Morning Posting.

• Updated !Earthquakes in the last 24 hours in the world seismic activity in New zealand 6.0 , Japan 6.0 and Cuba 5.2 ! More info here.

 

• Japan : For the most accurate info on the nuclear disaster go to: Paul Langley’s Nuclear History Blog.Here.

 

• US hikers to be freed by Oman, Iraq help.(HurriyetDaily).Oman has sent a private jet to Iran for two U.S. hikers convicted of spying even as the Islamic republic’s judiciary said Wednesday that it was still reviewing the pair’s bail conditions, challenging earlier comments by the president.An apparent deal to release Shane Bauer, 28, and Josh Fattal, 29, on $1 million bail was thrown into doubt earlier Wednesday when Iran’s judiciary said the matter still needed review. The statement by the hard-line judiciary appeared to be a message that only its officials, and not the president, could set the terms of any possible release. President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is locked in a bitter power struggle with Iran’s ruling clerics, who control the courts.Just hours after the judiciary’s declaration, however, the Gulf state of Oman dispatched a private plane to Tehran for the hikers, according to an official at Oman’s Foreign Ministry. The Omani official gave no further details on any possible timetable for the release of the Americans, who were detained along the Iran-Iraq border in July 2009 along with a friend, Sarah Shourd. The present situation mirrors the circumstances surrounding Shourd’s release least year. Iran’s courts sidelined Ahmadinejad after his announcement of a $500,000 bail deal for her release and then set the ground rules for her to eventually fly out on an Omani royal jet just as Ahmadinejad was heading to New York.Oman has close ties with both Tehran and Washington and plays a strategic role in the region by sharing control with Iran of the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani was also negotiating for the release of Bauer and Fattal with Iranian officials, an Iranian daily quoted an Iraqi envoy to Tehran as saying. “The Iraqi president contacted top Iranian officials after the pair’s families asked for his mediation … They will be handed over to the Swiss embassy in Tehran early next week,” the Thursday edition of Sharq daily quoted Nazem Dabbagh as saying.Read the full story here.

 

• Video- Netanyahu says he’ll address UN ahead of PA state vote.(JPost).After weeks of deliberation, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced Thursday that he would go to a United Nations General Assembly meeting next week to discuss the Palestinian statehood bid. Speaking at a press conference with visiting Czech Prime Minister Petr Nečas, Netanyahu said he will “speak the truth to those who want to hear it” at the UN General Assembly.Netanyahu said that the General Assembly is not “the place where Israel generally gets reasonable hearing,” but it was nonetheless important to present Israel’s position. For weeks there was internal debate inside the Prime Minister’s Office whether he should go, or whether Israel should be represented by President Shimon Peres. One government official said only this week that the decision would be based on whether Netanyahu felt he could have any impact on the European countries whose position on the matter has yet to be decided. The prime minister also called on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas not to bring the matter to the UN, but rather to return to peace negotiations with Israel. When asked how his country planned to vote on the statehood bid, Czech Prime Minister Petr Nečas said, “I would like to emphasis that at this moment I am unfamiliar with the format and context of the request.” The press conference came after Netanyahu held late-night meetings Wednesday with US envoys Dennis Ross and David Hale, and with EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, in an effort to head off what one diplomatic official termed a “diplomatic train wreck” at the UN.The focus of last-minute diplomatic fury, according to the official, was to prevent a “one-sided anti-Israeli resolution from being adopted by the UN.”None of the parties involved in the talks are being specific about what is being discussed, and it is not even clear whether the goal is to prevent the PA from going to the UN and asking for any type of statehood recognition, or whether the aim is to convince the Palestinians to bring to the UN a resolution that Israel could live with and that would form the basis for future negotiations.Abbas is due to speak to the General Assembly on September 23.An aide to Netanyahu said the prime minister also would address the forum that day and that efforts were under way to try to arrange meetings with US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.Opposition leader Tzipi Livni on Thursday expressed doubt as to the effectiveness of Netanyahu’s decision to speak at the General Assembly.”I am fine with him going, but he will not affect any real change,” Livni stated in an interview with Israel Radio. “To change things you must act and not just give a speech,” she added, reiterating her position that the government must act to renew negotiations with the Palestinians and the failure to do so has led to the Palestinian UN bid.Read the full story here.

 

• Communities Get Smart about CAIR.(IP).Communities in Washington state and Ohio recently questioned the appropriateness of CAIR’s involvement in community programs.In Puyallup, Wash., a school district is considering whether it should allow CAIR to teach about Islam in the classroom.”For America’s sake, we don’t think that it’s fair that Islam gets a pass and the other religions don’t, but also because CAIR is a front for the Muslim brotherhood,” said a member of a local ACT! For America chapter.”We have a real problem with organizations with ties to terrorism that come into the public schools.”One parent said that school is not the time or place to learn about religion. Dozens said that they did not believe that CAIR should teach Islam in the classroom while other religions went unrepresented.In August, an Ohio Catholic school cancelled an interfaith event with CAIR after the school received a flood of emails advising against the partnership. School president Kirsten MacDougal said the emails were from those who follow news about CAIR’s national office.”We share the concern over safety, but it is sad that this had distracted from our positive intent on both sides,” said MacDougal.CAIR was incorporated in 1994 by three members of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), a propaganda outlet for a U.S.-based Hamas support network. The FBI severed relations with the group three years ago after reviewing evidence from a terrorism-financing prosecution which showed CAIR’s founders were part of the Hamas support network. Prosecutors cast CAIR as “a participant in an ongoing and ultimately unlawful conspiracy to support a designated terrorist organization, a conspiracy from which CAIR never withdrew.”CAIR’s petition to be removed from a list of unindicted co-conspirators in the case failed. A district court judge ruled that “the government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR…with Hamas.Hmmmm…………..”By their fruits you will know them”.Read the full story here.

 

• “Strike Three” – GE Decides to Dump Offshore Wind-Power Plans Despite Collecting Millions in Stimulus Funds for Wind Projects.(GatewayPundit).GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, the head of Barack Obama’s Economic Advisory Panel, was invited to sit with the First Lady during the president’s speech to Congress this past week. He’s been a strong supporter of the president since he took over the White House and his companies have received plenty of government funds as well.GE was awarded 44 contracts totaling over $46,000,000 and 44 grants totaling more than $79,000,000 from the Obama-Pelosi $757 billion dollar stimulus package. Millions of dollars in stimulus funds were used by GE in green energy projects.Today GE announced that it was going to gut its offshore wind-power plans.Forbes reported:

General Electric, the U.S.-based industrial giant and leading manufacturer of wind-power turbines, is scaling back efforts to expand its presence in the offshore wind power market.

The rationale: there is no meaningful offshore wind market to speak of – at least not yet.Given slower-than-expected industry growth, the offshore market may not mature as rapidly as many wind boosters once believed.In 2009, GE moved into the offshore market by acquiring Norway’s ScanWind, a developer of direct-drive turbines, based in the city of Trondheim.GE is considering laying off about 40 employees in Norway as it scales-back its offshore operations there, according to reports in Recharge. The company has also suspended plans to construct a manufacturing facility in the United Kingdom indefinitely.Immelt also said the stimulus would work way back in April 2009.Hmmmm…..Now what if all these ‘Alternative energy projects’ fundings were a cover to make Taxpayer money flow back to the re-election fund for Obama?Read the full story here.

 

• Solyndra employee: “Everyone knew the plant wouldn’t work”(TheRightscoop).This is a must listen. While we were focused on the debate last Wednesday night, Mark Levin got a call from someone who worked at the Solyndra plant, who gave some revealing details about this Solyndra scandal.This is one of the more interesting things the caller said:

While we were out there, while we were building it – cause it is a half a billion dollar plant – everyone already knew that China had developed a more inexpensive way to manufacture these solar panels. Everyone knew that the plant wouldn’t work. But they still did it. They still built it. She then emphasized that she isn’t even that high on the totem pole and she knew this stuff. So there’s no doubt in her mind that Obama and the White House knew that it wasn’t feasible.Levin replayed the call tonight. Hereis the full call.

 

• Dictatorship Rising?Should Faking a Name on Facebook Be a Felony?Congress contemplates Obama regime draconian punishment for Internet lies.(WSJ).By Orin S. Kerr.Imagine that President Obama could order the arrest of anyone who broke a promise on the Internet. So you could be jailed for lying about your age or weight on an Internet dating site. Or you could be sent to federal prison if your boss told you to work but you used the company’s computer to check sports scores online. Imagine that Eric Holder’s Justice Department urged Congress to raise penalties for violations, making them felonies allowing three years in jail for each broken promise. Fanciful, right?Think again. Congress is now poised to grant the Obama administration’s wishes in the name of “cybersecurity.”The little-known law at issue is called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It was enacted in 1986 to punish computer hacking. But Congress has broadened the law every few years, and today it extends far beyond hacking. The law now criminalizes computer use that “exceeds authorized access” to any computer. Today that violation is a misdemeanor, but the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to meet this morning to vote on making it a felony. The problem is that a lot of routine computer use can exceed “authorized access.” Courts are still struggling to interpret this language. But the Justice Department believes that it applies incredibly broadly to include “terms of use” violations and breaches of workplace computer-use policies.Until now, the critical limit on the government’s power has been that federal prosecutors rarely charge misdemeanors. They prefer to bring more serious felony charges. That’s why the administration’s proposal is so dangerous. If exceeding authorized access becomes a felony, prosecutors will become eager to charge it. Abuses are inevitable. Real threats to cybersecurity must be prosecuted. Penalties should be stiff. But Congress must narrow the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act before enhancing its penalties. There’s no reason to make breaching a promise a federal case, and certainly not a felony crime.Hmmmm….The good old days with the ‘Gestapo, Stasi and KGB’?Read the full story here.

 

• Erdoğan to hold talks with Obama in NY.(HurriyetDaily).Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and U.S. President Barack Obama will meet in New York next week, with Iraq expected to be high on their agenda, a senior Turkish official said Wednesday.The meeting, which will occur on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, was requested by Washington and is likely to be a “lengthy” one, Deputy Prime Minister Beşir Atalay said on CNNTürk. He added that Turkey’s efforts to curb Kurdish militants based in northern Iraq and possible complications in Iraq in the wake of the U.S. military’s looming pullout would be discussed in detail. Atalay said there was “nothing more natural” than for Turkey to assume a more active role in neighboring Iraq after the withdrawal of U.S. troops.“We may have some demands from the United States as they are pulling out, and they may have assessments concerning Turkey,” the minister said, adding that Ankara had no plans “at the moment” to set up a buffer zone inside northern Iraq to thwart the infiltration of members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.Erdoğan and Obama are also likely to discuss the simmering crisis between Turkey and Israel, the unrest in the Arab world and a Palestinian plan to seek statehood recognition at the U.N. General Assembly.Hmmmm……Since when is Turkey dictating US foreign policy?Once again it seems that Israel has nothing to fear but Obama and Erdogan?Read the full story here.