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ROME (Reuters) - The Italian government denied on Wednesday reports that its secret services passed fake documents to the United States to help bolster claims about Baghdad's pre-war nuclear ambitions. Italian newspaper La Repubblica has been running daily articles since Monday alleging that Sismi intelligence officials helped pass-off forged documents that accused Iraq of trying to buy 500 tons of "yellowcake" uranium from Niger. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's office said in a statement the government and Sismi had no "direct or indirect role in the fabrication and the transmission of the 'fake dossier on Niger uranium."' La Repubblica accuses Sismi,...

ROME - The head of Italy's military secret services will be questioned by a parliamentary commission next week over allegations that his organization gave the United States and Britain disputed documents suggesting that Saddam Hussein had been seeking uranium in Africa, officials said Tuesday. Nicolo Pollari, director of the SISMI intelligence agency, will be questioned on Nov. 3 by members of the commission overseeing secret services, said Micaela Panella, a commission spokeswoman. She said Pollari asked to be questioned after reports Monday and Tuesday in the Rome daily La Repubblica claiming SISMI passed on to the CIA, U.S. government officials...

A Hadley man is hoping this will finally be the year lawmakers require the state to post all government jobs in a statewide employment database. "Something's wrong when qualified people aren't applying for jobs paid for by the taxpayers because they don't know about them," said Thomas McGee, a retired adjunct professor at Bay Path College. McGee is the driving force behind House Bill 1762 and its companion Senate Bill 889. McGee first filed the bills, through his senator and representative, in 1995, after he was dismayed to discover that the state did not list all government jobs at state...

As the civil war in Syria enters its third year, there is much discussion of the regimeÂ’s chemical weapons and whether SyriaÂ’s Bashar al-Assad will unleash them against Syrian rebels, or whether a power vacuum after AssadÂ’s fall might make those horrific tools available to the highest bidder. The conversation centers on SyriaÂ’s chemical weaponry, not on something vastly more serious: its nuclear weaponry. It well might have. This is the inside story of why it does not. Relations between the United States and Israel had grown rocky after IsraelÂ’s incursion into Lebanon in 2006, for Secretary of State Condoleezza...

SPRINGFIELD — Western Massachusetts Electric Co. has announced plans to install three charging stations for plug-in electric cars as its parent company studies the future of rechargeable vehicles. Charging equipment has been installed at the company's headquarters in Springfield and at the Courtyard Marriott Hotel in Hadley. A third location is planned for Pittsfield. WMECO President Peter Clarks says the company wants to better understand consumer charging patterns and preferences. He says soaring gasoline prices and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions make it clear the electric vehicles are a key component of the future of transportation.

Global Warming: Russian analysts accuse Britain's Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia? Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday's Washington Post that "stolen" e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit still don't alter the evidence for climate change. Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they "confuse the public." Chutzpah has been...

...Millions of measurements, global coverage, consistently rising temperatures, case closed: The Earth is warming. Except for one problem. CRU’s average temperature data doesn’t jive with that of Vincent Courtillot, a French geo-magneticist, director of the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris, and a former scientific advisor to the French Cabinet. Last year he and three colleagues plotted an average temperature chart for Europe that shows a surprisingly different trend. Aside from a very cold spell in 1940, temperatures were flat for most of the 20th century, showing no warming while fossil fuel use grew. Then in 1987 they shot up...

The headline on this Guardian article is pretty sanitized: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/23/climate-change-emails-uea "Climate change email hacking to be looked into by University of East Anglia" But you don't have to read very far to see that the media has zero interest in investigating the content of the emails. They want the leakers destroyed; as do the scientists.

The director of Britain's leading Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, has told Investigate magazine's TGIF Edition tonight that his organization has been hacked, and the data flying all over the internet appears to be genuine. In an exclusive interview, Jones told TGIF, "It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails." "Have you alerted police" "Not yet. We were not aware of what had been taken." Jones says he was first tipped off to the security breach...

The plan being discussed would eliminate the independent homeland security adviser’s office and assign those duties to the National Security Council to streamline sometimes overlapping functions. A deputy national security adviser would be charged with overseeing the effort to guard against terrorism and to respond to natural disasters. Mr. Bush's aides, including the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, have privately urged Mr. Obama's advisers not to get rid of the separate homeland security office, warning that it would load too many responsibilities on the National Security Council and risk important matters' falling through the cracks.

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2009/01/20090107-4.html For Immediate Release Office of the Press Secretary January 7, 2009 Remarks by National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley at the Center for Strategic and International Studies CSIS Washington, D.C. White House News National Security Council In Focus: National Security 10:40 A.M. EST MR. HADLEY: Thank you, John, very much for those kind words. I'm honored to be here at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I thank you for the research you conduct, the analysis you provide, and the policy ideas that you develop. In less than two weeks, a new...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2009/01/20090105-4.html For Immediate Release Office of the Press Secretary January 5, 2009 Statement by National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley White House News In Focus: Africa Today, President Bush announced his approval of the airlift of equipment for the United Nations/African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID). The President also authorized the waiver of the 15-day congressional notification requirements to allow the airlift assistance to proceed immediately, because failing to do so would pose a substantial risk to human health and welfare. The U.S. provision of airlift will deliver equipment and vehicles that are critical...

Wednesday, May 7, 2008 "not seem the time for a big high-level, three-way event" Press Briefing by National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley on the President's Trip to the Middle East "we think the bilateral negotiations are key. We can be encouraging those negotiations to go forward. A lot of it is better done, quite frankly, in private than in public. And this did not seem the time for a big high-level, three-way event with the President and the Prime Minister and President Abbas. For Immediate Release Office of the Press Secretary May 7, 2008 Press Briefing by National Security Advisor...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A boycott of Olympic ceremonies by world leaders over China's crackdown in Tibet would be an evasion of responsibility and less effective than quiet diplomacy, the U.S. national security adviser said on Sunday. The remarks by White House adviser Stephen Hadley come as a challenge to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has said she will not attend the opening ceremony of this year's Beijing Olympics, and to those calling for President George W. Bush and other leaders to do the same. "I think unfortunately a lot of countries say 'well, if we say we are not going...

Keith Weissman and Steven Rosen Are PhDs and Middle East Experts Who Did Some Lobbying. They Thought They Were Doing What Washington Insiders Always Do. Thomas O’Donnell didn’t reveal his job when he phoned Keith Weissman in 2004 and got the policy analyst’s wife. He says he didn’t want to scare her. When Weissman returned the call and found out O’Donnell was an FBI agent, his first reaction was to attempt a joke: “What did I do?” “I’m sure you didn’t do anything,” O’Donnell told him. He wanted to meet that day, for five or ten minutes, and get Weissman’s...

A new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), entitled “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities,” has just dealt a serious blow to the argument some of us have been making that Iran is intent on building nuclear weapons and that neither diplomacy nor sanctions can prevent it from succeeding. Thus, this latest NIE “judges with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program”; it “judges with high confidence that the halt was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work”; it “assesses with moderate confidence that Tehran had...

A Day in the Life of President Bush (with photos): 11-10-07 Enjoy your visit to Sanity Island Transcript: 11-10-07 - President Bush and Chancellor Merkel of Germany Participate in a Joint Press Availability - Prairie Chapel Ranch - Crawford, Texas QUOTE(s) OF THE DAY "First on al Qaeda, we do share a common goal, and that is to eradicate al Qaeda. That goal obviously became paramount to the American people when al Qaeda killed 3,000 innocent souls on our soil. And since then, the United States of America, along with strong allies and friends, has been in pursuit of...

Hadley: Bush Will Not Accept Mission Change Offered by Warner, Lugar Sunday , July 15, 2007 AP WASHINGTON — The White House is rejecting as premature a plan by two senior Republican senators to restrict the mission of U.S. troops in Iraq President Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, said Sunday the administration has a "very orderly process" set out for reviewing whether its Iraq strategy is working and that should be allowed to play out. Asked in a broadcast interview whether Bush could live with the plan offered by Sens. John Warner of Virginia and Richard Lugar of Indiana,...

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley visited Capitol Hill just before Congress adjourned for the Fourth of July. Meetings with a half-dozen senior Republican senators were clearly intended to extinguish fires set by Sen. Richard Lugar's unexpected break from President Bush's Iraq policy. They failed. Hadley called his expedition a "scouting trip," leading one senator to ask what he was seeking. It was not advice on how to escape from Iraq. Instead, Hadley appeared interested in how previous supporters of Bush's course had drifted away. In the process, though, he planted seeds of concern. Some senators were left with the...

Excerpt - The White House wants to appoint a high-powered czar to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies, but it has had trouble finding anyone able and willing to take the job, according to people close to the situation. At least three retired four-star generals approached by the White House in recent weeks have declined to be considered for the position, the sources said, underscoring the administration's difficulty in enlisting its top recruits to join the team after five years of warfare that have taxed...