Drone strikes in Yemen: US expert warns of anti-western sentiment

Drone strikes in Yemen: US expert warns of anti-western sentiment
WORLD NEWS: CIA | GUARDIAN.CO.UK | MAY 11, 2012
… Former CIA counter-terrorism chief says US military strategy in the region is forcing Yemenis into violent extremism

The former head of the CIA’s counter-terrorism centre has warned that the use of drone strikes in Yemen risks turning militants into “dedicated enemies of the west”.

Robert Grenier, who was director of the intelligence agency’s counter-terrorism unit from 2004 to 2006, said the US risked turning Yemen into the “Arabian equivalent of Waziristan”, a reference to the strife-torn Pakistani region.

His comments came after the resignation of the US ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, who is said to have clashed with the CIA over its drone programme. On Sunday, a US drone attack in Yemen killed a top al-Qaida leader who was on the FBI’s most wanted list.

“One wonders how many Yemenis may be moved in future to violent extremism in reaction to carelessly targeted missile strikes, and how many Yemeni militants with strictly local agendas will become dedicated enemies of the West in response to US military actions against them,” Grenier wrote in a comment article for Al Jazeera. – Via pulse

… Yemen was the launching pad for two foiled al-Qaida attacks on US territory: the Christmas 2009 attempt to down an American airliner over Detroit with an underwear bomb, and the sending of printer cartridges packed with explosives to Chicago-area synagogues in 2010.

On Monday, it was disclosed that the CIA thwarted yet another plot by AQAP to destroy a US-bound airliner using a bomb which could have been undetectable by conventional airport scanners.

A would-be suicide bomber tasked with bringing down the passenger jet was in fact a double agent, recruited by Saudi intelligence and in possession of a British passport. …

GUARDIAN.CO.UK | MAY 13, 2012
Via pulse

Why would a double British Saudi agent ( both our friends ) be part of a terrorist plot in Yemen? Is the US trying to manufacture enemies in order justify defense spending?

The double agent who infiltrated Al-Qaeda and helped foil a plot to blow up a US-bound airliner held a British passport in addition to being a Saudi national, CNN reported.

The man was sent by Saudi counterterrorism agents into Yemen as a mole after it was learned that Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was developing an updated model of the underwear bomb that failed to explode in a Christmas Day 2009 attempt.

CNN, citing counterterrorism sources, reported that the man grew up in Europe and at some point fell in with militant sympathizers who tried to recruit him for terror attacks.

It said that the Saudi man’s British passport enhanced his value to the terror group, because he could travel without a visa to the United States.

But when he learned that a concrete terror plot was in the works, the man contacted Saudi counterterrorism officials from Yemen.

The Saudis then informed the Americans of the planned operation and let them know that they had succeeded in infiltrating the group, according to CNN.

The spy spent weeks with the Al-Qaeda affiliate, garnering sensitive information that was passed on to the Americans.

That intelligence allowed the CIA to launch a drone strike on Sunday that killed Fahd al-Quso, a senior Al-Qaeda operative in Yemen wanted for the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.

A source working closely with US intelligence agencies and the US military also told CNN that the Al-Qaeda chapter in Yemen now has “a whole outfit designated to target the US homeland.”

The new details about the Saudi mole and the failed Al-Qaeda bomb plot come after US spy chief James Clapper earlier this week ordered an inquiry into leaks to media about the top secret operation.

The internal review is being conducted across 16 intelligence agencies, as US officials expressed fear that the disclosures could jeopardize future sensitive espionage work….

Oh, this is not evidence that al Quaeda is a fake enemy created to justify defense spending. The double agent (triple, right? Al Queada, British and Saudi) wasn’t creating terrorists by giving them ideas, recruiting local men in Yemen or acting as an al Quaida leader, he wasn’t an agent provocateur, he was just an infiltrator, just collecting data. He was also not collecting data on what targets would most inflame the locals and thus manufacture enemies of the US, he was finding out who the violent dangerous men are in the area so we could save lives by killing them preemptively by remote control with missiles from drones. Anyone with knowledge of the agent’s actual role in al Queada is now exploded. Makes sense.

Doctor who ran fake CIA vaccination drive to find Osama bin Laden is jailed

Doctor who ran fake CIA vaccination drive to find Osama bin Laden is jailed
WORLD NEWS: CIA | GUARDIAN.CO.UK | MAY 23, 2012
The Pakistani medical official who ran a fake CIA vaccination programme to help find Osama bin Laden has been jailed for 33 years.

A spokesman for Khyber Agency, an administrative unit in Pakistan’s restless frontier, said Dr Shakil Afridi would face decades in jail – despite calls from senior US officials to release the man who helped with efforts to track down the al-Qaida chief.

The tough sentence for the former surgeon general of Khyber will be taken as another sign of the terrible state of US-Pakistan relations.

And it will further alarm western critics of Pakistan who say the country has put far more effort into trying to understand how US spies and special forces were able to plan and launch the Bin Laden raid than into how the al-Qaida leader was able to remain for so long in the Pakistani army garrison town of Abbottabad.

The sentence was announced just days after Barack Obama snubbed the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, by refusing to hold a formal meeting with him at the Nato conference in Chicago.

In January Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, said he was “very concerned” about the arrest of Afridi after Pakistan’s intelligence service discovered he had set up a fake hepatitis B vaccination scheme with his nurses going from house to house in Abbottabad in the weeks before the raid on Bin Laden’s hideout in May last year.

“For them to take this kind of action against somebody who was helping to go after terrorism, I just think it is a real mistake on their part,”Panetta said in January.

There had been hopes that Afridi would eventually be quietly released after the controversy surrounding the Bin Laden raid had subsided.

US intelligence officials say the clandestine operation by Afridi did not succeed in determining whether Bin Laden was in the house and the raid went ahead without any certainty that the Navy Seal team would find its target.

However, Pakistani security officials recently told the Guardian that although the nurses working for Afridi were not allowed inside the house to vaccinate any of the children, they did succeed in getting a mobile phone number for someone in the house.

The Pakistani sources say that phone call allowed the CIA to make a voice match to Bin Laden’s private courier, a man known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.

US aid groups have complained that the bogus vaccination operation undermined their efforts “to eradicate polio, provide critical health services, and extend life-saving assistance during times of crisis” in Pakistan. The ruse may have fuelled fears, backed by religious extremists, that polio drops are a western conspiracy to sterilise the population.

Via pulse

Amazing Coating For Bottles’ Interiors Lets Ketchup Flow Like Water

LiquiGlide, developed by a team at MIT’s Varanasi Research Group.

When it comes to those last globs of ketchup inevitably stuck to every bottle of Heinz, most people either violently shake the container in hopes of eking out another drop or two, or perform the “secret” trick: smacking the “57″ logo on the bottle’s neck. But not MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith. He and a team of mechanical engineers and nano-technologists at the Varanasi Research Group have been held up in an MIT lab for the last two months addressing this common dining problem.

The result? LiquiGlide, a “super slippery” coating made up of nontoxic materials that can be applied to all sorts of food packaging–though ketchup and mayonnaise bottles might just be the substance’s first targets. Condiments may sound like a narrow focus for a group of MIT engineers, but not when you consider the impact it could have on food waste and the packaging industry. “It’s funny: Everyone is always like, ‘Why bottles? What’s the big deal?’ But then you tell them the market for bottles–just the sauces alone is a $17 billion market,” Smith says. “And if all those bottles had our coating, we estimate that we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year.” …

As Smith describes it, LiquiGlide is a surface that’s unique because it’s “kind of a structured liquid–it’s rigid like a solid, but it’s lubricated like a liquid.” It works with many types of packaging–glass, plastic–and can be applied in any number of ways, including spraying the coating onto the inside of bottles. Now, thick sauces that would normally move like sludge seem to just fall out of LiquiGlide-coated bottles, as if they were suspended in space. “It just floats right onto the sandwich,” Smith says.

One of the most significant challenges his team faced was making sure the coating was food safe, meaning his team could only work with materials the FDA had approved. “We had a limited amount of materials to pick from,” Smith says. “I can’t say what they are, but we’ve patented the hell out of it.”…

via Link

Mistaken identity, abuse and rendition: Khaled El-Masri finally has day in court

‘They beat me from all sides’
A German car salesman says that a year ago he was kidnapped in Europe, beaten and flown to a US-controlled jail in Afghanistan. Now the German government is collecting evidence to back up his story. James Meek hears Khaled el-Masri’s account of life in America’s secret offshore prison network …

The story that el-Masri tells them by way of explanation, on this evening in late May 2004, is extraordinary: a story of how an unemployed German car salesman from the town of Ulm went on a New Year’s holiday to Macedonia, was seized by Macedonian police at the border, held incommunicado for weeks without charge, then beaten, stripped, shackled and blindfolded and flown to a jail in Afghanistan, run by Afghans but controlled by Americans. Five months after first being seized, he says, still with no explanation or charge, he was flown back to Europe and dumped in an unknown country which turned out to be Albania.

What really happened? With no way to prove his story, el-Masri’s account remains in the balance, a terrifying snapshot of America’s “war on terror”. It is certain that he returned home to Ulm from Albania in May 2004, and that he was taken off a bus from Germany at the Macedonian border on New Year’s Eve 2003. The only person who has offered a clear explanation for what happened in the five months in between is el-Masri himself. Yet that may change.

The German authorities are now taking his allegations very seriously. They are subjecting a sample from el-Masri’s hair to radioisotope analysis, which can reveal, down to a particular country, the source of a person’s food and drink over a period of time. Discussions are also under way about bringing to Germany two men whom el-Masri has identified as being with him in the Afghan prison, and who were also subsequently released. The fact that the German authorities do regard Ulm as an area of potentially dangerous radical Islamic activity – a number of premises were raided and alleged Islamic activists were arrested on Wednesday – only emphasises the concern that Germany has over the el-Masri case…..

Mistaken identity, abuse and rendition: Khaled El-Masri finally has day in court | Darian Pavli
WORLD NEWS: CIA | GUARDIAN.CO.UK | MAY 15, 2012

… In the US, lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union took his case all the way to the supreme court. When that failed, they filed an international petition against the US with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, making El-Masri the first person to have brought cases before both the European and the American human rights systems.Back in Europe, two parallel international inquiries, led by Swiss Senator Dick Marty for the Council of Europe and Italian MEP Claudio Fava for the European Parliament, produced a compelling body of evidence corroborating El-Masri’s story – as did a multi-year investigation by the German Bundestag. More recently, Spanish investigating judges – following on the footsteps of a local investigative reporter – are considering issuing arrest warrants for the CIA rendition team that stopped in a Palma de Mallorca luxury hotel in the middle of a flight circuit that involved rendering both Khaled El-Masri and Binyam Mohamed, the British detainee recently released from Guantanamo.

Freedom of information requests and advocacy also played a role in establishing the facts and discrediting the versions provided by the governments involved. Thus a FOI request filed by the Justice Initiative with the Macedonian civil aviation authority triggered an official confirmation – the first public one in Macedonia – of the Skopje landing and departure of the rendition flight, and the fact that it arrived with no “passengers’ and left with one. Similar requests filed with the authorities in Albania – where El-Masri was reverse-rendered when the CIA realised it had the wrong man – confirmed his account that he was placed on a commercial flight from Tirana to Frankfurt, with just a ticket put in his hand.

The Wednesday hearing is, of course, a testament above all to Khaled El-Masri’s own courage and tenacity in his eight-year-old quest for justice and the truth. As he said on the steps of a Manhattan courthouse, what he wants most is “an explanation and an apology.” He has yet to receive one from either the US or the Macedonian government. But, finally at least, a court will sit in judgment over what was done to him. That hearing will be public and will go forward, any state secrets notwithstanding….

http://pulse.me/s/9wXz

Scientists turn skin cells into beating heart muscle

Scientists have for the first time succeeded in taking skin cells from patients with heart failure and transforming them into healthy, beating heart tissue that could one day be used to treat the condition.

The researchers, based in Haifa, Israel, said there were still many years of testing and refining ahead. But the results meant they might eventually be able to reprogram patients’ cells to repair their own damaged hearts.

“We have shown that it’s possible to take skin cells from an elderly patient with advanced heart failure and end up with his own beating cells in a laboratory dish that are healthy and young – the equivalent to the stage of his heart cells when he was just born,” said Lior Gepstein from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, who led the work.

The researchers, whose study was published in the European Heart Journal on Wednesday, said clinical trials of the technique could begin within 10 years. …

Gepstein’s team took skin cells from two men with heart failure – aged 51 and 61 – and transformed them by adding three genes and then a small molecule called valproic acid to the cell nucleus.

They found that the resulting hiPSCs were able to differentiate to become heart muscle cells, or cardiomyocytes, just as effectively as hiPSCs that had been developed from healthy, young volunteers who acted as controls for the study.

The team was then able to make the cardiomyocytes develop into heart muscle tissue, which they grew in a laboratory dish together with existing cardiac tissue.

Within 24 to 48 hours the two types of tissue were beating together, they said.

via Scientists turn skin cells into beating heart muscle – chicagotribune.com.

Chinese Company Buys U.S. AMC Theater Chain

A Chinese company is planning to buy US cinema chain, AMC Entertainment Holdings. The acquisition will create the largest movie theater chain in the world.

On Monday Dalian Wanda Group Co. released details on the deal which will be worth just over 2.6-billion-dollars. The buyout of AMC will be the largest corporate takeover by a Chinese company in the United States to date.

A spokesperson for Dalian said that after the takeover the company will put $500 million towards remodeling AMC’s theaters.

AMC has over 340 movie theaters, most of which are in the U.S. and Canada.

via Chinese Company Buys U.S. AMC Theater Chain « SuccessfulWebMarketing.

Vertical Forest now under Construction

This vertical forest will span across two towers that have fabulous balconies designed to house these trees.

If we are talking about optimizing space, this vertical forest will consist of 900 trees, 5,000 bushes and 11,000 plants. This forest, designed by architect Stefano Boeri, will produces oxygen and cuts down on all the noise pollution in Milan. If this same number of trees, bushes and plants were planted horizontally around these houses on the ground, it would require 50,000 square meters of land and 10,000 square meters of woodland.

via LinkNotes: 05/01/2012 – 06/01/2012.

New Paper Airplane Record Set, But Not Without Controversy

At the Maker Faire this weekend, John Collins (aka “the Paper Airplane Guy”) talked about his recent record-setting paper airplane flight that sailed 226 feet and 10 inches, smashing the previous record held by Stephen Kreiger by almost 20 feet.While Collins designed the glider himself, he didn’t actually throw it. Instead, he hired Joe Ayoob, a former quarterback for the University of California-Berkeley, to make the toss. Since then, several “professional” paper airplane throwers have cried foul, including Kreiger who said that hiring a ringer wasn’t exactly in the spirit of the competition. You can watch the record-breaking video and judge for yourself below.

via New Paper Airplane Record Set, But Not Without Controversy | The Conference Channel Blog.

Inflatable bike helmet is like an airbag for your head

Like other stuff that is good for your health (not smoking, sobriety, living slow, and dying old), bike helmets are uncool. But you can’t really enjoy your coolness with a giant crack in your skull. How do you protect your noggin without sacrificing your mojo? Swedish company Hovding has the answer: airbag bike helmets.

Unless it’s called upon to perform, this helmet stays safely stowed in a futuristic-looking black collar that you can pretend is a scarf. (Hovding also offers printed shells that go around the collar, to make it even more chic.) But if you get hit, presto, it bursts open like a popcorn kernel:

via Inflatable bike helmet is like an airbag for your head | Grist.

A Most Unfortunate Commencement Typo at UT Austin

A Most Unfortunate Commencement Typo at UT Austin | Open Culture.

See how long it takes you to spot the typo. Oops.