JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel triggered a fresh rift with Washington over settlement building on Tuesday by approving the building of 900 homes for Jews on West Bank land it occupied in a 1967 war and annexed to its Jerusalem municipality.
The Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth said U.S. President Barack Obama’s envoy, George Mitchell, had asked an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at a meeting in London on Monday, to block the proposed construction at the settlement of Gilo.
But a government planning commission approved the addition of 900 housing units at Gilo, where 40,000 Israelis already live.
The Israeli decision drew an unusually sharply worded rebuke from the White House, which said it was “dismayed” and accused Israel of undermining Obama’s efforts to resume peace talks with Palestinians stalled since December. Read the full story
* Brazil says hunger a “weapon of mass destruction”
* Summit declaration dilutes hunger and farm aid targets
* Berlusconi the only G8 leader attending
By Silvia Aloisi and Daniel Flynn
ROME, Nov 16 (Reuters) – The United Nations said on Monday that agreeing a climate change deal in Copenhagen next month is crucial to fighting global hunger, which Brazil’s president described as “the most devastating weapon of mass destruction”.
Government leaders and officials met in Rome for a three-day U.N. summit on how to help developing countries feed themselves, but anti-poverty campaigners and even some participants were already writing off the event as a missed opportunity. Read the full story
PORTLAND, Oregon (Reuters) – The United States’ first marijuana cafe opened on Friday, posing an early test of the Obama administration’s move to relax policing of medical use of the drug.
The Cannabis Cafe in Portland, Oregon, is the first to give certified medical marijuana users a place to get hold of the drug and smoke it — as long as they are out of public view — despite a federal ban.
“This club represents personal freedom, finally, for our members,” said Madeline Martinez, Oregon’s executive director of NORML, a group pushing for marijuana legalization. Read the full story
The American Medical Assn. changes its policy to promote clinical research and development of cannabis-based medicines and alternative delivery methods.
The American Medical Assn. on Tuesday urged the federal government to reconsider its classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug with no accepted medical use, a significant shift that puts the prestigious group behind calls for more research.
The nation’s largest physicians organization, with about 250,000 member doctors, the AMA has maintained since 1997 that marijuana should remain a Schedule I controlled substance, the most restrictive category, which also includes heroin and LSD.
In changing its policy, the group said its goal was to clear the way to conduct clinical research, develop cannabis-based medicines and devise alternative ways to deliver the drug.
“Despite more than 30 years of clinical research, only a small number of randomized, controlled trials have been conducted on smoked cannabis,” said Dr. Edward Langston, an AMA board member, noting that the limited number of studies was “insufficient to satisfy the current standards for a prescription drug product.” Read the full story
SAO PAULO, Brazil — A massive 2007 electrical blackout in Brazil has been newly blamed on computer hackers, but was actually the result of a utility company’s negligent maintenance of high voltage insulators on two transmission lines. That’s according to reports from government regulators and others who investigated the incident for more than a year.
In a broadcast Sunday night, the CBS newsmagazine “60 minutes” cited unnamed sources in making the extraordinary claim that a two-day outage in the Atlantic state of Espirito Santo was triggered by hackers targeting a utility company’s control systems. The blackout affected 3 million people. Hackers also caused another, smaller blackout north of Rio de Janeiro in January 2005, the network claimed.
Brazilian government officials disputed the report over the weekend, and Raphael Mandarino Jr., director of the Homeland Security Information and Communication Directorate, told the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo that he’s investigated the claims and found no evidence of hacker attacks, adding that Brazil’s electric control systems are not directly connected to the internet. Read the full story
Brazilian officials are disputing the claim by “60 Minutes” and others that a blackout in 2007 was caused by computer hackers. Wired magazine’s blog Threat Level, citing government and investigative sources, reports that the outage “was actually the result of a utility company’s negligent maintenance of high voltage insulators on two transmission lines.” Insulators hang from power lines and are prone to collect debris, which can cause power surges. In this case, officials say soot from nearby fires collected on the insulators.
Threat Level, which has long been skeptical of some of the more extraordinary claims by U.S. officials about cyber threats to critical infrastructure, spoke to the utility company involved in the blackout and got a denial of any hacker involvement. The company “has no knowledge of hackers acting in [the] power transmission system,” TL reported.
News of the “60 Minutes” piece hit the wires on Saturday, and over the weekend, Brazilian government officials started batting down the story. A senior homeland security official in Brazil told newspaper Folha de S. Paulo that he had investigated the allegations of a hacker causing the blackout and found no traces. Read the full story
When mainstream media began reporting on the shooting at Fort Hood, numerous reports surfaced stating multiple shooters were involved. Why haven’t we heard more information about these other shooters? Instead, allegations regarding Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s involvement have garnered the most attention from the mainstream media.
This video shows CNN interviewing Sgt. Maj. Jamie Poston. During this interview, Sgt. Maj. Jamie Poston confirms multiple times that more than one shooter was involved: Read the full story
FORT HOOD, Texas (AP) — The Army says 12 people were killed and 31 wounded in a pair of shootings at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas. The shooter was shot dead. Read the full story
You know things are shifting in America when Fortune magazine, the bible for business journalism, runs a cover story titled “Is pot already legal?”. You also know it when Barack Obama’s Department of Justice publishes a long-expected memo signalling that the federal government will no longer raid medical marijuana dispensaries if they are legal under state law. That happened formally this month. Read the full story
That’s a week after granting that status to the closing of the Champlain Bridge — the disasters are coming more often — and President Obama’s declaration that the swine flu was a National Emergency.
The executive order has these effects:
Allows health care workers who are not doctors, nurses or nurse practitioners to administer the vaccine
Allows school-based health centers to handle vaccinations Read the full story
(CNN) — Garth Brooks, one of the biggest country stars of all time, said Thursday he is coming out of retirement after nine years away from the music business, and will start a concert engagement in Las Vegas. Read the full story
CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela’s socialist leader Hugo Chavez said on Sunday that U.S. President Barack Obama had done nothing beyond wishful thinking to earn the Nobel Peace Prize.
Chavez, who has mixed praise for Obama personally with criticism of his government’s “imperialist” policies, said he thought it was a mistake when he read the U.S. leader had won. Read the full story
The Rio de Janeiro Olympics 2016 games are sure to be a great time for everyone involved. When the Rio de Janeiro Olympics 2016 games were announced, there was celebration all over the streets of this Brazilian city.
The Rio de Janeiro Olympics 2016 games come as a surprise to many that assumed that President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama and Oprah would be able to sway the IOC (International Olympic Committee) to select Chicago as the 2016 Olympic Games venue. Read the full story
Chicago has been eliminated in the first round of voting for the 2016 Olympics.
Hoping to persuade the IOC to award Chicago the 2016 Olympics, Obama and his wife led a heartfelt and, at times, very personal plea Friday. Instead of stodgy technical details, discussions of finances or computer-generated graphics, Chicago took members inside the city to show why it should win the games.
Obama spoke of finally finding a home in Chicago after a nomadic childhood. Michelle Obama recounted how, growing up on the city’s South Side, her disabled father taught her how to throw a ball and a “mean right hook.” Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley invoked the memory of Jesse Owens.
“Like so many young people, I was inspired” by the Olympics, the first lady said. “I found myself dreaming that maybe, just maybe, if I worked hard enough, I, too, could achieve something great. But I never dreamed the Olympic flame might light up lives in my neighborhood.
“But today I can.”
Chicago, competing with Madrid, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo for the 2016 Games, was the first of the finalists to make its presentation. Some of its speakers looked nervous and parts of the presentation came off as stilted. It also was surprisingly low-key, with a video featuring blues legend Buddy Guy and slick snapshots of the city the splashiest part of the presentation.
But that’s how it was designed, Daley said.
“It’s not about the words,” he said. “It’s about the heart and the soul.”
Though Chicago is the third-largest city in the United States, it is largely unknown overseas. Or, if people are familiar with it, they see it as the home of Michael Jordan and Al Capone — and not necessarily in that order.
So Chicago showed videos of its picturesque lakefront, where most of the venues will be clustered, and artsy Millennium Park, which will be a gathering place for fans during the games. Schoolchildren read letters to the IOC in another video, and a teacher spoke of a troubled student who turned his life around after joining the wrestling team.
Highlighting the city’s diversity — “It’s a place where our unity is on colorful display,” Obama said — the videos featured people of different colors and nationalities, including a group of veiled women playing basketball.
Bid chairman Patrick Ryan, who made his considerable fortune in insurance, spoke of the many companies that are based in the Midwest, making it “fertile territory” for new Olympic sponsors. He also mentioned the universities in and around Chicago, how they would be a source for research.
In planning the games, Chicago has made the athletes its focus, decathlon gold medalist Bryan Clay and Paralympic champion Linda Mastandrea said. The compact plan puts 90 percent of athletes within 15 minutes of their venues — a not insignificant detail, Clay said, describing a day that begins at 5 a.m. and doesn’t end until midnight.
Athletes would also feel at home in Chicago, Clay said. Pick pretty much any country in the world, and it likely has its own neighborhood in Chicago — the Walgreens in Greektown has English and Greek lettering on the building. Not only does that mean “local” cheering sections for all athletes, but there will be a homestay program for their families.
Chicago will use mostly existing and temporary facilities. While that means there won’t be any grand building, like the Bird’s Nest in Beijing, operations chief Doug Arnot said Chicago will leave a far more lasting — and important — legacy.
“We know that concrete and steel do not build sport, people build sport,” Arnot said.
The U.S. Olympic Committee has had a testy relationship with the IOC, including recent flare-ups over revenue sharing and a USOC TV network. Chicago leaders addressed that head on, repeatedly talking about wanting to be partners with the IOC. Stealing a page right out of Obama’s “Yes, we can” campaign theme, one video even featured residents repeating “Together we can.”
“I see a future in which the Olympic movement and the United States will move shoulder to shoulder toward the horizon, with a shared mission, together as true partners, thanks to an Olympic Games in Chicago in 2016,” said Bob Ctvrtlik, a former IOC member and the USOC’s vice chair of international relations.
Spanish Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, has admitted that he understands why some Spanish media, printed the photo of his family with Barack and Michelle Obama.
Zapatero has always made it clear that he did not want the press to take photos of his two daughters as they are children, currently 16 and 13, but the photo concerned which showed them was released by the White House, before a request from the Spanish Prime Minister later saw it removed. Many have commented that the Prime Minister cannot take his daughters on an official trip, at taxpayers’ expense, and keep his privacy demands in place. Read the full story
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