A short time ago CNN TV did a "breaking" that the Iranians are broadcasting a "confession" by imprisoned Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari. I can't find anything on the net on it yet, but here's the June 21 story of his arrest.

See also at the New York Times website: Europe Weighs Withdrawing Envoys From Tehran, by Alan Cowell and Stephen Castel, 1:52 PM ET today: Diplomats said that the European Union is considering pulling out all 27 ambassadors in a dispute over Iran's detention of local personnel from the British Embassy.  There's conflicting on that, as the Times' The Lede reported at 9:25am that that may have been resolved.

Their primary intended audience is domestic, of course, as they are trying to keep complete control, save their Islamic experiment, or whatever. But it seems they would like some Great Satans to play the game with them and will keep trying.

Gawker's Foster Kamer:

In a shallow attempt to divert attention away from their Iranian brethren (?), while you were getting out of bed today, Hondurans were having a military coup. Here's the basic rundown...

New York Times' current summary report.

Reuters: Honduras Zelaya calls for peaceful resistance to coup and
Chavez puts Venezuela troops on alert on Honduras.

Bloomberg:

..Over the past year, Zelaya has alienated Honduras's political and business elite by aligning with the Chavez-led group of socialist Latin American leaders...

Feel free to use comments for updates or discussion if a better thread doesn't appear.

Check out the poster in this photo: North Koreans rallied in Pyongyang on Thursday, shouting anti-American slogans and denouncing international sanctions

which accompanies this New York Times report: North Koreans Condemn U.S. and Sanctions at Huge Rally by Choe San-Hung, June 25, 2009 .

Who is the little blond guy in the American bomb being smashed by giant North Korean hands? He looks to me like he has Poppy Bush's face.

Obama's been fully indoctrinated into the vast coverup of the conspiracy, they implanted him with the chip or whatever:

The case has put the Obama administration in the middle of a political and legal dispute, with the Justice Department siding with the Saudis in court last month in seeking to kill further legal action. Adding to the intrigue, classified American intelligence documents related to Saudi finances were leaked anonymously to lawyers for the families. The Justice Department had the lawyers' copies destroyed and now wants to prevent a judge from even looking at the material.

from Documents Back Saudi Link to Extremists by Eric Lichtblau for the June 23 New York Times.

Chops to Lichtblau for trying, but sadly I don't think saying

The documents provide no smoking gun connecting the royal family to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. And the broader links rely at times on a circumstantial, connect-the-dots approach to tie together Saudi princes, Middle Eastern charities, suspicious transactions and terrorist groups.

is going to discourage you that much. Especially since he also adds this later:

...two intriguing pieces of evidence in the Saudi puzzle might still remain off limits.

One is a 28-page, classified section of the 2003 joint Congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks. The secret section is believed to discuss intelligence on Saudi financial links to two hijackers, and the Saudis themselves urged at the time that it be made public. President George W. Bush declined to do so.

More seriously, it sure would be nice to know what the heck is going on here, especially what the leaker is up to and what he or she doesn't like about what Obama's Justice Department is doing. 

Police Disperse Opposition Picketers in Georgia
3 hours ago‎
By Olesya Vartanyan and Ellen Barry--Tbilisi Georgia (New York Times)-- Police dispersed a gathering of around 100 demonstrators with clubs on Monday, seizing journalists' cameras, as street protests against President Mikheil Saakashvili's government extended into a third month....

Crowds have tapered off since April 10, when huge peaceful demonstrations first gathered to demand Mr. Saakashvili's resignation, but several recent protests have ended violently..... On Friday, as Georgia's parliament gathered for the first time since the opposition campaign started, protesters waited outside Georgia's parliament and pelted several members, and the speaker, with eggs. Later, they threw rocks at security guards.

Diplomats from France, Britain and the United States condemned the protesters. The United States Embassy released a statement saying their actions "crossed a line from free expression of opinion to criminal activity." Opposition leaders complained that foreign diplomats should not involve themselves in the country's internal politics....

And speaking of Georgia,

Russia threatens to veto West's UN Georgia plan
1 hour ago‎
By Louis Charbonneau UNITED NATIONS, June 15 (Reuters) - Russia's dispute with Western powers over its neighbor Georgia came to a head on Monday as Moscow threatened to veto a Western plan to extend the mandate of a U.N. mission in the former Soviet republic....

Georgia President Urges UN To Renew Abkhazia Mission As Part Of Georgia
June 15
TBILISI, Georgia (AFP)--Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili on Monday urged the United Nations to renew its monitoring mission in Abkhazia while still recognizing the breakaway region as part of Georgia....

and speaking of Russia,

Russia Seeks Bigger Afghan Role Before BRIC Summit
By Lyubov Pronina
June 15 (Bloomberg) -- President Dmitry Medvedev will seek to increase Russia's role in resolving the conflict in Afghanistan at a regional security summit that may also include talks with reelected Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Russia's contribution may include "giving Afghanistan practical assistance in restoring its economy and expanding the practice of regular political consultations," Sergei Prikhodko, an aide to Medvedev, told reporters in Moscow yesterday.

Medvedev will meet with his Afghan and Pakistani counterparts, Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari, today during a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a six-country security alliance that includes China and four former Central Asian Soviet republics. The two-day forum in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg will be followed late tomorrow by the first summit of the so-called BRIC countries.

Medvedev has repeatedly said Russia is prepared to cooperate with the U.S. to bring order to Afghanistan...

Iranian president puts off Russia trip
The Associated Press - ‎11 hours ago‎
...The change in plans came amid street protests in Iran following Ahmadinejad's re-election in a bitterly disputed vote Friday. The embassy did not give a reason for the decision....

It appears to be a quick decision made Friday:

Obama Pledges $73 Million for Zimbabwe's People 
By Kent Klein
White House
Voice of America, 12 June 2009
 
President Barack Obama is promising $73 Million in U.S. aid to the people of Zimbabwe. The president made the pledge Friday, after meeting with Zimbabwe's Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai in the Oval Office. 

President Obama says the U.S. assistance will go directly to the people of Zimbabwe because Washington believes that President Robert Mugabe does not always act in the interest of Zimbabwe's people.

But after meeting with Prime Minister Tsvangirai, Mr. Obama told reporters there is reason for hope.

"I, obviously, have extraordinary admiration for the courage, the tenacity that the prime minister has shown in navigating through some very difficult political times in Zimbabwe," he said....

contrast that with this report the day before:

US Seeks Ways to 'Appropriately' Support Zimbabwe Government - Clinton 
By Blessing Zulu & Patience Rusere
Washington
Voice of America, 11 June 2009
 
Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai met Thursday with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who in comments to reporters before their conversation appeared to add some nuance to the well-established American position that Washington will not directly fund the operations of the Harare government without seeing broad and deep reforms.

Mr. Tsvangirai is scheduled to meet Friday with President Barack Obama.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson said early this week that no major aid could be expected until the Harare government as a whole institutes significant reforms on human rights and the rule of law, and ends harassment of political and civic activists, seemingly underscoring the humanitarian-only aid policy that has been in place for months....

See also New York Times'  Zimbabwe Divisions Pose a Quandary for the West, of June 12, by Celia W. Dugger,

and  Urging Freedoms, Obama Chides Zimbabwe Leader, of June 13, by Sheryl Gay Stolberg. 

I was struck by the photo of the Peshawar five-star hotel bombing in the print edition of today's New York Times, it looked very similar to the results of Tim McVeigh's work in Oklahoma City. It appears there isn't the exact same photo available with the online version of the story--this one comes close, but is more cropped and fuzzy, doesn't give the same impact.

The accompanying report,

Militants Strike Five-Star Hotel in Pakistan, Killing 11, by Ismail Khan and Salman Masood from Peshawar,

pretty much makes it clear how huge the bomb was and that greater human damage was only avoided by the parking lot barriers:

The blast, powerful enough to leave a crater 6 feet deep and 15 feet wide, collapsed the western wing of the hotel...The bombing Tuesday was the seventh in Peshawar since the military operation began.

It was by far the largest -- using an estimated 1,000 pounds of explosives, the police said -- making it the most spectacular against a Western target in Pakistan since the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in the capital, Islamabad, last September, which left more than 50 dead.

The Pearl Continental is set back from a main road that is also the location of the Provincial Assembly and the High Court, and its parking lot is a gauntlet of zigzagging barriers to prevent just such an attack.

But the attackers employed tactics similar to those used in the assault on May 27 against the headquarters of the Pakistani intelligence service in Lahore, which fell short of its intended target but killed 26 people at a nearby emergency-response unit.

The last paragraph is quite striking:

"We are the front line," said Farahnaz Ispahani, the media advisor to President Asif Ali Zardari. "This is really a fight for our way of life. This is a fight for Pakistan."

The Times has summarized some very interesting updates to the story in its news blog this morning--

Report: U.S. Planned to Buy Bombed Peshawar Hotel, by Robert Mackey:

As a colleague here at The Times points out, the Pearl Continental hotel in Peshawar, Pakistan, which was partly destroyed on Tuesday by a massive car bomb, is well known locally as a meeting point for not just wealthy Pakistanis, foreign aid workers and journalists but also intelligence agents...

Given that reputation, the hotel was an obvious target for militants -- even before a report surfaced two weeks ago that the United States was planning to buy the hotel as part of a plan to greatly expand its diplomatic presence in the city. As the Press Trust of India reported on Tuesday, the Pearl Continental is currently owned by Sadruddin Hashwani, who also owns the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which was bombed last September, resulting in more than 50 deaths.

According to a report by Saeed Shah and Warren P. Strobel of McClatchy Newspapers, the hotel was apparently at the center of an American plan to establish a long-term presence in Peshawar...

Also of serious note is this second report in today's print version--
Villagers Take on Taliban After Bombing in Pakistan,
by Sabrina Tavernise and Irfan Ashraf in Peshawar:

....More than a thousand villagers from the district of Dir have been fighting Taliban militants since Friday, when a Taliban suicide bomber detonated his payload during prayer time at a mosque, killing at least 30 villagers....

The uprising is not the first time that Pakistanis have formed their own militias to stand up to the Taliban, and previous efforts have often collapsed largely because the government and military did not come to their aid.

But the latest attempt is significant, revealing the determination of the people of Dir to keep out both the Taliban and the military and to prevent their area from turning into another war zone, like the nearby Swat Valley, where millions have fled fighting.

The rebellion, locals said, gives the government a chance to demonstrate to the Pakistani people that it is serious in supporting them this time....

Fayaz Ahmad Khan Toru, an official with the government of North-West Frontier Province, said that officials knew that the government response was being closely watched, and that they were working with local people. "Failure is not an option," he said.

Syed Muhammad, 30, a civil servant from the village of Mian Dog in the valley, said that without the military's help, the uprising would fail. The militants were dug in too deep for the local militia to dislodge them on its own with just guns.

But he expressed cautious optimism that the local people would not be ignored, as they had been in most other operations, and that the military, now pressing ahead with its campaign against the Taliban, might be learning.

"I think that the military has now realized that the locals should be involved in these operations," he said. "Without the support of the local people they cannot wipe out the militants."

Meanwhile, Defense Sec. Gates was reporting to the U.S. Senate on Aghanistan "more hopeful than he had been in a long time," noting that the price for wheat there was almost the same as for opium, and Adm. Mike Mullen expressed a U.S. priority to reduce civilian casulaties.

See Woman Accused in Rendition Case Sues for Immunity,
by Scott Shane for the New York Times, May 14

A former American official charged with kidnapping in Italy in the 2003 seizure of a radical Muslim cleric filed a lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to force the State Department to invoke diplomatic immunity to halt the prosecution.

The Italians say Sabrina De Sousa is CIA, and was involved in the Feb. 2003 rendition of Abu Omar and want to prosecute her for it. She says she's not CIA and wasn't involved, swears she was a diplomat and is willing to sue in U.S. district court over it.  Scott Shane apparently found some "former agency officials" who told him that she had worked for the CIA.

Ms. De Sousa is suing the State Department because

"The government sent me to Italy to represent this country and then basically abandoned me." Ms. De Sousa called it "inexplicable" that the government had not invoked diplomatic immunity. "I'm still at a loss as to why this country is allowing the case to head toward conviction," she said.

Then there's this fishy response Shane got:

State Department officials declined to comment, noting that the case is at a highly sensitive stage. In March, Italy's Constitutional Court ruled that Italian prosecutors had violated state secrecy in gathering evidence in the case, and it is uncertain whether the prosecution will continue.

But the State Department officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, that they had been very active and "are pursuing every avenue to try to bring this case to a satisfactory resolution." They noted that most of the alleged officers charged in the rendition were not under diplomatic cover and would not qualify for immunity.

Legal experts said that intelligence officers serving under diplomatic cover often claim immunity when facing criminal charges overseas. But Curtis A. Bradley, a Duke law professor specializing in international law, cautioned that "consular immunity," the category that presumably would apply to Ms. De Sousa, was limited by treaty to "acts performed in the exercise of consular functions."

If she is CIA, is she angry about being made to take a fall for someone? If she's not, are they using her as a sacrificial lamb? The State Dept. anonymouse statement that the case is "at a highly sensitive stage" certainly suggests something or someone is being protected. I imagine they are not happy at the prospect of the American judicial system now being involved.  Maybe just dirty laundry could be exposed, maybe something much bigger?

I am going to try to follow the news updates in comments on this thread if I have time--participation by others welcome.

including new involvement by Ahmadinejad.

I posted several new comments and story links on Profco's April 18 blog on it. I did it that way rather than create a new post because I think it's helpful with a story like this to have more than one day's news developments in one place. If anyone has anything else to offer, please post it there.

for Obama's nomination acceptance, televised debates with McCain, and 2004 convention keynote, as well as for Bill and Hillary Clinton,

has more recently had Timothy Geithner as a client.

barring any unforeseen problems:

Obama has tapped Michael S. Barr, an adviser to former Treasury secretary Robert E. Rubin during the Clinton administration, as assistant secretary for financial institutions. A senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the Brookings Institution, Barr has researched and written about a range of financial regulation issues.

from Obama Settles on 3 More Senior Officials for Treasury by Philip Rucker, March 28.

Here's his University of Michigan faculty page, and his Brookings Institution home page.

Here's a pdf of his November 14, 2008 testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Domestic Policy on "the ongoing crisis in our housing and financial markets and Treasury's progress in preventing foreclosures under the Economic Emergency Stabilization Act of 2008." (10 pages.)

Barack Obama today at his G-20 press conference, to reporters from across the world:

It doesn't mean the state micromanaging -- ( sneezes) -- excuse me -- I've been fighting this all week -- it doesn't mean that we want the state dictating salaries; we don't. We -- I strongly believe in a free-market system, and as I -- as I think people understand in America, at least, people don't resent the rich; they want to be rich. And that's good. But we want to make sure that there's mechanisms in place that holds people accountable and produces results.

I heard it live, I heard him stress: people don't  resent the rich, they want to BE rich--and then after a pause, affirm: And that's good.

More, shortly thereafter:

I think that there's always been a spectrum of opinion about how unfettered the free market is. And along that spectrum, I think there have been some who believe in very fierce regulation and are very suspicious of globalization, and there are others who think that it's always -- that the market is always king. And I think what we've learned here, but if anybody had been studying history they would have understood earlier, is that the market is the most effective mechanism for creating wealth and distributing resources to produce goods and services that history has ever known, but that it goes off the rail sometimes; that if it's completely unregulated, that if there are no thoughtful frameworks to channel the creative energy of the market, that it can end up in a very bad place.

And so, in that sense, I think that we just went through a couple of decades where there was an artificial complacency about the dangers of markets going off the rails. And a crisis like this reminds us that we just have to put in some common-sense rules of the road, without throwing out the enormous benefits that globalization have brought in terms of improving living standards, reducing the cost of goods, and bringing the world closer together.

I hate to break the spell, but it really is way past time those in denial give up their imaginary Obama now, he's just not going to show up. He wasn't just pandering to the middle on the campaign trail and in his campaign white papers on economics, he meant what he said. He didn't get stuck with Geithner and Summers and others of the same school, he purposefully chose them. He's not waiting for pitchfork rebellions to allow him to go to the left on economics, because he doesn't want to be there and he doesn't believe most Americans are there. He's not against capitalism, he likes it. (Not only that, but rumor has it, he even likes some people that are also extremely wealthy!)  He never lied about who he was on this front, either.

For those who missed it, I recommend reading the entire transcript or watching a video, it was quite a bit more interesting than his last one.

My Manhattan Project
How I helped build the bomb that blew up Wall Street,
 
By Michael Osinski for the April 6, 2009 New York Magazine:

I have been called the devil by strangers and "the Facilitator" by friends. It's not uncommon for people, when I tell them what I used to do, to ask if I feel guilty. I do, somewhat, and it nags at me. When I put it out of mind, it inevitably resurfaces, like a shipwreck at low tide. It's been eight years since I compiled a program, but the last one lived on, becoming the industry standard that seeded itself into every investment bank in the world.

I wrote the software that turned mortgages into bonds....

Captions from the cartoon illustrations that accompany the article:

I arrived on Wall Street in 1985 to work at Salomon Brothers as a computer programmer, one foot out of the typing pool....I learned how to bundle home mortgages into bonds. As my mentor described it, "you put chicken into the grinder and out comes sirloin."...Traders loved the software, as it did more of the thinking, they were able to do less....

Josh Marshall in this post seems to suggest that E.U. antipathy to Obama administration levels of Keynesian stimulus (as well as China's) should be dismissed as the ranting of one crazy right-wing Czech E.U. president.

I think he misleads his readers by doing that, it is a denial of reality that will not prepare them for what they are going to continue to hear from Europe, and the problems the Obama administration will be confronting in that regard.. It's not just a bunch of crazy Czechs who are thinking along those lines, it's also Germany and France.

James Surowiecki summarizes the situation well in this short column for the March 30 New Yorker,

....While the U.S. is devoting almost six per cent of its G.D.P. to fiscal stimulus, France and Germany are spending a barely noticeable twenty-six billion euros and fifty billion euros, respectively. Whereas the U.S. hopes that the upcoming G20 summit will lead to a global stimulus package, European policymakers have been warning against the dangers of "crass Keynesianism." The U.S. Federal Reserve has been flooding our economy with money, but the European Central Bank has cut interest rates slowly and reluctantly. Far from wild-eyed leftists, Europeans are looking downright conservative.

...Europe's caution also reflects important differences between its economy and ours, as well as a profoundly different attitude toward things like inflation and debt. If European and American policymakers seem, in their public statements, to be dealing with two very different financial crises, it's because, in some sense, they are....

Read the whole thing, it won't take long and it will give you a clearer picture of why you will not see strong support for large stimulus from the E.U. Yes, that will feed  U.S. "winger" arguments against Obama's plan, but your response to them is right in the article: they have hefty safety nets for and tolerance for high unemployment, we don't (not to mention, they have us to always be the growth guinea pig while they go for "stability.")

My title is just funning with M.J. Rosenberg's newest post (which I find to be almost humorous in its hyperbole) and is not serious. But I thought of "humorous analagies to McCarthyism" when I was reading this at the same time in today's paper:

Goldman's sudden urgency to return the money stems, in part, from the uproar over A.I.G.'s bonuses last week, and the criticism of Goldman over revelations that the firm had been the largest recipient of government money as a counterparty of bets placed with A.I.G. It's also paying a hefty 5 percent interest payment to taxpayers for that money.

"It's just impossible to run our business in this environment," said one senior Goldman executive who insisted on not being quoted by name for fear of crossing the Treasury Department.

from Dealbook: If Goldman Returns Aid, Will Others? by Andrew Ross Sorkin. The ruminations therein about what might happen with the competition among firms to get off the public teat first was intriguing. 

This was also very interesting:

....the administration also had a more careful plan in place to introduce the proposal, because neither Mr. Geithner nor Mr. Obama could afford another negative review.

"Did we do things differently? It's self-evident that we did," Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said in an interview.

With selective leaks to the media for the last several days, the administration had time to explain the complexities in advance, preparing the financial markets over the weekend for what was coming. Mr. Geithner and other administration officials spent days briefing crucial people on Wall Street and working to line up endorsements from prominent equity fund managers and other private-sector "validators," in particular two leading global investment management firms, BlackRock and Pimco.

In a White House meeting late last week, Mr. Obama personally admonished administration officials to join Mr. Geithner in the plan's public marketing....

The administration also paid close attention to the political climate. With the private sector increasingly wary of Congressional intervention in the business of those who participate in government bailout programs, Mr. Obama substantially dialed back the near endorsement he had given late last week to the House vote for a confiscatory 90 percent tax on bonuses like those A.I.G. doled out....

There was even good news by Monday evening on the matter of Treasury's much criticized understaffing. The White House announced the nominations of two Clinton administration veterans to top posts: Neal S. Wolin to be Mr. Geithner's deputy Treasury secretary, and Lael Brainard to be under secretary for international affairs....

from Rescue Plan, With Some Fine Print, Dazzles Wall Street by Jackie Calmes.