World Health Organization, (WHO) stressed that polio cases detected in Syria recently is linked to the strain of Pakistani origin found in sewage in Egypt and the Palestinian territories in the past year. ● WHO said in a statement published on Monday that the genetic sequencing of Polio strain which has crippled to children in Deir- Ezzour indicates that the isolated viruses are most closely linked to virus detected in environmental samples in Egypt in December 2012, which in turn had been linked to wild poliovirus circulating in Pakistan. The statement added that "Syria's immunization rates have dropped from more than 90 percent before the conflict to around 68 percent, clarifying that polio mainly affects children under five and cannot be cured, only prevented.

Jason Ditz: Officials Say US Trying to Make Deal to Avoid Israeli Attack ■ Israeli officials continue to rail against a diplomatic pact between the P5+1 and Iran, today focusing on the idea that such a deal would get in the way of Israeli plans to attack Iran. Over the weekend, the collapse of the deal was nominally on the exact opposite pretext, that Israel would use the deal as an excuse to start a war with Iran, but that seems not to be the case. Major General Giora Eiland says that the deal would as a practical matter shut down any option of an Israeli attack, and while others insisted Israel would “do what’s necessary,” it would risk a major backlash against them in the international community. Other officials went as far as to accuse the US of trying to make a deal, even a “bad” one, specifically to avoid an Israeli attack. Israeli officials have insisted repeatedly that they “reject” any deal and wouldn’t feel bound by it.

Justin Raimondo: ‘Peace Scare’ in Geneva ■ The United States long ago concluded "with high certainty" that Iran abandoned any effort to build a nuclear weapon in 2003 – and yet here we are, a decade later, threatening war over a program our intelligence agencies have declared to be nonexistent. Why is that? To begin with, we’ve been subjected to a years-long propaganda campaign by Israel and its amen corner in this country: the Israel lobby claims the Iranians are secretly constructing nukes with the ultimate goal of attacking the Jewish state. It’s basically the same scenario that played out in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq – and we all know how that turned out. This time, you’d think we learned our lesson. One only has to ask how many times, over the years, has Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed Tehran is "months" away from joining the nuclear club? I’ve lost count. Whether it’s three months, six months, or a year or so, his predictions have always turned out to be false: if he had been right, by this time Iran’s nuclear arsenal would almost be on a par with Israel’s. It never happened.

Rescue workers struggled to reach ravaged towns and villages in the central Philippines on Monday as they tried to deliver aid to survivors of a powerful typhoon that killed an estimated 10,000 people and displaced more than 600,000. ● The United Nations said some survivors had no food, water or medicine. Relief operations were hampered because roads, airports and bridges had been destroyed or were covered in wreckage, it said. President Benigno Aquino, facing one of the biggest challenges of his three-year rule, deployed soldiers to the devastated city of Tacloban to quell looting and said he might impose martial law or a state of emergency to ensure security. Super typhoon Haiyan destroyed about 70 to 80 percent of structures in its path as it tore through Leyte province on Friday, said police chief superintendent Elmer Soria. After weakening, the storm headed west towards Vietnam. Huge waves from one of the strongest storms ever recorded swept away coastal villages. Some officials likened the destruction to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. "From a helicopter, you can see the extent of devastation. From the shore and moving a kilometer inland, there are no structures standing. It was like a tsunami," said Interior Secretary Manuel Roxas, who was in Tacloban, Leyte's capital, before the typhoon struck. "I don't know how to describe what I saw. It's horrific."

AP/Big Story: Desperate survivors seek to flee typhoon zone
Russia Today: 4.8 quake hits typhoon-ravaged Philippines
xinhuanet.com: Tropical storm follows super-typhoon Haiyan in Philippines
The Guardian: Typhoon Haiyan: 800,000 Filipinos displaced

Recent revelations about NSA spying have given fresh impetus to the dream of a purely German Internet. Deutsche Telekom believes it could introduce a system safe from prying foreign surveillance, but some criticize the plan as pointless. ● Even before it emerged that the National Security Agency had wiretapped her mobile phone, German ChancellorAngela Merkel was calling for the Internet to have something like Airbus -- a joint European initiative able to compete with the dominance of American and Chinese high-tech companies, just as Airbus does with the US aerospace giant Boeing. Currently, the global market for software and online services is firmly in American hands. What's more, American corporations, such as Google, are subject to the Patriot Act, which requires them to allow American intelligence agencies access to their data centers. On the other hand, the equipment that directs traffic on the Internet often comes from China -- for example, routers made by Huawei. "No one can be certain that there isn't spying technology built in there as well," warns Norbert Pohlmann, chair of the IT Security Association Germany (TeleTrust).

One of the key responses from the NSA and its defenders to all of these Snowden leaks is that there is "rigorous oversight" of the NSA by the courts and Congress. Of course, that talking point has been debunked thoroughly, but NSA defenders keep trotting it out. It appears that the public is not buying it. At all. A recent poll from YouGov found that only 17% of people believe that Congress provides "adequate oversight" on the spying of Americans. A marginally better 20% (though, within the 4.6% margin of error, so meaningless difference really) felt that Congress provides adequate oversight of the NSA when it comes to collecting data on foreigners. Basically, that part of the NSA story just isn't particularly believable in light of everything that's come out. Oh, and people are paying attention to the news. A full 87% had heard something about the spying on foreign countries -- with only 14% thinking that such a program has helped US interests abroad. Oh, and it gets worse.

Mark M. Jaycox/EFF: Three Leaks, Three Weeks, and What We've Learned About the US Government's Other Spying Authority: Executive Order 12333 ■ A Washington Post article reveals that the National Security Agency has been siphoning off data from the links between Yahoo and Google data centers, which include the fiber optic connections between company servers at various points around the world. While the user may have an encrypted connection to the website, the internal data flows were not encrypted and allowed the NSA to obtain millions of records each month, including both metadata and content like audio, video and text. This is not part of the PRISM collection under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act or the business records program under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, but a separate program called MUSCULAR under what appears to be Executive Order 12333 ("12333").

Ex-CIA Analyst on Snowden and Calling Journalists Terrorists

Member of U.S. Army National Guard's Tactical Human Intelligence Team commits suicide; his suicide note says he was forced to commit "war crimes, crimes against humanity" in Iraq. ● Daniel returned home in the fall of 2007. In conversations over the next few months, he told us that he had made several attempts to get medical treatment for an array of health problems. Because his National Guard unit was still in ready reserve status, the Veterans Affairs Department medical center in Phoenix refused him treatment because he was not yet officially a veteran. The local Defense Department health care facility denied him services because he was not on active duty. He told us that he had suffered innumerable concussions in the course of more than 400 missions in the turret of a Humvee. He spoke of having flashbacks, and he appeared tense and nervous in person. But for the most part, he hid the severity of his symptoms from us. When he was finally deemed eligible for veterans benefits, he began treatment at the Phoenix medical center in February 2008. There, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury, and given a disability rating of 40 percent. By the end of that year, Daniel was so frustrated with the problems with his care, including long wait times for appointments and turnover in health care providers, that he sought treatment from outside providers at his own expense. From time to time he attempted to re-enter the Veterans Affairs system, only to experience the persistent problems of access and availability. Daniel took his own life on June 10 of this year, a block and a half from his Phoenix home. He left the family a letter listing the many roadblocks to care he had encountered in the Veterans Affairs system.

Did you know that there are more than 102 million working age Americans that do not have a job? Yes, I know that number sounds absolutely crazy, but it is true. Right now, there are more than 11 million Americans that are considered to be "officially unemployed", and there are more than 91 million Americans that are not employed and that are considered to be "not in the labor force". When you add those two numbers together, the total is more than 102 million.