Tuesday, Dec 09th
Last update07:17:16 AM GMT
The Vietnam Veterans of America asked a federal judge to impose sanctions on the Central Intelligence Agency, for failing to produce documents on the CIA's testing of hundreds of kinds of drugs - including sarin and phosgene nerve gas and LSD - on thousands of soldiers.
The Vietnam Veterans of America sued the CIA in January 2009, claiming the agency had experimented on soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal and Fort Detrick, Md., testing the effects of mind-controlling drugs.
The U.S. military is demanding to know what happened to $1.9 million worth of computers purchased by American taxpayers and intended for Iraqi schoolchildren that have instead been auctioned off by Iraqi officials for less than $50,000, the military said Friday.
The U.S. press release was a rare public admission by the military of the loss of American taxpayer money in Iraq and an equally rare criticism of Iraqi officials with whom the Americans are trying to partner as the military hands over more and more responsibility and withdraws troops from the country.
More than a quarter of the $20 billion in Housing and Urban Development relief funds that were earmarked for Gulf Coast states after Hurricane Katrina remains unspent five years after the storm, a fact noticed by at least one congressional leader who's eager to spend it elsewhere.
In June, U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, ordered data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development on how much remains unspent from the Community Development Block Grants that were earmarked in hurricane relief funds for Gulf Coast states after the 2005 storms. The answer: about $5.4 billion, comprising $3 billion of the $13 billion earmarked for Louisiana and $2 billion of the $5.5 billion for Mississippi.
The CIA is making secret payments to multiple members of President Hamid Karzai's administration, in part to maintain sources of information in a government in which the Afghan leader is often seen as having a limited grasp of developments, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The payments are long-standing in many cases and designed to help the agency maintain a deep roster of allies within the presidential palace. Some aides function as CIA informants, but others collect stipends under more informal arrangements meant to ensure their accessibility, a U.S. official said.
The Bush administration made a "fatal mistake" by talking up facts and figures without painting a broader picture of the obstacles in its widely criticized Hurricane Katrina response effort, ex-FEMA chief Michael Brown said Thursday.
Brown told CNN's Anderson Cooper that the talking points he and other federal officials used at the time didn't tell the whole story.
Did you know that the majority of FDA approved drugs have serious potential side effects that were not detected before marketing approval?
That about three quarters of a million people a year are rushed to emergency rooms in the U.S. because of adverse drug reactions, according to the CDC?
That the number of medication-related deaths in the U.S. is estimated at over 200,000 a year, making medications the third or fourth leading cause of death in this country?
They say marijuana is dangerous. Pot is not harmful to the human body or mind. Marijuana does not pose a threat to the general public. Marijuana is very much a danger to the oil companies, alcohol, tobacco industries and a large number of chemical corporations. Big businesses, with plenty of dollars and influence, have suppressed the truth from the people. The truth is, if marijuana was utilized for its vast array of commercial products, it would create an industrial atomic bomb! The super rich have conspired to spread misinformation about the plant that, if used properly, would ruin their companies.
The jury in the Bronx synagogue bomb plot case was told Wednesday that the informant who provided the four suspects with phony bombs and missiles was paid $97,000 by the FBI.
The FBI gave Pakistani immigrant Shahed Hussain $44,000 for expenses and $53,000 for "his services" over a three-year period, agent Robert Fuller said.
Former President Jimmy Carter was expected to leave North Korea on Friday with Aijalon Mahli Gomes, an American who was sentenced to eight years of hard labor for illegally entering the country, the Carter Center said. “Former President Jimmy Carter announced that he is leaving Pyongyang, North Korea, this morning accompanied by Mr. Aijalon Mahli Gomes,” the Carter Center said in a statement sent in an e-mail message.
Mr. Carter had been visiting Pyongyang on a private humanitarian mission to win the release of Mr. Gomes, who was sentenced in April to eight years in a North Korean prison and fined $700,000 for entering the country illegally. There has also been speculation that North Korea might try to use Mr. Carter as a conduit to ease tensions with the United States.
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