On May 7 we published Google’s reply where Google wrote, "We currently don't include sites that are primarily news aggregators". This is FALSE, of course. [See below] Today – after several attempts to have more information on the arbitrary exclusion of Uruknet from Google News – Google was kind enough to reply again: Hi Vincenzo, Thank you for your reply and for providing us with this additional information about your site. We apologize for our delayed response. As we mentioned in our previous email, we currently don't include sites that are primarily news aggregators. Please be assured, however, that we'll log your site for future consideration. Also, if you know of a site that you think shouldn't be included in Google News, please send us the URL of the site in question and we’ll look into it. We sincerely appreciate your interest in Google News. Regards, The Google Team Google keeps lying but, as bad as this surely is, it’s not even the worst part in this Orwellian e-mail. The Google Team now would like to engage Uruknet as its informer?????????????After embracing censorship and self-censorship , we wonder if delation is now officially Google’s policy.

In Congress, it's the unimaginable: a Senate without its liberal lion. But that prospect, seemingly life-altering, descended on Edward M. Kennedy's colleagues Tuesday after word spread through the Capitol that the 46-year Senate veteran has brain cancer. LA Times: Kennedy's tumor prognosis is weakened by age.

Hillary Clinton won a landslide victory in Kentucky Tuesday, but momentum -- and a growing sense of inevitability -- is now firmly on Barack Obama's side. Sen. Barack Obama has picked up a majority of the pledged delegates, according to CNN calculations. He took Oregon last night, but it was his symbolic victory with pledged delegates that was the storyline. The one-time long shot for the Democratic nomination has a majority of pledged delegates to the Democratic Convention and is now about 70 delegates shy of the finish line. Yahoo: Clinton calls victory in Kentucky a vote of confidence. TinesOnline: Barack Obama scores Oregon win as focus shifts to John McCain. '08 IS RIGGED. -Don't Vote!

An Israeli press report that US President George W. Bush intends to launch a military attack on Iran before he leaves office at the beginning of next year prompted a heated denial from the White House Tuesday. The article, which appeared in Tuesday’s Jerusalem Post, cited a report on Israeli Army Radio, quoting Israeli officials who had met with Bush and his delegation during their visit to Israel last week. “A senior member of the president’s entourage said during a closed meeting that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were of the opinion that military action was called for,” the article quoted an Israel official as saying. MWAW: From Basra to Beirut: US is gunning for Iran. Global Research: Planned US Israeli Attack on Iran: Will there be a War against Iran?

In 2002, concerned about the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, FBI agents created a "war-crimes file" to document accusations against U.S. military personnel, a Justice Department report disclosed Tuesday. The Justice Department inspector general's report, which took four years to complete, provides the fullest account to date of dissent and confusion over the interrogation tactics used by the military and the CIA. In one of several previously undisclosed episodes, the report found that U.S. military interrogators appeared to have collaborated with visiting Chinese officials at Guantánamo Bay to disrupt the sleep of Chinese Muslims held there, waking them up every 15 minutes the night before their interviews by the Chinese. The report describes what one official called "trench warfare" between the FBI and the military over the methods used on detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq. CBS News: Report: CIA Pushed Torture Envelope.

Last year, former deputy attorney general James Comey revealed that in 2004, he refused to “certify” the legality of certain aspects of the National Security Agency (NSA) spy program. Comey witnessed Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card try to force a bed-ridden John Ashcroft to approve the program. Comey, however, did not publicly give specifics as to what program he opposed.

The use of depleted uranium (DU) munitions by the U.S. military may lead to a death toll far higher than that from the nuclear bombs dropped at the end of World War II. DU is a waste product of uranium enrichment, containing approximately one-third the radioactive isotopes of naturally occurring uranium. Because of its high density, it is used in armor- or tank-piercing ammunition. It has been fired by the U.S. and British militaries in the two Iraq wars and in Afghanistan, as well as by NATO forces in Kosovo and the Israeli military in Lebanon and Palestine. Global Research: VIDEO: Beyond Treason - Chemical and Biological Warfare.

The United Nations estimates that more than 100,000 people may have been killed in the devastating cyclone in Burma and that some 220,000 are reported missing. But approaching three weeks after the storm, some 75 percent of the 3 million or more severely affected have yet to receive any food, water, shelter, medication for the sick, or means of escape from flooded regions. The Burmese junta has denied access for the delivery of humanitarian aid to all but a handful of outsiders. The next wave of dying is already underway, from thirst, starvation, untreated injuries, and infectious diseases. Major health threats for survivors include water-borne diseases such as typhoid, dysentery, cholera, and e. coli; food-borne diseases from eating poor or rotten food, compounded by the lack of cooking fuel and equipment; and the mosquito-borne diseases malaria and dengue fever, now compounded by the huge numbers of people sleeping outside and surrounded by water. Time.com: Burma's Woes: A Threat to the Junta. The Nation: Regime-Quakes in Burma and China.

Ever here some fool say that Palestine was never a state? Or even more ridiculous, that Palestine never existed? If you are one of the many idiots who say that I say to you: That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Palestine was a State even in My Grandmother's life time. Of all the Jewish Prime Ministers only one has ever actually been born in Israel. Even in Biblical times Jews never made up more than 3% of the population. WUFYS: "A Land without a People for a People without a Land"?

An Israeli military court sentenced three Israeli servicemen to ten days behind bars as a disciplinary measure for "killing" a Palestinian man in northern Ramallah during a picnic. The Israeli army radio said late Tuesday that the three soldiers, all from Beit Eil settlement, had fired at the man in Ein Yabroud killing him instantly. The soldiers claimed that they came under fire and when they returned fire they killed the unarmed youth. The soldiers had gone on their picnic without a permit from their superiors, the radio noted.

Official casualty figures in the May 12 earthquake disaster in southwestern China’s Sichuan province continue to rise, amid continuing concerns about possible aftershocks, flash flooding and sanitary conditions. Reports have also begun to emerge of organized protests against shoddy construction, especially by parents whose children were killed in the numerous school collapses caused by the earthquake.

In a different time, in another country, where violence and terror did not stalk the streets, Dr. Amir Hussain could practice psychiatry the way he once hoped to. He can see it in his mind: the clean, tastefully decorated hospital wards, the well-stocked pharmacies, the gleaming laboratory equipment, the thickly carpeted consulting rooms, the halfway houses and outreach teams that help chronically ill patients reestablish their lives outside the hospital.

Every day I promise myself "Thou shall not blog today" and then I read a piece of news that just makes me enraged. Look at this one for instance -Iranian shelling of Iraqi/Kurdish villages - a member of the "Iraqi parliament" (hahahahahaha) is astonished over the government's position regarding these Iranian shelling.

Forced drugging. Abuse. Death. That's what workplace-based immigration enforcement without deeper reform looks like.

Andrew Lobaczewski studied at close range a deviant category of humans who, when they manage to grab pivotal positions of power, hold a devastating potential for raining death and destruction down on humanity, simply to further their own interests. These individuals are known as psychopaths, and they move skillfully and purposely throughout the higher echelons of the global body politic. And like clockwork, they slot themselves into all the significant seats of power.

No country in the world helps the United States more than Israel does, asserted Opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu in the Knesset Monday afternoon. The address came as part of a special welcome session for US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is currently heading a delegation of US congressmen. The rest can be read HERE.

Our planet Earth has been convulsed by tsunamis, typhoons, tornados; by hurricanes, earthquakes; floods, fires and volcanic eruptions. Less eye catching for the media are droughts and water pollution, which are linked with the present famines and food shortages. They are causes for future loss of life. . Index first researched many problems associated with water in Water: the Impending Apocolypse (November 2007).

It didn't take long Tuesday for a posse of Inyo County sheriff's deputies and forensics experts to mark their first find while searching for buried human remains at a remote, sun-scorched ranch once used as a hangout by the notorious Charles Manson family. Just 2 inches beneath the surface of a 3-by-6-foot plot lay a .38-caliber bullet casing.

The Dalai Lama has appeared in front of MPs at Westminster, amid criticism of the government's decision not to give him a Downing Street reception.

Meet George Lucas, office supply salesman. If he had listened to his father and gone into the family business, that's what the creator of Star Wars and Indiana Jones might be doing. "He wanted me to go into his business. I said, 'I'm absolutely not going to do it,' " Lucas recalls. "He sold office equipment in a store. I said, 'I will never go to work every day doing the same thing day in and day out.'" It sort of gives a new perspective to all Darth Vader's talk of, "Join me and together we can rule the galaxy!" Lucas says the tension between fathers and their children is a deep part of both of his most famous projects, and it turns up again in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, opening in many cities tonight and Thursday worldwide. The last time around, Jones was treasure-hunting with his aloof professor father in The Last Crusade, and the battling father-son dynamic is even more obvious in every Star Wars movie after The Empire Strikes Back.

Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent The Guardian, Tuesday May 20 2008 Article historyAbout this articleClose This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday May 20 2008 on p20 of the International section. It was last updated at 00:01 on May 20 2008. A female rebel commander with a formidable reputation has surrendered to Colombian forces, delivering a fresh blow to South America's last big insurgency.

Why the press gives McCain a pass for consorting with batshit holy men, but condemns Obama to talk-show hell for the same sin. John McCain has some seriously screwed-up holy men surrounding him. First, there's the Rev. John Hagee, a hate-monger and certifiable loon who believes that Hurricane Katrina was God's judgment on New Orleans for planning a gay parade, calls Catholicism a "false cult system" that conspired with Hitler to exterminate the Jews, and believes that America's divine duty is to destroy Iran.

It's easy enough to imagine a party marking this fine occasion, with antiwar protesters, civil libertarians, community leaders, environmentalists, health-care advocates and trade unionists clinking glasses to toast the end of an unfortunate era. Even Americans not normally inclined to political life might be tempted to join the festivities, bringing their own bottles of bubbly to the party. Given that presidential job approval ratings have rarely broken 40% for two years and now remain obdurately around or below 30% - historic lows - it would not be surprising if this were a sizeable celebration.

A top official at the US Environmental Protection Agency confirmed that the agency denied strong carbon emissions limits proposed by California after the White House intervened, it emerged today.

Myanmar has been hit devastated by Cyclone Nargis and tens of thousands are dead, tens of thousands more require food and medical aid.1 The Myanmar regime is accused of blocking and delaying aid to its people.

“There is a huge number of [secret prisoners] being held in Iraq, and one of the intriguing aspects of this that doesn’t get much reporting is that the US is bringing people into Iraq from elsewhere to hold them there, simply because that keeps [the media and lawyers] away from the prisoners so they can’t get any sort of legal rights,” reports British attorney Clive Stafford Smith. [includes rush transcript] Real Video Stream | Real Audio Stream

Democrat Barack Obama has a message for Tennessee's Republican Party: "Lay off my wife. If they think that they're going to try to make Michelle an issue in this campaign, they should be careful because that I find unacceptable, the notion that you start attacking my wife or my family." He called the strategy "low class."

The British Government is accused of being the chief obstacle to the signing of a treaty to ban cluster bombs, which have maimed and killed thousands of civilians worldwide.

A media rights group called for a full probe into a 2003 US shelling that killed two foreign journalists at a Baghdad hotel, claiming that new evidence showed the incident was not an accident.

The International Federation of Journalists said the United States should "tell the whole truth" about the incident at the Palestine Hotel on April 8, 2003, just a day before Baghdad fell to US invading forces.

The IFJ said a former US army sergeant had reported seeing secret US documents that listed the hotel as a possible target, a statement which it said "exposed as a cover-up" the US position that the shelling was an accident.

"Slowly the awful truth about the events of that day are emerging," Aidan White, general secretary of the Brussels-based IFJ, said in a statement.

A United Nations investigator released a preliminary report last week citing widespread civilian deaths in Afghanistan, often at the hands of unaccountable units led by the CIA or other foreign intelligence agencies. The investigator is Philip Alston, a New York University professor serving as the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Council on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary execution. His report provides a partial glimpse into the illegal actions of intelligence agencies, occupying forces, and Afghan police, as they seek to repress opposition to the US-led occupation and US-backed government.

The events marking 60 years of Nakba, or Catastrophe, have brought to my attention a very different type of Palestinian solidarity activism: it is young, vibrant, dynamic and creative. It’s a new form of struggle that goes far beyond the old dogmatic clichés, a fierce battle that aims at exposing the Jewish state for what it is: a racist, chauvinist, apartheid state.

Representatives from more than 100 countries have gathered at a conference in Dublin, Ireland's capital, in an attempt to agree a global ban on the use of cluster bombs.

Recently released government research on the health of the American people brought the nation some troubling information -- our life expectancy, which many proudly assumed was steadily climbing, is actually declining in many parts of the country.

Subaih also disclosed that many prisoners are subjected to daily physical and psychological torture at the hands of a special task force assigned to suppress women called the Nakshon brigade whose members are heavily armed with batons and tear and poison gas grenades, adding that this brigade uses batons to attack women priosners and drags them on the floor by pulling their hair. The ex-detainee strongly denounced the human rights organizations especially those concerned with women's rights for their passivity towards what Palestinian women and their children are exposed to in Israeli jails.

Branded As Collaborators By Insurgents, Many Iraqis Who Helped The U.S. Face Grave Danger The refugee crisis in Iraq is among the biggest humanitarian emergencies in the world. Millions of Iraqis have fled the war, many marked for death because they worked for the United States. Didn't Rumsfeld and the other bushites say that Iraq would be a 'cake walk', that the Iraqi people would throw flowers at American soldier's feet as they entered Baghdad, that America is bringing freedom and democracy?

Washington must assert to the rest of the world that if they want to be friends with America, they need to do more to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, visiting US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said Sunday in an exclusive interview with The Jerusalem Post. Who is Nancy Pelosi?

Mike Malloy's reading of my essay on Bush's comments about Nazi's on the Knesset floor brought me to tears. I listened to his passionate reading and I simply reacted while listening. I got up and paced around, sat back down, got up again, all the while shaking because I heard what it was that I had conveyed to someone when they spoke those words back. I don't know if my piece is as powerful as Malloy's reading - somehow I doubt it - but I urge you to listen to his reading of it and see for yourself if in hearing it, it added something more than I think I alone could ever have gotten across.

Malvina Schwartz survived Auschwitz as a young girl. She managed to make her way to America and eventually came to Los Angeles where I published her oral history in 1977 in the Los Angeles Times. I am certain that Malvina is no longer alive. But if she had managed to survive to today, I'd like to think she would have something to say about George Bush's misuse of the Holocaust for political gain in his speech to the Israeli Knesset.

Families' fears, official secrecy and lies kept 1950 Korea mass killings hidden from history. One journalist's bid to report mass murder in South Korea in 1950 was blocked by his British publisher. Another correspondent was denounced as a possibly treasonous fabricator when he did report it. In South Korea, down the generations, fear silenced those who knew.

An aid charity has warned that 30,000 Burmese children face starvation due to the delay in distributing international aid in the wake of Cyclone Nargis. Save the Children said that under-fives living in the Irrawaddy delta were already "acutely malnourished" when the cyclone hit on May 2 and it believed some children in the stricken areas of Burma may now be dying from lack of food.

Believe the advocates of a treaty banning cluster munitions, and the international community is about to take a decisive step toward curbing the use of a weapon that inflicts terrible suffering, particularly on civilians. Believe the US government, and the measure they propose threatens to undermine the NATO alliance that has underpinned Western security since World War II. What a shame that America has been taken over by a tiny gang of murderous war criminals.

British soldiers fighting alongside American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq would face criminal prosecution if the government goes ahead with plans to sign a treaty limiting the use of cluster bombs, senior US diplomats have warned.

More than 360 workers who dealt with the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster are known to have died, New York health officials said in May. Of the more than 600 diagnosed with cancer (other than blood cancer), 80 are included in the death count. Other deaths were traced to blood cancers and heart and circulatory diseases.

"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

David Roy Park began finding empty hives where his bees should have been in the winter of 2006. In a matter of months, he went from 4,000 hives to 1,600. “You go to the bee yard and open the hive and there's just no bees in it,” said Park, a fourth-generation beekeeper

"It is hard to fight wars when the national economy is destroyed, except for the desperate act of dropping a few atomic or hydrogen bombs."

After faithfully funding the war in Iraq for more than five years, the US House of Representatives voted Thursday, for the first time ever, against a so-called supplemental appropriations bill to pay for the fighting to continue.

Far from this decision signaling any Congressional rebellion against the war policy of the Bush administration, however, the bill’s defeat was—from the standpoint of the House Democratic leadership—an unanticipated and unwelcome political detour, precipitated by the Republicans.

The funding measure provided $162.5 billion to pay for the US wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan into the summer of 2009—several months after Bush leaves office and the next president takes control of the White House. When it was put to a vote, 132 Republicans sat on their hands, answering “present.” As a result, it went down to defeat by a narrow margin, with 141 voting in favor and 149 against.

Two weeks have passed since Cyclone Nargis struck the Irrawaddy delta region of Burma. Yesterday, the state media sharply revised the official death toll upward to 78,000 dead and 55,917 missing. The number of injured has risen from 1,403 to 19,359. Previous estimates from the UN and International Red Cross put the number of dead at 100,000 or more.

I am not sure what was the worse part of this week. Living in Lebanon? Or reading the outrageous words of George Bush? Several times, I have asked myself this question: have words lost their meaning?

· Cost of crude has shot up sixfold in past eight years
· Bush seeks Saudi Arabian help to curb rising prices
Ashley Seager The Guardian, Saturday May 17 2008 Article historyAbout this articleClose This article appeared in the Guardian on Saturday May 17 2008 on p39 of the Financial section. It was last updated at 00:05 on May 17 2008. World oil prices jumped to a fresh record of almost $128 a barrel yesterday on the back of a weaker dollar, fears over a shortage of diesel and a bullish price prediction from Goldman Sachs.

Nazareth — It has been a week of adulation from world leaders, ostentatious displays of military prowess, and street parties. Heads of state have rubbed shoulders with celebrities to pay homage to the Jewish state on its 60th birthday, while a million Israelis reportedly headed off to the country’s forests to enjoy the national pastime: a barbecue.

Thirty years ago, when the state of Israel had traveled only half its present journey through time since 1948 I interviewed General Matti Peled in New York. “What do you think will happen,” I asked the former general, “If no Israeli government ever emerges strong enough to take such a path?” “Oh, I think we’ll end up like the Crusaders,” he answered. “It might take some time, but just like them, in the end, we’ll be gone.” It was startling at the time to hear any Israeli, particularly a military man, talk like that.

The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex on the main American military base in Afghanistan, officials said, in a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come. And there will be no end to the wars.

Now all bets are off. We have fallen under the spell of money, faction, and fear, and the great American experience in creating a different future together has been subjugated to individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and power -and to the claims of empire, with its ravenous demands and stuporous distractions.

President Bush used a speech to the Israeli Parliament on Thursday to liken those who would negotiate with “terrorists and radicals” to appeasers of the Nazis — a remark widely interpreted as a rebuke to Senator Barack Obama, who has advocated greater engagement with countries like Iran and Syria. US New & WR: Obama Erupts At Bush "Appeasement" Remark. GWB: I Agree with Bush . . . Stop Appeasing the Terrorists! The Guardian: How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power. at-Largely: All the President's Nazis (real and imagined): An Open Letter to Bush.

Get ready for a puke read: President George Bush lavished anniversary praise on Israel yesterday, as Palestinians commemorated the "Nakba" or "catastrophe" when 700,000 were forced from or fled their homes 60 years ago. In a special address to the