Personal details of 100m Facebook users have been collected and published on the net by a security consultant. Ron Bowes used a piece of code to scan Facebook profiles, collecting data not hidden by the user's privacy settings. The list, which has been shared as a downloadable file, contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user's profile, their name and unique ID. Mr Bowes said he published the data to highlight privacy issues, but Facebook said it was already public information. The file has spread rapidly across the net. On the Pirate Bay, the world's biggest file-sharing website, the list was being distributed and downloaded by more than 1,000 users. One user, going by the name of lusifer69, described the list as "awesome and a little terrifying". [Ron Bowes, of Skull Security, posted the torrent HERE. That failing try HERE or HERE. Facebook directory is HERE.]

The Israeli parliament is considering several new laws that could seriously impact the ability of citizens to criticise the government, according to rights groups. Human Rights Watch is reporting a crackdown on political activists who criticise Israeli’s treatment of the Palestinians. In what rights groups consider part of an alarming pattern, Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, recently admitted to spying on a young Australian activist in the West Bank. Al Jazeera’s Sherine Tadros reports from Jerusalem.

A federal judge's decision barring police in Arizona from demanding immigration documents from people they suspect of being in the country illegally was a dramatic victory for the Obama administration and civil rights groups that may be hard to overturn, at least in the short run. U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton in Phoenix issued an injunction blocking Arizona from implementing the heart of its new immigration law Wednesday, less than 24 hours before it was to have taken effect, and endorsed the administration's argument that the state would be interfering with the federal government's enforcement of immigration laws. The law's key provision would require local police to ask for proof of legal residency from people they stop for other reasons and reasonably suspect of being here illegally. Those detained would have stayed in custody until their legal status was verified. Houston Chronicle: Legal fight begins over Arizona immigration law. USA Today: Mexico braces for effects of Arizona immigration law.

[Editor's Comment:] The Right see the immigrants as foreigners. The Left see them as people. The conspiracy theorists see them as pawns. We think all of these groups may have a point. We would like to add though, that ultimately there's no such thing as the "integrity" of the United States. This is a figment of fantasy pushed by special interest. Arizona is a temporary political unit built upon land stolen from another temporary unit, Mexico. The latter ultimately wants it back; the former wants to have its cake and eat it. -Something's gotta give.

The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation. The administration wants to add four words -- "electronic communication transactional records" -- to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's browser history. It does not include, the lawyers say, the "content" of e-mail or other Internet communication.

The New York Times continues to downplay the human rights abuses, amounting in some instances to war crimes, documented in classified reports that were released to them by Wikileaks. In contrast to the Guardian and Der Spiegel, the NYT’s failed to highlight the many accounts of atrocities committed by U.S. and coalition troops in the paper’s recent coverage.

The Guardian’s article on the Wikileaks’ document release begins:

A huge cache of secret U.S. military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighboring Pakistan and Iran are fueling the insurgency.

In contrast, the New York Times’ article begins by stating the release, "offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal." It is not until the tenth paragraph that it briefly refers to special ops raids that "claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment." There is no mention of the revelations of widespread civilian casualties caused by U.S. or coalition forces.

WSWS: A record of war crimes. For its part, the [New York] Times published its story only after urging WikiLeaks to engage in self-censorship and clearing it with the White House. The newspaper’s main conclusion is that the leaked documents demonstrate the need to intensify the war in Afghanistan and spread it more aggressively into Pakistan. It has sought to spin the documents as evidence of a “hamstrung war” in which the US military has been subjected to too many restrictions while denied sufficient resources. The Times advances this line in the face of evidence detailing a staggering degree of brutality in Afghanistan.

That it was left to WikiLeaks, an online organization with a tiny fraction of the Times’ resources, to make these revelations is an indictment of the media as a whole. The Times and other news organizations, with their “embedded” reporters, are no doubt aware of many of the incidents revealed in the leaked documents, but chose not to report them. They, no less than the Pentagon and the political establishment, have conducted a systematic cover-up of the crimes against the Afghan people.

Politico: How the papers got the leaks.

Here we see one of the most bizarre twists in the story: US government sources now using the leaked documents to buttress the current anti-Iran narrative and in the process acting as though the intelligence reports are providing information that hadn’t been accessible inside government until they were leaked!

At the very same time, the State Department’s leading expert on Iran, John Limbert — a genuine source of intelligence and “the most qualified person on the Iran team at State in the three decades I have lived in the United States,” according to Haleh Esfandiari, head of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars — is about to resign.

At Foreign Policy, Barbara Slavin writes:

[I]t’s hard not to view Limbert’s departure as a turning point and yet another missed opportunity in U.S.-Iran relations. A number of players with more skeptical views about the prospect of rapprochement with Tehran — such as White House aide Dennis Ross and nonproliferation experts like Robert Einhorn and Gary Samore — appear to be driving U.S. policy now, and the president himself blames the Iranian government for failing to respond to his outreach.

What could please the attack-Iran lobby more than to see the departure of the most skilled American proponent of engagement and at the same time to be served a prize piece of propaganda by an outfit aligned with the anti-war movement?!

One day after Israeli authorities razed the Bedouin village of el Araqib, village residents joined with Palestinian, Israeli and international volunteers to rebuild the village.

"We successfully rebuilt all the structures and tents destroyed, noted Dr. Awad Abu Freih, spokesperson of the el Araqib village and member of the el Araqib Popular Committee and the Arab Education Forum in the Negev. In a conversation with the AIC, Dr. Abu Freih stated that the residents of el Araqib "plan on building more than what was destroyed, in an attempt to prevent future demolitions."

Over 300 Bedouins, mainly children, were forcefully removed from their village Tuesday morning (27 July) as they watched the Israeli police destroy their homes and property. The raid began at about 4:30 in the morning and residents woke up surrounded by a huge force of 1,500 police with guns, stun grenades, helmets and shields, including hundreds of Special Riot Police as well as mounted police, helicopters and bulldozers.

Despite being unrecognized by Israel, the village of el Araqib has existed since before the creation of Israel in 1948. Bedouin residents were evicted by the newly declared Israeli state in 1951, but returned to the land on which they live and where they cultivate. Ownership of the land is now the subject of proceedings in the Be'er Sheva District Court. AWIP: Israel destroys a whole Negev Village – 200 Children left Homeless.

Oliver Stone said some true things, got in trouble with the Jews, and then had to apologize (of course, the apology was not accepted). He referred to the "Jewish domination of the media", and then went into turbo-truth mode (bowdlerization fixed):

"There’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has fucked up United States foreign policy for years."

This is the most true thing said by an American since Mel Gibson.

LA Times: How Jewish is Hollywood? I have never been so upset by a poll in my life. Only 22% of Americans now believe "the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews," down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten. Jews totally run Hollywood.

AWIP/Gilad Atzmon: Oliver Stone apologized for Telling the Truth.

American's Journey: Isn't Oliver Stone just being truthful? -After all, his only crime is being candid. [From the Treasury link:] "Of the twenty(20) top officials in the U.S. Treasury Department, twelve(12) are Jews. This is a numerical representation of 60%. Jews are approximately 2% of the United States population.* This means that Jews are over-represented among the top officials of the U.S. Treasury Department by a factor of 30 times times, or 3,000 percent. This extreme numerical over-representation of Jews among the top officials of the U.S. Treasury Department cannot be explained away as a coincidence or as the result of mere random chance. You must ask yourself how such an incredibly small and extremely unrepresentative minority ethnic group that only represents 2% of the American population could so completely dominate the highest levels of the U.S. Treasury Department."

Consider the following:

Who Controls the U.S. Treasury Department?
Who Controls the Federal Reserve System?
Who Controls the US Economy?
Who Controls the U.S. State Department?
Who Controls the AIG?
Who Controls the Goldman Sachs?
Who Controls the CFR?
Who Controls the Ivy League?

Oliver Stone: Jewish control of the media is preventing free Holocaust debate. Outspoken Hollywood director says new film aims to put Adolf Hitler, who he has called an ‘easy scapegoat’ in the past, in his due historical context. In the Sunday interview, Stone reportedly said U.S. public opinion was focused on the Holocaust as a result of the “Jewish domination of the media.” “There’s a major lobby in the United States,” Stone said, adding that “they are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington.” AWIP/Gilad Atzmon: Oliver Stone apologized for Telling the Truth.

Yesterday, she called a media conference to confront allegations that in cabinet she actively opposed last year’s decisions by the Rudd government to slightly increase aged pensions and establish, for the first time, an 18-week, minimum-wage paid parental leave scheme.

Initially, the prime minister refused to comment on Oakes’s story. Yesterday morning, however, Gillard and her advisors did an about-face, deciding to go on the offensive and use the revelations to make a positive pitch for big business and media backing. Instead of rejecting the substance of Oakes’s report, the prime minister insisted that she had “no apology” to make—her concern had been the “affordability” of the increased spending.

Gillard was installed as prime minister on June 24, behind the backs of the population, at the direct behest of the mining giants and corporate boardrooms, in order to shift government policy away from Rudd’s preoccupation with stimulus packages to the corporate tax-cutting and austerity program that the financial markets are now demanding of governments around the world.From Greece and Ireland to Eastern Europe, Russia, Japan and the United States, savage spending cuts, retirement age increases and higher consumption taxes are being imposed in order to make the working class pay for the trillions of dollars spent to bail out or prop up the banks and major corporations during the 2008-09 global financial meltdown. [Photo: Daily Telegraph]

About Wikileaks: There is no doubt that Obama himself, his top aides in the White House and Pentagon and the leading circles in the media were well aware of these atrocities. That makes all the more criminal the president’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan. AWIP: US funds billions more for Afghan war.

Man shows up in court to face G20 ‘five-metre’ charges, discovers they don’t exist: Toronto Police Chief said, “the five-metre zone around the fence is for the protection of the security barrier.” When the summit ended, Chief Blair said there never was a five-metre law!

You wouldn’t be reading the coverage of the so-called Afghanistan logs—in the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian — if Nick Davies, a senior contributor to the British paper, hadn’t tracked down WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Brussels one month ago. Davies’s interest had been piqued in mid-June when Bradley Manning, a junior army intelligence analyst and the alleged source of several high-profile WikiLeaks disclosures, was quoted in chat transcripts claiming to have leaked a voluminous amount of yet-to-be disclosed diplomatic cables. Whatever Assange had, and whomever its source, Davies knew that WikiLeaks would publish again—and hoped to convince him to let the Guardian look at any future release before WikiLeaks splashed it on its own site.

Deborah Gross couldn’t get the image out of her head Tuesday – a police cruiser driving over a blanket on the Washington Park grass, the screams that followed and then seeing Joann Burton slide out from underneath.

“I couldn’t believe what I saw,” said Gross, 48, who has frequented the park for about three months. “She tried to get up, but then fell back down. She curled up in a ball and just rocked back and forth, moaning.”

Gross looked back at Cincinnati Police Officer Marty Polk and saw a pained expression fall over his face. Near tears, he took his police hat off, wiped his hand over his head and cried “Oh my God, what have I done? ... Oh my God.” Burton – identified as homeless – died at University Hospital. She was 48.

• Photos: Woman killed in Washington Park
• Photos: Vigil for Joann Burton

Aldous Huxley was right, not George Orwell.

The US defence department is unable to account for almost $9bn taken from Iraqi oil revenues for use in reconstruction, according to an official audit released yesterday. The report by the US Special Investigator for Iraq Reconstruction says $8.7bn (£5.6bn) out of $9.1bn withdrawn between 2004 and 2007 from a special account set up by the UN Security Council is unaccounted for. This is separate from $53bn set aside by Congress for Iraqi reconstruction. Though the special investigator found that some of the money was spent properly, Iraqis continually complain that they see little sign of their infrastructure being rebuilt after 30 years of war and sanctions. Electricity, clean water and sewage disposal remain wholly inadequate and seven years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein there are few cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline or any other signs of rebuilding. A total of 95 per cent of the country's federal budget comes from oil revenue. The scale of the sums unaccounted for are particularly striking given they cover periods well after serious fraud and corruption had been widely publicised in Iraq and abroad. The audit says that no organisation in the defence department was set up to oversee how money from the Development Fund for Iraq was spent. It adds that "the breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss". Many of the organisations at the

There's been a sea change, a darkening of the political climate in this country. The first instinct is to discount such troubling thoughts. So perhaps the view of someone born elsewhere, but long on our shores, is more to be trusted. Ursula Franklin -- the celebrated physicist, pacifist, author and Companion of the Order of Canada -- recently spoke to CBC Radio's The Current. She had survived a Nazi death camp and come to Canada hoping for better. Now 88, Franklin is "profoundly worried about the absence and erosion of democracy in Canada."

Paris. France's interior minister said Wednesday half the country's illegal Gypsy camps would be dismantled within three months and Bulgarian and Romanian Gypsies will be sent back home if they break the law, AFP reports. Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux made the announcement after a meeting of ministers called by President Nicolas Sarkozy in the wake of violence between Gypsies and police. Hortefeux vowed Gypsies who committed offences would undergo "virtually immediate" deportation to their countries of origin. Most Gypsies in France are thought to be from Romania and Bulgaria, which both joined the EU in 2007. Sarkozy warned ahead of the meeting that some members of the minority pose security "problems", in the wake of clashes between police and Gypsies in Saint-Aignan, central France.

Rick Norsigian, a Californian antique buff, knew exactly what he was looking for when he went rooting through a Fresno garage in 2000. He was looking for a vintage barber's chair, to add to his eclectic collection of old telephone switchboards, petrol pumps and aeroplane propellers. But when the chair turned out to be a dud, he chanced upon something that changed his life: two boxes of antique glass negatives which, a Beverly Hills art appraiser declared yesterday, were the work of Ansel Adams, the father of American photography.

Mr Norsigian, a construction worker and painter, had bargained his garage sale counterparty from $75 down to $45 for the lot. Now it seems the collection is worth at least $200m (£129m). "When I heard that [figure], I got a little weak," he said.

Unveiling the photographs at a Beverly Hills gallery yesterday, after years of scepticism from the art world, an attorney, Arnold Peter, said a team of experts had finally concluded the 65 negatives were the early work of Adams, most likely taken between 1919 and the early 1930s and rescued from a fire in 1937. The photographer declared himself heartbroken at the fire, which destroyed an estimated one-third of his work.