Obama Urges Senate Passage Of Equal Pay Bill

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggests in a new interview with Larry King that legalizing gay marriage could one day lead to polygamy. "I listen to some of the Supreme Court justices and one of them said, well, what's next after that? Is it two people? Three people?" Rumsfeld said after being asked whether he supports gay marriage. Read full article >>    

Attorney General Eric Holder says four American citizens have been killed in drone strikes since 2009.

Muslim leaders from across the globe knelt in prayer for the Holocaust dead at the Auschwitz’s notorious Wall of Death on Wednesday, in an emotional visit to the Nazi German death camp in southern Poland. Imams from Bosnia, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States offered traditional Muslim “salat” prayers facing south towards their holy city of Mecca, shoes removed, during a Holocaust awareness visit to the site. Thousands of Auschwitz prisoners perished at the wall, which is grey and still riddled with bullet holes. It is a stone’s throw from the infamous wrought iron “Arbeit macht frei” (Work makes you free) gate at the camp’s entrance. “What can you say? You’re speechless. What you have seen is beyond human imagination,” a visibly moved Imam Mohamed Magid, President of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), told AFP after prayers and viewing the camp’s infamous gas chamber and crematoria. “Whether in Europe today or in the Muslim world, my call to humanity: End racism, for God’s sake, end anti-Semitism, for God’s sake, end Islamophobia for God’s sake, end sexism for God’s sake… Enough is enough,” he said. “When I saw what happened for the people here, I tried to prevent my tears from my eyes because its very difficult to see how many people were killed without any reason,” Palestinian Imam Barakat Hasan from Ramallah said. “I am from Palestine and my people are suffering now since 65 years until now, so of course I feel for others who have suffering,” he added. The visit was part of a Holocaust awareness and anti-genocide programme organised in part by the US State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom. Of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II, a million were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, mostly in its notorious gas chambers, along with tens of thousands of others including Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war. Operated by the Nazis from 1940 until it was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was part of a vast and brutal network of death and concentration camps across Europe set up as part of Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” of genocide against an estimated 10 million European Jews. Once Europe’s Jewish heartland, Poland saw 90 percent of its 3.3 million pre-war Jews wiped out under Nazi German occupation between 1939-45. Some of the imams wept at an emotional meeting Tuesday with Jewish Holocaust survivors and their Polish Catholic saviours who told stories of their war-time sacrifice and survival at Warsaw’s Nozyk Synagogue. Earlier Tuesday, the group visited the Polish capital’s new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, in the heart of city’s pre-war Jewish community which became the infamous Warsaw ghetto under the Nazis. The sprawling venue highlights nearly a millennium of Jewish life in Poland obliterated by the Holocaust. A soaring rupture opening on to undulating walls marks its facade, an allusion to Exodus and the parting of the Red Sea, through which Moses led the Jews fleeing slavery in Egypt to freedom, a narrative shared by the Torah, the Bible and the Quran.

Iran is making significant progress in expanding its nuclear programme, including in opening up a potential second route to developing the bomb, a new UN atomic agency report showed Wednesday. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s latest quarterly update said that Tehran has accelerated the installation of advanced uranium enrichment equipment at its central Natanz plant. It also outlined further progress at a reactor under construction at Arak, also in central Iran, which Western countries fear could provide Iran with plutonium if the fuel is reprocessed. The US State Department said the report was an “unfortunate milestone” marking a decade of Iran expanding its nuclear activities “in blatant violation of its international obligations”. Highly enriched uranium and plutonium can both be used in a nuclear weapon. North Korea used plutonium in two tests in 2006 and 2009, while uranium was used in the “Little Boy” atomic bomb dropped by the US on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. The new IAEA report, seen by AFP, said Iran has installed at Natanz almost 700 IR-2m centrifuges and/or empty centrifuge casings, compared with just 180 in February. None was operating, however. Iran has said it intends to install around 3,000 of the new centrifuges at Natanz — where around 13,500 of the older models are in place — enabling it to speed up the enrichment of uranium. The UN Security Council has passed numerous resolutions calling on Iran to suspend all enrichment and heavy water activities — of the kind under development at Arak — and has imposed four rounds of sanctions. Last year additional unilateral US and EU sanctions targeting Iran’s oil exports and its financial system began to cause real problems for the Persian Gulf country’s economy. Israel, the Middle East’s sole if undeclared nuclear-armed state, has refused to rule out military action against Iran, as has US President Barack Obama. Iran says that its atomic activities are peaceful. Diplomatic efforts to resolve the impasse, most recently in six-power talks with Iran in Kazakhstan in April, have failed to make concrete progress. Despite developments at Natanz, the IAEA report noted that Iran has not started operating any new equipment at its Fordo facility, built under a mountain near the holy city of Qom. Fordo is of more concern to the international community, since it is used to enrich uranium to fissile purities of 20 percent and Natanz mostly to five percent, technically much closer to the 90-percent level needed for a bomb. The IAEA report showed that Iran has produced so far 324 kilos (714 pounds) of 20-percent enriched uranium, 44 kilos more than three months ago, but that 140.8 kilos have been diverted to fuel production, up from 111 kilos. Experts say that around 240-250 kilos are needed for one bomb. At the research reactor under construction at Arak, meanwhile, which Iran says will start operating in the third quarter of 2014, the IAEA said that the plant’s large reactor vessel “has been received but … yet to be installed”. But the agency also “observed that a number of other major components had yet to be installed, including the control room equipment, the refuelling machine and reactor cooling pumps.” Iran had not provided the IAEA with updated design information for the IR-40 reactor at Arak since 2006, the IAEA added, saying this was “urgently required”. “This is important because the reactor could be used to produce enough weapons grade plutonium for one weapon a year,” Mark Fitzpatrick, analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told AFP. The IAEA is meanwhile also trying to press Iran to provide access to documents, sites and scientists involved in what it suspects were research activities, mostly in the past but possibly ongoing, towards developing the bomb. At one of these sites, the Parchin military base near Tehran, the new IAEA report said that in addition to months of activity levelling the area that the agency wants to inspect, Iran has now covering a “significant proportion” with asphalt. “I don’t think they are doing themselves any favours,” one senior official familiar with the probe said, adding that some rubble from the site had been dumped in lakes.

Hey, these things happen: Penny Pritzker, President Obama’s nominee to lead the Commerce Department, understated her income by some $80 million and had to file a correction to her government-filed disclosures, Bloomberg is reporting. Read full article >>