Pentagon and CIA Fighting State Dept. Plan to Allow Russian Space Agency to Build GPS Stations on U.S. Soil

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Photo Credit: Pedro Ladeira/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesIn the view of America’s spy services, the next potential threat from Russia may not come from a nefarious cyberweapon or secrets gleaned from the files of Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor now in Moscow.

Instead, this menace may come in the form of a seemingly innocuous dome-topped antenna perched atop an electronics-packed building surrounded by a security fence somewhere in the United States.

In recent months, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon have been quietly waging a campaign to stop the State Department from allowing Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, to build about half a dozen of these structures, known as monitor stations, on United States soil, several American officials said.

They fear that these structures could help Russia spy on the United States and improve the precision of Russian weaponry, the officials said. These monitor stations, the Russians contend, would significantly improve the accuracy and reliability of Moscow’s version of the Global Positioning System, the American satellite network that steers guided missiles to their targets and thirsty smartphone users to the nearest Starbucks.

“They don’t want to be reliant on the American system and believe that their systems, like GPS, will spawn other industries and applications,” said a former senior official in the State Department’s Office of Space and Advanced Technology. “They feel as though they are losing a technological edge to us in an important market. Look at everything GPS has done on things like your phone and the movement of planes and ships.”

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Trans-Pacific Partnership: Obama’s Dangerous International Deal Surrendering U.S. Sovereignty

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Photo Credit: WikicommonsWhile the Obama Administration appears to be growing ever-more-limp domestically, the president is still making a vigorous international push that has the potential to shift economic power dynamics, rewrite intellectual property laws, establish new labor and environmental regulations, and reduce the authority of Congress. And, the White House hopes to have all this sorted out by the end of this year.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), considered the “cornerstone of the Obama Administration’s economic policy in the Asia Pacific,” has been quietly negotiated since since the president’s first term began. The U.S. Trade Representative Office (USTR) presents the agreement as a means for the United States and other 11 other Pacific-rim countries to be the leaders of a technology-fueled future by trading with each other free of government tariffs. For all this, it has received a ringing endorsement from the New York Times.

However, as documents from negotiations have been leaked, a growing number of politicians and policy groups across political ideologies have found disconcerting features of the TPP that point not at all toward free trade, but bigger government, stricter laws, and less accountability.

Too Much Secrecy

Perhaps the most widely discussed aspects of the ongoing TPP negotiations is the apparent secrecy. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have spoken out against the lack of transparency for such a massive agreement. Warren even wrote a letter to Obama, goading him that the Bush administration conducted more democratic, transparent trade negotiations.

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China Loosens Its One-Child Policy (+video)

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Photo Credit: Carlos Barria / ReutersThe Chinese government announced on Nov. 15 that it will loosen its notorious family-planning scheme, commonly known as the one-child policy. The new regulations will allow couples in which at least one parent is an only child to have two offspring. Xinhua, China’s official news agency, said the reform was designed to “steadily adjust and improve family planning policies.”

The reform is part of what the Chinese government earlier this week referred to as “fine-tuning” of its restrictive family-planning policy, which was unveiled in 1979. (Generally speaking, the scheme limited urban families to one child but allowed rural couples to have more than one child in certain cases.) The curtailing of reproductive freedom, its supporters contend, meant that 400 million fewer Chinese were born, allowing for an unprecedented economic boom over the past 30-plus years.

But critics have assailed the policy for both the human-rights abuses it gave rise to—forced abortions and sterilizations, to name just two—as well as its social costs, which are now multiplying. China today faces a dramatic increase in its elderly population, along with too few young people to take care of all these retirees. The nation must also contend with an alarming gender imbalance because some parents have terminated pregnancies of female fetuses in order to ensure a favored boy as their sole child. By some estimates, China will have an extra 25 million young males by 2020.

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Hugo Chavez-Linked Group Crafted ‘You Can Keep Your Plan’

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Photo Credit: WND A little-known group called the Herndon Alliance has been the driving force in branding Obamacare to the public.

It was this group that advised President Obama to say Americans can maintain their choice of doctors and insurers under his health-care plan, WND has learned.

The Herndon Alliance is openly partnered with a number of radical groups, including MoveOn, the National Council of La Raza and a slew of George Soros-funded activist organizations.

It is also partnered with a “direct action” group dedicated to the teachings of radical Saul Alinsky.

The original research that informed Herndon’s blueprint for marketing Obamacare, WND has found, was concocted by the imaging guru for the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.

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Kerry Warns Fresh Iran Sanctions Could Scuttle Nuclear Talks

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Photo Credit: Getty Images Secretary of State John Kerry has told US lawmakers any new sanctions against Iran would risk ruining talks over Tehran’s nuclear programme.

He told a Senate banking committee that the US might lose negotiating partners if it imposed economic penalties.

The panel has been considering a fresh package but legislators are divided on the measure.

Mr Kerry has told the BBC that Iran and world powers had come “extremely close” to a deal at the weekend.

Before Wednesday’s closed-door meeting with senators, Washington’s top diplomat told reporters: “What we’re asking everybody to do is calm down, look hard at what can be achieved and what the realities are.”

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United Nations Elects Human Rights Violators to Human Rights Council

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Photo Credit: APThe United Nations elected China, Cuba, Russia, and Saudi Arabia to seats on its Human Rights Council Tuesday, all countries that have been widely condemned by international groups for gross human rights violations.

The U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) cast votes for 14 seats on the 47-member Human Rights Council (HRC). The HRC is responsible for adopting resolutions that censure human rights abuses globally and placing special monitors on problem countries and issues.

“China, Cuba, Russia, and Saudi Arabia systematically violate the human rights of their own citizens, and they consistently vote the wrong way on U.N. initiatives to protect the human rights of others,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of U.N. Watch, in a press release.

“When the U.N.’s highest human rights body becomes a case of the foxes guarding the henhouse, the world’s victims suffer,” he added.

France, Britain, South Africa, Vietnam, Algeria, Morocco, Namibia, Maldives, Macedonia, and Mexico also secured seats in the vote and will serve three-year terms.

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Typhoon Haiyan: 600,000 Believed Homeless; Desperate Survivors Wait in the Open for Aid as Rains Return

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Photo Credit: EPA/FRANCIS R. MALASIGHundreds of thousands of people were spending their fifth night sleeping in the open in the Philippines last night as soldiers and aid workers struggled to deliver help to the victims of Typhoon Haiyan.

Almost half of the estimated 660,000 people left homeless by its devastating wind and waves were still without shelter as tropical weather brought more heavy and forecasters warned of the risk of a second typhoon later this week.

Anger across the Philippines was continuing to rise at what seemed to be the slow response to the crisis, with many areas yet to receive aid on the scale needed.

The number killed remains unclear, with the United Nations estimating at least 10,000.

Benigno Aquino, the Philippines’ president, said yesterday that he believed that the true figure was lower – saying only between 2,000 and 2,500 had perished – but many of the worst-affected towns and islands have yet to provide reliable death tolls.

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North Korea Publicly Executes 80, Some for Watching South Korean Videos or Owning Bibles

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Photo Credit: APAs many as 80 people were publicly executed in North Korea earlier this month, some for offenses as minor as watching South Korean movies or possessing a Bible.

South Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo reported that the so-called criminals were put to death in seven cities across North Korea on Nov. 3, in the first known large-scale public executions by the Kim Jong-un regime.

A source, who is familiar with internal affairs in the North and who recently visited the country, told the paper that about 10 people were killed in each city.

Eight people — their heads covered with white bags — were tied to stakes at a local stadium in the city of Wonsan, before authorities shot them with a machine gun, according to the source.

Wonsan authorities gathered a crowd of 10,000 people, including children, at Shinpoong Stadium and forced them to watch the killings.

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Soldiers Killed by Terrorists Backed by US Cash

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Photo Credit: Jonathan Saruk/Getty ImagesThe United States has paid more than $150 million to companies in Afghanistan that are accused of helping to finance terrorist attacks on American soldiers and facilities, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

“It’s like the United States government subsidizing the Taliban, al Qaeda, the Haqqani network, those groups that are trying to shoot and kill our soldiers,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., a member of the Senate’s Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News’ “World News with Diane Sawyer”.

A list of 43 companies in Afghanistan was compiled by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) using data from both classified Pentagon investigative reports and Commerce Department lists of terror-connected companies.

Among them is a road construction company the U.S. says is partly owned by a leader of the brutal Haqqani network, which was blamed for an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul that claimed 16 lives in 2011.

The cover letter of a classified investigation by the U.S. Army said there was evidence of a direct role of both the company and its owners “in the facilitation and operation of the Haqqani Network” and that “approximately $1-2 million per month flow[s] to Haqqani Network to finance its activities.”

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Hagel Sends US Troops Into Philippines to Help with Post-Typhoon Humanitarian Efforts

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Photo Credit: REUTERSSecretary of Defense Chuck Hagel on Sunday directed the U.S. Pacific Command to support American humanitarian relief efforts in the Philippines in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan.

Col. Brad Bartelt, a Marine Corps spokesman, said the U.S. military was called in at the request of the Philippines government.

Haiyan struck the island nation Friday, impacted more than 4.2 million people across 36 provinces in the Philippines, according to the Philippine government’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.

The death toll has reached 1,000 but the number is projected to climb to 10,000.

Philippine officials say they will have a better idea about fatalities and damage in the coming days as transportation and communications systems are repaired.

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