a comparatively affordable joke

Mary Margaret Graham, the deputy director for national intelligence collection and a 27-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, revealed the annual budget for U.S. intelligence: $44 billion. The apparent slip occurred during a talk Graham was giving at a San Antonio conference on Oct. 31. The disclosure of the number, reported in the Nov. 14th issue of U.S. News and World Report, marked the first time the figure has been revealed since 1998, when the figure was almost half its current figure, at $26.7 billion.

for someone else's eyes only?

European Foreign Ministers this week vetoed planned publication of the report - which also warns that rapid expansion of Jewish settlements in and around East Jerusalem, along with use of the separation barrier to isolate East Jerusalem from the West Bank, "risk radicalising the hitherto relatively quiescent Palestinian population of East Jerusalem".

clearly, they're jealous of our freedom

Britain has warned media organizations they are breaking the law if they publish details of a leaked document said to show U.S. President George W. Bush wanted to bomb Arabic television station Al Jazeera.

laugh or cry?

UK gags paper over Aljazeera memo

What's that white powder?

White Phosphorous. WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE. We fired "shake and bake" missions at the insurgents, using WP and HE to take them out.

Field Artillery magazine, on American tactics used in taking Fallujah, published in March, whilst accusations came out at the beggining of this month from an Italian T.V. station that the chemical weapon had been used, the State department was still denying it had been used as a weapon.

'Burned bodies, burned women, burned children; white phosphorous kills indescriminately....when it makes contact with skin, then its absolutely irreversible damage, burning flesh to the bone'
-ex U.S. servicemen, Jeff Engelhart's eyewitness account of the effects of White phosphorous deployed in Falluja

baptist fundamentalists pulled over by vatican for getting overly esoteric

"Vatican issues defence of evolution, rejects fundamentalist creationism"

if you didn't like Iraq'n'Roll, you're gonna hate Iran Maiden

"Iraq started to trade oil in euros in 1999. Four years later Iran did the same and may soon be joined by others. Such a move would mean consuming nations having to swap some of their dollars for euros to be able to buy or sell oil, leading to a freefall in the value of the dollar. The US economy is already knackered and is only propped up by rabid consumption. The US is the most debt-ridden nation on earth – owing $3,500,000,000,000 to various creditors (and we thought our bar tab was bad!). China, meanwhile, holds the second largest reserves of dollars in the world which means they could wreak havoc on the US economy by selling greenbacks. Similair tactics against currencies have been well used as an economic weapon by the US, not just against upstart third world countries but also against the UK during the Suez Crisis in 1956."

SchNEWS does Iran