Researchers in Switzerland have questioned the authenticity of the recent audio recording attributed to Osama Bin Laden.

A team from the Lausanne-based Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence, Idiap, said it was 95% certain the tape does not feature the voice of the al-Qaeda leader.

IntelCenter, a US group that monitors Islamist websites, also said that manner of the release and the content of the message showed it was "credible" that it was a new release from the Saudi extremist.

Internet users are being spied on in their own home as the Government uses the threat of terrorism and the spread of child pornography to justify launching a dramatic expansion of surveillance society, according to a leading academic.

“A Spanish politician said on Saturday that he was ’stupefied’ by the FBI’s decision to use his photograph to compose its latest image of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and is considering taking legal action,” the CIA’s favorite newspaper, The Washington Post, reports today. “In the last few days I have seen the security services involved in some very strange things, some major failures, but I would never have believed they could have affected me so directly,” said Gaspar Llamazares, a former leader of Spain’s communist party Izquierda Unida.

Walmart
Stores Inc. said Sunday that it is cutting about 11,200 jobs at its Sam's Club warehouse division as it outsources its product-sampling department to marketing company Shopper Events in an effort to win more customers and boost lagging sales.

The terminations represent about 10 percent of the warehouse club operator's 110,000 staffers across its 600 stores. About 10,000 members of the demonstration department, most part-time workers, were let go. Employees were told the news at mandatory meetings on Sunday morning.

Vying for the $35 billion contract for 179 tanker planes are the Washington-based Boeing and the Toulouse, France-based European Aeronautic Defense Space Company (EADS), though the former has threatened to withdraw from consideration if the Pentagon did not significantly alter their request for proposals (RFP) to fit the capabilities of their plane.

In the wake of the weird Christmas Day “underwear bomber” incident on Northwest Flight 253, former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, as if on cue, was all over the mainstream media touting whole-body scanners as the answer to America’s airline security problems. Since leaving public office in 2009, Chertoff had co-founded the Chertoff Group, a security and risk-management firm whose clients include a manufacturer of body-imaging screening machines. While some in the media noted this rather commonplace conflict of interest, ignored by all was a far more significant abuse of the American public’s trust.

The Downing
Street Memo is only the beginning of the proof we were all lied to.

Pittsburgh police have reassigned three plainclothes officers to uniformed duty pending an investigation into the beating of an 18-year-old student.

A police report indicates that officers became interested in Jordan Miles when they suspected he had a gun in his coat. After beating Miles in the head with a closed fist, the officers discovered the object was a Mountain Dew bottle.

Miles, a violinst and honor student who attends the prestigious Creative and Performing Arts High School, says he resisted arrest because he thought the men were trying to abduct him and didn't identify themselves as police.

Israel-Arab claims she was humiliated by two security guards who ordered her off bus after hearing her speak Arabic on cell phone.

Ayalon warned Williams, who is responsible for the resolution's implementation, that Hezbollah fighters were testing surface-to-surface missile systems in Syria. He warned against the training of Hezbollah men on air-to-surface systems, which may be deployed in Lebanon in the future.

The deputy foreign minister demanded that the UN examine thoroughly the claims that Hezbollah is training and arming itself with modern weapon systems. He asked that the next UN report on Lebanon mention this incident, as well as other serious cases in which Hezbollah weapons were discovered in the country.

harles Pasqua became Interior Minister. While keeping high hand over Moroccan marijuana trade, he took advantage of his situation to legalize his other activities taking control of casinos, gambling and horse races in francophone Africa. He wove ties with Saudi Arabia and Israel and became an officer of honour to the Mossad. Nicolas Sarkozy on his part, became minister of Budget and spokesman for the government.

In Washington, Frank Wisner, Jr. became the successor of Paul Wolfowitz as head of the Political Planning department of the Department of Defense. Nobody noticed at that time the ties to the spokesman of the French government.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny - and ignored warnings from scientific advisers. The report's author later withdrew the claim because the evidence was too weak.

The link was central to demands at last month's Copenhagen climate summit by African nations for compensation of $US100 billion from the rich nations.

However, the IPCC knew in 2008 that the link could not be proved but did not alert world leaders, who have used weather extremes to bolster the case for action on climate change.

The top United Nations official in Afghanistan has welcomed today''s decision to postpone the country''s parliamentary elections by four months, saying it will give election authorities more time to prepare for the polls.

Israel's prime minister declared on Sunday that his country would retain parts of the West Bank forever - a statement sure to provoke Palestinians and complicate the year-old peace mission of a visiting U.S. envoy.

This was the largest demonstration yet in Sheikh Jarakh, were for some time now a demo is taking place every Friday, much like the demos in Bil’in, Nilin and other places.

The Friday before, the police had brutally squashed the protest and arrested 11 demonstrators, among them the director of the Association for Human Rights. Contrary to their usual treatment of peace demonstrations, the media this time covered the event extensively. The behavior of the police upset many who generally do not take part in demonstrations. This time they felt they must take part.

Israel's prime minister has distanced himself from comments by a member of his cabinet who suggested Israel was heading for a new war with Lebanon.

North Korea on Sunday accused the South of declaring war by warning earlier this month that it would launch a preemptive strike if it thought its impoverished neighbor was preparing a nuclear attack.

The angry retort from Pyongyang is the latest in what have become increasingly brittle relations between the two Koreas just as the international community tries to lure the North back to nuclear disarmament talks.

The head of the UN's climate change body has been forced to make a humiliating apology over claims the Himalayan glaciers could vanish within 25 years.

Last week it emerged there was no evidence for the warning from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

After a global outcry, Dr Rajendra Pachauri - chairman of the IPCC - has issued an unprecedented apology.

It is well known in economics academia that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz written by L. Frank Baum in 1900 is loaded with powerful symbols of monetary reform which were the core of the Populist movement and the 1896 and 1900 president bid of Democrat William Jennings Bryan.

The yellow brick road (gold standard), the emerald city of Oz (greenback money), even Dorothy’s silver slippers (changed to ruby slippers for the movie version) were the symbol of Baum’s and Bryan’s belief that adding silver coinage to gold would provide much needed money to a depression-strapped, 1890s America.

Desperate to unload, the ship's crew lied about their cargo, hoping to catch a government unawares. Sometimes they identified the ash as "construction material"; other times they said it was "road fill," and still others "muddy waste." But environmental experts were generally one step ahead in notifying the recipients; no one would take it. That is, until it got to Haiti. There, U.S.-backed dictator Baby Doc Duvalier issued a permit for the garbage, which was by now being called "fertilizer," and four thousand tons of the ash was dumped onto the beach in the town of Gonaives.

Maine’s largest utility is asking the Public Utilities Commission to approve its plans to install the latest in “smart” meter technology, using a federal recovery act grant to pay for half of the $191 million project.

But lawmakers are worried about the policy implications of Central Maine Power’s proposal and the irony of the use of recovery act money that is supposed to create jobs to help fund a project that will eliminate 141 positions.

“That has to be a concern,” said Sen. Barry Hobbins, D-Saco, co-chairman of the Legislature’s Utilities Committee. “Those funds were to create jobs.”

Since then, however, The Sunday Times has discovered that the same bogus claim has been cited in grant applications for TERI.

One of them, announced earlier this month just before the scandal broke, resulted in a £310,000 grant from Carnegie.

An abstract of the grant application published on Carnegie's website said: "The Himalaya glaciers, vital to more than a dozen major rivers that sustain hundreds of millions of people in South Asia, are melting and receding at a dangerous rate.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has approved the use and sale of a new weapon that simulates a feeling of being shot in those targeted.

The feeling of "being hit" produced by the stun gun is said to be similar to that of standing in front of a firing squad.

The Bank of the Vatican has been accused of laundering USD 200 million by proxy through an Italian creditor, a report indicates.

The allegation of the Vatican bank's financial corruption has been made by an Italian magazine that pointed to the financial institute's purported involvement in stealth fiscal transactions —via several accounts —with Italy's UniCredit Bank, Russia Today television network quoted the Panorama .

Since the suicide bombing that took the lives of seven Americans in Afghanistan on Dec. 30, the Central Intelligence Agency has struck back against militants in Pakistan with the most intensive series of missile strikes from drone aircraft since the covert program began.

Beginning the day after the attack on a C.I.A. base in Khost, Afghanistan, the agency has carried out 11 strikes that have killed about 90 people suspected of being militants, according to Pakistani news reports, which make almost no mention of civilian casualties.

"About 450,000 homeowners currently have HAMP trial modifications and have demonstrated a willingness and ability to make timely payments for at least three months," said Richard Neiman, superintendent of the New York State Banking Department.

"Now, unfortunately and very alarmingly, these same homeowners face the prospect of foreclosure strictly on account of documentation issues," he said.

Paperwork has proved a major stumbling block for the president's foreclosure-prevention program. Homeowners complain that their servicers continuously lose the documents they send in, while financial institutions argue that borrowers have not been sending in their paperwork.

Afghanistan announced on Sunday that it is postponing parliamentary polls for four months, days ahead of crunch talks on the war-torn nation in London, saying it was unsafe to go ahead amid a spiraling Taliban insurgency.

The announcement, five months after the presidential election descended into a ballot-stuffing farce, will deepen global concern that graft and logistical problems are undermining democracy in one of the world's poorest and most corrupt nations.