Pentagon adviser Richard Perle came under fire on Friday for failing to disclose financial ties to Boeing Co. , even while championing its bid for a controversial $20 billion-plus defense contract.
Perle co-wrote a guest column in The Wall Street Journal newspaper this summer praising the plan to lease then buy 100 modified refueling planes, a year after Boeing committed to invest up to $20 million in Trireme Partners, a New York venture capital fund in which Perle is a principal.

A senior security officer at the United Nations suffered a deadly gunshot wound to his head in an apparent suicide in an employees' lounge above the General Assembly, sources said.
The death of Michael Halton, 41, stunned friends and colleagues as well as bystanders gathered in the building for a World AIDS Day function
Halton, a popular 16-year veteran of the U.N. security force, was apparently depressed over marital problems and had recently begun taking an anti-depressant drug, police sources said.

Sources said despite Halton's upbeat demeanor at work, he had recently been depressed and, unbeknownst to his bosses, had been taking medication during the past week.

The New Alchemy - Turning Murder into Suicide


Fighting for his composure, lawyer Rocco Galati said Thursday that he will drop all of his terrorism-related cases after a death threat that he said he believes came from an intelligence agency.
“I'm not on the verge of tears for my safety. I'm on the verge of tears because it means we now live in Colombia. It means that the rule of law is meaningless. It means that lawyers cannot represent anyone even in what you profess to be a democracy here in Canada,” he said. “It comments on where we've arrived as a society.”

“You get to recognize when someone is trying to blow off steam and when someone is serious,” he said at his office, his own lawyer by his side. “This is serious, this is an institutional threat, this is not an individual.”
He was tightlipped when asked to explain his apparent certainty that the threat came from an official source. He would say only that he recognized the voice on the message from a previous case and said that, in that earlier instance, a person mentioned by the voice had subsequently disappeared.
Mr. Galati's own lawyer, Paul Slansky, said that neither the RCMP nor the Toronto police seem willing to take the threat seriously.

The left leg of retired Colonel David Hackworth still carries a bullet that he picked up while fighting in the Vietnam War. Wounded a total of eight times, he claims to be America's most highly decorated soldier, his chest weighed down by honours such as eight Purple Hearts, nine Silver Stars and eight Bronze Stars.
Colonel Hackworth, 72, described the US Defence Secretary as "an arrogant asshole".

BA denied any knowledge of the incident, but yesterday National Air Traffic Services, confirmed the conversation took place between a pilot from a non-British carrier and an air traffic controller at Swanwick, Hampshire, who was simply reading from a flight plan that stated the flight would be operated by a Gulfstream.


A quasi-governmental corporation set up to fund telecommunications company start-ups is spending nearly as much on executive salaries and overhead as it is investing in companies, a Center for Public Integrity investigation has found.
FCC Chairman Michael Powell appointed himself to the board, raising questions as to whether it is a good idea to put the top FCC regulator in charge of a venture capital fund in the same industry he regulates.

Nearly one woman in two has searched her husband's pockets or read his mobile telephone messages without his knowledge, according to a survey published today.

30 July 2001 Wayne Madsen: However, it is not an e-Pearl Harbor we must be concerned about but an e-Reichstag Fire.

Virginia needs a new law that complies with a Supreme Court ruling that struck down anti-sodomy laws but will keep its existing sodomy ban as a non-working, unconstitutional vestige, the State Crime Commission said.

This spreading flu fright stretching from Asia to North America has all the earmarks of a novel social experiment in population manipulation aimed to culture the mass mind for the arrival of “the Big One”—a biological agent, predicted to be a flu, that will facilitate the decimation of approximately a third to half of the world’s population. Curiously, this number is in keeping with current official population reduction objectives. Naturally you would be disinclined to believe the above sentence.
Surely the SARS death rate, falsely alleged to be 3-4%, was insufficient cause for such widespread panic.

What is HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS about the mysterious and terrifying arrival of SARS was its timing. It arrived virtually synchronous with the global war on terrorism, and the Anglo-American war with Iraq.
“People are all too willing to relinquish their civil rights and personal freedoms in the wake of such engineered frights.”

It seems certain that Bush will make it back to the Oval Office through the back door that is the Electoral College.
With the election of Bush II in 2004, the ideological and economic fracturing of America will be complete and, for the foreseeable future, permanent.
The Palestinians will likely be granted a piece of the former Syria and will be relocated there by the US and Israel.
Simultaneously with invasion of Syria, Iran will be subjected to an extraordinary air and cruise missile assault led by American forces.

Since the Bush PCS believes that North Korea cannot be allowed to exist, it will attack North Korea simultaneously with its invasion of Syria and Iran. China will have been dealt with during back channel negotiations. The price China will demand of not intervening against the US invasion (Chinese troop strength at 100 million) will be Taiwan.

The US and South Korean military will attempt to neutralize the North Korean military with low yield tactical nuclear weapons which will be used primarily along the heavily fortified Southern border.

Meanwhile in Colombia, US military forces will openly engage in combat against the FARC and indigenous peoples movements there. Over in Venezuela, the US will finally topple Hugo Chavez (if not prior to 2004). The aged leaders of Cuba and Libya will be no match for the Bush PCS, and they will likely be toppled in US led coups.