NewsCloud.com Intelligence News

Gordon Brown aide a victim of honeytrap operation by Chinese agents - Times Online

Aide to the UK PM gets picked up by hot girl at a nightclub in Shanghai; wakes up to discover his Blackberry is missing. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Internet Archive's NSL Challenge

FBI Withdraws Unconstitutional NSL Served on Internet Archive On November 26, 2007, the FBI served a National Security Letter NSL on the Internet Archive, a digital library. The letter sought personal information about one of the Archive s users, including the individual s NAME, address, and any electronic communication transactional records pertaining to the user. The NSL also included a gag order, prohibiting the Archive and its counsel from revealing the existence of the letter.

Media Matters - WSJ editorial falsely claimed

A Wall Street Journal editorial falsely asserted that "the Senate Intelligence Committee found" former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV "had lied in claiming his wife [former CIA agent Valerie Plame] had played no role in sending him to Niger."

Evolution battle flares in states

Creationism v. evolution in schools has been for many years a battle in the nation s culture war, and these days it s no different.

Trial by Fire: How Military Commissions Work and Why They Fail - Brookings Institution

More than six years after the Bush administration first introduced military commissions, finally we will learn whether they offer a plausible means of trying terrorists or whether the system really is the total flop it has seemed to be so far.

Reason Magazine - Open-Source Warfare

Let the world make its own choice between life and death. Why should we be saddled with the responsibility?

Iran: Certainty Declines in U.S. Intelligence Reports

Throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, the U.S. government regularly stated in a variety of forums that Iran possessed a large undeclared stockpile of chemical weapons (CW) and a substantial production capability. . .

OPINION FEATURE: American torture past and present

Many Americans were puzzled by the news, in 1902, that United States soldiers were torturing Filipinos with water. The United States, throughout its emergence as a world power, had spoken the language of liberation, rescue, and freedom. This was the language that, when coupled with expanding military and commercial ambitions, had helped launch two very different wars. The

Exclusive: Peace Corps, Fulbright Scholar Asked to 'Spy' on Cubans, Venezuelans

In an apparent violation of U.S. policy, Peace Corps volunteers and a Fulbright scholar were asked by a U.S. Embassy official in Bolivia "to basically spy" on Cubans and Venezuelans in the country, according to Peace Corps personnel and the Fulbright scholar involved.

Bill Richardson makes it short, sweet and brutal

Gov. Richardson released a statement re: the recent intel estimate that says Iran shelved their nuclear weapons program years ago, an assessment which differs greatly from what Bush, Cheney, and various neocons chihuahuas have yapped of late and insist on even now. The key bit of Richardson's very brief statement...

Radiation Poisoning Killed Ex-Russian Spy

His name was Litvinenko, Alexander Litvinenko. And before he died he blamed Putin.

Men Smarter than Women, Scientist Claims

To determine if there was a link between gender and intelligence, and perhaps between brain size and intelligence, Rushton and a colleague analyzed the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores from 100,000 17- and 18-year-olds. When Rushton and colleagues weighted each SAT question by an established general intelligence factor called the g-factor, they discovered that males surpassed females by an average of 3.6 IQ points.

Taller people are smarter

While researchers have long shown that tall people earn more than their shorter counterparts, it's not only social discrimination that accounts for this inequality -- tall people are just smarter than their height-challenged peers, a new study finds. "As early as age three -- before schooling has had a chance to play a role -- and throughout childhood, taller children perform significantly better on cognitive tests," wrote Anne Case and Christina Paxson of Princeton University in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The findings were based primarily on two British studies that followed children born in 1958 and 1970, respectively, through adulthood and a U.S. study on height and occupational choice.

Does bin Laden trail lead to Pakistan?

According to a U.S. military intelligence official familiar with the hunt, bin Laden is likely hiding in an area called Chitral, in the far north of Pakistan, bounded by Afghanistan to the west and China to the north. Contrary to popular belief, the official said, bin Laden most likely isn't living in a cave but in a house, possibly with a family and no more than two bodyguards. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the hunt, said the thinking that bin Laden is in Chitral is based in part on trees that are peculiar to that region that can be seen in a 2003 video of bin Laden walking in a mountainous region.

Some in G.O.P. Say Iran Threat Is Played Down

apparently reality still has a liberal bias