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Google in 2012 sought to help insurgents overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to State Department emails receiving fresh scrutiny this week. Messages between former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's team and one of the company's executives detailed the plan for Google to get involved in the region. "Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool ... that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from," Jared Cohen, the head of what was then the company's "Google Ideas" division, wrote in a July 2012...

The man behind the 2006 cult sci-fi film “Idiocracy” is lamenting that his fictional movie appears to have become reality. "I never expected #idiocracy to become a documentary,” tweeted screenwriter Etan Cohen in an apparent jab at the 2016 presidential race.

The two men arrested in Albany for allegedly taking part in a terrorist plot were men of God. So friends and neighbors have been telling reporters. Mohammed Mosharref Hossain was a pillar of the local congregation. Yassin Muhiddin Aref was a prayer leader. They called their mosque the House of Peace. The mosque belongs to the North American Islamic Trust, which runs many other mosques in the U.S. The trust is funded mostly by the Saudis. It has other enterprises, too, including a book club. One of its featured offerings is "Jihad: A Commitment to World Peace." Or if you...

Then again, how could they not. Otherwise the only senator they could fundraise for would be Tom Cotton. AIPAC backed the Corker bill. So did most Republicans. Everything else was political theater. AIPAC played its part to get publicity, and then it's back to business as usual, fundraising for people who voted to let Iran go nuclear. Steve Rosen, a former foreign policy director for Aipac, told me his former organization will be inclined to work with Democrats rather than turn them into enemies. "There is no question Aipac lay leaders will in the future be holding fundraisers for Democrats...

Khobar Towers The Clinton administration left many stones unturnd. BY LOUIS J. FREEH Sunday, June 25, 2006 12:01 a.m. Ten years ago today, acting under direct orders from senior Iranian government leaders, the Saudi Hezbollah detonated a 25,000-pound TNT bomb that killed 19 U.S. airmen in their dormitory at Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The blast wave destroyed Building 131 and grievously wounded hundreds of additional Air Force personnel. It also killed an unknown number of Saudi civilians in a nearby park. The 19 Americans murdered were members of the 4,404th Wing, who were risking their lives to enforce...

The CIA official who led the hunt for Osama Bin Laden is being removed from his post, it has been revealed. The head of the agency's Counter­terrorism Center, who also directed drone campaigns which killed thousands, has been in the position for nine years and is described as a 'true hero'.

Will diplomacy prevail in Ukraine? The Nation’s Stephen Cohen joined The John Batchelor Show on Tuesday to discuss the feasibility of the Minsk II agreement and the increased war footing among NATO officials and policymakers in Washington. Cohen argued that the “rhetorical war” on Minsk II is based on “political ideological imaginations,” because there is no “hard intelligence to back up the claims that there’s been this massive Russian invasion.” If Minsk II fails and fighting escalates, the United States and NATO face “a real chance of war with Russia,” Cohen said.

For days now we’ve watched Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen from Tennessee make the rounds on cable TV and hear how he was planning to skip Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s big speech to Congress…

A group of Democrats in the House of Representatives are circulating a petition asking Republican Speaker John Boehner to postpone the March 3 speech by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to a joint meeting of Congress, Bloomberg reported on Monday. “As members of Congress who support Israel, we share concern that it appears that you are using a foreign leader as a political tool against the president,” states the letter, which is being circulated among lawmakers by Representatives Keith Ellison, Steve Cohen and Maxine Waters. The three started sending the petition to fellow lawmakers last week, said Mike Casca, a spokesman...

It was a time of beheadings...It was a time of aggression...It was a time of breakup...It was a time of hatred.... It was a time of weakness. The most powerful nation on earth was tired of far-flung wars, its will and treasury depleted by absence of victory. An ungrateful world could damn well police itself. The nation had bridges to build and education systems to fix. Civil wars between Arabs could fester. Enemies might even kill other enemies, a low-cost gain. Middle Eastern borders could fade; they were artificial colonial lines on a map.

Attorney Stanley Cohen, who has defended Osama bin Laden's son-in-law and the leader of Hamas .. SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Stanley Cohen, a prominent lawyer who has represented political activists and terrorism suspects, among them Osama bin Laden's son-in-law, pleaded guilty this morning in Syracuse to obstructing the IRS. ... Last month, Cohen was the lawyer representing Osama bin Laden's son-in-law in a high-profile New York City criminal trial. Sulaiman Abu Ghaith was convicted of conspiring to kill Americans and of other terrorism charges. ... Assistant U.S. Attorney John Duncan wrote that Cohen failed to file tax returns from 2005 through...

The New York Times' Roger Cohen, who is not exactly a friend of the Jewish state, admits the truth in this New York Times op-ed: The BDS movement aims to bring about the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Yet these developments make me uneasy for a simple reason: I do not trust the B.D.S. movement. Its stated aim is to end the occupation, secure “full equality” for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and fight for the right of return of all Palestinian refugees. The first objective is essential to Israel’s future. The second is laudable. The third, combined with...

Note: Audio files, transcript and photos at link. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130519592 SNIPPET - quote: When Yousef al-Khattab demonstrated outside New York mosques just a couple of years ago, it was pretty obvious where he stood on the political spectrum. "All we want is the non-Muslims, at this point, off the lands of Muhammad. ... We want the kafirs out of it," Khattab said in one interview, using a term for infidels or Muslim nonbelievers. When asked if he wanted Islam to take over the world, his answer was unequivocal: "Of course I want it to ... and it will." To promote that...

Tennessee Democrat Rep. Steve Cohen blamed opposition to gun control on voters’ affinities for “guns and the Bible” on Wednesday in an MSNBC appearance. “I got the vitriol from on the Twitter from all these people who opposed that cartoon,” said Cohen, who tweeted a cartoon that appeared to blame the National Rifle Association for the Navy Yard shooting spree on Tuesday. ”They are hardcore Republicans. This I think means more to them than — I think their guns are right there next to their Bibles. I’m not sure which they find more important to them.” Cohen’s remarks bear a...

The United States government is preparing to charge SAC Capital, the multi-billion dollar hedge fund operated by the reclusive Wall Street trading legend Steven A. Cohen, with criminal charges, according to multiple reports. Manhattan-based federal prosecutors, working in conjunction with the FBI, are poised to move against the massive hedge fund as early as this week. On Wall Street, this type of criminal charge amounts to a death sentence, because few major clients would be willing to invest money with a firm under federal indictment. It’s possible that lawyers for Cohen, a secretive 57-year-old billionaire with lavish tastes in art...

"Failure to Supervise" is the charge in the civil action being leveled by the SEC against legendary hedge fund manager Steve Cohen. This story has been running ad nauseum on CNBC since Friday afternoon. There is little information to go on but my conjecture is that this is another agency being directly used and abused by the Obama Administration to accomplish greater control over anything financial. Based up the well established pattern, his finger prints can be found anywhere intimidation is being exerted by government agencies. The default assumption with this President should be that every federal agency is being...

OCTOBER 17, 2009 Rajaratnam Surfaced in U.S. Terrorism Probe By EVAN PEREZ and MATTHEW ROSENBERG WASHINGTON—The hedge-fund billionaire charged as part of a vast insider-trading case surfaced in an earlier, separate probe into U.S. fundraising by a Sri Lankan terrorist group, people familiar with the probe said. As part of that investigation, federal agents said they uncovered documents showing that Raj Rajaratnam, founder of the Galleon Group, was among several wealthy Sri Lankans in the U.S. whose donations to a Maryland-based charity made their way to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, according to people familiar with the probe. Raj...

If you're considering going to Wall Street, you should really know what you're getting into. Yes, you will get paid better than average people all over the world. Yes, you will get to learn new things constantly, and yes, you will be involved in important transactions (well, hopefully) and meet interesting clients. However, there is a downside, and it's generally all in your head. A Wall Street veteran, who will remain anonymous, gave us a laundry list of ways working on the Street can actually ruin your life. Wall Streeters have to deal with a distorted sense of money, questions...

The Senate did something this past weekend it hasn't done in four years: passed a budget. The law requires the Senate to pass a budget, but Congress often ignores its own laws. For most of Barack Obama's presidency, a series of continuing resolutions kept the money -- your money -- flowing. Now the Senate wants to add a trillion dollars of new taxes, even more than President Obama seeks. Despite our growing debt, the Senate wants to fund things like the Senate barbershop, which loses a third of a million dollars every year. It's like they live in a...

Wall-Street Craziness Is Back Wolf Richter, Testosterone PitMarch 29, 2013 The craziness on Wall Street, the reckless for-the-moment-only behavior that led to the Financial Crisis, is back. This time it’s Citigroup that is once again concocting “synthetic” securities, like those that had wreaked havoc five years ago. And once again, it’s using them to shuffle off risks through the filters of Wall Street to people who might never know. What bubbled to the surface is that Citigroup is selling synthetic securities that yield 13% to 15% annually—synthetic because they’re based on credit derivatives. Apparently, Citi has a bunch of shipping...