriguez soon saw a third of his body had been badly burnt by the blast. “When I realised, I started screaming. I looked at his face and it was missing parts.”

It was the start of a day that transformed Mr Rodriguez from a maintenance man to the hero of 9/11. He ran back into the crumbling tower three times, and helped save hundreds of people.

In the months that followed, his role would change again, from the “face” of the rescue effort to an outspoken critic of the government. (more…)

The dollar may fall for a fourth day on speculation reports on U.S. services and manufacturing will provide further evidence economic growth is slowing.

Factory orders probably dropped by the most in more than six years in October, while expansion in service industries cooled in November, cementing expectations that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates. The dollar declined 1 percent versus the euro and 0.7 percent against the yen in the past week.

“I am pretty much dollar bearish,'’ said Michiyoshi Kato, a senior currency dealer in Tokyo at Mizuho Corporate Bank Ltd., a unit of Japan’s second-largest lender by assets. “Faced with a slowing U.S. economy, investors are certainly losing confidence in the dollar. It will likely head south.'’ (more…)

Flatulence brought 99 passengers on an American Airlines flight to an unscheduled visit to Nashville early Monday morning.

American Flight 1053, from Washington Reagan National Airport and bound for Dallas/Fort Worth, made an emergency landing here after passengers reported smelling struck matches, said Lynne Lowrance, a spokeswoman for the Nashville International Airport Authority.

The plane landed safely. The FBI, Transportation Safety Administration and airport authority responded to the emergency, Lowrance said.

The passengers and five crew members were brought off the plane, together with all the luggage, to go through security checks again. Bomb-sniffing dogs found spent matches. (more…)

In a press release issued today, the American Civil Liberties Union announces that a “landmark” case against Donald Rumsfeld will be heard in federal court this week.

The ACLU and another legal rights organization, Human Rights First, are to appear in court here on Friday “to argue that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is directly responsible for the torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. military custody,” said the release.

“The hearing will be the first time a federal court will consider whether top U.S. officials can be held legally accountable for the torture scandal in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the release continues, adding that the lawsuit was first filed in 2005 “on behalf of nine Iraqi and Afghan former detainees.” (more…)

The right-wing news site WorldNetDaily is reporting a claim by conservative British tabloid The Sunday Express that Scotland Yard is checking into the possibility that dead Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, a KGB defector, may have been attempting to smuggle highly radioactive polonium to terror groups.

Mentioning reports that Litvinenko converted to Islam shortly before his death, the site repeats the paper’s claim that “[Scotland Yard’s] biggest fear … is that Litvinenko, who died of polonium-210 poisoning in a London hospital, may have been helping al-Qaida or other extremist groups get hold of radioactive material to be used in a devastating ‘dirty’ atom bomb.”

Not everyone supports the Express’s assertion, or, by extension, believes in Scotland Yard’s purported concern. (more…)

Predicting Iran will obtain nuclear weapons by the end of the decade, the defense establishment’s new and updated assessment for 2007 does not foresee the United States undertaking a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear installations, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

The chances of an American strike are deemed “low,” according to assessments by the security establishment. Israel also believes that international diplomatic efforts to stop Iran will fail, security sources said.

In an interview with the Post in late September, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said US President George W. Bush would prevent the Iranians from obtaining a nuclear bomb.Asked whether he felt Bush would one way or the other stop Iran going nuclear, Olmert responded: “I believe so.” (more…)

One of two men wounded in the hail of 50 police bullets that killed their unarmed friend following a bachelor party has for the first time publicly disputed the police version of the incident.

In an interview Tuesday at a Queens hospital, Trent Benefield was asked if it was true that a fourth companion, possibly armed, fled the scene of the Nov. 25 shooting outside a Queens strip club.

“No,'’ he said in a soft voice. “No fourth man.'’

Benefield, 23, who was shot three times in the legs, was released from the hospital on Tuesday and was scheduled to meet with the Rev. Al Sharpton, according to Sharpton’s office. (more…)

Ann Althouse always has the capacity to completely and utterly astound me. There is always another layer of just plain nuts.

The pictures of Jose Padilla being led to the dentist in leg shackles and blackout goggles have provoked outrage and disgust and bafflement. Why the goggles? What’s the point?

Althouse has an answer:

Perhaps there is a fear that he will communicate in code by blinking. (more…)

A government plan to use radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in a proposed passport card program for U.S. citizens is drawing fire from some quarters. The identification cards would be needed by residents who don’t have passports for verifying their identity at land and sea border crossings.

The Smart Card Alliance, a nonprofit industry body representing several large vendors of smart-card and RFID technologies, this week formally urged the government to reconsider a decision to use RFID technology in personal ID verification cards. The alliance cited security and privacy concerns for its stance.

It was responding to an Oct. 17 notice in the Federal Register in which the U.S. Department of State announced plans to use RFID chips for a proposed new passport card to be issued as part of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, or WHTI. (more…)

Where was the FOX news fanfare? Total media blackout suggests new strategy may be to ignore 9/11 questions

There has been a total media blackout on the release of the Doubletree Hotel video that shows the explosion at the Pentagon on 9/11 but does not reveal any footage of the impact. This may suggest that the corporate media has adopted a new strategy of ignorance towards questions concerning the official 9/11 story.

View Two versions of the video below, the second has a close up zoom in on the explosion. (more…)