The Iowa caucus is only a few days away and the nation's attention will be directed to the results, which signify the beginning of the U.S. presidential race. But does anyone watch who tallies the results of the Iowa caucus?

The Iowa caucus results were tallied in 2004 by a company that is headed by a man whose company was bought by Elron Electronics, the Israeli defense firm. I suspect that it will be the same this year. Don't expect to see any grassroots political activists doing the tally in Iowa. The Israeli defense establishment takes care of that part of the American "democratic" election process.

And with the Republican race, I wouldn’t look first at fraud in the number one position. I’d look for it in the area of repositioning candidates in the second through sixth spot.

- The delay in results is a red flag.

- The vote totals going down during the count is a red flag.

- The failure to release county results in live time, as promised in a Republican Party press release on Jan. 2, is a red flag.

- The failure to release precinct totals at all is a corrupt procedure. Note that the day before the caucuses, after much pressure, the Republicans did (belatedly) promise to release the precinct results on election night. They didn’t.

The earlier version had a reference to the temperature rise being caused by climate change. This has been removed as the relevant research is still in its early stages.

Tony Blair today launched an extraordinary attack on the Iraq Inquiry - as the chairman warned that he and others could be recalled over 'gaps' in their evidence.

In an outspoken interview in the U.S. the former prime minister dismissed the inquiry as part of a ‘continual desire to sort of uncover some great conspiracy’.

As part of this build up the US Military has more than doubled its stockpile of weapons in Israel which it states "Israel can use." One would assume that just like the preparation in the build up to the Lebanon Crisis in 2006 and pre Cast Lead in 2008 that this is a very clear indication that both the US and Israel are preparing for a strike on the nuclear facilities in Iran. The US Navy already has a significant naval force in the Gulf and we are now seeing the slow deployment of Israeli Naval Vessels into the region. In order for the Israeli Navy to position to such a location it requires the permission of the Gulf States to enter their waters.

In 2001 the IPCC published its Third Assessment report prominently featuring a graph that became "the logo of global warming". Previous historical reconstructions didn't show our modern warm climate as particularly anomalous. This was very different, and was hailed as a "call to action". Yet Michael Mann's studies were deeply flawed. Omit one or two proxies, for example, and the scary warming 'spike' disappears. Mann's model could produce hockey stick shapes using random data, such as baseball scores, or red noise. Critics alleged that Mann's choices of data and statistical tools all cooled the Medieval Warm Period, and emphasised late 20th Century warming.

Philippine election officials on Wednesday declared they had successfully tested the automatic ballot-counting machines to be used in May's elections.

According to a post on the Mozilla add-ons blog, the malicious add-ons were Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader and all versions of Master Filer.

The Sothink Web Video Downloader contained Win32.LdPinch.gen, and Master Filer contained the Win32.Bifrose Trojan. Both add-ons have been been disabled but Mozilla said they were active since September 2009.

Ever since the ill-fated Rogers Plan, proposed and named after former US secretary of state William Rogers in 1969, every American administration made ostensibly exhaustive efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. However, all these efforts failed miserably, apparently due to Israel’s adamant refusal to give up the spoils of the 1967 War.

Another key reason behind the failure of the US peace diplomacy in the Middle East is the US reluctance and consistent refusal to exert meaningful pressure on Israel to abide by international law, which further emboldened Israel and made the Jewish state bask undisturbed in its rejectionism and arrogance of power.

December was the worst month for US unemployment since the Great Recession began.

For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country’s influence around the world eroded.

Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal said Monday that Israeli leaders bring "war and occupation" thus blocking peace talks on the Palestinians, Syria and Lebanon.

Mashaal spoke after a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Msocow.

His statement leaves in doubt Russia's desire to host a Mideast peace conference and to involve Hamas, despite strong opposition from Israel and the US.

The Russian Foreign Ministry issued no information about Monday's meeting between Mashaal and Lavrov. Moscow hopes to host a Middle East peace conference but has not yet set a date.

The economists are ill qualified to analyse the current economic situation since they lack the overview of historians such as himself.

"There are economic professors in American universities who think they are masters of the universe, but they don't have any historical knowledge. I have never believed that markets are self correcting. No historian could."

More than half of U.S. voters who describe themselves as independents disapprove of President Barack Obama’s job performance for the first time since he took office in January 2009, according to a poll released today.

Fewer registered voters nationwide — 44% — approve of President Barack Obama’s job performance than disapprove — 47%, according to a new Marist College poll. When Marist last asked about the president’s approval rating in December, 46% thought well of Obama’s job performance while 44% gave him low marks.

At first glance it appeared there was a typo in the headlines. The national media reported that, in January, another 20,000 more jobs were lost. Somehow, the unemployment rate dropped, from 10 percent to 9.7 percent. Nobody thought this paradox was worth explaining; instead, the media’s attitude was “more good news” about the economy.

But there was other evidence of an obliterated job market hiding behind the cheerful headlines. After revising the employment numbers in 2009, The New York Times reported, “…the economy lost 150,000 jobs in December, far more than the 85,000 initially reported.” Overall in 2009, the adjusted numbers showed an additional “…1.36 million fewer jobs…” (February 5, 2010).

Late last night Occupation forces raided the Stop the Wall offices in Ramallah. Some 10 military jeeps, hummers and an armoured bus surrounded the building as soldiers searched rooms, turning the office upside down and confiscating computer hard disks, laptops, and video cameras along with paper documents, CDs, and video cassettes.

Though both parties were cited in the report by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge, Israel faces far more serious charges. It is accused of deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure in a conflict that saw over 1,400 Palestinians killed—compared with 13 Israelis killed—and the full or partial destruction of more than 21,000 buildings and apartments, including more than 200 major factories.

Third, among the few sectors of the economy showing net employment growth over the past year is the federal government. The federal civil service is rapidly expanding as Obama increases the size of government, with 33,000 new positions being added in January alone. Only 9,000 of those new slots were for temporary census jobs. In other words, what we are seeing is good times for the public sector and the growing prospect of a continuing and perhaps even deepening recession for everybody else.

Iran on Monday informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in an official letter that stating from Tuesday, it will begin enriching higher-grade nuclear fuel.

"Today we handed over the letter," Iran's envoy to the IAEA, Ali-Asghar Soltanieh, told Press TV. He added that Tehran will use its nuclear stockpile to enrich uranium to up to 20 percent to supply the Tehran research reactor which produces medical isotopes.

The fuel will be be produced at the Natanz enrichment plant.

Iran says as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it is entitled to enrich uranium for civilian purposes.

Position: 63 Degrees 43 Minutes South 81 Degrees 26 Minutes East

The Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin joined the Sea Shepherd ship Bob Barker this morning at 0700 Hours (Sydney time). Both Sea Shepherd ships are now on the tail of the Japanese factory ship Nisshin Maru.

The Japanese fleet was running fast to the Northeast not knowing that the Steve Irwin was on a course of Southwest coming directly for them. With the fleet doing 15 knots, and the Steve Irwin doing 15 knots, the Steve Irwin and the whaling fleet closed the gap at 30 knots cutting the rendezvous time in half.

Heavy snowfall has seriously disrupted transport in Bulgaria and neighboring Romania, blocking highways and leaving cars stranded in snow.

Officials in Bulgaria say the weather caused power outages in parts of that country Monday, and delayed most flights for about an hour at Sofia International Airport. Off-road vehicles are being used to free stranded drivers and transport patients requiring emergency treatment to the hospital.

People who drink two or more sweetened soft drinks a week have a much higher risk of pancreatic cancer, an unusual but deadly cancer, researchers reported on Monday.

The state Legislature is looking to add back jobs sliced from the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, including those lost when most of the state Film Office staff was let go.

*Israel is preparing to invade Lebanon with massive ground troops.

Israel will not spare any kind of weaponry, including phosphorous and cluster bombs.

Israel is secretly evacuating its northern region residents.

Israel intends to create a new security zone inside Lebanon, south of the Litani to enhance her long term occupation.

While the war of words is escalating around the clock between Israel on the one side and Hezbollah and Syria on the other, analysts in the Middle East and Europe strongly believe that war is inevitable and will break out within a few months.

A former Philadelphia cop faces charges for shooting and killing Bill Panas in their neighborhood.

Subversives who think government is corrupt and should be controlled by the people face 10 years in prison and a $25,000 dollar fine if they fail to register with authorities in South Carolina, in another chilling example of how free speech and dissent is being criminalized in America.

The state’s “Subversive Activities Registration Act” is now officially on the books and mandates that “Every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States … shall register with the Secretary of State.”

Ohio's tax coffers are nearly $100 million lighter than officials had expected by this point in the fiscal year, largely due to a January income tax shortfall.

I don’t want this column to be seen as bashing the US. However, there is much to validly criticize about the current model in the US and much to dissent from, also.

Maui's commercial real estate industry sure isn't as bad as on the Mainland, said veteran local leasing broker Ed Bello of Bello Realty Inc., who on a recent business trip to Colorado saw a bankrupt big-box store converted into a charter school and a former Blockbuster Video into a veterinary clinic.

If they had any tenants at all.

When he looks around at Maui's shopping centers, Bello said, rather than maybe one empty storefront, there may be four. Three more vacant spaces is a big shift for an island that just two years ago had a nearly 100 percent occupancy rate, he said.

The Geneva-based laboratory would like to invite an astronomer from the Vatican Observatory to collaborate on studies concerning the origin of the universe, said Ugo Amaldi,

Ex-Downing Street communications chief Alastair Campbell has emotionally denied Tony Blair misled MPs over the intelligence ahead of the Iraq war.

On Feb. 15, the collider will start up again. Soon thereafter, it will start producing scientific data for the first time. This year, the plan is to ramp up the collider to unprecedented levels of speed in order to test traditional physics theories. If all goes well, Myers expects the LHC to run at full energy – accelerating particles to nearly the speed of light – in 2011.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will visit Moscow to persuade the Kremlin into backing tougher sanctions against Iran, days after media reports revealed that Tel Aviv has dispatched two warships to the Persian Gulf.

The three-day trip, planned weeks ago, will see Netanyahu making every effort in convincing Russian government officials to join the Western-led campaign for additional sanctions against Iran's enrichment activities.

The IDF acknowledged Sunday that there are problems with some of the fences surrounding minefields on the Golan Heights, and in some of the areas the fences are not visible.

Through a little-known visa program that connects international fortunes to depressed economies around the country, Gaithersburg-based NobleOutReach has set out to rebuild parts of New Orleans through investments from wealthy foreigners seeking a gateway for immigration.

As the descent into the slippery slope of racism continues nabated in this land of apartheid, the angle and degree of the slide seem to surprise many. The Israeli parliament (Knesset) has a “Constitution, Law and Justice Committee” terms that only sound similar to what exists in a Western democracy. But the “Jewish state” is “special” where a committee with this name drafts laws to discourage inter-religious marriages, to deny Jerusalemites residency rights, to declare it legal to take land for Jewish
development from those natives who happen to be non-Jews, and to flaunt many other basic rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

THERE IS a danger that all these struggles will become something like “cities of refuge” for young idealists, who desire to devote themselves to a noble cause, but have no desire to take part in the main struggle.

This is another example of "Environment" being used to force us to buy products that we might not want. The CFCs do not last anywhere near as long as the package claims. The ones I bought from Home Depot started failing after just 1 month. Contrary to the package claims, they do NOT put out the same amount of light as the regular bulb of thus and such wattage; I checked with light meter.

Finally, CFCs are TOXIC! If they break, you get mercury vapor in your homes. And unless you dispose of them at special collection sites, the mercury goes into the water table at whatever landfill the bulbs and sent to, along with the toxic materials on the circuit board and the tiny radioisotope that initiates the lamp when switched on.

Not everyone was happy that it passed by voice vote. It's an election year and senators want some Iran-bashing credit with their donors.

Social Security's annual surplus nearly evaporated in 2009 for the first time in 25 years as the recession led hundreds of thousands of workers to retire or claim disability.

While some commentators are concerned with questions to do with the legality of the war, the most crucial issue here is actually the disappearance of ethical judgment from our public and political life. Rather than being concerned with morality and ethics British politicians are concerned with legalism. In other words, if someone would manage to prove that the war was ‘legal’ then the murdering of a million and a half Iraqis would be well justified.

Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor who ran with Sen. John McCain against the Obama-Biden ticket, said on Sunday that U.S. President Barack Obama can win again if he starts backing Israel and decides to attack Iran.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said the U.S. is in no danger of losing its AAA debt rating even though the Obama administration has predicted a $1.6 trillion budget deficit in 2010.

“Absolutely not,” Geithner said, when asked in an ABC News interview broadcast today whether a downgrade is a concern. “That will never happen to this country.”

The South Carolina blog FitsNews describes the new law as "bureaucracy for terrorists."

"In the long and storied history of utterly retarded legislation in South Carolina, we may have finally found the legal statute that takes the cake for sheer stupidity, which we think you’ll agree is saying something," the unsigned blog posting scathingly commented.