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UNITED NATIONS - A former Russian top spy says his agents helped the Russian government steal nearly $500 million from the U.N.'s oil-for-food program in Iraq before the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Sergei Tretyakov, who defected to the United States in 2000 as a double agent, says he oversaw an operation that helped Saddam's regime manipulate the price of Iraqi oil sold under the program — and allow Russia to skim profits. Tretyakov, former deputy head of intelligence at Russia's U.N. mission from 1995 to 2000, names some names, but sticks mainly to code names. Among the spies...

'Jackie Kennedy of China' at Center of Political Drama By JEREMY PAGE, BRIAN SPEGELE and STEVE EDER The wife of sacked Communist Party official Bo Xilai made quite an impression when she showed up in Mobile, Ala., 15 years ago with her young son in tow. Denver lawyer Ed Byrne, whom she had hired to represent Chinese companies embroiled in a legal mess in U.S. federal court, was struck by her brains, charm and beauty. Gu Kailai, he says, seemed like the "Jackie Kennedy of China." Gu Kailai was close to a British businessman who died mysteriously. . The business...

Retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson is no stranger to controversy, with a legacy of questionable statements on Israel and the US government. In 2013 the former chief of staff for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell suggested that Israel was responsible for the use of chemical weapons in Syria. In 2007 Wilkerson appeared in a Dutch documentary, claiming that American foreign policy was dominated by “the Jewish lobby”. Despite his history of inflammatory rhetoric and frequent conspiracy theories, Wilkerson was tapped to serve as a military and foreign policy adviser for the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2015. In the wake...

This month’s announcement from Party City that it’s closing more than 40 stores as it grapples with new challenges, including diminishing helium supplies, likely came as unwelcome news to customers who count on the store for their balloon and event planning needs. But for scientists like Mark Elsesser, the announcement was something of a relief, inflating hopes that the public, and the government, might start paying closer attention. “When it comes to helium, we’re at a tipping point,” said Elsesser, who is the associate director of government affairs at the American Physical Society, a nonprofit association of physicists. “Party City...

Astronomers expect that this year’s Alpha Monocerotid meteor shower will be an epic outburst with possible rates of up to 400 shooting stars an hour. ================================================================= Sky-watchers may get to see 2019 really go out with a bang, with the expected arrival this week of an explosion of shooting stars. If astronomers’ predictions hold true, the Alpha Monocerotid meteor shower could come to life in dramatic fashion on November 21 and 22, with possible rates of up to 400 shooting stars an hour during its relatively brief peak. Such an outburst would make this shower at least four times more...

September 7, 2004 U.S. Secretly Detained bin Laden Brother-in-Law For Four Months After Purported May 1995 Deportation Controversial 9/11 Commissioner Linked To Case By FOIA Documents By J.M. Berger INTELWIRE.com The U.S. government secretly detained Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law for four months in 1995, after the INS announced he had already been deported to Jordan, according to documents obtained by INTELWIRE using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The Jordan deportation was authorized by then-Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, at the request of Secretary of State Warren Christopher. A member of the independent commission investigating the September 11 attacks, Gorelick...

NEWS ANALYSIS: Ostensibly his resignation was a consequence of the leaking of the names of five suspended Vatican officials, but sources tell the Register it was actually triggered by other issues.VATICAN CITY — The resignation of Vatican police commander Domenico Giani on Monday had been long expected, but the background to his removal remains shrouded in intrigue and mystery. The Vatican announced Giani’s replacement today, Gianluca Gauzzi Broccoletti, who has served in the Vatican police corps since 1995 and was appointed Giani’s deputy last year. A former officer in both Italy’s finance police, the Guardia di Finanza, and Italy’s Secret...

Former President Bill Clinton dined with financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 1995, records show—years before the interactions detailed in a statement from his office earlier this week. That statement condemned the wealthy hedge fund manager after his indictment for alleged sex trafficking crimes was unsealed Monday. The statement said Clinton "knows nothing" about Epstein's alleged crimes and included a timeline of Clinton's interactions with him starting in 2002. But according to a story published back in March 1995 by the Palm Beach Post, then-President Clinton attended a “three-hour dinner” at the time with a “very select group of...

The Moscow Military District Court has ruled that it was Colonel Aleksander Zaporozhsky who gave up Robert Hanssen to the CIA. The court ended up giving the former intelligence officer an even stiffer sentence than the prosecutor had demanded. On Wednesday the former Colonel of the Foreign Intelligence Service Aleksander Zaporozhsky was found guilty of high treason in the form of revealing state secrets to the USA. Zaporozhsky was sentenced to 18 years in a high security labour camp and stripped of his military rank and all state decorations, though his property will not be confiscated. During his service, Zaporozhsky...

Litigation: After thwarting a $9.5 billion judgment from an Ecuadorean court, Chevron is going after the entire edifice of environmentalist enablers who make such junk lawsuits possible. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch. To the surprise of many, the oil giant is suing the tony, white-shoe law firm of Patton Boggs for alleged unethical involvement in an all-out legal attack by environmentalists over rainforest pollution in Ecuador. Chevron accuses the oh-so-respected firm of lying, concealing inconvenient facts, running a public smear campaign and miscellaneous other flim-flammery, all for the sake of the dollar signs spinning in their eyes. This poses...

U.S. Links Charity to Chechen RebelsBy Nabi Abdullaev Staff Writer The head of a U.S.-based Islamic charity who is suspected of having ties to Osama bin Laden is in jail facing a grand jury investigation after the FBI showed he had lied about his support for Chechen rebels. Federal officials accused Enaam Arnaout, a Syrian-born U.S. citizen, and his Benevolence International Foundation of perjury last month for claiming they did not provide support to "people or organizations known to engage in violence, terrorist activities or military operations of any nature." Arnaout, 39, was arrested April 30. He had been under...

The marbled crayfish is the only crustacean that reproduces asexually, with the all-female species making clones of itself from eggs unfertilized by sperm... Since its discovery in 1995 in Germany, the marbled crayfish has spread across Europe and into Africa in huge numbers. “They eat anything—rotten leaves, snails or fish broods, small fish, small insects," says Frank Lyko, a molecular geneticist at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. “This crayfish is a serious pest,” ... Lyko and his colleagues sequenced genomes of about a dozen marbled crayfish from different parts of the world and performed less detailed genetic analyses...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV), and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) have introduced the Jerusalem Embassy and Recognition Act, which would move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and therefore recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital city. Currently, the U.S. Embassy is located in Tel Aviv. In a statement, Sen. Cruz said that it was "finally time" to move the embassy. “Jerusalem is the eternal and undivided capital of Israel,” Sen. Cruz said. “Unfortunately, the Obama administration's vendetta against the Jewish state has been so vicious that to even utter this simple truth - let alone the reality...

Say it isn't so. Could this actually be the next US Secretary of State (Hat Tip: Barak Ravid)? Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry met during his visit to Washington Wendy Sherman, an adviser to the US Democratic Party's presidential primary candidate Hillary Clinton, the foreign affairs ministry announced on Thursday. The Egyptian foreign ministry spokesperson Ahmed Abu Zeid stated that during the meeting Sherman listened to Shoukry's evaluations of political and economic developments taking place in Egypt, the country's regional and international relations, as well as the country's efforts to fight terrorism. "The meeting reflected the mutual wish to...

Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said on Tuesday that he's bothered by the Republican National Committee's decision to its reinstate support for GOP Senate candidate and accused child molester Roy Moore, saying that Moore "deserves to lose." "I think he deserves to lose," Cantor said on CNN's New Day. "When I was in office as Majority Leader, I had the policy of zero tolerance for any of this kind of stuff."

Lost in the tumult over Islamic port deals and Katrina video capers is the recently released -- and willfully ignored -- Barrett Report. David Barrett, you'll recall, is the independent counsel appointed in 1995 to investigate allegations of impropriety against President Clinton's Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros. Mr. Barrett found his path mined by the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service and President Clinton's attorneys, even after Mr. Clinton departed the White House. He prepared 18 felony indictments against Mr. Cisneros but had to settle for a guilty plea on a misdemeanor charge (lying to the...

Breakdown of the Connections Between The Working Family Party, SEIU, ACORN, The New Party, The DNC, Democratic Socialists of America, Tides, George Soros and The Obama Administration Patrick Gaspard, the current executive director of the DNC, former director of Obama’s Office of Political Affairs, was an organizer for the New Party, the executive vice president of the SEIU Local 1199, political director for Bertha Lewis the former president of ACORN and a co-chair of the Working Families Party. The New Party’s influential Chicago chapter began to formed in January 1995. Its members consisted mainly of individuals from ACORN, SEIU and...

"These five guys are not a threat to the United States," says Clinton. "They are a threat to the safety and security of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's up to those two countries to make the decision once and for all that these are threats to them. So I think we may be kind of missing the bigger picture here. We want to get an American home, whether they fell off the ship because they were drunk or they were pushed or they jumped, we try to rescue everybody." Last week President Obama traded the Taliban 5, who were being...

I stand by every word of it. And it’s even worse today. Of the thousands of Clinton presidential records released to the public last week, one among them has received of the bulk of attention: a 332-page memo from 1995. The memo, which offers an in-depth analysis of the right-wing media, describes how conservative conspiracy theories about the Clintons passed from the fringes to the mainstream. (...) Let’s go all the way back to the summer of 1995. At the time, my then colleague (and current business partner) Mark Fabiani and I were working at the White House as lawyers...

YT comment "...With all the overblown 2016 election rhetoric it's instructive to watch Bill Clintion's 1995 State of the Union Address. Actually the Clintons and seemingly a bipartisan Congress all supported steps to stop the flow of illegal immigrants across the southern U.S.-Mexico border. Suddenly in 2016 it has become controversial as the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton decided she needed to stake out a position opposite of Donald Trump, now labeling the position as racist or unworkable. However, as this video shows, at one time there was bipartisan agreement on steps needed to enforce existing immigration law. What do you...