Imagine the look of contempt on Karl Rove's face this past Sunday as he swaggered toward his star turn on CBS's Face the Nation only to be served with our subpoena sanctioned by the Secretary of the State of Ohio. The federal subpoena orders Rove to testify in deposition. Our attorney, Cliff Arnebeck, intends to ask Mr. Rove about his role in the theft of the 2004 election, and to discuss his orchestration of tens of millions of corporate/billionaire dollars in the one coming up on November 2, 2010. As co-counsel and plaintiff in the on-going King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit, we have fought for six years to win justice and full disclosure in an election that Rove stole for George W. Bush.

BradBlog: E-Voting Systems Left Unattended at UT Poll Site

Christine O'Donnel snaps her fingers and beckons a spokesman to her side after the host of "The Rick Jensen Show" asks her some questions she doesn't like. She later threatened to sue the station if they released this video. The guy in the video is Rick Jensen.

WDEL 1150AM: O'Donnell campaign apologizes to WDEL. The Christine O'Donnell campaign is apologizing to WDEL after it demanded that video of an O'Donnell appearance on "The Rick Jensen Show" be destroyed and threatened a lawsuit if it wasn't.

Daily Telegraph: Sarah Palin gives clearest indication she will run for president in 2012

France has dispatched a nuclear-powered warship to the Persian Gulf as part of an unprecedented buildup of naval and air power in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. France's Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier is now en route to the region and will arrive there at the end of October, when a quarter of the world's nuclear aircraft carriers will gather in the "stratgeic waters". The French carrier is accompanied by two frigates, an attack submarine, a re-fuelling tanker, 3,000 sailors and 27 aircraft. "The force would help allied navies fight piracy off the coast of Somalia and send jets to support NATO in the skies above Afghanistan," said the commander of the group, Rear Admiral Jean-Louis Kerignard. -This is while new opinion polls show that a vast majority of the French are against any military presence in Afghanistan and want an immediate withdrawal of troops from the war-torn country. There are currently over 31 warships docked in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, nineteen of them belonging to the United States.

A child at the morgue - Matthewgood/flickr

Loss of life: At least 122,000 civilians were killed during the US-led occupation of Iraq, 15,000 more than previously thought. The civilian toll accounts for 80 per cent of all deaths in the Iraq conflict.

The numbers of dead were recorded by coalition troops throughout the conflict. The leaked documents provide the first view of these numbers.

Iraq Body Count (IBC), a London-based group has been analysing the numbers for the past two months, comparing them to an extensive database of civilian deaths in the war it had built up from media reports and other public records.

From IBC’s analysis the US files identify more than 15,000 civilian deaths that never appeared in media reports or public records. This new information pushes the total number of fatalities in the war, including combatants, to more than 150,000.

There are 52,000 war logs that record deaths in Iraq – this includes civilian and coalition casualties, as well as those classed as “enemy kills”. IBC intends to complete a thorough analysis of every file, a process that could take several years. Already IBC has uncovered thousands of deaths that were never known about. In some, scores of Iraqi civilians were killed in a single incident.

Related article: Hundreds of civilians gunned down at checkpoints
Der Spiegel: Hellfire from the Sky: Iraq War Logs Reveal Details of Dubious Apache Attacks

US drone strikes launched a pair of drone strikes against North Waziristan Agency today, killing at least eight people and wounding another 12. The strikes destroyed a car in the village of Datta Khel, then destroyed a home in Mir Ali. Pakistani sources termed all eight of the slain people “suspects,” but the 12 wounded people were transported to local hospitals and none of them appear to have been arrested or charged with anything as the result of the US attack. The Obama Administration has dramatically increased the number of drone strikes against North Waziristan over the past few months, with officials terming almost everyone killed a suspect, though few have actually been named.

Iran says the US and Europe with efforts to hide human rights violations in their own countries ahead of a review of US human rights records by the UN Human Rights Council. In less than two weeks, the Human Rights Council will, for the first time ever, assess the human rights status of the United States as part of the new Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism which will assess the human rights situations in all 192 UN member states.

PressTV: Larijani slams US human rights abuses

The Haitian president, Rene Preval, said his state was subjected to a biological attack in order to completely destabilize the already extremely complicated situation. The cholera imported from another country is rampant throughout the state. Haitian President Rene Preval said on Saturday that the cholera epidemic affecting the country since the beginning of the week was" imported. Preval, however, does not want to name the criminal. "It would be irresponsible and dangerous to identify a country as a source of the epidemic that has killed 210 people", said the Haitian leader to station Radio Kiskeya in Mirebalais, one of the areas affected by the disease.

[Image by Bendib] [FPJ] Israel has been subject to some bad publicity recently. In 2008-09, it launched a brutal military campaign in the Gaza Strip that killed over 400 Palestinian children. In May, 2010, bumbling Israeli commandos murdered nine nonviolence activists on the relief flotilla Mavi Marmara. It only got worse for Israel when it was revealed that soldiers stole and sold personal items such as laptops from the ship. Last week, former Israeli soldier Eden Abergil posted photos onto Facebook showing her preening in front of blindfolded and despondent Palestinian prisoners, in some instances mocking those prisoners with sexual undertones. The photos were part of an album entitled “IDF—the best time of my life.”

[T]hese recent episodes merely extend an age-old list of Israeli crimes and indignities that illuminate a depravity in the Zionist enterprise itself. Americans now have all the evidence they need for a reasonable and morally-sound conclusion, that Zionism produces a cruelty and truculence that they bankroll with their taxes and legitimize with either silence or consent. As a result, I am not arguing that Americans should reassess their level of support for Israel. I am arguing that Americans should oppose Zionism altogether. Perhaps in this way we might begin the long and difficult process of redeeming our own nation of its imperial sins.

MEMO: New photographs reveal IDF's "purity of arms" claim to be a sick joke

Assange fumed openly about John Burns and Ravi Somaiya's expose from this past Sunday's Times that characterized the WikiLeaks mastermind as increasingly paranoid, erratic, and dangerously egotistical.

"It's a smear piece, and more tabloid behavior by the Times," [Assange said of the article.] "Is it that only journalists with bad character work for the Times?"

he added, before quickly shifting gears to argue that that the paper is beholden to the US military-industrial complex and, as a result, too often confuses a false sense of balance with accuracy. WikiLeaks, Assange maintained, is free from the political constraints that tie the hands of a mainstream media organization like the Times, and so does not have to make editorial concessions to the Pentagon that could compromise its accuracy. For Assange, the Times's allegedly compromised sense of accuracy clearly extends to the "terrible" article by Burns and Somaiya that seeks to analyze -- though, he would say impugn -- his character and motives.

Forget China or Al Qaeda. In a twist that would have been inconceivable even a few months ago, the WikiLeaks.org Web site is being proposed as the first public target for a U.S. government cyberattack. After the shadowy, document-leaking organization distributed nearly 400,000 classified documents from the Iraq war on Friday, Washington officialdom responded with a torrent of denunciations alleging violations of national security and endangering U.S. military operations. In a rare point of congruence, The Washington Post and The Washington Times both criticized the release, with the smaller paper arguing that WikiLeaks' offshore Web site should be attacked and rendered "inoperable" by the U.S. government. Some hawkish conservatives followed suit, including Christian Whiton, a State Department adviser under President George W. Bush, who wrote a column calling on the U.S. military to "electronically assault WikiLeaks and any telecommunications company offering its services to this organization." Their target's actually not that far away. WikiLeaks' Web site is now hosted on Amazon.com servers on United States soil near San Jose, Calif.

Multisource political news, world news, and entertainment news analysis by Newsy.com

NPR: Fears Hundreds More Dead In Indonesia Tsunami
OneIndia: Indonesia struggles as twin disaster tolls mount
HeraldSun: Indonesian tsunami death toll hits 343, with 338 still missing
ABC Gold Coast: Surfers survive tsunami

WSWS: Hundreds dead after two Indonesian disasters The remote Mentawai islands off the west coast of Sumatra were devastated on Monday night after a 7.7 magnitude undersea earthquake triggered a tsunami that swept across coastal areas. Poor weather has hampered efforts to assess the extent of the damage and to get relief supplies to the islands. The first photos from North Pagai showed trees flattened and buildings badly damaged with broken walls. According to World Vision project manager Ita Balanda, at least 7,900 families had been affected. Many had lost their homes, which were simply swept away. Surf Aid official Andrew Judge said: “[The] limited hospital services are overwhelmed.” Images from the village of Muntei Baru-Baru showed dozens of bodies, including those of women, young children and babies, laid out in the open.

Archbishop Cyrille Salim Butros of Newton, Mass, the leader of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church in the U.S., has caused a little 'spat' in Catholic and Jewish relations by remarks made at a Vatican meeting of Middle Eastern bishops. Unless I'm mistaken, until the jewish creation of "christian zionism' what Butros said was standard Christian theology. Basically it's that Jesus' teachings nullified the concept of the 'chosen ones' and introduced the novel idea that everyone is equal. It was out with the old and in the new. Jewish supremacists don't like that kind of talk so they had the ADL's hatchet man Abe Foxman do what he's paid to do ... attack. Butros said:

"We Christians cannot speak of the ‘promised land’ as an exclusive right for a privileged Jewish people,” [adding:] "This promise was nullified by Christ. There is no longer a chosen people – all men and women of all countries have become the chosen people.” [...] What we say is something political. Sacred scripture should not be used to justify the occupation of Palestinian land on the part of the Israelis.

The judges at Nuremberg after World War II had a much deeper understanding of the horrors of war than the neocon editors at the Washington Post do. Assessing the barbarity unleashed by the Nazis, the Nuremberg Tribunal identified “war of aggression” as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

© Dees Illustration

There’s been plenty of recent media attention to the prospect of investor lawsuits over fraudulent mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. But as Zach Carter writes at Truthout.org, The Elephant in the Foreclosure Fraud Room: Second Liens:

The four largest banks hold nearly half a trillion dollars worth of second-lien mortgages on their books—loans that could be decimated if investors successfully target improper mortgage servicing operations. The result would be major trouble for the financial system. The result would be major trouble for too-big-to-fail behemoths.

[T]he nation’s four largest banks also operate the four largest mortgage servicers. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup service about half of all mortgages in the United States. They also have multi-trillion-dollar businesses whose interests often conflict with those of mortgage security investors.

Washington's Blog: Why Did Banks Give Home Loans to People Who They KNEW Couldn't Pay? William K. Black - professor of economics and law, and the senior regulator during the S & L crisis - explained last month before to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission why banks gave home loans to people who they knew couldn't repay. The whole piece is a must-read, but here are excerpts from the introduction:

The data demonstrate conclusively that most liar’s loans were fraudulent, which means that there were millions of fraudulent mortgage loans because liar’s loans became common (Credit Suisse estimates that they represented 49% of new originations by 2006). The data also demonstrate that even minimal underwriting of the loan files was sufficient to detect the overwhelming majority of such fraudulent liar’s loans. No honest, rational lender would make large numbers of liar’s loans. The epidemic of mortgage fraud was so large that it hyper-inflated the housing bubble, which allowed refinancing to further extend the life of the bubble (and the depth of the ultimate Great Recession.

NeitherCorp Press: The Purpose Behind Engineered Economic Collapse

Statement from Arundhati Roy re possible sedition charge October 26th 2010. [I was just forwarded this by Pankaj Mishra. In Srinagar Roy shared a stage with Kashmiri separatist leader Syed Shah Gilani. a report from the Economic Times is here. English PEN's statement of solidarity and my comment are here.]

Dear all of you,
I am sending this from Srinagar. This is my statement in response to the news that I may be arrested soon on charges of sedition. It would be lovely if the whole statement is carried— which is why I am not sending it to the wire services.
All the best
Arundhati

Democracy Now: Indian Author Arundhati Roy on Kashmir's Independence -VIDEO

Ken O'Keefe on the Mavi Marmara from pentos films on Vimeo.