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Howard still maintains that he is going to support Kerry to ensure Bush's removal, he made it clear that likes Aaron as a candidate-- witness the quote that led off this entry. Stern appears to have left room to be persuaded, and he ended with "Let me think about it."

One solid thing that came from the interview was Stern conceding that the country was heading toward becoming a police state, and that neither Bush nor Kerry are going to do anything to change that. And he also acknowledged that neither Bush nor Kerry would stand up for his right to free speech, nor tame the out-of-control FCC. So there are clearly grounds for a continuing discussion with Howard Stern and his 10 million or so fiercely loyal listeners.

Six air traffic controllers provided accounts of their communications with hijacked planes on Sept. 11, 2001, on a tape recording that was later destroyed by Federal Aviation Administration managers, according to a government investigative report issued today.

It is unclear what information was on the tape because no one ever listened to, transcribed or duplicated it, the report by the Department of Transportation inspector general said.

THE inquiry into the Dunblane massacre was a massive cover-up, a top Scots Freemason has sensationally claimed.

Former Grand Master Lord Burton says that Lord Cullen's official probe suppressed crucial information to protect high-profile legal figures.

He says they may belong to a secretive "super-Mason" group called The Speculative Society.

Some had links to Dunblane's Queen Victoria School -where gunman Thomas Hamilton was allowed to roam free before the 1996 atrocity.

And Lord Burton revealed that he was bullied and threatened by other peers when he tried to raise his concerns in the House of Lords. . . .

police are investigating claims that pupils at QVS were regularly taken away and sexually abused.

The Cullen Inquiry failed to investigate why suspected paedophile Hamilton was allowed to wander around the school whenever he liked, running camps and using the shooting range. . . .

The QVS school is for children of the miltary services and has long-standing links to high office -its current patron is the Duke of Edinburgh.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Friday blamed the "imperialist" policies of U.S. President George W. Bush and the U.S.-led war in Iraq for sending crude oil prices to 13-1/2-year highs.

"Oil prices have risen to nearly $40 a barrel because of what is happening in Iraq and in the Middle East. George W. Bush is to blame...not only in the Middle East, but in a fair part of the world because of his imperialist policies," Chavez said at a televised public event.

U.S. crude futures on Friday shot to $40 a barrel for the first time since shortly after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in October 1990 on concerns over the security of oil installations in the Middle East and tight U.S. gasoline supplies.

A McDonald's manager testified Friday that Timothy McVeigh and a dark-skinned man were part of a group that piled out of a Ryder truck and entered her restaurant just days before the Oklahoma City bombing.

But the woman could not say whether the man with McVeigh was John Doe No. 2, the enigmatic suspect who is the key to Terry Nichols' defense on state murder charges in the April 19, 1995, bombing. The defense contends others helped McVeigh plan and execute the blast and that Nichols was set up to take the blame.

Joan Rairden testified that the men visited the McDonald's in Junction City, Kan., shortly before midnight on April 13 or 14, 1995. She said three people came inside, including McVeigh and the man with the dark skin and slicked-back hair.

The Bush administration's plan to use military tribunals to try some of the detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which has faced considerable skepticism, has been receiving some of its sharpest attacks from the military defense lawyers who are participating in the process.

Senior government planners once expected that the first of the prisoners to go before a tribunal would plead guilty as part of an agreement to reduce their jail time. But the five military lawyers assigned to defend the first group of prisoners have radically altered that hope, the officials now acknowledge.

The uniformed lawyers have been especially forceful, not only in asserting their clients' innocence but also in denouncing the tribunal system as inherently unfair and rigged.

[...]

Last month, an audience at Oxford University in England was stunned, witnesses said, when two of the lawyers, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift of the Navy and Maj. Mark Bridges of the Army, said the tribunals were not capable of producing a fair and just result.

An Oregon lawyer was taken into custody by the F.B.I. on Thursday on a material witness warrant in connection with the deadly railway bombings in Madrid on March 11, a government official said.

The lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, was the first person in the United States to be drawn into the investigation of the Madrid bombings, which killed 191 people and which Spanish officials have linked to possible associates of Al Qaeda.

[...]

A government official said: "We don't know how strong the case is, and the information is very limited. It's a very active investigation at this point."

Officials confirmed Thursday night, however, that Mr. Mayfield's fingerprints matched prints found on a bag in the wreckage of the Madrid bombing.

A new Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles policy that requires extra steps for immigrants seeking driver's licenses is discriminatory and has created a culture of fear, protesters said Wednesday.

About 400 people attended a Cinco de Mayo protest against the policy in South Bend.

Indiana is one of 39 states that does not permit illegal immigrants to obtain licenses to drive. Under the new policy, documents presented by foreign nationals seeking driver's licenses are copied and verified against federal immigration records.

"A driver's license is a license to drive, period," said Jose Arevalo, who helped organize the rally. "It creates numerous problems that arise from this set of discriminatory, illegal and unconstitutional rules that the Bureau of Motor Vehicles has arbitrarily set up."

Protesters said that immigrants are already living and working in Indiana and will be driving to work, school or medical appointments regardless of whether they have a license. There are more than 186,000 foreign-born people estimated to be living in Indiana, about 45,000 of them illegally, according to federal immigration officials.

latest gem

CALLER: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men --

LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?

CBS News was prepared as early as mid-April to report details of abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of U.S. troops but held off on the broadcast for two weeks at the request of Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The delay, disclosed by correspondent Dan Rather at the end of Wednesday's broadcast on "60 Minutes II," raised questions about whether CBS News was cooperating with the government in managing the timing of a highly embarrassing story.

It is not uncommon for news organizations to withhold sensitive information for reasons of national security. In this instance, Rather said CBS News delayed its report because of "the danger and tension on the ground in Iraq."

Jeffrey Fager, executive producer of "60 Minutes II," said Myers warned that the story, including photographs of U.S. troops abusing Iraqi prisoners, could incite Iraqi groups to injure American hostages.

Americans have a fearsome new enemy since 9/11, and that enemy is their own government, a panel of prominent defense lawyers told colleagues Friday.

Congress and the Bush administration are behaving in most un-American ways under the guise of national security, the lawyers argued: gutting civil rights, usurping powers to eavesdrop, creating secret tribunals where the accused have no rights.

And, they emphasize, all Americans not just terrorists are potential victims of the USA Patriot Act and other laws and presidential orders implemented in 9/11's wake.

"We are living in a very dangerous age," said Marvin Miller, an Alexandria, Va., trial lawyer. "I have this theory that just because we started out as a democracy doesn't mean we're going to survive as a democracy."

US military policemen moved unregistered Iraqi prisoners, known as "ghost detainees", around an army-run jail at Abu Ghraib, in order to hide them from the Red Cross, according to a confidential military report.

The report on abuses at Abu Ghraib prison - a copy of which was obtained by the Guardian - described the practice of hiding prisoners as "deceptive, contrary to army doctrine, and in violation of international law".

The revelations surfaced at a time when the prison abuse scandal threatened to engulf the Pentagon and the military occupation of Iraq.

The US army yesterday admitted to the Senate there was evidence of widespread abuse of prisoners in military-run jails in both Iraq and Afghanistan. There have been a total of 25 recorded deaths in US military custody in both countries.

The army also said yesterday that one soldier had been court-martialed for using excessive force in shooting to death an Iraqi prisoner last September. The soldier was reduced in rank and dismissed from the army.

It disclosed, too, that it had referred to the Justice Department a homicide case involving a CIA contract interrogator alleged to be responsible for the death of an Iraqi prisoner last November. That death was at Abu Ghraib prison.

Democratic 9/11 commissioner Bob Kerrey made an early departure from the commission's long-anticipated session with President Bush and Vice President Cheney . . .

Fellow Democratic commissioner Lee Hamilton also left the meeting with the president and vice president

The United States Election Assistance Commission (EAC) will meet Wednesday, May 5 to conduct their first public hearing on the present status of computerized electronic voting systems in America. The event will take place at EPA Headquarters, 1200 Pennsylvania Ave, N.W., Room 3000, in the Rachel L. Carson Great Hall of the Ariel Rios North Building in Washington, DC.

The daylong event will feature testimony from five distinct and diverse panels of witnesses. Included for presentation are: a Technology Panel, Vendor Panel, Election Administrator Panel, Research Panel and Advocacy Organization Panel.

Germany became the host country of the Codex Alimentarius Commission's Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses when Helmut Kohl was Chancellor in 1995.

It is noteworthy that Kohl's first job was as a lobbyist for BASF, and that he was put into power by electoral votes controlled by Germany's pharmaceutical industry.

Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, Shering and others made Germany the world's largest pharmaceutical exporter, and they became host country of the UN's Codex Commission's Committee on Nutrition out of a long range desire to crush the dietary supplement industry in order to insure that things STAY THAT WAY.
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Ralf Grossklaus is a bureaucrat at the German Bgvv, and he is Chair of the Codex Committee on Nutrition. I've witnessed him in action, and he forced me to shut my camcorder down at the meeting in Berlin in '98 (see the videofootage where Grossklaus stopped the entire meeting and forced me to stop taping at http://www.iahf.com in the media section) . . .

Many of us have observed Grossklaus acting more like a Judge than a Moderator as chair of these Codex meetings, always looking to advance the Cartel's agenda by how he runs these meetings. He stops discussion when it suits the wishes of his Cartel masters, blocks people from speaking when it suits him, and has the final meeting report written in such a way that it never reflects what actually took place in the meeting.

HELP NEEDED FROM SOMEONE WHO SPEAKS GERMAN TO PUT THIS JERK UNDER A MAGNIFYING GLASS TO DIG UP EVERYTHING ON HIM SO WE CAN FOLLOW THE MONEY TRAIL

Two Iraqi prisoners were murdered by Americans and 23 other deaths are being investigated in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States revealed on Tuesday as the Bush administration tried to contain growing outrage over the abuse of Iraqi detainees.

"The actions of the soldiers in those photographs are totally unacceptable and un-American," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said of humiliating images in the media of Iraqi prisoners. "Any who engaged in such action let down their comrades who serve honorably each day and they let down their country."

Army officials said the military had investigated the deaths of 25 prisoners held by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and determined that an Army soldier and a CIA contractor murdered two prisoners. Most of the deaths occurred in Iraq.

Hundreds of former commanders and military colleagues of presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry are set to declare in a signed letter that he is "unfit to be commander-in-chief." They will do so at a press conference in Washington on Tuesday.

"What is going to happen on Tuesday is an event that is really historical in dimension," John O'Neill, a Vietnam veteran who served in the Navy as a PCF (Patrol Craft Fast) boat commander, told CNSNews.com. The event, which is expected to draw about 25 of the letter-signers, is being organized by a newly formed group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

"We have 19 of 23 officers who served with [Kerry]. We have every commanding officer he ever had in Vietnam. They all signed a letter that says he is unfit to be commander-in-chief," O'Neill said.

The 13th Amendment states:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

108th CONGRESS
1st Session
S. 89
To provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense, homeland security, and for other purposes.

[...]

SEC. 2. NATIONAL SERVICE OBLIGATION.

(a) OBLIGATION FOR YOUNG PERSONS- It is the obligation of every citizen of the United States, and every other person residing in the United States, who is between the ages of 18 and 26 to perform a period of national service as prescribed in this Act unless exempted under the provisions of this Act.

(b) FORM OF NATIONAL SERVICE- National service under this Act shall be performed either--
(1) as a member of an active or reserve component of the uniformed services; or
(2) in a civilian capacity that, as determined by the President, promotes the national defense, including national or community service and homeland security.

Ahmad Chalabi, the longtime Pentagon [neocon] favorite to become leader of a free Iraq, has never made a secret of his close ties to Iran. Before the U.S. invasion of Baghdad, Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress maintained a $36,000-a-month branch office in Tehran—funded by U.S. taxpayers. INC representatives, including Chalabi himself, paid regular visits to the Iranian capital. Since the war, Chalabi's contacts with Iran may have intensified.

[...]

But U.S. intelligence agencies have recently raised concerns that Chalabi has become too close to Iran's theocratic rulers. NEWSWEEK has learned that top Bush administration officials have been briefed on intelligence indicating that Chalabi and some of his top aides have supplied Iran with "sensitive" information on the American occupation in Iraq. U.S. officials say that electronic intercepts of discussions between Iranian leaders indicate that Chalabi and his entourage told Iranian contacts about American political plans in Iraq. There are also indications that Chalabi has provided details of U.S. security operations. According to one U.S. government source, some of the information Chalabi turned over to Iran could "get people killed."

Derek V. Smith sees bad people lurking everywhere: terrorists, sexual predators, quack doctors, identity thieves. And yet Smith colors himself an optimist, insisting that society can protect itself from such dicey characters, using information as a shield.

In Smith's view, if we did more to examine each other's digital footprints -- addresses, employment records, credit data, lawsuits, criminal files, professional licenses, vehicle registrations -- the world would be safer.

Not surprisingly, Smith can supply much of that information -- he heads ChoicePoint, a leading electronic data warehouse regularly mined by companies and the government. ChoicePoint does 8 million background checks a year, serving more than half of the Fortune 500.

Database aggregators like ChoicePoint have quietly become powerful arbiters, whirring in the background when people seek jobs, get on airplanes, apply for insurance, commit a crime or fall victim to one. ChoicePoint's computers are packed with 19 billion public records.

[...]

[ChoicePoint] took heat after a firm it had acquired, DBT Online, supplied Florida elections officials with an inaccurate list of felons -- the roster included some people with misdemeanors. Those names were purged from voter rolls before the 2000 elections.

The head of a U.S.-funded Iraqi newspaper quit and said Monday he was taking almost his entire staff with him because of American interference in the publication.

On a front-page editorial of the Al-Sabah newspaper, editor-in-chief Ismail Zayer said he and his staff were ''celebrating the end of a nightmare we have suffered from for months ... We want independence. They (the Americans) refuse.''

Al-Sabah was set up by U.S. officials with funding from the Pentagon soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein last year. Since its first issue in July, many Iraqis have considered it the mouthpiece of the U.S.-led coalition, along with the U.S.-funded television station Al-Iraqiya.

Zayer said almost the entire staff left the paper along with him and that they were launching a new paper called Al-Sabah Al-Jedid (''The New Morning''), which would begin publishing Tuesday.

A cross-partisan group of registered Maryland voters announced today they will be filing a lawsuit against the Maryland State Board of Elections and its Administrator, charging that the new Diebold AccuVote-TS electronic voting machines recently purchased by Maryland fail to comply with both state and federal law. The lawsuit ? to be filed on Thursday in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court ? would force state election officials to decertify the electronic machines until the manufacturer, Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, remedies well-publicized security vulnerabilities in the new machines and institutes a voter-verified paper audit trail.

See the full complaint.

DEPARTMENT OF STATE

Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs

[Public Notice 4699]

List of April 22, 2004, of Participating Countries and Entities (Hereinafter Known as ``Participants'') Under the Clean Diamond Trade Act of 2003 (Public Law 108-19) and Section 2 of Executive Order 13312 of July 29, 2003

ACTION: Notice.

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