In the past two days, the same number of pro-Palestinian Blogs were locked by Google…. accusing them of being Spam Blogs. They claim it is ‘Robots’ that are doing the dirty work…. I claim it is a very sophisticated, well organised cell of zionists at work. Robots don’t log into Blogs randomly and read entries as Google has been doing on a number of occasions this week. Google’s Blogsite, Blogspot, also insisted late last year that users log in using a gmail.com account. Does this mean they are also logging in to our private emails?

The cyclone death toll soared above 22,000 on Tuesday and more than 41,000 others were missing as the international community prepared to rush in aid after the country's deadliest storm on record, state radio reported. Up to 1 million people may be homeless after Cyclone Nargis hit the Southeast Asian nation, also known as Burma, early Saturday. Some villages have been almost totally eradicated and vast rice-growing areas are wiped out, the World Food Program said. M & C: UN emergency aid in cyclone-crushed Myanmar awaits assessment. The Guardian: Death toll rises to 22,000 as Burma appeals for aid.

Authorities in Chile have ordered the complete evacuation of two towns after a volcano erupting nearby increased its activity, spewing out lava and ash. Chaiten volcano in the southern Patagonia region began erupting on Friday for the first time in 450 years, taking local officials by surprise.

Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe. The warning comes from the head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) at New Scotland Yard as the force launches a series of initiatives to try to boost conviction rates using CCTV evidence. They include ► A new database of images which is expected to use technology developed by the sports advertising industry to track and identify offenders. ► Putting images of suspects in muggings, rape and robbery cases out on the internet from next month. ► Building a national CCTV database, incorporating pictures of convicted offenders as well as unidentified suspects. The plans for this have been drawn up, but are on hold while the technology required to carry out automated searches is refined.

US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said Sunday that he hopes the time does not arrive when the US decides to discontinue sanctions against Iran and instead tries to solve the nuclear standoff militarily. "I hope the US does not get into a situation where we get into a military conflict with Iran," Mullen told Channel 10. Concerning the Syrian nuclear faculty reportedly bombed by Israel and which the CIA said was being built with North Korean help, Mullen called the situation "troubling." He went on to say that the US has "has been at Israel's side for all of 60 years, it will be for the next 60 years, 100 years and 1,000 years. The Guardian: The old drumbeat. The Washington Note: Selling the War with Iran. URUKNET: Ayatollah: Iran won't stop nuke program.

The Israeli President, Shimon Peres, stated Monday that "Iran is a danger not only for Israel but also for the rest of the world", adding that if Iran were to get a nuclear weapon, it would be a "nightmare". In his talk, he tacitly acknowledged that Israel is a nuclear power - something that was long denied by the Israeli state, but has recently been discreetly mentioned by Israeli leaders on a number of occasions. Peres has long been called the 'father of Israel's bomb', having obtained help from the French government in the 1950s to build Israel's nuclear reactor at Dimona. Since building the reactor, the Israeli government has maintained a policy of "nuclear ambiguity" and has never signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Most estimates put the number of nuclear bombs in Israel's arsenal at about 100, which would make it the sixth-largest nuclear power in the world, if it were to come out of the closet and openly admit that it has nuclear weapons. Yahoo: IRAN REJECTS NUCLEAR INSPECTIONS UNLESS ISRAEL ALLOWS THEM.

Let us not confuse having a clean green environment with 'global warming'. You will discover that man simply cannot influence the earth surface temperature. Only the sun can do that. 97% of greenhouse gasses (including clouds) are in fact H2O. CO2 changes lag 800 years behind earth surface temperature changes. Man contributes 3% to the total CO2 output of the planet. Increasing the CO2 in glass-houses increases crop yield of plants and it is still completely safe to work inside this environment. The entire world people are being conned and manipulated. Why?

In a bid by the two major parties to prevent November’s presidential election from being turned into a referendum on the war in Iraq, the Bush administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress are both working to craft new war funding legislation that would pay for the fighting to continue at the present level well past January, when the next president takes office.

[Photo: Amer Samara’ae was held for a year in US prisons in Iraq without any charge.] Amer Samara’ae hates Americans. Not some Americans, not American soldiers, not American mercenaries, not the US president. He hates all Americans, something he learned to do during a year inside their Iraq prisons. "I was innocent and they took me and they stole my life from me," he said. "I’m not a religious extremist; I never was. I hate them because they took everything. Do they think you’re just going to forget?" The Iraqi, who is 36, was not caught up in any of the headline-grabbing torture scandals and did not fall under the sway of radical Islamists. His story of life inside the US internment camps is more mundane: sitting in his Damascus flat, where he now lives as a refugee, he speaks of humiliation, of casual inhumanity. "I was arrested in Baghdad while visiting a friend and then I was taken into the system," he said. "They didn’t have any charges against me and one day in an interrogation they decided that I was giving weapons to the insurgents. I don’t think they knew what they were doing. "I was made to stand around naked sometimes, I was handcuffed and I had to walk to the toilet chained to a heavy tyre. That was normal."

A former Iraqi detainee filed a lawsuit against two private US military contractors Monday alleging that he was tortured tortured while held at the Abu Ghraib prison [JURIST news archive] in Iraq in 2003, according to AP. Emad al-Janabi said that employees of CACI International and L-3 Communications [corporate websites], who work as interrogators for the US military, physically abused him and often left him chained naked in his cell over the course of his 10-month stay at the prison. He also alleges that the contractors conspired to hide evidence of torture from International Red Cross inspectors and military and government officials.

A front-page article in Monday’s New York Times provides some insight into the barbaric treatment of immigrants held in US custody. After obtaining a government list through a Freedom of Information Act request, the Times investigated the circumstances surrounding a number of immigrant deaths that occurred in detention centers between 2004 and 2007.

If it was unclear to most American observers of the U.S. presidential elections, it was clear to most Middle Easterners, of whom I am one. I am talking about the recently solved mystery about what one Democratic candidate, Hilary Clinton, would ultimately be willing to do to us Middle Easterners of the Iranian variety, if elected. I get the feeling that Barak Obama would likely do the same to us, but he's coy about it, and keeps that kind of talk for special audiences only: Jewish ones, especially when the audience is packed by the AIPAC. Now, in case you thought Clinton was only talking about obliterating Iran, you are wrong.

Palfrey told former NSA official that call girls had picked up information concerning foreknowledge of attacks. Former NSA analyst and Navy intelligence officer Wayne Madsen tells the The Alex Jones Show that one of the key motives behind the DC Madam's murder may have been the information her call girls picked up from Washington's top brass concerning foreknowledge and government complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Madsen also connected another suspicious death - that of former CIA agent Roland Carnaby who was gunned down by Houston police last week - to another individual who was involved in both the 9/11 cover-up and the D.C. Madam scandal, disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Rarely seen archival photographs alongside Palestinian survivors remembering the 1948 ‘ Nakba ‘ (Catastrophe), describing the expulsion from their land on which the suburbs of Tel Aviv have since been built and their subsequent struggles as refugees. Memories include the terror immediately prior to fleeing, the slow realisation that they would not be returning home soon, the struggle to rebuild their lives in cramped refugee camps, and the increased resistance that grew once the Israeli military pursued them to the refugee camps. Desert Peace: PALESTINE REMEMBERED ~~ 60 YEARS LATER ~~ THE LONG ROAD TO HOME.

The EU ambassador to the Israeli occupation government Ramiro Cibrian Uzal asserted on Monday that the Israeli economic blockade on Gaza that was backed by the USA and the EU has failed in achieving it goals. In press statements he made in the occupied Palestinian city of Jerusalem and published on Monday, Uzal said that the international community's policy against Gaza Strip has failed in inciting the Palestinian public against Hamas Movement. Uzal also stressed that the EU should rethink its policy on Gaza Strip, adding that all Gaza exits must be opened before goods and humanitarian aid.

The third of five U.S. extra brigades sent to Iraq last year to help curb spiralling sectarian violence is returning home, the U.S. military said. The redeployment of about 3,500 soldiers from the 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division in the next several weeks, is part of a wider plan to withdraw the five "surge brigades", or 20,000 troops, by the end of July. U.S. President George W. Bush last month suspended further troop withdrawals from July, imposing a 45-day freeze on the remaining 140,000 troops to assess the security situation before considering more cuts. TomDispatch: Endless War.

At a speech before the Heritage Foundation this week, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the U.S. needs to have a “nonpoliticized, serious discussion” while writing new laws to define the best way to combat terrorism.

On TV and the radio, conservative pundits infuse violence into their arguments, destroying our precious culture of civil debate. The emergence of a cohort of right-wing pundits who use violent logic, language and arguments in national political debate did not gradually take shape over a long stretch of time, but rose up at a starling speed in the lead-up to the national elections of 2004 and 2006. As the horrific extent of the Iraqi military occupation waxed and George W. Bush's popularity waned, a hitherto sarcastic right-wing punditry seemed all at once to step into a new rhetorical frame. Suddenly, with Bush's re-election in doubt, casualties spiraling out of control, and revelations of U.S. military human rights abuses popping up all over, right-wing pundits shifted their tone from critique to conspiracy. The shift is summed up best by the opening line in Dinesh D'Souza's book The Enemy at Home: "The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11." Their language poisons SOMETHING, alright. But not "our democracy", 'cause we don't have one anymore; we lost it in the way-back. But it seems to us that what is DOES poison is our minds and our will. -Or have we lost that too?

Oil futures rose to an all-time high near $121 a barrel Tuesday with new concerns about a threat to supply and a weaker dollar. The surge in oil prices was also fueled by hopes that the U.S. economy will be spared a sharp downturn after the release of data Monday showing an unexpected expansion in the U.S. service sector in April, analysts said. Light, sweet crude for June delivery rose to a record $120.93 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Tuesday. The contract later retreated to $119.88 a barrel, down 9 cents from Monday's close.

Ever since Sappho wrote of her feelings for other women, the Greek island of Lesbos where she lived has had its own place in the dictionary. But now its modern residents have begun a campaign to reclaim the term for themselves. When is a lesbian not a Lesbian? The answer's in the capital letter – it's when you are a woman who loves women, rather than an inhabitant of the Aegean paradise of Lesbos (or Lesvos in the modern spelling). For decades, foolish and unsophisticated tourists have giggled about the coincidence of the Greek island and the sexual orientation. Now it's become the crux of a legal dispute whose implications are global. It began when a gay rights group, calling themselves the Greek Gay and Lesbian Union (Olke) came to the ears of Dimitris Lambrou, a publisher of a small, serious magazine devoted to ancient-Greek religious issues, and an islander on Lesbos. He objected to the casual appropriation of his island's name, co-opted two local women, Maria Rodou and Kokkoni Kouvalaki, and filed a lawsuit on 10 April. Olke responded stoutly, claiming that the proposed injunction is a groundless violation of freedom of expression.