Australian toll road giant Macquarie agreed Wednesday to purchase forty local newspapers, primarily in Texas and Oklahoma, for $80 million. Macquarie Bank is Australia's largest capital raising firm and has invested billions in purchasing roads in the US, Canada and UK. Most recently the company joined with Cintra Concesiones of Spain in a controversial 75-year lease of the 157-mile Indiana Toll Road.
Sal Costello, the leading opponent of toll road projects as head of the Texas To... (more)
LONDON, January 28 (IranMania) - Iran has condemned the order by US President George W Bush allowing US military to capture or kill Iranian agents operating inside neighbouring Iraq, terming it a 'terrorist act'.
'I really hope that this report is wrong as such an order is a clear terrorist act and against all internationally acknowledged norms,' the head of the parliament's foreign policy and security commission, Alaeddin Boroujerdi told Fars news agency Saturday.
CHAPEL HILL - Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, who toured the country last fall talking about other people's homes, is now fielding questions about his own $6 million estate outside Chapel Hill.
Edwards had hit the talk show circuit to promote his book "Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives," which describes the childhood homes of various more-or-less famous people, including his own modest mill village houses.
But since he announced his second run for th... (more)
Russia said yesterday it was not willing to hand over to Britain the businessman suspected by Scotland Yard of poisoning the former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko.
Russian prosecutors said there was virtually no prospect they would agree to any future British request for Andrei Lugovoi to be extradited to the UK to stand trial.
Senior Whitehall officials have told the Guardian that a Scotland Yard file on Mr Litvinenko's murder, which is abo... (more)
Low levels of chlorine in tap water used for bathing can almost double the risk of bladder cancer, a study claims.
Scientists found chemical by-products from mains water containing the disinfectant can be absorbed through the skin in the bath or shower and accumulate in the bladder.
Swimming in public pools can also present a risk because chlorine levels are much higher.
The risk is caused by chemical by-products called THMs which are produced when ch... (more)
Women in southern Sweden will in the future not be able to choose the sex of their gynaecologist. Allowing them to choose discriminates against male gynaecologists, it has been ruled.
The new practice has been introduced by clinics in the counties of Skåne, Halland, Blekinge and Kronoberg. Gynaecological patients in those areas will now be assigned a doctor of either sex, Helsingborgs Dagblad reports.
Exceptions will be made in some cases, such as for women who come... (more)
MEN are turning to cosmetic surgery to tackle the embarrassment of “man breasts”, fuelling a near doubling in the number of people sculpting their bodies through liposuction.
Surgeons have reported a surge in the number of men requesting breast-reduction operations for ‘moobs’. According to one theory, the condition, called gynaecomastia, may be caused by an excess of female hormones in tap water.
The boom in demand for liposuction is revealed in an audit by the Bri... (more)
MILAN, Italy -- Italy's top criminal court has ruled that downloading music, movies and software over the Internet isn't a crime if profit wasn't the motivation, though analysts questioned Monday whether the ruling would have much effect on copyright laws.
The court's decision, issued earlier this month but reported over the weekend by the Italian media, overturns earlier convictions against two former Turin Polytechnic Institute students who set up in 1994 a peer-to-peer, file-s... (more)
Bush and Cheney have less than two years to go in their current role and want to go down in the history books as the heroes of the Pax Americana, as the men who managed to conquer the Middle East and its oil, as the men who took full-spectrum dominance seriously, while in their own country booking successes through exorbitant profits for the military-industrial complex and the realization of radical l... (more)
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has requested that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities as a "confidence-building measure", in light of Iran's 18 years of non-transparency. Tehran now faces two paths: either heed this call or face tougher sanctions and, worse, the possibility of war.
Increasingly, the voices of dissent in Iran on the nation's nuclear policy are getting louder and louder, reflecting a growing d... (more)
The escalation of US military planning on Iran is only the latest chess move in a six-year push within the Bush Administration to attack Iran, a RAW STORY investigation has found.
While Iran was named a part of President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” in 2002, efforts to ignite a confrontation with Iran date back long before the post-9/11 war on terror. Presently, the Administration is trumpeting claims that Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than the CIA’s own analysis shows an... (more)
I was an ordinary American until November 27, 2006 when I became a terrorist or more accurately what I call a "stand-by terrorist." Perhaps I cannot truly own this newfound nickname until the government decides to prosecute me for word crimes, if that day ever arrives. Until then, I just think of myself as being on stand-by, just as are most--if not all--Americans, whether they realize it or not.
You may wonder how words can amount to a terrorist act in the la... (more)
(San Francisco) In a truly bizarre development, the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, in Livermore, California, has gotten underway even larger nuclear radiation open air explosive detonations at "Site 300" near Tracy, California.
Tracy is on the South end of the Bay Area. The High Explosive detonations are to widely distribute radioactive poison gas [uranium oxide gas and aerosols] over the unsuspecting seven million residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, water supplies, ... (more)
Dramatic footage of mostly Shi'a Iraqi soldiers delivering a "brutal beating" to several local Sunnis has been obtained by a British public-service television station.
US soldiers, assigned to train the Iraqi troops, look on as the Iraqi soldiers push the beaten men into the rear compartment of an armored vehicle.
"It is a shocking insight into the sectarian violence that is tearing Baghdad apart," Jonathan Miller reports for Channel Four. ... (more)
From the beginning of the “war on terror,” George W. Bush has lied to the American people about the goals, motivation and even the identity of the enemy – a propaganda exercise that continued through his 2007 State of the Union Address and that is sounding the death knell for the Republic.
Since 2001, rather than focusing on the al-Qaeda Sunni fundamentalist terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks, Bush has expanded the conflict exponentially – tossing in unrelated e... (more)
It looks like a table top stuck on a Humvee, but to the US military it is a revolutionary new weapon, a controversial heat-ray destined to change the face of conflict by dispersing mobs, protecting military bases and sorting friend from foe without inflicting injuries.
Called Silent Guardian, the prototype fires a high-intensity beam of millimetre waves, inflicting a burning sensation like a light bulb pressed against the skin. After 12 years in development it... (more)
Newt Gingrich once again climbs up on the soapbox, this time at the Herzliya Conference sponsored by the Institute for Policy and Strategy in Israel. Newt tells us that the “terrorist threats are larger and more formidable than the political system in Israel or the US can cope with,” and of course, following the official fairy tale, this threat is nuclear, never mind Israel and the Unit... (more)
Bush's state of the union address did not describe the deplorable state of the union. The speech's importance consists of Bush's plea to Congress to please let him fool them one more time in order that he can attack Iran and start a bigger war that Congress will have to support in order to support Israel.
That is all the president had to say.
The "surge" of US troops for Iraq is another deception. The surge's purpose has nothing to do with achi... (more)
Barely a day goes by that one can avoid reading or hearing yet another Israeli, American or British warhawk regurgitate the broken record that Iran's President Ahmadinejad threatened to "wipe Israel off the map," framed in the ridiculous context that Israelis are being targeted for a second holocaust. This baseless rallying call for conflict holds about as much credibility as Dick Cheney's assertion that Saddam Hussein was planning to light up American skies with mushroom... (more)
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A senior official of Israel's central Holocaust memorial on Saturday assailed Jewish settlers who harass Palestinians in a tinderbox West Bank city, saying the abuse recalled the anti-Semitism of 1930s Europe.
The attack by Yosef Lapid, chairman of Yad Vashem's advisory council, was prompted by Israeli television footage showing a Hebron settler woman hissing "whore" at a Palestinian neighbour and settler children lobbing rocks at Arab homes.
Baghdad is paralysed by fear. Iraqi drivers are terrified of running into impromptu checkpoints where heavily armed men in civilian clothes may drag them out of their cars and kill them for being the wrong religion. Some districts exchange mortar fire every night. This is mayhem beyond the comprehension of George Bush and Tony Blair.
Black smoke was rising over the city centre yesterday as American and Iraqi army troops tried to fight their way into the insurgent district of Haifa... (more)
In the overall flow of information coming from the Middle East, there are increasingly frequent reports indicating that within several months from now the US will deliver nuclear strikes on Iran. For example, citing well-informed but undisclosed sources, the Kuwaiti Arab Times wrote that the US plans to launch a missile and bomb attack on the territory of Iran before the end of April, 2007. The campaign will start from the sea and will be supported by the Patriot missile defense systems in order... (more)
Long-term users of mobile phones are significantly more likely to develop a certain type of brain tumour on the side of the head where they hold their handsets, according to new research.
A large-scale study found that those who had regularly used mobiles for longer than 10 years were almost 40 per cent more likely to develop nervous system tumours called gliomas near to where they hold their phones.
The new research, to be published later this year in the Internati... (more)
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has left the Pentagon but not the Defense Department, reports Thursday's edition of the Washington Times, in a story which reveals that Bush's onetime Defense chief is now an unpaid consultant -- with classified access.
"On Jan. 4, Mr. Rumsfeld opened a government-provided transition office in Arlington and has seven Pentagon-paid staffers working for him," a Pentagon official told the paper.
