Qatar-Gaza: The Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, on Tuesday became the first head of state to visit the Gaza Strip since Hamas won control of it through elections in June 2007. He crossed into Gaza from Egypt.
The Emir pledged $400 million to build two housing complexes, rehabilitate three main roads and create a prosthetic center, among other projects. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said that the visit by Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani has helped lift the Israeli blockade.
“The nuclear plant at Fukushima was built by GE (General Electric), which means it was not the Japanese who miscalculated the risks of building in a flood plain in an area subject to earthquakes and consequent tsunami. GE has been involved in a great many similar projects in Japan for many decades, since long before WW2. A full investigation of GE's role is imperative, because blaming it all on the Japanese is a cop-out — especially when you realize that the consequences of the Fukushima disaster are much greater (and scarier) than has been revealed so far. Sterling Seagrave”
Well at least my favorite candidate is not handcuffed to a chair for tonight’s debate. Tonight’s debate is proceeding in the wake of a court challenge by Green Party Candidate Jill Stein. Here is the latest from her campaign:
Last week Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein was arrested, along with VP candidate Cheri Honkala, attempting to get into the presidential debates in Hempstead, New York. This week her fight continues with a lawsuit filed today against the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), claiming that the CPD, Democratic National Committee, and Republican National Committee, together with the Federal Election Commission and Lynn University, had deprived her of her constitutional rights to due process, equal protection, and free speech, as well as her statutorily protected civil rights.
President Obama’s response to Mitt Romney comments on the size of the U.S. Navy during Monday’s debate did not “play well” with American voters, former CIA Director Michael Hayden tells Newsmax.
Romney complained that the Navy is “smaller now than any time since 1917.”
Obama responded: “We also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military has changed.”
He added sarcastically: “We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go under water, nuclear submarines.” The issue, he said, “is not a game of Battleship, where we are counting ships.”
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In the world of security clearances for access to classified information, the term “reciprocity” is used to indicate that one executive branch agency should ordinarily recognize and accept a security clearance that has been granted by another executive branch agency.
This is not just a nice, cost-efficient thing to do, it is actually a requirement of law. Under the 2004 intelligence reform law, “all security clearance background investigations and determinations… shall be accepted by all agencies.”
This requirement for mutual recognition and acceptance applies equally to the higher order clearances of the intelligence community, where reciprocity is intended to promote employee “mobility” throughout the intelligence system, according to the 2009 Intelligence Community Directive 709.
So possessing a clearance from one agency should simplify the process of access approval at another agency. But the opposite is not supposed to be true. If an agency refuses for some reason to recognize the clearance granted by another agency, that refusal is not supposed to incur loss of clearance in the original agency.
Officially, such “negative reciprocity” is not an authorized, legitimate security clearance practice. And yet there are signs that it is being adopted within the Department of Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals (DOHA), which rules on contested security clearance cases.
A new paper by attorney Sheldon I. Cohen describes a series of DOHA rulings in which a perverse form of negative reciprocity has been used to justify the denial or revocation of a security clearance, to the obvious detriment of due process.
“While the burden of proof has always been placed on the employee by the DOHA Appeal Board to show why he or she should be granted a security clearance, until now there was a modicum of a right to confrontation, and a right to challenge the evidence presented by the government,” Mr. Cohen wrote.
But in a ruling he describes, “anonymous redacted reports and other agency's decision are enough to deny or revoke a DoD clearance regardless of contrary evidence.”
