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As JPMorgan Chase reported sluggish earnings and potential new legal costs on Wednesday, its chief executive, Jamie Dimon, lashed out at regulators and analysts, including some who are calling for the breakup of what is the nation’s largest bank.

“Banks are under assault,” Mr. Dimon said in the call with reporters. “In the old days, you dealt with one regulator when you had an issue. Now it’s five or six. You should all ask the question about how American that is, how fair that is.” This is not the first time that Mr. Dimon has publicly criticized the new scrutiny and rules that banks have dealt with since the financial crisis. But in the past, Mr. Dimon was often confronting skeptics from outside the banking world. On Wednesday, he faced off against several industry analysts who questioned whether the costs associated with JPMorgan’s heft are outweighing the benefits.

“This is not Elizabeth Warren asking the questions,” said Mike Mayo, a bank analyst at CLSA, referring to the Massachusetts senator and outspoken critic of big banks. “Investors are talking about this.” Mr. Dimon and Marianne Lake, JPMorgan’s chief financial officer, rebutted any suggestion that JPMorgan would need to be broken into smaller parts to be more valuable, and argued that the bank’s size gave it many advantages against competitors — “the model works from a business standpoint,” Mr. Dimon said. But some of the analysts questioning Mr. Dimon and Ms. Lake did not seem to be satisfied by the answers and suggested that they expected to hear more about the bank’s efforts to change itself.

The United States already has 4500 troops in Iraq, but outgoing defense secretary Chuck Hagel says more may be needed.

U.S. ground forces may again be deployed to Iraq, outgoing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel hinted on Friday. “I think it may require a forward deployment of some of our troops,” he told CNN. Hagel stated troops wouldn't operate as frontline fighters, but instead support Iraqi government forces in spotting Islamic State group targets and gathering intelligence. He also stated he is unsure whether such a deployment is yet needed. “I would say we're not there yet. Whether we get there or not, I don't know,” he said. Despite a pledge by President Barack Obama that there would be “no boots on the ground” in the fight against the Islamic State group, around 4500 U.S. troops are already in Iraq. The administration says the troops are primarily providing training to Iraqi government forces, and will not directly face the Islamic State group.

However, Hagel himself has acknowledged las year, “This is a long-term effort.” “It’s difficult. There will be setbacks. There will be victories,” he said ahead of a visit to Baghdad in December. The surprise visit was the first time Hagel has been to Iraq since he became defense secretary in February, 2013.

To the young Syrian rebel fighter, the Skype message in early December 2013 appeared to come from a woman in Lebanon, named Iman Almasri, interested in his cause. Her picture, in a small icon alongside her name, showed a fair-skinned 20-something in a black head covering, wearing sunglasses.They chatted online for nearly two hours, seemingly united in their opposition to the rule of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian leader still in power after a civil war that has taken more than 200,000 lives. Eventually saying she worked “in a programing company in Beirut,” the woman asked the fighter whether he was talking from his computer or his smartphone. He sent her a photo of himself and asked for another of her in return. She sent one immediately, apologizing that it was a few years old.“Angel like,” he responded. “You drive me crazy.”

What the fighter did not know was that buried in the code of the second photo was a particularly potent piece of malware that copied files from his computer, including tactical battle plans and troves of information about him, his friends and fellow fighters. The woman was not a friendly chat partner, but a pro-Assad hacker — the photos all appear to have been plucked from the web.

The Syrian conflict has been marked by a very active, if only sporadically visible, cyberbattle that has engulfed all sides, one that is less dramatic than the barrel bombs, snipers and chemical weapons — but perhaps just as effective. The United States had deeply penetrated the web and phone systems in Syria a year before the Arab Spring uprisings spread throughout the country. And once it began, Mr. Assad’s digital warriors have been out in force, looking for any advantage that could keep him in power.In this case, the fighter had fallen for the oldest scam on the Internet, one that helped Mr. Assad’s allies. The chat is drawn from a new study by the intelligence-gathering division of FireEye, a computer security firm, which has delved into the hidden corners of the Syrian conflict — one in which even a low-tech fighting force has figured out a way to use cyberespionage to its advantage. FireEye researchers found a collection of chats and documents while researching malware hidden in PDF documents, which are commonly used to share letters, books or other images. That quickly took them to the servers where the stolen data was stored.

On January 20, as Houthi fighters battled the guards watching the compound of Yemen's president and further expanded their grip on the capital, a US citizen who has been detained in Sana'a since 2010 and hasn't been seen in almost a year called home to say that the Shia rebels had taken over the prison where he is held and that they planned to "kill everyone," according to his wife who resides in the US."Yemen is in complete turmoil as of yesterday," she wrote on a Facebook page advocating for his release. "He was able to make a call and asked for his country, America, to save his life by rescuing him from a sectarian battle between two groups [with] which he has no involvement."Sharif Mobley, a 31-year-old father of three from New Jersey, was snatched by Yemeni security officers 5 years ago and is suspected by the US of having ties to terrorist groups after he made contract with US-born Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a US drone attack in Yemen in 2011. His wife, who lived with him at the time of his capture, said they had traveled to Yemen to study Arabic and the teachings of Islam.

On January 20, as Houthi fighters battled the guards watching the compound of Yemen's president and further expanded their grip on the capital, a US citizen who has been detained in Sana'a since 2010 and hasn't been seen in almost a year called home to say that the Shia rebels had taken over the prison where he is held and that they planned to "kill everyone," according to his wife who resides in the US.

On January 20, as Houthi fighters battled the guards watching the compound of Yemen's president and further expanded their grip on the capital, a US citizen who has been detained in Sana'a since 2010 and hasn't been seen in almost a year called home to say that the Shia rebels had taken over the prison where he is held and that they planned to "kill everyone," according to his wife who resides in the US."Yemen is in complete turmoil as of yesterday," she wrote on a Facebook page advocating for his release. "He was able to make a call and asked for his country, America, to save his life by rescuing him from a sectarian battle between two groups [with] which he has no involvement."Sharif Mobley, a 31-year-old father of three from New Jersey, was snatched by Yemeni security officers 5 years ago and is suspected by the US of having ties to terrorist groups after he made contract with US-born Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a US drone attack in Yemen in 2011. His wife, who lived with him at the time of his capture, said they had traveled to Yemen to study Arabic and the teachings of Islam.

here’s yet another tantalizing clue that the National Security Agency and its “Five Eyes” allies are behind a poweful cyber-espionage tool called Regin, used to spy on friend and enemy alike. That’s the conclusion Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky drew after examining the source code of Regin and an innocuously-named spying tool called QWERTY. It’s an appropriate monicker. The malware, known as a keylogger,  vacuums up anything typed on a computer keyboard and sends it back to the programmer controlling it. The crucial clue Kaspersky found is that QWERTY “can only operate as part of the Regin platform.” After tracking Regin across 14 countries for years, Kaspersky and technology firm Symantec identified it in November 2014.  At the time, Symantec said Regin’s “capabilities and the level of resources behind [it] indicate that it is one of the main cyberespionage tools used by a nation state.” 

Though neither company said it, suspicion immediately arose that the NSA and its allies had created Regin. It immediately drew comparisons with Stuxnet, the joint U.S.-Israeli computer worm used to damage Iranian nuclear centrifuges in Natanz in 2009. Unlike Stuxnet’s narrow mission of sabotage, Regin is designed for spying in a wide set of environments. It hides in plain sight, disguised as ordinary Microsoft software.

The new evidence further points to the Five Eyes. The German news magazine Der Spiegel has a trove of documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, which included the source code. Der Spiegel gave Kaspersky the code to examine: The new analysis provides clear proof that Regin is in fact the cyber-attack platform belonging to the Five Eyes alliance, which includes the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Neither Kaspersky nor Symantec commented directly on the likely creator of Regin. But there can be little room left for doubt regarding the malware’s origin. Der Spiegel pointed to five elements they believe suggest Five Eyes authorship: the presence of QWERTY in Snowden’s files, its use in the Belgacom hack by Britain’s GCHQ, references to the sport of cricket in the code, structural similarities to tools outlined in other Snowden documents, and targets consistent with other Five Eyes tools and campaigns.

We’ve long noted that Saudi Arabia is a huge supporter of terrorism. But the new Saudi king is particularly bad. Investors Business Daily notes: King Salman has a history of funding al-Qaida, and his son has been accused of knowing in advance about the 9/11 attacks. *** Salman once ran a Saudi charity tied to al-Qaida and has been named a defendant in two lawsuits accusing the Saudi royal family of helping the 9/11 terrorists, one of which the U.S. Supreme Court recently let move forward after years of being blocked by the State Department and the well-funded Saudi lobby. Plaintiffs have provided an enormous amount of material to source their accusations against Salman. Here’s why his ascension to the throne is not good news, especially as the terrorism threat grows: • Salman once headed the Saudi High Commission for Relief to Bosnia and Herzegovina, which served as a key charitable front for al-Qaida in the Balkans. • According to a United Nations-sponsored investigation, Salman in the 1990s transferred more than $120 million from commission accounts under his control — as well as his own personal accounts — to the Third World Relief Agency, another al-Qaida front and the main pipeline for illegal weapons shipments to al-Qaida fighters in the Balkans.

• A U.N. audit found that the money was transferred following meetings with Salman, transfers that had no legitimate “humanitarian” purpose. • Former CIA officer Robert Baer has reported that an international raid of Saudi High Commission offices found evidence of terrorist plots against America. • Baer also revealed that Salman “personally approved” distribution of funds from the International Islamic Relief Organization, which also has provided material support to al-Qaida. • A recent Gulf Institute report says Salman and former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal knowingly aided and abetted al-Qaida in the run-up to 9/11. • Salman works closely with Saudi clerics Saleh al-Moghamsy, a radical anti-Semite, and Safar Hawali, a one-time mentor of Osama bin Laden, according to the Washington Free Beacon. • In “Why America Slept,” author Gerald Posner claimed that Salman’s son Ahmed bin Salman also had ties to al-Qaida and even advance knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

David Andrew Weinberg provides a superb round-up of Salman’s ties to terrorism and extremism: As former CIA official Bruce Riedel astutely pointed out, Salman was the regime’s lead fundraiser for mujahideen, or Islamic holy warriors, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, as well as for Bosnian Muslims during the Balkan struggles of the 1990s. In essence, he served as Saudi Arabia’s financial point man for bolstering fundamentalist proxies in war zones abroad. As longtime governor of Riyadh, Salman was often charged with maintaining order and consensus among members of his family. Salman’s half brother King Khalid (who ruled from 1975 to 1982) therefore looked to him early on in the Afghan conflict to use these family contacts for international objectives, appointing Salman to run the fundraising committee that gathered support from the royal family and other Saudis to support the mujahideen against the Soviets. Riedel writes that in this capacity, Salman “work[ed] very closely with the kingdom’s Wahhabi clerical establishment.” Another CIA officer who was stationed in Pakistan in the late 1980s estimates that private Saudi donations during that period reached between $20 million and $25 million every month. And as Rachel Bronson details in her book, Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership With Saudi Arabia, Salman also helped recruit fighters for Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, an Afghan Salafist fighter who served as a mentor to both Osama bin Laden and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper this morning released a report detailing new rules aimed at reforming the way signals intelligence is collected and stored by certain members of the United States Intelligence Community (IC). The long-awaited changes follow up on an order announced by President Obama one year ago that laid out the White House’s principles governing the collection of signals intelligence. That order, commonly known as PPD-28, purports to place limits on the use of data collected in bulk and to increase privacy protections related to the data collected, regardless of nationality. Accordingly, most of the changes presented as “new” by Clapper’s office  (ODNI) stem directly from the guidance provided in PPD-28, and so aren’t truly new. And of the biggest changes outlined in the report, there are still large exceptions that appear to allow the government to escape the restrictions with relative ease. Here’s a quick rundown.

Retention policy for non-U.S. persons. The new rules say that the IC must now delete information about “non-U.S. persons” that’s been gathered via signals intelligence after five-years. However, there is a loophole that will let spies hold onto that information indefinitely whenever the Director of National Intelligence determines (after considering the views of the ODNI’s Civil Liberties Protection Officer) that retaining information is in the interest of national security. The new rules don’t say whether the exceptions will be directed at entire groups of people or individual surveillance targets.  Section 215 metadata. Updates to the rules concerning the use of data collected under Section 215 of the Patriot Act includes the requirement that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (rather than authorized NSA officials) must determine spies have “reasonable, articulable suspicion” prior to query Section 215 data, outside of emergency circumstances. What qualifies as an emergency for these purposes? We don’t know. Additionally, the IC is now limited to two “hops” in querying the database. This means that spies can only play two degrees of Kevin Bacon, instead of the previously allowed three degrees, with the contacts of anyone targeted under Section 215. The report doesn’t explain what would prevent the NSA (or other agency using the 215 databases) from getting around this limit by redesignating a phone number found in the first or second hop as a new “target,” thereby allowing the agency to continue the contact chain.

National security letters (NSLs). The report also states that the FBI’s gag orders related to NSLs expire three years after the opening of a full-blown investigation or three years after an investigation’s close, whichever is earlier. However, these expiration dates can be easily overridden by by an FBI Special Agent in Charge or a Deputy Assistant FBI Director who finds that the statutory standards for secrecy about the NSL continue to be satisfied (which at least one court has said isn’t a very high bar). This exception also doesn’t address concerns that NSL gag orders lack adequate due process protections, lack basic judicial oversight, and may violate the First Amendment.

Hillary Clinton on Tuesday dismissed the idea of putting American or Western troops on the ground to combat the Islamic State militant group, instead favoring “air force, but also army soldiers from the region, and particularly from Iraq,” in fighting what she said would be a “long-term struggle.” The former secretary of state also said that she was “obviously” considering a run for president in 2016, but that her decision would come “all in good time.”

While lauding the technology field in general, Clinton also was careful to touch on subjects that can be sensitive in any industry, including rising CEO pay. She also called for a higher minimum wage, pay fairness, and paid leave policies.

Clinton said the National Security Agency should be more transparent about its activities, insisted that she “can never condone” the actions of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, and offered support for net neutrality. She also spoke at length about the important role women can play in the technology industry, intertwining that theme with an economic one. On the effort against ISIL, Clinton suggested during the Q&A with journalist Kara Swisher that there was little use in inserting U.S. combat troops into the fight and essentially backed the president’s strategy so far. “It’s a very hard challenge, because you can’t very well put American or Western troops in to fight this organism,” she said, in her clearest statement yet on the topic. “You have to use, not only air force but also army soldiers from the region and particularly from Iraq. … A lot of the right moves are being made, but this is a really complicated and long-term problem.”

On February 12, Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, announced that the IMF had reached an agreement with the Ukrainian government on a new economic reform program. Ms Lagarde’s statement, made in Brussels, came only minutes after peace negotiations between the heads of the German, French, Russian und Ukrainian governments in Minsk, Belarus, had ended. The timing was no coincidence. Washington had been left out of the negotiations and now reacted by sending its most powerful financial organization to the forefront in order to deliver a clear message to the world: that the US will not loosen its grip on the Ukraine, if not by sending weapons, then at least economically and financially.

The loans will be based on the terms of an economic program for Ukraine for 2015 – 2020, passed by the Kiev parliament in December 2014, and are tied to harsh conditions laid down in a letter of intent, signed by prime minister Yatseniuk and president Poroshenko in August 2014. Some of the measures have already been implemented, others will follow. Among those already in force is the flexible exchange rate regime which has not only led to a 67% devaluation of the hrivna, lowering the average monthly wage of Ukrainian workers to less than $ 60, but has also opened the doors for international currency speculators who have already made millions by indebting themselves in hrivnia and repaying their debts in euros and dollars. The rate of inflation, running at 25 % in 2014 and expected to rise even higher in 2015, and a hike in gas prices by 50 % in May 2014 made survival almost impossible for the weakest 20 % of the population who already lived below the poverty line in 2013. Among the measures still to come are the layoff of 10 % of the country’s public employees and the partial privatization of health care and education. The retirement age for women is to be raised by 10 years, that for men by 5 years, most benefits for old age pensioners are to be abolished, the pharmaceuticals market is to be deregulated. Retirement pensions will be frozen, and there will be no more free lunches for school children and patients in hospitals. Benefits for victims of the 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl are to be cut, and the boundaries of the officially designated radioactive hazard zone will be revised. The country’s monthly minimum wage is to remain at 1,218.00 hrivna ($ 46 at the current rate of exchange) until at least November 2015.

My War on Terror Letter to an Unknown American Patriot By Tom Engelhardt Dear American Patriot, I wish I knew your name. I’ve been thinking about you, about all of us actually and our country, and meaning to write for a while to explain myself.  Let me start this way: you should feel free to call me an American nationalist.  It may sound ugly as hell, but it’s one way I do think of myself. True, we Americans usually reserve the more kindly word “patriot” for ourselves and use “nationalist” to diss other people who exhibit special feeling for their country.  In the extreme, it’s “superpatriot” for us and “ultranationalist” for them. In any case, here’s how my particular form of nationalism manifests itself. I feel a responsibility for the acts of this country that I don’t feel for those of other states or groups.  When, for instance, a wedding party blows up thanks to a Taliban roadside bomb, or the Islamic State cuts some poor captive’s head off, or Bashar al-Assad’s air force drops barrel bombs on civilians, or the Russians jail a political activist, or some other group or state commits some similar set of crimes, I’m not surprised.  Human barbarity, as well as the arbitrary cruelty of state power, are unending facts of history. They should be opposed, but am I shocked? No.

Still -- and I accept the irrationality of this -- when my country wipes out wedding parties in other lands or organizes torture regimes and offshore prison systems where anything goes, or tries to jail yet another whistleblower, when it acts cruelly, arbitrarily, or barbarically, I feel shock and wonder why more Americans don’t have the same reaction. Don’t misunderstand me.  I don’t blame myself for the commission of such acts, but as an American, I do feel a special responsibility to do something about them, or at least to speak out against them -- as it should be the responsibility of others in their localities to deal with their particular sets of barbarians. So think of my last 12 years running TomDispatch.com as my own modest war on terror -- American terror.  We don’t, of course, like to think of ourselves as barbaric, and terror is, almost by definition, a set of un-American acts that others are eager to commit against us.  “They” want to take us out in our malls and backyards.  We would never commit such acts, not knowingly, not with malice aforethought.  It matters little here that, from wedding parties to funerals, women to children, we have, in fact, continued to take “them” out in their backyards quite regularly. Most Americans would admit that this country makes mistakes. Despite our best efforts, we do sometimes produce what we like to call “collateral damage” as we go after the evildoers, but a terror regime? Not us. Never.

And this is part of the reason I’m writing you. I keep wondering how, in these years, it’s been possible to hold onto such fictions so successfully. I wonder why, at least some of the time, you aren’t jumping out of your skin over what we do, rather than what they’ve done or might prospectively do to us. Let’s start with an uncomfortable fact of our world that few here care to mention: in one way or another, Washington has been complicit in the creation or strengthening of just about every extreme terror outfit across the Greater Middle East. If we weren’t their parents, in crucial cases we were at least their midwives or foster parents.

Man, at some point Congress is going to have to declare the FBI legally contemptuous and throw them in jail. They continue to refuse to cooperate with DOJ’s Inspector General, as they have been for basically 5 years. But in Michael Horowitz’ latest complaint to Congress, he adds a new spin: FBI is not only obstructing his investigation of the FBI’s management impaired surveillance, now FBI is obstructing his investigation of DEA’s management impaired surveillance. I first reported on DOJ IG’s investigation into DEA’s dragnet databases last April. At that point, the only dragnet we knew about was Hemisphere, which DEA uses to obtain years of phone records as well as location data and other details, before it them parallel constructs that data out of a defendant’s reach.

But since then, we’ve learned of what the government claims to be another database — that used to identify Shantia Hassanshahi in an Iranian sanctions case. After some delay, the government revealed that this was another dragnet, including just international calls. It claims that this database was suspended in September 2013 (around the time Hemisphere became public) and that it is no longer obtaining bulk records for it. According to the latest installment of Michael Horowitz’ complaints about FBI obstruction, he tried to obtain records on the DEA databases on November 20, 2014 (of note, during the period when the government was still refusing to tell even Judge Rudolph Contreras what the database implicating Hassanshahi was). FBI slow-walked production, but promised to provide everything to Horowitz by February 13, 2015. FBI has decided it has to keep reviewing the emails in question to see if there is grand jury, Title III electronic surveillance, and Fair Credit Reporting Act materials, which are the same categories of stuff FBI has refused in the past. So Horowitz is pointing to the language tied to DOJ’s appropriations for FY 2015 which (basically) defunded FBI obstruction. Only FBI continues to obstruct.

There’s one more question about this. As noted, this investigation is supposed to be about DEA’s databases. We’ve already seen that FBI uses Hemisphere (when I asked FBI for comment in advance of this February 4, 2014 article on FBI obstinance, Hemisphere was the one thing they refused all comment on). And obviously, FBI access another DEA database to go after Hassanshahi. So that may be the only reason why Horowitz needs the FBI’s cooperation to investigate the DEA’s dragnets. Plus, assuming FBI is parallel constructing these dragnets just like DEA is, I can understand why they’d want to withhold grand jury information, which would make that clear. Still, I can’t help but wonder — as I have in the past — whether these dragnets are all connected, a constantly moving shell game. That might explain why FBI is so intent on obstructing Horowitz again.

A damning report by the State Comptroller said that Netanyahu spent up to $230,000 on cleaning fees in 2011 alone

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to be probed over allegations of fiscal misconduct at his private and official residence. Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein on Thursday ordered a preliminary investigation, which will determine whether or not a criminal investigation will eventually be launched to deal with the misdemeanours. However, the attorney general has stressed that at this stage the investigations are not focusing in on the prime minister personally and noted that the probe will not begin before the election on 17 March where Netanyahu is vying for re-election.  

The announcement follows a scathing report by the State Comptroller, which queried huge sums spent on cleaning, makeup and clothing between 2009 and 2013. The long-awaited report by Yosef Shapira, who reviews how the Israeli government operates, unearthed that at their highest point in 2011, cleaning expenses for one of Netanyahu’s homes cost the Israeli taxpayer almost $285,000. Netanyahu and the First Lady only spend the occasional weekend there, but monthly cleaning costs for the house averaged more than $2,100 over the four-year period, the report found. The document also queried a large amount of electrical work carried out at the private residence by a personal friend of the Netanyahu's. “In light of the large cleaning costs, the [Prime Minister’s Office] should examine...their prudence and act to avoid unnecessary expenditures," Shapiro wrote in the report.

As readers of this blog already know, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) was the top congressional recipient of “pro-Israel” campaign funding in the 2012 election cycle, the last time he ran for office, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. He has since distinguished himself as the leading proponent among Senate’s Democrats of new sanctions against Iran. He has repeatedly co-sponsored sanctions legislation—with Mark Kirk (R-IL), the top recipient of pro-Israel campaign funding for the past decade—with the ostensible purpose of increasing pressure on Tehran to make far-reaching concessions at the negotiating table. It appears that Menendez has also been the top recipient of campaign funding from donors with ties to the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MeK), the cultish group that was until recently included on the State Department’s terrorism list, according to a new investigative report published Thursday by LobeLog alumni and occasional contributors Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton on The Intercept website. The article, “Long March of the Yellow Jackets: How a One-Time Terrorist Group Prevailed on Capitol Hill,” details how Menendez, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, maintained a hold for some six months—from July 2013 until late January 2014—on an arms package for the Iraqi government that included 24 Apache helicopters. Menendez explained publicly that he was concerned about then-Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s record of attacks against civilians and his tacitly allowing Iran to use Iraqi airspace to transport weapons to Syria.

But Ali and Eli cite sources that cumulatively suggest that Menendez’s position may have been influenced by intense lobbying on the part of pro-MeK individuals, including the lobbyist for one of the MeK’s political fronts and Menendez’s immediate predecessor, Robert Torricelli. Menendez finally lifted his hold after the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) launched their first major offensive into al-Anbar province from bases along the Syrian-Iraqi border, taking Fallujah and most of Ramadi.

According to the article,Menendez accepted more than $25,000 from donors with ties to the MEK, making him the largest recipient from 2012, when the MeK was delisted that September, to the present. That’s not much compared to the well over $300,000 Menendez received from pro-Israel groups during the 2012 election cycle, but it was more than twice what was provided to the next biggest recipients, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). In any event, the article casts light on the seamier side of the politics around Iran, and it’s a good read besides.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief on Tuesday said an Iran nuclear deal was “at hand” and urged different sides to show political will ahead of a new round of talks scheduled in Geneva next week

“We cannot miss this opportunity,” Federica Mogherini, whose predecessor Catherine Ashton chairs the talks in Switzerland, said at Chatham House, a think tank in London.

“A good deal is at hand if the parties will keep cooperating as they did so far and if we have enough political will from all sides to agree on a good deal and sell it domestically,” Mogherini said. “We have a series of internal domestic political dynamics we have to handle with care,” she said, listing “tensions” in the US Congress, Israel’s elections and Sunni-Shiite rivalry in the Gulf region. “A comprehensive agreement would be mutually beneficial for all sides,” she said. US Secretary of State John Kerry earlier on Tuesday said world powers “had made inroads” since reaching an interim deal with Iran in November 2013 on reining in its suspect nuclear program. “We expect to know soon whether or not Iran is willing to put together an acceptable, verifiable plan,” Kerry said after returning from talks in Geneva with his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif.

New Zealand is "selling out" its close relations with the Pacific nations to be close with the United States, author Nicky Hager has said. Hager, in conjunction with the New Zealand Herald and the Intercept news site, revealed today how New Zealand's spies are targeting the entire email, phone and social media communications of the country's closest, friendliest and most vulnerable neighbours. The revelations, based on documents supplied by United States fugitive and whistleblower Edward Snowden, expose a heavy focus on "full-take collection" from the Pacific with nearly two dozen countries around the world targeted by our Government Communications Security Bureau.

The Snowden documents show that information from across the Pacific is collected by New Zealand's GCSB but sent on to the United States' National Security Agency to plug holes in its global spying network.

READ MORE• The price of joining the Five Eyes club• How foreign spies access the data

In August of 2013, even as the words came out of US President Barack Obama’s mouth regarding an “impending” US military strike against the Syrian state, the impotence of American foreign policy loomed over him and those who wrote his speech for him like an insurmountable wall.  So absurd was America’s attempt to once again use the canard of “weapons of mass destruction” to justify yet another military intervention, that many believed America’s proxy war in Syria had finally reached its end. The counterstroke by Russia included Syria’s immediate and unconditional surrendering of its chemical weapons arsenal, and with that, so evaporated America’s casus belli. Few would believe if one told them then, that in 2015, that same discredited US would be routinely bombing Syrian territory and poised to justify the raising of an entire army of terrorists to wage war within Syria’s borders, yet that is precisely what is happening. President Obama has announced plans to formally increase military force in Iraq and Syria “against ISIS,” but of course includes building up huge armies of “rebels” who by all other accounts are as bad as ISIS itself (not to mention prone to joining ISIS’ ranks by the thousands)First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/03/07/us-war-on-isis-a-trojan-horse/

The number of Americans aged 16 and older not participating in the labor force hit 92,898,000 in February, tying December’s record, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Over the longer trend, the labor force participation rate was between 62.9 percent and 62.7 percent from April 2014 through February, and has been hovering around 62.9 percent or lower in 13 of the 17 months since October 2013, the BLS data revealed. To put it another way, when President Obama took office in January 2009, there were 80,529,000 Americans who were not participating in the workforce, which means that 12,369,000 US citizens have left the workforce since then.

The number of Americans out of the workforce jumped by 354,000 last month. The last time the labor participation rate dropped below 63 percent was 37 years ago, in March 1978 when it was 62.8 percent.

CAIRO:  A Chinese delegation from Star Oil & Gas (SOG) holdings along with partners from the International Drilling Material Manufacturing (IDM) company met Sunday with Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Sherif Ismail, offering new projects of $250M to be completely funded by the Chinese government and Chinese banks. A statement released from the ministry added that the delegation discussed a feasibility study of a new steel rolling factory to produce seamless pipes to supply the entire African market, that will be considered as a “development step” in the whole IDM system. SOG’s representative in Egypt Mohamed Al-Gohary stated that this project is going to be “a first” in the Middle East on the field of drilling and oil exploration. He assured that the Chinese trust in Egypt’s economic vision, that was one of the main reasons that encouraged them to prepare the study and discuss it with the government. Li Yang, SOG holdings head, said that the Chinese government considers Egypt as a “key investment country” in Africa.

A presidential statement released during that visit stated it would “usher in a new phase of relations between the two countries, as China has expressed an interest in promoting their relationship to the level of ‘strategic partnership’—a level China maintains with only a limited number of countries globally.” During the visit, President Sisi held talks and signed a number of cooperation agreements with his Chinese counterpart President Xi Jinping, on bilateral economic and technical cooperation. In previous presidential statement, spokesperson Alaa Youssef, noted that China is Egypt’s second largest trading partner. The trade between Egypt and China amounted to $10.3 billion in 2013, of which $1.9 billion were Egyptian exports to China and $8.4 billion were imports from China, according to government figures. The history of modern bilateral relations between the two countries dates back to 1956, when Egypt became the first Arab and African country to recognize the communist government of the People’s Republic of China.

The ACLU has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSA’s mass interception and searching of Americans’ international communications. At issue is the NSA's “upstream” surveillance, through which the U.S. government monitors almost all international – and many domestic – text-based communications. The ACLU’s lawsuit, filed in March 2015 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, is brought on behalf of nearly a dozen educational, legal, human rights, and media organizations that collectively engage in hundreds of billions of sensitive Internet communications and have been harmed by NSA surveillance.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are: Wikimedia Foundation, The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA, PEN American Center, Global Fund for Women, The Nation Magazine, The Rutherford Institute, and The Washington Office on Latin America. These plaintiffs’ sensitive communications have been copied, searched, and likely retained by the NSA. Upstream surveillance hinders the plaintiffs’ ability to ensure the basic confidentiality of their communications with crucial contacts abroad – among them journalists, colleagues, clients, victims of human rights abuses, and the tens of millions of people who read and edit Wikipedia pages. Read the complaint » Upstream surveillance, which the government claims is authorized by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, is designed to ensnare all of Americans’ international communications, including emails, web-browsing content, and search engine queries. It is facilitated by devices installed, with the help of companies like Verizon and AT&T, directly on the internet “backbone” – the network of high-capacity cables, switches, and routers across which Internet traffic travels.

The NSA intercepts and copies private communications in bulk while they are in transit, and then searches their contents using tens of thousands of keywords associated with NSA targets. These targets, chosen by intelligence analysts, are never approved by any court, and the limitations that do exist are weak and riddled with exceptions. Under the FAA, the NSA may target any foreigner outside the United States believed likely to communicate “foreign intelligence information” – a pool of potential targets so broad that it encompasses journalists, academic researchers, corporations, aid workers, business persons, and others who are not suspected of any wrongdoing.

The United States continues to fund and support a network of abusive Afghan strongmen in the name of security. It's time to stop.

n October 2013, police in Kandahar — the Afghan province that is the birthplace of the Taliban and home to some of the fiercest fighting in the war — picked up “Tariq” for alleged ties to the insurgents. Whether those allegations were true will remain unknown. Tariq, whose name has been changed for security purposes, died in custody days later from wounds inflicted on his skull with an electrical drill. His case is not unique. Over the past two years, dozens of Kandahari residents have been tortured to death by the province’s police — one of a range of forces in Afghanistan that the United States supports and equips. As the Obama administration continues its ongoing troop withdrawal, one area of support remains steadfast: material, training, and billions of dollars in financial assistance to Afghanistan’s security infrastructure. Local officials and their U.S. mentors have tasked these forces — which include police units, intelligence services, and the paramilitary Afghan Local Police (ALP), among others — with rooting out the Taliban insurgency. But these groups, who are often led by or linked to former warlords, have also exhibited a pattern of violence for which Afghan victims have obtained no official redress. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented systematic, gross human rights violations by some of these forces that has included numerous cases of torture, extrajudicial executions of civilians, and forced disappearance of detainees. The findings raise concerns about Afghan government and U.S. efforts to arm, train, vet, and hold accountable the country’s security apparatus — run by a network of strongmen, many of whom attained official authority as allies of the United States in the fight against the Taliban.