[The Economist]
Most anti-terrorist spending is wasteful, claims a new study.

[Boston.com]
Almost 32 years to the day after President Ford created an independent Intelligence Oversight Board made up of private citizens with top-level clearances to ferret out illegal spying activities, Bush has issued an executive order that strips the board of much of its authority.

[Pew Research Center]
The balance of party identification in the American electorate now favors the Democratic Party by a decidedly larger margin than in either of the two previous presidential election cycles. The share of voters who call themselves Republicans has declined by six points since 2004, and represents, on an annualized basis, the lowest percentage of self-identified Republican voters in 16 years of polling by the Center.

[The American Conservative]
The American Conservative argues for Obama over McCain.

[The Intelligence Daily]
The United States has proposed an array of confidence building measures to Russia, in particular allowing Moscow to monitor U.S. missile defense elements in Central Europe.

[Yahoo! News]
Republican Senator Chuck Hagel writes in a new book that the United States needs independent leadership and possibly another political party, while suggesting the Iraq war might be remembered as one of the five biggest blunders in history.

[France 24]
The current crisis rocking the markets and global economy could turn out to be the worst since World War II, says former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.

[AFP]
The humanitarian situation in post-war Iraq five years after the US-led invasion is one of the most critical in the world, the International Committee of the Red Cross says in a new report.

[Harper's Magazine]
That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.

[Associated Press]
House Democratic leaders agreed Thursday to a rare closed-door session—the first in 25 years—to debate surveillance legislation. The last private session in the House was in 1983 on U.S. support for paramilitary operations in Nicaragua. Only five closed sessions have taken place in the House since 1825.

[Telegraph.co.uk]
Republican votes skew Democrat primaries. Some primaries are open to all voters, regardless of their party allegiance, and this is being used as a tactical weapon by Republican activists. In the "open" Democratic primary in Texas last week Republicans turned out in numbers to back Hillary Clinton—their favoured opponent in November for the Republican candidate John McCain.

[The New York Times]
Senior officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation repeatedly approved the use of “blanket” records demands to justify the improper collection of thousands of phone records, according to officials briefed on the practice.

[BBC News]
China has accused the US of double standards over human rights. The Chinese report accuses the US of arrogance and is particuarly scathing about the Iraq conflict. The invasion of Iraq by US troops has produced the biggest human rights tragedy and the greatest humanitarian disaster in modern world, the document said.

[Yahoo! News]
An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.