Poland and the United States signed on Saturday an agreement on the establishment of a missile shield, despite the objections from Russia.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton witnessed the signing of the document, which allows both countries to station U.S. missile interceptors on Polish territory to defend the country against possible threats from Iran or other parts of the world.

The U.S. official later attended a conference on the development of democracy and civil liberties, a recurring theme of his four-day visit to Ukraine, Poland, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.

President Barack Obama has canceled last year a draft of the Bush Administration planned to deploy a larger missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. It gave preference to smaller missile interceptors based at sea and on land.

“The U.S. is deeply committed to security and the sovereignty of Poland,” Clinton told reporters at a joint press conference with his Polish counterpart Radoslaw Sikorski.

“Today, by signing an amendment to the agreement on ballistic missile defense, we are strengthening that commitment.”

THE DEFENSE SYSTEM

If Poland was angered last year to see Obama about the Bush project, Sikorski said that his country preferred the new formula of fact.

“When Obama announced the new system configuration, we said we preferred this new arrangement, but I think we did not believed you,” he said. “I hope that now that we signed the schedule, we believe you. ”

Hillary Clinton has sought to contain the Russian objections to the project, which Moscow deems threatening to its own nuclear deterrent.

“This is a purely defensive system, which is not directed against Russia. It is a defensive system to protect our friends and allies and our deployed forces,” she said. The real threats come from the development of missiles to short and medium range at an accelerated rate in Iran. ”

Clinton began the day by laying a wreath at a memorial to victims of the plane crash that killed in April 10 Russia 96 people including President Lech Kaczynski, the main military leaders and the Polish central bank governor country.

This group was to mark the 70th anniversary of the massacre of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet forces in Katyn when his Tupolev crashed in fog near Smolensk in western Russia.

DISCOURSE ON THE FREEDOM VIOLATIONS

The second round of the Polish presidential election, a result of the death of Lech Kaczynski Sunday. The ballot counters with his twin brother, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the president Acting Bronislaw Komoroswki.

Clinton has not taken sides in the race and did not meet Komorowski. “Whichever candidate the U.S. will remain friends and partners,” she said.

As part of the meeting of the Community of Democracies, an intergovernmental body that promotes democratic principles and civil society, Hillary Clinton, however, that groups campaigning for democracy and civil liberties were taken in a “steel vise .

She cited many countries, Iran and North Korea to Cuba and Zimbabwe, where NGOs are banned, harassed or better clamped.

This repression is an ideology forged in the twentieth century, particularly by communist regimes, but today is often motivated by a desire for power, pure and simple, “she said.

“For over 60 years, Winston Churchill came to the United States warned the democracies of the world that Iron Curtain descended on Europe,” said Clinton. “Today, fortunately, (…) the iron curtain fell.

“But we must remain vigilant against the vise of steel in which governments override slowly across the world, civil society and the human spirit,” she added.

Clinton has proposed that the Community of Democracies creates an independent oversight body of the repression of NGOs, and take other measures to defend its values. She also announced the creation of a protection fund for groups harassed.

The Attorney General (Minister of Justice) American Eric Holder arrived Wednesday in Afghanistan to discuss with Afghan leaders and U.S. to fight against corruption and strengthening the judicial system.

“The fight against corruption and support for rule of law in Afghanistan is a priority for the government (Obama),” said Eric Holder in a statement issued by the Department in Washington.

The U.S. Department of Justice representative in Afghanistan of lawyers who train Afghan judicial officials.

This is the first time a U.S. Justice Minister visits Afghanistan year.

Barack Obama said to Dmitry Medvedev that the United States would support the entry of Russia in the World Trade Organization (WTO), indicating that the two men found common ground on economic and trade cooperation.

“To enhance the integration of Russia into the global economy, I reaffirm our strong commitment the access of Russia’s World Trade Organization,” said U.S. President Barack Obama to the reporters after having received at the White House his Russian counterpart.

The two men shared at a joint press conference of their desire to overcome the technical problems hindering this project by fall.

This decision marks a further step in warming relations between Washington and Moscow, that Barack Obama had wanted to “rethink” early in his mandate and turn the page after tensions that peppered the two terms of George W. Bush administration.

The detente between the two countries are already doing so by a new agreement on strategic arms reduction as well as support from Kremlin on issues such as the nuclear Iran or Afghanistan conflict.

After these steps in the diplomatic sphere, Barack Obama is now willing to extend this progress to the commercial field.

This perspective also concerns Kremlin, which made the economy a priority after it was severely hurt by the global financial crisis. Russia recorded a contraction of 7.9% of GDP in 2009.

In addition to the long awaited announcement of U.S. support for Russia’s entry to WTO, the two leaders said they reached an agreement on the resumption of U.S. poultry exports to Russia, that Moscow had decided to ban last January in advancing safety reasons.

During the joint press conference, Obama also said China had made progress by announcing that it would loosen its currency regime but it was still “too early to tell” if the appreciation of Yuan would be sufficient.

It is well known that nanotechnology is too small to see with the naked eye and yet chemists have found a way to make it even less perceptible by creating a nanoscopic form of invisible ink.

The technique was published in „Angewandte Chemie International” and offers a way of growing nanocrystals of a much higher purity than achieved to date.

Hubertus Marbach at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and his colleagues removed oxygen ions from a silicon oxide wafer by using an electron beam, leaving nanoscopic dents in the surface. Virtually there is no visible trace, but a hidden message written onto the wafer with the electron beam is revealed later by flowing iron pentacarbonyl gas across the surface. The iron pentacarbonyl gas reacts at the indentations and forms carbon monoxide while leaving solid and reflective iron nanocrystals fixed to the surface.

According to Hubertus Marbach the electron beams are used commercially to deposit nanocrystals like in semiconductor industry which uses the technology to repair defects in the lithographic masks used to create integrated circuits. But this involves targeting electron beams directly at molecules like iron pentacarbonyl, forcing them to decompose into iron nanocrystals. The harsh process leads to carbon and oxygen impurity levels as high as 60 % within the crystals. With the new technique the crystals are over 95 % iron.

„Instead of using a sledgehammer approach to destroy the iron pentacarbonyl molecules, ours is gentler”, because the decomposition of the molecules is purely chemical, said Hubertus Marbach.

„It’s a nice technique. The problem with existing electron-beam deposition is that the quality is not great”, which affects the properties of the nanocrystals, said Russell Cowburn at Imperial College London.

The punishment was quick to General Stanley McChrystal. 24 hours after the publication of an interview highly critical of the strategy of the Obama administration, the chief of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan was revoked Wednesday. The American president has chosen to replace General David Petraeus. “This is a change of the man, not of the strategy,” insisted the Democratic president. He also claimed his team, undermined by internal conflicts, a unity of effort on the Afghan file. Petraeus’s appointment must still be confirmed by the Senate. The general, Stanley McChrystal supervisor as chief of U.S. Central Command oversees operations in the Middle East as well as interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was the architect of the “surge” against the insurgency of 2007, which has improved security in Iraq.

Asked to explain his confidence in Rolling Stone, General Stanley McChrystal, based in Kabul, was summoned to the White House. The meeting between the senior and the president lasted 20 minutes. During his speech, Barack Obama defended himself from sin of pride. “War is more important than a man, he was a soldier, a general or a president.” If McChrystal pointed out its functions is not “due to personal insults but because his conduct did not satisfy the criteria required for a general and threatened to undermine the confidence of the troops and American strategists .

“Considerable Regret ” for Obama

Paying tribute to the career of Stanley McChrystal, Barack Obama said to see him go “with considerable regret”, but “it is a good decision for national security and our soldiers,” he said. For its part, the general said will “see the mission” of the United States in Afghanistan “successful”. “I support the presidential strategy in Afghanistan”

ACORN is about to realize its worst nightmare, as today,  the U.S. House voted 345-75 to completely defund ACORN. The vote comes just days after the outbreak of undercover investigations led by documentary maker James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, as well as an overwhelming Senate vote to cut all federal housing funds to ACORN. ACORN receives a large portion of its funding from the U.S. Government, with claims that they were potentially to receive billions from the new stimulus bills that were recently passed.

You can see the complete vote tally here.

According to Boston.com, the following statement was quoted by House Republican Eric Cantor:

“ACORN has violated serious federal laws, and today the House voted to ensure that taxpayer dollars would no longer be used to fund this corrupt organization. All federal ties should be severed with ACORN, and the FBI should investigate its activity,” Representative Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican said in a statement. “This united Republican effort to defund ACORN is a victory for the rule of law and taxpayers across the country.”

The Senate only voted to defund one portion of funding, to be clear, this was a vote to completely sever Federal funding to ACORN.

More to come….

In one of the most head-turning incidents in the history of Presidential address events, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) stood up and shouted “YOU LIE!” after President stated the following in his address to a joint session of Congress this evening:

“There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.”

While this is a blatant disrespect of the President of the United States, especially when he’s speaking in front of the world, I think it just goes to show you that as much as they want you to believe that things are starting to turn to peaches and creme, they really are NOT behind the scenes.

It’s more like peaches and poo.

Now here is one thing I guarantee that will happen to Rep. Wilson in his home district – he will not only gain votes from his constituents, but he’ll NEVER be voted out of office because to them, he had the STEEL balls to stand up to the biggest man in the land while he was speaking about the most controversial issue in decades. His people will hail him a hero, even though he has already released statements bearing his sincere apologies (which is standard procedure, mind you).

His burst of temporary insanity drew dirty looks from everyone in the place (except his buddies), and most noticeably from Michelle Obama, Obama himself, Pelosi, and VP Biden. Rep. Wilson has started a hailstorm of response from both sides, some cheering him on, and others downing him as hard as they can on Twitter and his official web page. He’s definitely going to have a full inbox in the morning.

You can read some of the citizen reactions on Twitter here.

And here is the video of the actual incident:

Apparently, Hoyer and crew are deciding on whether or not and how to punish Wilson, and of course, we’ll keep you updated.