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  Date / Time: 12/4/2009 5:35 AM UTC

  IRAN CRACK DOWN GLOBALLY

  His first impulse was to dismiss the ominous email as a prank, says a young Iranian-American named Koosha. It warned the 29-year-old engineering student that his relatives in Tehran would be harmed if he didn't stop criticizing Iran on Facebook. Two days later, his mom called. Security agents had arrested his father in his home in Tehran and threatened him by saying his son could no longer safely return to Iran. "When they arrested my father, I realized the email was no joke," said Koosha, who asked that his full name not be used. Tehran's leadership faces its biggest crisis since it first came to power in 1979, as Iranians at home and abroad attack its legitimacy in the wake of June's allegedly rigged presidential vote. An opposition effort, the "Green Movement," is gaining a global following of regular Iranians who say they never previously considered themselves activists. The regime has been cracking down hard at home. And now, a Wall Street Journal investigation shows, it is extending that crackdown to Iranians abroad as well. In recent months, Iran has been conducting a campaign of harassing and intimidating members of its diaspora world-wide -- not just prominent dissidents -- who criticize the regime, according to former Iranian lawmakers and former members of Iran's elite security force, the Revolutionary Guard, with knowledge of the program.
  
  Part of the effort involves tracking the Facebook, Twitter and YouTube activity of Iranians around the world, and identifying them at opposition protests abroad, these people say.
  
  Interviews with roughly 90 ordinary Iranians abroad -- college students, housewives, doctors, lawyers, businesspeople -- in New York, London, Dubai, Sweden, Los Angeles and other places indicate that people who criticize Iran's regime online or in public demonstrations are facing threats intended to silence them.
  
  
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• Date / Time: 12/4/2009 2:15 AM UTC

  US: Hundreds of thousands of jobless to lose health insurance subsidy

  Large numbers of people in the US will lose federal medical insurance assistance with the expiration of a $25 billion program included in the 2009 stimulus package. The benefit was eliminated for many families beginning December 1, and hundreds of thousands are set to follow each month.

  Families that received the subsidy will have their health insurance premiums triple on average, making it extremely difficult to maintain coverage. The program provided assistance to some seven million adults and dependent children, according to a preliminary survey, allowing them to remain insured during unemployment.

  The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985, known as COBRA, provides unemployed workers with a means to maintain their employer-sponsored family health insurance for up to 18 months after losing their jobs. In order to maintain the coverage, workers must pay their original premiums, together with the portion previously paid by their employer and an additional fee, making the program prohibitively expensive for many unemployed workers.

  The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Obama’s stimulus bill), passed in February, included a subsidy that paid 65 percent of coverage for up to nine months, leaving jobless workers to take care of the remaining 35 percent. On December 1, the first people to apply for the program were dropped, and more will follow every succeeding month.

  A report published Tuesday by Families USA, a non-profit health care advocacy group, revealed that the average recipient of assistance will not be able to pay for family health insurance together with other necessities out of his or her unemployment check.

  The report found that COBRA premiums for the average family cost $1,111 per month, leaving only $222 out of $1,333 in average unemployment benefits that such a family receives for other expenses. The report also found that the average COBRA premium exceeds the average unemployment benefit check in a number of states. In Mississippi, for example, “the average monthly COBRA premium is 22 percent higher than the average unemployment payment,” said Kathleen Stoll, director of health policy at Families USA, in a telephone interview.

  “A worker who wanted to keep their family secure would have to spend an average of 83.4 percent of their unemployment check, and obviously that’s not feasible,” said Ms. Stoll.

  “When workers lose their jobs, they often lose their health coverage as well,” said Ron Pollack, Executive Director of Families USA, in a statement. “For millions of laid-off workers and their families, the federal COBRA subsidies have been a health-coverage lifeline. It is essential, therefore, that new jobs legislation extends those subsidies.”

  The program will also remain closed for people who become unemployed after January 1, 2010, potentially leaving millions more without any way to pay for health insurance. The Families USA report notes that “this group of people will receive no COBRA subsidy at all, and, without a subsidy, most will not be able to afford coverage for either themselves or their families.”

  Being without health care coverage for any period of time is dangerous; for those who become seriously ill or pregnant while uninsured, the situation may prove catastrophic. People who are uninsured for over nine weeks lose the legal guarantee that they will be subsequently covered for any “pre-existing” medical condition under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, passed in 1996.

  Over 8.5 million people have lost their jobs since the start of the recession, and in October 5.6 million had been out of work for more than half a year. Sixteen percent of the US population, or about 47 million people, have no health insurance.

  “There is a big difference between paying 35 percent of coverage and the full price,” said Ms. Stoll. “The difference between having the subsidy and not having the subsidy is the difference between having insurance and not having insurance, and that means the difference between seeing a doctor or not. It means that the people who lose coverage will face physical and financial devastation.”

  While various Democrats, including President Obama, have made public calls for the benefit to be reinstated, there is little indication that anything will be done about it soon. Families USA said that while the House of Representatives may move to reinstate coverage this month, the Senate will likely wait until at least January, potentially leaving millions of additional people uninsured for months.

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• Date / Time: 12/4/2009 2:12 AM UTC

  The bursting of the Dubai debt bubble By Alex Messenger

  Global markets, thrown into panic following Dubai’s announcement last week of a repayment halt on $59 billion in foreign borrowings, have apparently been calmed by indications that Dubai World, the government’s main holding company, will enter into debt restructuring negotiations with creditor banks and that the central bank of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will pump extra funds into the local banking system. That step is aimed at reducing the risk of a run on the banks in the UAE and the Gulf area more broadly.

  However, the fact that Dubai has decided to take a more co-operative approach towards its creditors does not make the emirate’s situation less serious. In the absence of a bail-out by oil-rich neighbour, Abu Dhabi, Dubai’s debt position is intractable.

  On 25 November, Dubai World announced that it intended to halt repayments on its $59 billion in foreign debt, most of which is owed to European and British banks, including HSBC and the now UK-government owned Royal Bank of Scotland. The borrowings of Dubai World—which owns the emirate’s key real estate and tourism companies as well as, through subsidiary DP World, a global port network—accounts for 40 percent of the borrowings of the Dubai government and the entities it controls.

  The repayment halt announcement was followed by three days of heavy slides in most major markets. The atmosphere of panic has been fed by a lack of clarity regarding Dubai’s intentions and by the difficulty in identifying at-risk creditors. More than that, the market reaction demonstrates the fragility of the so-called global recovery. The surge in equity, commodity and property markets right across the globe in recent months (with some notable exceptions, including US real estate) has been the result of stimulus packages, a US cheap money policy and the refusal of markets, driven by profit-seeking, to build into price levels the unprecedented explosion of debt that has followed the financial crash. As Gary Jenkins, head of London-based Evolution Securities, told the Financial Times earlier this week, “We’ve had a bounceback and that can fool investors into thinking that underlying conditions have improved dramatically when the truth is they haven’t really. All that’s improved is the price.” Dubai’s self-proclaimed debt holiday has served to remind otherwise dazzled markets of how quickly the runaway profits could (and will) evaporate. Dozens of countries (including Greece, Hungary and Argentina) are in debt positions that, until recently, seemed even more precarious than that of Dubai.

  The apparent recovery of financial markets is being threatened by the very conditions and contradictions that created the crisis in the first place.

  Dubai provides a good example. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the UAE, of which Dubai is a part, pegged the dirham, its currency, to the US dollar. It followed that the low interest rate policies pursued by the US Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan allowed Dubai and other countries with similarly-pegged currencies (chiefly non-exporting countries reliant on finance sector profits and property) to borrow large amounts of cheap dollars. In other words, Dubai, with its glittering towers and pretensions as a global finance and trading hub, only rose from relative obscurity because of US policy. Its own zero-tax policy—key to its financial and trade hub status—made the cheap dollars, together with borrowings from Abu Dhabi, one of the few possible sources of finance (Dubai has little oil) and therefore a drug of addiction from which Dubai could not possibly be weaned.

  With each successive financial crisis through the 1990s (Argentina, Mexico, Asia, Russia) the policy response of the US Federal Reserve was to push interest rates even lower, ramping up global liquidity. Dubai naturally over-borrowed. Reports at the time of the emergence of the crisis last week suggested a total government-related debt of $80 billion, but according to investor services firm Moody’s, the figure is likely to be more than $100 billion, i.e., greater than Dubai’s annual GDP. Meanwhile, a large proportion of the assets purchased with the cheap funds, especially property assets, have seen their values halved. In this way, Dubai is just a different face of the same global process that produced the subprime housing bubble in the US itself.

  Despite the claims of US policy makers, including Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, that the mistakes of the Greenspan era have been digested and eliminated, the US response to the crash of 2007-2008 has been no more than Greenspan’s policy taken to its logical conclusion—near-zero interest rates into the foreseeable future plus the generation of additional liquidity. As Australian Reserve Bank board member, economist Warwick McKibbin put it in a speech earlier this week, in circumstances where there has been a relative decline in the value of the US dollar, “the monetary policy of the developing countries is US monetary policy.” McKibbin went on to say that the asset and price bubbles that have been created in East Asia, especially China, by the zero interest rate policy (a Dubai-style cheap-dollar bubble writ large), could set off a second stage of the financial crisis. Dubai’s repayments crisis has caused such alarm because overleveraged markets are hyper-sensitive to even a whisper of default. Moreover, bubbles are burst in precisely such moments of panic.

  The banking and real estate profits that have, in Dubai, funded the lavish lifestyles of European and US finance sector expatriates were not, however, simply the product of US monetary policy and a zero-tax regime. They were, in a more direct sense, the product of a partnership between global banks and the brutal regime of the ruling Al-Makhtoum family and of virtual slave labour imported from poor countries. Nearly 80 percent of Dubai’s 1.5 million residents have come to the country from elsewhere, and about 85 percent of that number are from East and South Asia, especially India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and the Philippines. Before the crash there were an estimated 500,000 construction workers in Dubai, many of whom, typically, left their families in their home country. The UAE has an estimated 300,000 foreign housemaids.

  Working and living conditions in Dubai are among the worst in the world. Unions are banned, while internal security forces punish dissent and violation of racial segregation rules with violence or deportation. Until recently, workers were paid on average $150 per month, meaning millions in remittances to poor families. Reports from various human rights and labour organisations indicate that thousands of workers in the construction industry have not been paid for months.

  Together with the various cheap labor platforms of South East Asia, Dubai demonstrates that a major source of capitalist profitability, including its less industrial and more “financialised” forms, is the compact between finance and feudal, dictatorial, regimes, whose primary service is the suppression of the working class.

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• Original Air Date: 12/3/2009 11:00 PM UTC

  REAL NEWS INSIDE IRAN , AND HOW GHOST BETRAYED IRANIAN LAST NIGHT ?THIS RESPOND TO HIM

  TRUE STORY OF IRAN , INSIDE IRAN, WHO CONTROLS IRANIAN GOVERNMENT AND WHY 100 MILLIONS ARE TAKEN HOSTAGES INCLUDING 4 AMERICAN HOSTAGES,WE ASK GOVERNMENT OF IRAN FREE ALL 4 AMERICAN HOSTAGES AT ONCE,SPECIALLY MR ROBERT LEVINSON EX FBI AGENT. PLEASE CALL ME YOU WANT REAL NEWS INSIDE IRAN WITH OUT SHUTTING,COME HERE ALSO WE COVER USA NEWS AS WELL 347-884-9191 PRESS 1
  
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• Date / Time: 12/3/2009 9:35 PM UTC

  Police 'misusing anti-terrorism powers to stop tourists taking photos

  Police 'misusing anti-terrorism powers to stop tourists taking photos'

  Police are misusing their anti-terrorism powers to stop innocent photographers taking pictures of tourist attractions and even a chip shop, according to the Government's anti-terrorism adviser.

   

  By Chris Irvine
  Published: 8:03AM GMT 03 Dec 2009

  

  More than 100 Section 44 stop and search areas exist in London alone Photo: GETTY

  Lord Carlile of Berriew has warned that officers, who are allowed to stop and search anyone in a designated "Section 44 authorisation zone" without giving a reason, need to be aware somebody taking a photograph is not a good enough reason to detain them.

  "The police have to be very careful about stopping people who are taking what I would call leisure photographs, and indeed professional photographers," he said. "The fact that someone is taking photographs is not prima facie a good reason for stop and search and is very far from raising suspicion. It is a matter of concern and the police will know that they have to look at this very carefully."

   

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  The Section 44 power allows senior officers to designate entire areas of their police force regions as stop-and-search areas. More than 100 exist in London alone, while every British train station is covered by the order. But the exact location of the Section 44 areas is known only to the Home Office, due to fear the information could be used by terrorists.

  A BBC journalist was stopped recently taking photographs of St Paul's Cathedral, while Andrew White, 33, was stopped and asked to give his name and address after taking photographs of Christmas lights on his way to work in Brighton days earlier. In July, an amateur photographer from Kent was arrested after taking pictures of a chip shop.

  Marc Vallee, a photojournalist who has set up a campaign group with more than 4,000 supporters called 'I'm a photographer, not a terrorist'.

  "Why is the act of taking a picture deemed by the state to be so potentially threatening? Photography is not a crime but it is being routinely criminalised," he told The Independent. "Anti-terrorism legislation talks about creating a hostile environment for terrorists to operate but the reality is that it is creating a hostile environment for public photography. That has an incredibly detrimental effect on freedom of speech."

  Craig Mackey, from the Association of Chief Police Officers, said part of the problem was some officers were unaware how best to use the legislation.

  "It goes back to the issue of briefing and training of staff and making sure they are clear around the legislation we are asking them to use. There is no power under Section 44 to stop people taking photographs and we are very clear about getting that message out to forces," he said.

  "In the past there has been a buildup around photographers and policing. That said, it is difficult to imagine a scenario where someone taking pictures of Christmas lights would be something we should be dealing with."

  Earlier this year the Conservatives said they would scrap stop and search powers, with David Cameron arguing that it had been used on 120,000 people in the last year, but only led to an arrest on one per cent of cases.

  • Tags:
  • POLICE IN UK IS LIKE
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• Date / Time: 12/3/2009 4:07 PM UTC

  US: Hundreds of thousands of jobless to lose health insurance subsidy

  Large numbers of people in the US will lose federal medical insurance assistance with the expiration of a $25 billion program included in the 2009 stimulus package. The benefit was eliminated for many families beginning December 1, and hundreds of thousands are set to follow each month.

  Families that received the subsidy will have their health insurance premiums triple on average, making it extremely difficult to maintain coverage. The program provided assistance to some seven million adults and dependent children, according to a preliminary survey, allowing them to remain insured during unemployment.

  The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985, known as COBRA, provides unemployed workers with a means to maintain their employer-sponsored family health insurance for up to 18 months after losing their jobs. In order to maintain the coverage, workers must pay their original premiums, together with the portion previously paid by their employer and an additional fee, making the program prohibitively expensive for many unemployed workers.

  The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Obama’s stimulus bill), passed in February, included a subsidy that paid 65 percent of coverage for up to nine months, leaving jobless workers to take care of the remaining 35 percent. On December 1, the first people to apply for the program were dropped, and more will follow every succeeding month.

  A report published Tuesday by Families USA, a non-profit health care advocacy group, revealed that the average recipient of assistance will not be able to pay for family health insurance together with other necessities out of his or her unemployment check.

  The report found that COBRA premiums for the average family cost $1,111 per month, leaving only $222 out of $1,333 in average unemployment benefits that such a family receives for other expenses. The report also found that the average COBRA premium exceeds the average unemployment benefit check in a number of states. In Mississippi, for example, “the average monthly COBRA premium is 22 percent higher than the average unemployment payment,” said Kathleen Stoll, director of health policy at Families USA, in a telephone interview.

  “A worker who wanted to keep their family secure would have to spend an average of 83.4 percent of their unemployment check, and obviously that’s not feasible,” said Ms. Stoll.

  “When workers lose their jobs, they often lose their health coverage as well,” said Ron Pollack, Executive Director of Families USA, in a statement. “For millions of laid-off workers and their families, the federal COBRA subsidies have been a health-coverage lifeline. It is essential, therefore, that new jobs legislation extends those subsidies.”

  The program will also remain closed for people who become unemployed after January 1, 2010, potentially leaving millions more without any way to pay for health insurance. The Families USA report notes that “this group of people will receive no COBRA subsidy at all, and, without a subsidy, most will not be able to afford coverage for either themselves or their families.”

  Being without health care coverage for any period of time is dangerous; for those who become seriously ill or pregnant while uninsured, the situation may prove catastrophic. People who are uninsured for over nine weeks lose the legal guarantee that they will be subsequently covered for any “pre-existing” medical condition under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, passed in 1996.

  Over 8.5 million people have lost their jobs since the start of the recession, and in October 5.6 million had been out of work for more than half a year. Sixteen percent of the US population, or about 47 million people, have no health insurance.

  “There is a big difference between paying 35 percent of coverage and the full price,” said Ms. Stoll. “The difference between having the subsidy and not having the subsidy is the difference between having insurance and not having insurance, and that means the difference between seeing a doctor or not. It means that the people who lose coverage will face physical and financial devastation.”

  While various Democrats, including President Obama, have made public calls for the benefit to be reinstated, there is little indication that anything will be done about it soon. Families USA said that while the House of Representatives may move to reinstate coverage this month, the Senate will likely wait until at least January, potentially leaving millions of additional people uninsured for months.

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• Date / Time: 12/3/2009 4:04 PM UTC

  President Obama's Secret: Only 100 al Qaeda Now in Afghanistan

  As he justified sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan at a cost of $30 billion a year, President Barack Obama's description Tuesday of the al Qaeda "cancer" in that country left out one key fact: U.S. intelligence officials have concluded there are only about 100 al Qaeda fighters in the entire country.

  

  President Barack Obama addresses the nation on Afghanistan at the United States Military Academy at...

  President Barack Obama addresses the nation on Afghanistan at the United States Military Academy at West Point in West Point, N.Y, Dec. 1, 2009. Obama said sending 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan is in the "vital national interest" of the United States.

  (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
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  A senior U.S. intelligence official told ABCNews.com the approximate estimate of 100 al Qaeda members left in Afghanistan reflects the conclusion of American intelligence agencies and the Defense Department. The relatively small number was part of the intelligence passed on to the White House as President Obama conducted his deliberations.

  President Obama made only a vague reference to the size of the al Qaeda presence in his speech at West Point, when he said, "al Qaeda has not reemerged in Afghanistan in the same number as before 9/11, but they retain their safe havens along the border."

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  • 000 alqeda in afghan
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