Apology: At 6:44 I called the inimitable Nigel Kennedy, Simon, the name of a guy I used to know. It's too late to change it now, but it just proves that nobody's perfect. But still: Racist and abusive comments will be deleted. World-renowned violinist Nigel Kennedy has been attacked by Baroness Deech, of Cumnor, for something that he said at a BBC Proms concert, featuring the Palestinian Strings, a group of talented young musicians aged between twelve and twenty-three.

Nahida Exiled Palestinian: God’s “chosen” Psychopaths

Detainee Faces Open-Ended "Interrogation" in International Waters. ● Over the past 12 years, captives disappeared off the streets of foreign cities have regularly found themselves in CIA “black sites,” held incommunicado for indefinite periods of time for “enhanced interrogation.” President Obama harshly criticized this policy at one point, but the weekend capture of Abu Anas al-Liby has set up a distinction without a difference, as he is being held in similar circumstances at sea. Liby’s capture by US ground troops sparked an immediate rebuke from the Libyan government, and the Obama Administration is now holding Liby on the USS San Antonio, an amphibious warship, and arguing that it can more or less keep him there as long as it likes, and since it’s in international water, it’s outside of the US justice system.

A review panel established by the White House to assess the country’s intelligence programs is due to report its findings to the president this Friday. Days before deadline, though, that board has become a voluntary casualty of the government shutdown. President Barack Obama announced in August that the unauthorized disclosure of national security documents and the subsequent discussions it sparked warranted the creation of an independent panel, the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies.

ArsTechnica: Meltdowns at NSA spy data center destroy equipment, delay opening

After months of speculation, it's official: Janet Yellen will be the next chair of the Federal Reserve, succeeding Ben Bernanke, the White House said late Tuesday. ● President Obama will make the announcement on Wednesday at 3pm ET, the White House said. Both Janet Yellen and current Fed chair Ben Bernanke are expected to attend. That announcement will be right after the Fed releases the minutes from its last meeting, due out at 2pm ET. Dow and S&P futures shot higher following the announcement, pointing to a higher open on Wall Street Wednesday.

Why are Americans totally oblivious to the fact that “their” Federal Reserve Bank is Jewish?
The Globe and Mail: Why Janet Yellen is the right person to lead the Fed
The Independent: Obama to nominate current vice chair Janet Yellen as next head of the Fed

God bless Lynne Stewart! Many thousands of global supporters stand with you. We do so uncompromisingly. ● We do it because it matters. We do it because it’s the right thing to do. We wish you happy birthday and many more. We hope for lots more outside prison walls. We want you free at last. We want you healthy in top form again. We want what you rightfully deserve. We support your liberating struggle. ● On October 8, Lynne turns 74. She’ll add a year behind bars. She’ll do it for devoting her life to helping others. For promoting right over wrong. For being above reproach. For giving so much. For wanting so little in return. For supporting society’s most disadvantaged. For being a role model for others to emulate. For wanting little more beyond knowing doing the right thing is its own reward. ● What kind of society imprisons its best and most honorable? What kind mischaracterized as a democracy does so? What kind operates the world’s largest gulag? What kind does so globally. What kind institutionalizes cruel and unusual treatment? What kind does it worldwide? What kind runs a homeland police state apparatus? What kind made state terror, torture and other forms of abuse official policy? What kind persecutes innocent people? What kind targets society’s most vulnerable? What kind spurns rule of law principles? What kind builds prisons, not hospitals or schools? What kind ignores human need? What kind does so disdainfully? What kind thinks fundamental rights are quaint and out-of-date? What kind ravages and destroys one country after another? What kind wages war on humanity? What kind does so for imperial dominance? What kind risks survival doing so? What kind values wealth, power and privilege over equity, justice, and human life? What kind claims doing the wrong thing is right?

Saudi Arabia, exasperated with U.S. vacillation related to Syria's chemical arsenal and now its effort to reconcile with Iran, Riyadh's foremost adversary, is forging a new alliance of Islamist rebels in Syria under a pro-Saudi warlord to supersede the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army. ● Riyadh also wants to foment an Iraq-style "Sunni Awakening" to unite Syria's majority sect to topple the minority Damascus regime of President Bashar Assad. Middle East analyst Michael Weiss, writing in the Beirut Web portal Now Lebanon, observed Riyadh has "taken substantive measures to circumvent Washington altogether on Syria by activating a cadre of new clients in the form of a hard-line Salafist rebels who are now united under the umbrella of the army of Islam. ...

HSBC Bank pays $1.9bn settlement after US regulators found it was laundering money for major drug cartels and international terrorists for almost a decade. ● Britain's biggest bank was forced to pay $1.9bn (£1.17bn) fine to settle allegations by US regulators that it allowed itself to be used to launder billions of dollars for drug barons and potential terrorists for nearly a decadeuntil 2010. The US department of justice said HSBC had moved $881m for two drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia and accepted $15bn in unexplained "bulk cash", across the bank's counters in Mexico, Russia and other countries. In some branches the boxes of cash being deposited were so big the tellers' windows had to be enlarged.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has voiced concern over allegations that his country spies on Brazilian officials, stressing on the need to repair the damage. ● The Canadian premier said during the APEC summit in Bali, Indonesia on Tuesday that Ottawa is “reaching out very proactively” to Brasilia regarding the suspected spying of Brazil’s Mines and Energy Ministry, though he failed to comment further due to “national security operations.” Harper promised to confirm if the Communications Security Establishment of Canada (CSEC) is following its mandate.

Keith Jones: Canada spied on Brazil’s government as part of global commercial espionage campaign ■ Canadian mining companies have huge investments in Brazil. The two countries are important commercial rivals in mining and aircraft manufacture and are competing for foreign investment in their oil and natural gas sectors. According to the report that aired Sunday on O Globo Television’s “Fantastico” investigative journalism program, CSEC used the Olympia metadata mining program to track the communications of Brazil’s Ministry of Mines and Energy. The report did not say whether communications deemed of special interest were read or listened to. But CSEC, NSA and the other three members of the “Five Eyes” signal intelligence partnership (Britain, Australia, and New Zealand) bluntly state that there are no legal-constitutional restrictions on their “right” to spy on communications in foreign countries—be they the communications of foreign governments, left and dissident groups, or private citizens.

Russia Today: ‘Aggressive and insidious’: More details of Canada spying techniques to follow, Greenwald promises ● Canada is in the spotlight of an ongoing spying scandal as Glenn Greenwald has promised to disclose more details of the espionage of the Five Eyes global intelligence alliance that has already sparked unprecedented fury in Brazil. American journalist Glenn Greenwald has promised to leak more secret cables he obtained from Edward Snowden in a series of interviews conducted on Monday. “There is a huge amount of stuff about Canada in these archives because Canada works so closely with the NSA,” Greenwald, who lives in Brazil told the Globe and Mail. Without providing details into the soon to be revealed secret documents, Greenwald suggested that the new material will shed more light into Canada’s global spying activities, including economic and industrial espionage against Brazil, which has been at the center of the recent scandal.

One day, when Peter Higgs was a 34-year-old physicist studying at the University of Edinburgh, he came up with an idea. It was a bold one, an ambitious one, and an extremely complex one. He wrote two papers about it — pencil scribbled on paper. The second paper was turned down; the editors said the theory was "of no obvious relevance to physics." His colleagues even told him he did not grasp the fundamentals of the field. Fifty years later, 84-year-old Higgs achieved the Nobel Prize in Physics for that one idea, on Tuesday morning.

It all started on a hike in the Cairngorms, a mountain range in the eastern Highlands of Scotland, when Higgs had an inspiration: There had to be an energy field strewn across the universe that would give mass to certain particles and leave others massless. He submitted the paper to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). That editor probably came to seriously regret rejecting that paper. Apparently, he had not yet grasped the path Higgs was embarking upon, that the young physicist was beginning to formulate the mechanism that endows the building blocks of the universe with mass, a fundamental property of all matter. Higgs was in the early stages of finding a crucial puzzle piece; he was beginning to solve a mystery that nagged physicists for decades.