The Bush administration has not found disaster recovery files for White House e-mails from a three-month time period in 2003, according to court documents filed this week, raising the possibility that messages sent before and after the invasion of Iraq may never be recovered.

The United States has always shaped its criminal justice practices to suit and satisfy the imperative to smash African American resistance. When no organized resistance can be found, the system invents it. The Bush administration has outdone the post-Civil War Black Codes, which treated all gatherings of three or more African Americans as potential "conspiracies."

The House of Representatives will vote as soon as tomorrow - Thursday, May 8 - on an additional $178 Billion for the war and occupation in Iraq! Amazingly, the bill includes $70 Billion for fiscal year 2009. This means the funds for the occupation will keep flowing well into the next administration, allowing the new president a free hand to continue the war and occupation with little or no accountability to Congress until next spring. This is an appalling abdication of responsibility. These people answer to the Military-Industrial-Complex (MIC), not to the people of America. They have not abdicated anything. They are doing what they are supposed to be doing. They never were elected by We the People. We just thought they were. They were selected by the MIC -and the Zionists, who have infiltrated the Government. Deal with it!

Five Palestinians including three fighters affiliated with the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, were injured Wednesday during Israel aerial and artillery attacks in the Abasan village, southern Gaza Strip. Palestinian local sources told the PIC reporter that a large number of IOF troops reinforced by tanks and air cover invaded the village amid intensive gunfire and bombardment and was met with fierce resistance by the Palestinian fighters spearheaded by the Qassam Brigades. Security sources reported that an Israeli drone fired an air-to-surface missile at a group of the Qassam fighters during their confrontations with the IOF troops who invaded Abasan at dawn which resulted in serious-to-moderate injury to three of them.

The Chaitén volcano in southern Chile blasted ash and what appeared to be lava a dozen miles into the air on Tuesday, leading the government to order the immediate and complete evacuation of everyone living within a 30-mile radius of it. ABC News: Visa delays stall Burma relief efforts. Yahoo: UN officials call Myanmar a 'major disaster' after cyclone. WSWS: Bush administration moves to exploit Burma cyclone disaster.

On the rebound, Barack Obama left Hillary Rodham Clinton with fast-dwindling chances to deny him the Democratic presidential nomination after beating her in North Carolina and falling just short in an Indiana cliffhanger. Obama was on track to climb within 200 delegates of attaining the prize, his campaign finally steadying after missteps fiercely exploited by the never-say-die Clinton. AP: Clinton loses N.C., best chance to upset Obama. + Obama takes early lead in race for delegates. HuffPo: Wesley Clark Privately Urging Clinton To Quit Race.

Rarely seen archival photographs alongside Palestinian survivors remembering the 1948 ' Nakbe ' (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. The People's Voice: Sixty Years of Palestinian Displacement, Occupation and Suffering. Electronic Intifada: Sixty years ago in Battir (Part 2). Scribd: 60 Years of Catastrophe, 90 years of Betrayal.

The world is witnessing a terrible human rights crime in Gaza, where a million and a half human beings are being imprisoned with almost no access to the outside world by sea, air, or land. An entire population is being brutally punished. This gross mistreatment of the Palestinians in Gaza was escalated dramatically by Israel, with United States backing, after political candidates representing Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006. The election was unanimously judged to be honest and fair by all international observers.

A Professor at University College London, Philippe Sands, has revealed that top echelons in the Bush administration put pressure on officials at Guantánamo Bay detention camp to devise new torture techniques. These actions flouted the Geneva conventions protecting prisoners’ human rights. This information is revealed in a new book 'Torture Team’ published by Allen Lane.

Contagious hand-foot-mouth disease (HFMD) had led to 28 deaths in China as of Wednesday morning, according to Xinhua's tally based on confirmed death reports from provincial-level health bureaus. Two new child deaths were reported by health bureaus in the central province of Hunan and in the southwest Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, respectively, on Wednesday, after health minister Chen Zhu announced the death toll of 26 on Tuesday. The Hunan and Guangxi child deaths were the first for both jurisdictions.

I'll try to make this brief. Being modern Americans, both you and I have short attention spans. That's how stories like the following get memory holed. We don't pay attention. On April 29, 2008, Roland Carnaby was shot down in the street by the Houston Police Department. The capital crime he committed was running from the cops after a traffic stop.

Crude oil was little changed near $122 a barrel in New York after rising to a record yesterday on supply disruptions in Nigeria, Africa's largest producer. Oil rose above $122 a barrel for the first time after Royal Dutch Shell Plc reported a militant attack on a pump station in Nigeria, where Shell is losing 164,000 barrels of crude a day. Crude may reach $125 this week on speculative buying, Libya's top oil official said. Rock-The-Truth: Demand Down, Price Up.

The old politics died on May 6, 2008 as the predictable and inevitable happened and the voters said no to business as usual. The voters said no to the most phony and fraudulent proposal in memory for a gas tax cut that would never happen, that would profit the oil companies that Senator Clinton falsely said she was fighting with it, that would do nothing for the people she falsely claimed she was helping with it.