CHICAGO — A Muslim convert who talked about his desire to wage jihad against civilians was charged Friday in a plot to set off hand grenades at a shopping mall at the height of the Christmas rush, authorities said.

Investigators said Derrick Shareef, 22, an American citizen from Rockford, was acting alone and never actually obtained any grenades. He was arrested Wednesday when he met with an undercover agent in a parking lot to trade a set of stereo speakers for four hand grenades and a gun, authorities said.

“He fixed on a day of December 22nd on Friday … because it was the Friday before Christmas and thought that would be the highest concentration of shoppers that he could kill and injure,” said Robert Grant, the agent in charge of the Chicago FBI office.

Authorities said Shareef had been under investigation since September, when he told an acquaintance that “he wanted to commit acts of violent jihad against targets in the United States as well as commit other crimes.”

Yeah, that sounds plausible… (more…)

YORK, Pa. — A half-dozen surveillance cameras are being installed this week outside bathrooms in the local high school in response to a spate of bomb threats.

For the fifth time this school year, Dover Area School District students were evacuated Monday while police and fire crews searched the high school and found nothing.

Superintendent Richard Nilsen said Tuesday that six surveillance cameras are being installed this week in hallways outside school bathrooms where the threats were written. Another 10 cameras will be installed in other parts of the school, Nilsen said. (more…)

The Kremlin has launched an aggressive public relations war designed to undo the damage caused by its claimed involvement in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.

After five weeks of allegations that the poisoning of the former KGB agent was sanctioned by President Vladimir Putin, state-controlled media in Moscow made a concerted attack on Mr Litvinenko’s reputation ­ describing him as a hard-up fantasist whose death was part of a smear campaign against Russia.

The onslaught represented a reversal of the initial silence from the Russian media and senior officials about his death. (more…)

At a Pentagon townhall meeting today, outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said he began reading books about the U.S. Civil War, but “turned away from that” because he “there were so many people killed and wounded, and they were all Americans.” Rumsfeld said he began reading books about World War II instead.

Rumsfeld appears to be in denial about civil wars, refusing to read books on the U.S.’s history and failing to recognize there is one going on currently in Iraq.

Full transcript: (more…)

In what was likely her final legislative act in Congress, outgoing Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney introduced a bill Friday to impeach President Bush.

The legislation has no chance of passing and serves as a symbolic parting shot not only at Bush but also at Democratic leaders. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has made clear that she will not entertain proposals to sanction Bush and has warned the liberal wing of her party against making political hay of impeachment.

McKinney, a Democrat who drew national headlines in March when she struck a Capitol police officer, has long insisted that Bush was never legitimately elected. In introducing her legislation in the final hours of the current Congress, she said Bush had violated his oath of office to defend the Constitution and the nation’s laws.

In the bill, she accused Bush of misleading Congress on the war in Iraq and violating privacy laws with his domestic spying program. (more…)

Iran has begun installing 3,000 centrifuges in an expansion of its uranium enrichment program that brings the Islamic nation significantly closer to large-scale production of nuclear fuel, the president said Saturday.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also claimed that the international community was caving in to Tehran’s demands to continue its nuclear program.

“Resistance of the Iranian nation in the past year forced them to retreat tens of steps over the Iran’s nuclear issue,” the semi-official Fars agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying. Fars is considered to be close to Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards.

Iran has been locked in a standoff with the West over its nuclear program. The U.S. alleges that Tehran is secretly trying to develop atomic weapons, but Iran contends its program is for peaceful purposes including generating electricity. (more…)

US President George W. Bush on Saturday hailed the US Congress’s passage of a landmark bill allowing civilian nuclear fuel and technology to be exported to India for the first time in 30 years.
“I am pleased that our two countries will soon have increased opportunities to work together to meet our energy needs in a manner that does not increase air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, promotes clean development, supports nonproliferation and advances our trade interests,” Bush said in a statement.

“I appreciate Congress’s support for the US-India civil nuclear cooperation initiative,” Bush said, adding: “I look forward to signing this bill into law soon.” (more…)

A world-famous British scientist failed to disclose that he held a paid consultancy with a chemical company for more than 20 years while investigating cancer risks in the industry, the Guardian can reveal.
Sir Richard Doll, the celebrated epidemiologist who established that smoking causes lung cancer, was receiving a consultancy fee of $1,500 a day in the mid-1980s from Monsanto, then a major chemical company and now better known for its GM crops business.

While he was being paid by Monsanto, Sir Richard wrote to a royal Australian commission investigating the potential cancer-causing properties of Agent Orange, made by Monsanto and used by the US in the Vietnam war. Sir Richard said there was no evidence that the chemical caused cancer.
Documents seen by the Guardian reveal that Sir Richard was also paid a £15,000 fee by the Chemical Manufacturers Association and two other major companies, Dow Chemicals and ICI, for a review that largely cleared vinyl chloride, used in plastics, of any link with cancers apart from liver cancer - a conclusion with which the World Health Organisation disagrees. Sir Richard’s review was used by the manufacturers’ trade association to defend the chemical for more than a decade. (more…)

President slips to all-time low in the Zogby Poll as key demographic groups jump ship

The national job approval rating of President Bush has plummeted to 30%, an all–time low in the latest Zogby International telephone poll, sinking below the 31% approval rating he dropped to in early June.

The President’s positive job rating is down from 36% in late October, in the weeks heading into the congressional midterm elections. Since then, the Democrats swept to control of both houses of Congress, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned and was replaced by Robert Gates, who said the U.S. is not winning the war in Iraq. Release of the Iraq Study Group’s report calling for significant change in the way the U.S. is conducting the Iraq war came as this latest Zogby poll was in the field.

Sixty–eight percent said they believe Bush is doing only a fair or poor job leading the nation. (more…)

President Bush spoke Saturday about parts of the Iraq Study Group report that mirror his policies - but he ignored the sections that criticize his administration’s handling of the war.

In his weekly radio broadcast, Bush said the bipartisan group’s report presented a straightforward picture of the “grave situation we face in Iraq.'’ He said he was pleased the panel supported his goal of an Iraq that can govern, sustain and defend itself, even though that will take time. And he said he was glad the bipartisan panel did not suggest a hasty withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

“The group declared that such a withdrawal would `almost certainly produce greater sectarian violence’ and lead to `a significant power vacuum, greater human suffering, regional destabilization and a threat to the global economy,”’ Bush said, quoting the report, which was issued Thursday. (more…)

The American secret service was bugging Princess Diana’s telephone conversations without the approval of the British security services on the night she died, according to the most comprehensive report on her death, to be published this week.

Among extraordinary details due to emerge in the report by former Metropolitan police commissioner Lord Stevens is the revelation that the US security service was bugging her calls in the hours before she was killed in a car crash in Paris.

From PP: Lord Stevens is the whitewash specialist the government turns to on every occasion it wants to sweep its criminal actions under the rug. The crash was an accident, the blood samples being swapped was an accident, the ambulance taking over an hour to reach the hospital was an accident, the change of route to Dodi’s flat was an accident, police radios and cameras shutting off moments before the crash was an accident, Diana saying she would be killed in a car crash was a coincidental, the laser beam was coincidental, the white Fiat Uno was coincdental, secret service agents swarming the tunnel before the crash was coincidental. Yes, it was all one big coincidental accident according to Stevens, but the fact remains that 94% of Brits believe it was murder and one more apologetic cover-up from within the very establishment that killed Diana is not going to change that. (more…)

Suspicious restoration in name of “historical interest” will raise fears of link to Halliburton camps for dissidents

One of the last acts of Congress was to send President Bush a bill that establishes a $38 million program of National Park Service grants to preserve Japanese POW internment camps in Hawaii, California, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Idaho. Is this really in the name of historical interest or does it dovetail with programs on the books to intern hundreds of thousands of dissidents in a time of crisis?

The Honolulu Advertiser reports,

“Notorious internment camps where Japanese-Americans were kept behind barbed wire during World War II, including a camp in Honouliuli Gulch, will be preserved as stark reminders of how the United States turned on some of its citizens in a time of fear.” (more…)

Like most soldiers serving in Iraq, Joe Darby just wanted to go home when his time was up. But blowing the whistle on his unit members for abusing Iraqi prisoners changed all that, and now the former military police specialist lives in an undisclosed city with his wife, still worried for their safety.

“I worry about the one guy who wants to get even with me, and that one guy could hurt me and my family,” says Darby. That one guy could be from his hometown of Cumberland, Md., where many in his unit lived.

What were his friends and neighbors saying about him after they learned he gave photos to authorities showing U.S. soldiers, some from Cumberland, abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison? “He was a rat. He was a traitor. He let his unit down and the U.S. military. Basically, he was no good,” Colin Engelbach, commander of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter, says he heard townspeople say. It was hard on Darby. “These were people who knew me since I was born….my parents’ friends, my grandparents’ friends, that turned against me.”

Says Engelbach, “I agree that his actions…were no good and borderline traitor.” He understands Darby was reporting a crime. “But do you put the enemy above your buddies? I wouldn’t.” (more…)

Governmental changes and upcoming legislation from the new Congress may bring an end to “paperless” electronic voting, The New York Times reports in its Friday edition.

“By the 2008 presidential election, voters around the country are likely to see sweeping changes in how they cast their ballots and how those ballots are counted,” write Ian Urbina and Christopher Drew, “including an end to the use of most electronic voting machines without a paper trail.”

Quoting federal voting officials and legislators, the Urbina and Drew report that new government guidelines and bills in Congress “will probably combine to make paperless voting machines obsolete.” (more…)