Link: http://rebelreports.com/post/120143061/breaking-15-million-settlement-in-wiwa-vs-shell-oil

Today, the parties in Wiwa v. Shell agreed to settle human rights claims charging the Royal Dutch/Shell company, its Nigerian subsidiary, Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC or Shell Nigeria), and the former head of its Nigerian operation, Brian Anderson, with complicity in the torture, killing, and other abuses of Ogoni leader Ken Saro-Wiwa and other non-violent Nigerian activists in the mid-1990s in the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta.

Link: http://www.trifter.com/Africa/15-Awesome-Sites-to-See-in-Namibia.774295

[Click on photo to enlarge.] [Located in Southern Namibia along the Fish River is the second largest canyon in the world the Fish River Canyon which is roughly 100 miles long and up to 16.5 miles wide.] Namibia is one of the poorest countries in the world with an unemployment rate approaching 40% and is the second most sparsely populated country in the world. Namibia relies heavily on tourism for its economy and the country is really an eco-tourists dream. It has tremendous sites to see set in such a sparsely populated country that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt decided to have their daughter Shiloh Nouvel born in Swakopmund, Namibia in 2006. Here are 15 great things to see and visit in Namibia.

Link: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-2086-NY-Foreign-Policy-Examiner~y2009m6d6-Campaign-in-Israel-against-Obama-the-antisemite

They didn't even wait for the speech in Cairo. According to a report in Courrier International, on June 3rd, over 130 people gathered in front of the American Consulate in Jerusalem to protest against President Obama's Middle East tour. Protesters carried banners that defended the extension of settlements into Palestinian territory. -So, call Obama and the rest of the world antisemitic, - clearly it is no longer impressing anyone. The people who really care about Israel's survival are going to do something about it. And perhaps some of the Israelis will learn how to stop the hate. Jerusalem Post: Israeli minister proposes Israeli sanctions on US.

Link: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/06/08/2592391.htm?section=world

Up to 100 Amazon natives have been killed after Friday's military crackdown on protesters in Peru and the situation is expected to worsen, says a Canadian Indigenous rights activist. Twenty-two-year-old Ben Powless is working alongside Peru's national organisation of Amazon Indigenous people, AIDESEP, and fears more lives will be lost, with the government now labelling protesters as "terrorists".

Many Peruvians - not just Indigenous - are upset by plans to open land in Peru's Amazon region to oil, gas and mineral exploration, even though much of the land is officially protected. The Government has recently signed a number of free trade agreements with the United States and Canada, seeking to change domestic laws and encourage foreign investment in the Amazon. InfoShop: Massacre in Peru ongoing.

Link: http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2009/06/08/noah-s-ark-revisited

Mammals have only been able to attain large dimensions on land once atmospheric CO2 concentrations declined toward c. 500 ppm during the Eocene (56-34 million years ago) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammal), with related cooling of c.5 degrees C, formation of the Antarctic ice sheet and decline of sea levels by c.70 meters. current atmospheric carbon gas levels (CO2 - 387 ppm; CO2+CH4 >450 ppm equivalent) threaten fast-tracking toward the top of ice age conditions.

Link: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHA20090606&articleId=13872

A recovery is supposed to be in the works in the midst of increased savings, declining debt balances on credit cards, more bankruptcies, higher unemployment and new wave of foreclosures. Consumer participation in GDP is down from 72% to 70.4%. Bank and other financial firms’ balance sheets are what they say they are and we have a stock market bear rally built on sand just as we had in 1931. And, lest we forget, bogus government statistics calculated to confuse professionals and investors alike.

Link: http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2009/06/08/holocaust-denial-zionist-style/

Being a ‘page one’ entry on the S H I T List gives me special privileges. One of them is being the recipient of almost every piece of zionist hate mail that is written. Yesterday I was sent a zionist position on the speech President Obama made during his recent trip to the Middle East…..

Link: http://www.uruknet.de:80/?s1=1&p=54962&s2=09

The world has always offered certain apparent pleasures that are best enjoyed under particular conditions: a mind that deliberately and systematically avoids every difficult question of fact, just as it rejects inquiry into all instances of divergence and contradiction between proclaimed intentions and continuing patterns of action; a willingness to succumb to the easy, sentimental allure of contentless phrases and slogans, provided one joins the pretense that pretty-sounding utterances carry nobility and significance; an approach to analysis that voluntarily restricts itself to the familiar, the conventional, and the comfortable.

Link: http://www.ikhwanweb.com/Article.asp?ID=20385&LevelID=1&SectionID=0

"The speech was cleverly written in the way it addressed the Muslim world... and in the way it showed respect to the Muslim heritage," Meshaal told IPS in an exclusive interview. "But I think it"s not enough. What"s needed are deeds, actions on the ground, and a change of policies."

Link: http://www.alternet.org/rights/140022/little_known_military_thug_squad_still_brutalizing_prisoners_at_gitmo_under_obama/?page=entire

The 'Black Shirts' of Guantanamo routinely terrorize prisoners, breaking bones, gouging eyes, squeezing testicles, and 'dousing' them with chemicals.

Link: http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=97390&sectionid=351020203

The Western-backed March 14 coalition headed by Saad al-Hariri, claims parliamentary election victory as a Hezbollah politician concedes defeat.

Link: http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2009/06/07/75137.html

Tel Aviv has 936 lawsuits against them for Gaza assault. Israel was set to face an avalanche of war crimes lawsuits from Palestinian lawyers who accused Tel Aviv of dozens of crimes five months after its three week assault on the Gaza Strip, the German daily Der Spiegel reported Saturday.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t361Zgkxm1k

Like thousands of soldiers on thousands of battlefields, we wait for the coming storm. Yes, I survived the tornado threat to my town. -Miracle, huh?

Link: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/pers-j08.shtml

The Obama administration has already ruled out the only rational response to the crisis of healthcare availability: the establishment of a single-payer system in which the federal government would guarantee universal access to healthcare as a matter of right. Every other advanced industrialized country has some form of universal coverage. But such a system would eliminate the tens of billions raked in by insurance companies whose “business model” requires that they limit coverage, deny treatment or reject bills—in other words, it would infringe on the “right” of MetLife, Aetna, CIGNA and other giant corporations to make a profit from illness and disease.

Link: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/nine-more-police-killed-in-amazon-protests-1698891.html

President Alan Garcia labored yesterday to contain Peru's worst political violence in years, as nine more police officers were killed in a bloody standoff with Amazon Indians fighting his efforts to exploit oil, gas and other resources on their native lands.

Link: http://www.abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=7773867&page=1

Ronnie Holloway's eyes were still black and blue one week after he was allegedly beaten by a Passaic, N.J., police officer -- an attack that was inadvertently caught on a video surveillance camera.

Link: http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/63085

"Instead of calling for a cessation of construction of new outposts, Barack Obama should be demanding a total withdrawal of Israeli citizens and military from Palestinian lands to the 1967 borders, leaving Israeli "improvements" intact for the use of the Palestinian people as they see fit."

Link: http://english.globalarabnetwork.com/200906071088/Opinion/denied-infamy-the-israeli-attack-on-the-uss-liberty.html

Japan’s surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, described by then-President Roosevelt as “a date which will live in infamy.” Less catastrophic but more treacherous and deserving of infamy was the deliberate Israeli air and naval attack upon the USS Liberty, a clearly marked naval intelligence ship, on June 8, 1967. After several hours of aerial surveillance, unmarked aircraft attacked the USS Liberty with gunfire, rockets and napalm.

Link: http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=97297&sectionid=351020202

Israel could soon be charged with hundreds of war crimes as Palestinian lawyers file 936 lawsuits against the Israeli military five months after its three week war on Gaza.

Link: http://bellaciao.org/en/spip.php?article18866

Nobody caught this in the Western media—or the world media in general. I’m referring to a major, major gaffe in Obama’s Cairo speech that concerns the history of Muslims in Spain. I quote: "Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition." Holy crap!!!... I nearly choked on my granola!

Link: http://news.antiwar.com/2009/06/07/clinton-threatens-retaliation-in-case-iran-nukes-israel/

Spending yet more time publicly railing against a nuclear weapons program which both US intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Agency insist doesn’t exist, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today insisted that the American nuclear umbrella in fact extends over Israel, as well as “a number of nations” and that the US would retaliate “massively” in the event of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel.

Link: http://wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/jobs-j06.shtml

The official US unemployment rate rose sharply in May to 9.4 percent. A broader and more accurate reading puts the unemployment rate at 16.4 percent. One of every six American workers is now unemployed or underemployed.

Link: http://wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/pers-j06.shtml

This weekend’s European election takes place under conditions of fierce domestic and international tensions. Germany’s conflicts with France, on the one hand, and the US, on the other, are intensifying as national conflicts within Europe threaten to blow the European Union apart.

Link: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/06/05-7

In a packed and sometimes contentious hearing [1] on Capitol Hill Thursday, representatives of the oil and gas industry and their state regulators vigorously defended the practice of injecting toxic fluids underground without federal regulatory oversight [2].

Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/05/AR2009060503490_pf.html

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton forcefully rejected yesterday Israeli claims that the Bush administration had secretly agreed to expanding Jewish settlements on the West Bank, deepening the impasse between the two countries.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jun/06/david-carradine-bangkok-death

The family of the American actor David Carradine have asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to help investigate his death after his body was found in a hotel cupboard in Bangkok. Carradine's family do not believe he committed suicide and are troubled by conflicting accounts about the circumstances of his death, Mark Geragos, a lawyer for Carradine's brother Keith, told CNN's Larry King last night.

Link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/hezbollah-no-threat-former-lebanese-pm/article1169635/

The group ‘is not the monster it is made out to be in Israel and the West' A respected former Lebanese prime minister says the West has nothing to fear should the Hezbollah-led opposition win Sunday's national election.

Link: http://www.larouchepac.com/lpactv?nid=10540

The information from Europe, from experts â€" let's keep it that way â€" is that what happened with the Air France Flt447, as far as anyone can tell now, from among the relevant experts â€" this is not official, but it's the opinion of the relevant experts â€" that one of two things could have brought down the plane, in a pattern of the type which has been presented to us. Both involve an explosion underneath the cockpit, in the nose of the aircraft. Such an explosion would have neutralized all control of the electronics for the pilot and the plane would have gone out of control.

Link: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/06/03/israel/index.html

Both Likud Party members in Israel as well as their Americans supporters – including members of both parties in the U.S. Congress – are beginning to complain that the Obama administration is unduly "interfering" in Israeli politics by insisting on a full cessation of settlement growth. -Identically, if Israel wants to be free of what it and some of its U.S. supporters call "interference" from the Obama administration, that’s very easy to achieve: Israel can stop asking for tens of billions of dollars of American taxpayer money, huge amounts of military and weapons supplies for its various wars, and unyielding American diplomatic protection at the U.N. But as long as Israel remains dependent on the U.S. in countless ways, then Obama not only has the right -- but he has the obligation -- to demand that Israel cease activities which harm U.S. interests.

Link: http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/06/05/corporations-behind-efforts-to-label-sotomayor-racist/

Corporate interests posing as a grassroots conservative group are behind attacks on President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, a RAW STORY investigation has found.

Link: http://wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/paki-j05.shtml

The arrival of Obama administration special envoy Richard Holbrooke in Pakistan on Wednesday serves to underscore that the massive military operation taking place in the country’s north-west is a proxy war on behalf on US imperialism. As part of completing the transformation of Afghanistan into a client-state in Central Asia, Obama is demanding that the Pakistani government suppress the local Islamist movements that lend support to the Afghan resistance over the border.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/05/barack-obama-cairo

Obama's long-awaited speech demonstrated little to suggest America will pursue any course beyond its own interests. This is hard. It's hard because we so need to believe that Obama is about change, that he's wise, that he's good, that he has the interests of the world – rather than just the interests of the United States – at heart.

Link: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/140455/economic_fallout_has_spurred_an_epidemic_of_murder_and_suicide_that_has_gone_largely_unnoticed_/

After David B. Kellermann, the chief financial officer of beleaguered mortgage giant Freddie Mac, tied a noose and hanged himself in the basement of his Vienna, Virginia, home, the New York Times made it a front-page story. The stresses of the job in economic tough times, its reporters implied, had driven him to this extreme act.

Link: http://socialistworker.org/2009/06/05/nightmare-that-doesnt-end

THE SUICIDE of Guantánamo Bay detainee Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh al Hanashi on June 1 offered a stark reminder that the Obama administration has yet to uphold its pledge to treat prisoners of the "war on terror" more humanely than its predecessors.

Link: http://socialistworker.org/2009/06/05/how-the-superrich-live

The 10 richest people in the U.S.-- a rogue's gallery of serial polluters, budget-slashers, CIA contractors, union-busters and right-wing nuts. "Americans might get angry sometimes," "but we don't hate the rich. We prefer to laugh at them." Newsweek couldn't be more wrong. The 10 percent of Americans who rely on food stamps, the 25 percent of Ohioans who are waiting in lines at food banks, the 500,000 people who lost their jobs last month and the millions more who can't find work--these people aren't laughing.

Link: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1090527.html

Residents of the Misgav bloc of communities in the Galilee consider themselves to be liberal, peace-loving people who support coexistence with their Arab neighbors and even root for Bnei Sakhnin, the soccer club based in a nearby Arab town considered a prominent symbol of that community. Which is why they were shocked this week when proposals raised at local council meetings to accept only applicants who shared their

Link: http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22777.htm

A CNN headline, reporting Obama's plans for his June 4 Cairo address, reads 'Obama looks to reach the soul of the Muslim world.' Perhaps that captures his intent, but more significant is the content hidden in the rhetorical stance, or more accurately, omitted.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/06/us/politics/06gitmo.html?_r=1

The Obama administration is considering a change in the law for the military commissions at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that would clear the way for detainees facing the death penalty to plead guilty without a full trial.

Link: http://jnoubiyeh.blogspot.com/2009/06/obama-to-muslims-put-up-and-shut-up.html

What are we to make of Obama’s speech at Cairo University in Egypt? "I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect." Cairo is the capital of Egypt, an American puppet state whose ruler suppresses the aspirations of Egyptian Muslims and cooperates with Israel in the blockade of Gaza.

Link: http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,25585276-5006003,00.html?from=public_rss

AIR France received a bomb threat just days before Flight 447 mysteriously crashed, killing 228 passengers, raising new fears that the jet was a victim of a terrorist attack. Argentine police received an anonymous telephone warning on May 27 about an Air France flight from Buenos Aires to Paris. Police searched the plane before passengers boarded but found nothing and it was allowed to take off with a delay of 32 minutes, an Air France spokesman revealed today. El Mundo: Un piloto dice que vio caer un 'destello de luz blanca' donde desapareció el avión francés: "De repente, observamos en la lejanía un fuerte e intenso destello de luz blanca que tomó una trayectoria descendente y vertical que se desvaneció en seis segundos". ["Suddenly, at a distance, we saw a strong and intense flash of white light plunging downwards. It was gone in about 6 seconds."]