‘Build a Death Star’ petition clears threshold for Obama response

By Olivier Knox, Yahoo! News | The Ticket – 3 hrs ago

Disney CEO Robert Iger, left, andIt is a period of civil war. Rebel pranksters, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the forces of Taking White House Petitions Too Seriously. Specifically: They have secured the 25,000 signatures necessary to get a formal response from the White House to their call for America to build a DEATH STAR.

"Those who sign here petition the United States government to secure funding and resources, and begin construction on a Death Star by 2016," the petition reads.

"By focusing our defense resources into a space-superiority platform and weapon system such as a Death Star, the government can spur job creation in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration, and more, and strengthen our national defense."

Some estimates put the cost of doing so at around $852 quadrillion, roughly 13,000 times the gross domestic product of the entire Earth—even when factoring in the savings of not putting any guardrails around any of the facility's seemingly endless number of bridges, spans, shafts and pits. And history cautions against being too proud of the technological terror thus constructed, because the ability to destroy a planet, or even a whole system, is insignificant next to the power of the Force.

Crossing the 25,000-signature threshold—right before the Dec. 14 deadline—doesn't actually guarantee a response. The White House has made clear that it will pick and choose which petitions will get an answer. We may have to rely on the Bothans.

Majority of U.S. to blame both sides for ‘fiscal cliff’ failure: Poll

By Rachel Rose Hartman, Yahoo! News | The Ticket – 8 hrs ago

If Washington lawmakers fail to reach a deal to avoid the "fiscal cliff," a majority of Americans will blame Democrats and Republicans equally, according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal survey.

Fifty-six percent of adults surveyed Dec. 6-9 said Democrats, including President Barack Obama, and Republicans would be equally to blame if no deal is made to avoid the fiscal cliff—the automatic spending cuts and tax increases set to go into effect on Jan. 1. Twenty-four percent said Republicans will be more to blame and 19 percent pointed the finger at Democrats.

Those results differ from the response to a similar question posed one week earlier by The Washington Post and the Pew Research Center that suggested the public is more likely to blame Republicans in Congress for negotiating failures.

The new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll and the Post/Pew poll both showed that Americans still say they trust Obama more than congressional Republicans to reach a deal.

Thirty-eight percent of adults surveyed by NBC/WSJ said they trusted the president more to handle the fiscal cliff situation, while 19 percent said they trust House Speaker John Boehner and congressional Republicans more to handle negotiations.

When compared with past NBC/WSJ surveys, the latest poll shows that approval ratings for the Republican Party have declined since the election. The GOP's favorability rating in the new poll was 30 percent and its unfavorability stood at 45 percent. That's down from NBC/WSJ's October survey in which the GOP received a 36 percent favorable and 43 percent unfavorable rating.

Mitt Romney's favorability also declined, according to the poll, from 43 percent favorable/44 percent unfavorable in October to 35 percent favorable/44 percent unfavorable in the Dec. 6-9 survey.

The poll showed Americans want compromise. Two-thirds of respondents said they were willing to accept tax increases or cuts in federal government programs in order to reach a deal.

The poll's margin of error was plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

U.S. lawmaker says Syria's chemical weapons are ready to use

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Syria's chemical weapons could be used at "a moment's notice" and the international community should not accept any assurances from Syrian officials that they will not be used, U.S. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said on Wednesday.

U.S. and other Western officials recently issued sharp warnings to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad not to deploy chemical weapons. Syria called those warnings a "pretext for intervention" in the civil war.

Rogers, a Republican, told Reuters in an interview that the Syrian government's activities related to chemical weapons were a shift in posture and a major concern.

"I believe that they have put elements of their chemical weapons program in a condition of which they could be used at a moment's notice, which is very different from before," Rogers said.

"And some notion that they have promised not to use them, I don't think the international community ... should take that on face value," he said.

"This is a regime that's getting more desperate by the day. They have affirmatively put elements of their chemical weapon program in a position for use, that is something that we should all be concerned about."

His comments came amid reports that Assad's forces had fired Soviet-era Scud ballistic missiles against rebels in a significant escalation of the nearly two-year-old conflict that has already killed more than 40,000 civilians.

Rogers said more information was needed before he could say for sure whether the Scuds had been used.

"Some of the sourcing I've seen on the material just doesn't make me feel comfortable. We've seen a lot of mistakes based on social media, we're going to need more than that," he said.

But reports about use of Scud-style weapons and the changed posture on chemical weapons suggested desperation on the part of Assad's government, Rogers said.

But he added: "It would not be unusual for a regime that possesses some fairly sophisticated weapons systems in these last, I argue days and months, or days and weeks, of a pretty desperate regime to use the weapons at its disposal.

"So Scuds, and I make the next leap of chemical weapons, I think is of real concern."

Rogers has just returned from a visit to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia where he discussed Syria and other security issues with officials. Arab League officials want to see the United States step up its role on Syria, he said, adding that he was not referring to military action.

"The United States has a unique capability to deal with these," Rogers said, referring to Syria's chemical weapons. He would not describe the capability.

"I sensed a real frustration from our Arab League partners, frustration with the United States. I believe that we need to step up our role, and I am not talking about military, I'm just talking about U.S. influence and leadership and bringing unique capabilities that only the United States has to the table in these discussions," Rogers said.

"And again that doesn't mean boots on the ground. It does mean that we have unique capabilities that we should at least offer as a part of the discussion of how we prevent the use of these chemical weapons and the sheer humanitarian crisis in the region that I think would be created by their use."

(Reporting by Tabassum Zakaria; editing by Christopher Wilson)

European court condemns CIA in landmark ruling

PARIS (AP) — A European court issued a landmark ruling Thursday that condemned the CIA's so-called extraordinary renditions programs and bolstered those who say they were illegally kidnapped and tortured as part of an overzealous war on terrorism.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled that a German car salesman was a victim of torture and abuse, in a long-awaited victory for a man who had failed for years to get courts in the United States and Europe to recognize him as a victim.

Khaled El-Masri says he was kidnapped from Macedonia in 2003, mistaken for a terrorism suspect, then held for four months and brutally interrogated at an Afghan prison known as the "Salt Pit" run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. He says that once U.S.authorities realized he was not a threat, they illegally sent him to Albania and left him on a mountainside.

The European court, based in Strasbourg, France, ruled that El-Masri's account was "established beyond reasonable doubt" and that Macedonia "had been responsible for his torture and ill-treatment both in the country itself and after his transfer to the U.S. authorities in the context of an extra-judicial rendition."

It said the government of Macedonia violated El-Masri's rights repeatedly and ordered it to pay €60,000 ($78,500) in damages. Macedonia's Justice Ministry said it would enforce the court ruling and pay El-Masri the damages.

United States officials have long since closed internal investigations into the El-Masri case, and the U.S. administration of President Barack Obama has distanced itself from some counterterrorism activities conducted under former U.S. President George W. Bush.

But several other legal cases are pending from Britain to Hong Kong involving people who say they were illegally detained in the CIA program. Its critics hope that Thursday's ruling will lead to court victories for other rendition victims.

The case focused on Macedonia's role in a single instance of wrongful capture. But it drew broader attention because of how sensitive the CIA extraordinary renditions were for Europe, at a time when the continent was in fear of terrorist attacks but divided over the Bush administration's methods of rooting out terrorism.

Those methods involved abducting and interrogating terror suspects — without court sanction — in the years following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A 2007 Council of Europe probe accused 14 European governments of permitting the CIA to run detention centers or carry out rendition flights between 2002 and 2005.

The CIA declined to comment on Thursday's ruling.

El-Masri's lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic, said he hoped the ruling would inspire El-Masri to resume contact with his lawyers and family, which he broke off after he was sentenced to two years in prison in 2010 for assaulting the mayor of the German town of Neu-Ulm.

"I hope this will give him a little bit more confidence again that even a little person who has come into a crime of great nations has the chance to have his rights," he said.

Macedonian authorities had argued that El-Masri was detained on suspicion of traveling with false documents, then traveled on his own to neighboring Kosovo — an argument the court called "utterly untenable."

The court based its ruling not only on El-Masri's version of events but also on testimony from former Macedonian officials, results of a German investigation, and U.S. diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks.

The court said El-Masri was severely beaten, sodomized, shackled and hooded "at the hands of the CIA rendition team" in the presence of Macedonian authorities. It described the measures as "invasive and potentially debasing ... used with premeditation, the aim being to cause Mr. El-Masri severe pain or suffering in order to obtain information." And that was only the first stage in El-Masri's months-long ordeal.

Jim Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Institute and a lawyer for El-Masri, said the ruling "serves as a wake-up call to the U.S. government and judiciary to re-examine how the CIA has treated rendition victims. ... and offers an opportunity to re-examine the (U.S.) position of looking forward instead of backward."

Goldston said that even if the ruling has no impact in the United States, courts in other countries are likely to take it into account. He expressed hope that it will encourage "victims who have been denied redress or have simply not come forward."

A U.N. special rapporteur on human rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, the International Committee of Jurists and Amnesty International were among others hailing the ruling as a long-awaited breakthrough.

The court's rulings are binding on the 47 member-states of the Council of Europe, the continent's human rights watchdog.

The decision is the second blow for the CIA program in recent months. In September, Italy's highest criminal court upheld the convictions of 23 Americans in the abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect from a Milan street, paving the way to possible extradition requests for CIA operatives by Italian authorities.

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Knife-wielding man injures 22 children in China

BEIJING (Reuters) - A knife-wielding man slashed 22 children and an adult at an elementary school in central China on Friday, state media reported, the latest in a series of attacks on schoolchildren in the country.

The man attacked the children at the gate of a school in Chenpeng village in Henan province, theXinhua news agency reported.

Police arrested a 36-year-old man, identified as villager Min Yingjun, Xinhua said. It did not give further details of the extent of the injuries.

There have been a series of attacks on schools and schoolchildren around China in recent years, some by people who have lost their jobs or felt left out of the country's economic boom.

The rash of violence has prompted public calls for more measures to protect the young in a country where many couples only have one child.

In 2010, a man slashed 28 children, two teachers and a security guard in a kindergarten in eastern China.

(Reporting by Terril Yue Jones; editing by Jonathan Standing)