Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said political leaders are discussing the idea of closing the world's financial markets while they ``rewrite the rules of international finance.''

``The idea of suspending the markets for the time it takes to rewrite the rules is being discussed,'' Berlusconi said today after a Cabinet meeting in Naples, Italy. A solution to the financial crisis ``can't just be for one country, or even just for Europe, but global.''

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell as much 8.1 percent in early trading and pared most of those losses after Berlusconi's remarks. The Dow was down 0.5 percent to 8540.52 at 10:10 in New York.

The difficult Fifth NIGHT ruled by Tezcatlipoca

At this point I feel it may be in its place to make a jump forward to discuss what is likely to occur after the two pulses of LIGHT in DAY 4 and DAY 5. In the Fifth NIGHT, (November 18 2007 – November 12, 2008, ruled by the energy of Tezcatlipoca, the god of darkness), we will see the last desperate attempts of the West, and power hierarchies based on materialism everywhere, to remain in control and strengthen their power in some new very oppressive way.

If the international monetary system collapses in DAY 5 we may for instance come to see this replaced by a centralized Electronic control over everyone’s economic interactions (Not to mention control of whereabouts and other things). Except that I simply look upon it as a phase in a cosmic plan, this is the time period when many of the scenarios described by conspiracy theoreticians may come true.

For the first time ever, the US military is deploying an active duty regular Army combat unit for full-time use inside the United States to deal with emergencies, including potential civil unrest.

Beginning on October 1, the First Brigade Combat Team of the Third Division will be placed under the command of US Army North, the Army’s component of the Pentagon’s Northern Command (NorthCom), which was created in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks with the stated mission of defending the US “homeland” and aiding federal, state and local authorities.

The unit—known as the “Raiders”—is among the Army’s most “blooded.” It has spent nearly three out of the last five years deployed in Iraq, leading the assault on Baghdad in 2003 and carrying out house-to-house combat in the suppression of resistance in the city of Ramadi. It was the first brigade combat team to be sent to Iraq three times.

The hand full of men who seized power in the United States used the Supreme Court, “a small but critical segment of the state apparatus,” to facilitate their immediate takeover. The day after the September 11th, 2001 hijackings the Neocons established a shadow government absent of both legislative and judicial branches. On October 26th, 2001 President Bush signed the USA Patriot Act into law, abrogating Constitutional rights and the Bill of Rights, and facilitating the declaration of Martial Law. On November 5th, 2002 Bush signed The Homeland Security act, consolidating the duties of 22 federal agencies into one cabinet level Department of Homeland Security and strengthening Public Law 101-647. Signed by his father in November 1990, Law 101-647 allows Bush to declare a national emergency for almost any reason, an earthquake, a terrorist attack, or even an economic crisis. In the event of a Bush declared emergency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency – FEMA, is empowered to implement the horrific Executive Orders 10995 through 11005. As acting president of the United States during the declaration of a national emergency and Martial Law Bush can also issue Executive Orders, granting him far reaching powers to unilaterally create law without congressional oversight and approval.

The intensity of the sun's million-mile-per-hour solar wind has dropped to its lowest levels since accurate records began half a century ago, scientists say.
Measurements of the cosmic blasts of radiation, ejected from the sun's upper atmosphere, were made with the Ulysses spacecraft, a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).

The solar wind "inflates a protective bubble, or heliosphere, around the solar system," which protects the inner planets against the radiation from other stars, said Dave McComas, Ulysses' solar wind principal investigator and senior executive director at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.

"With the solar wind at an all-time low, there is an excellent chance the heliosphere will diminish in size and strength," said Ed Smith, NASA's Ulysses project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"If that occurs, more galactic cosmic rays will make it into the inner part of our solar system," added Smith.

Scientists say the weakening of solar wind appears to be due to changes in the sun's magnetic field, but the causes of these changes are unknown.

There over 800 prison camps in the United States, all fully operational and ready to receive prisoners. They are all staffed and even surrounded by full-time guards, but they are all empty. These camps are to be operated by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) should Martial Law need to be implemented in the United States and all it would take is a presidential signature on a proclamation and the attorney general's signature on a warrant to which a list of names is attached. Ask yourself if you really want to be on Ashcroft's list. The Rex 84 Program was established on the reasoning that if a "mass exodus" of illegal aliens crossed the Mexican/US border, they would be quickly rounded up and detained in detention centers by FEMA. Rex 84 allowed many military bases to be closed down and to be turned into prisons.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ninety percent of Americans approve of the way President Bush is handling his job, the highest rating for a U.S. president ever recorded by the Gallup polling group, USA Today and CNN reported on Sunday.

The 90 percent job approval rating, measured in a poll of 1,005 adults Friday and Saturday, outranks the previous record -- a rating of 89 percent garnered by Bush's father, former President George Bush, at the end of the 1991 Gulf War.

It compares to an approval rating of 86 percent scored by the younger Bush in a survey conducted last week...

Gallup said the poll, which it conducted for CNN and USA Today, showed the highest presidential approval rating in the six decades it has been posing the question to Americans.

President Harry Truman scored an approval rating of 87 percent after the Germans surrendered in WWII. Gallup began measuring presidential approval in 1938 during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt.

Franklin D. Roosevelt scored an 84 percent approval rating in January 1942... Bush breaks record

Waxman: "It may well turn out to be the largest war profiteering in history." A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq. The BBC's Panorama programme has used US and Iraqi government sources to research how much some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding. A US gagging order is preventing discussion of the allegations. The order applies to 70 court cases against some of the top US companies. While Presdient George W Bush remains in the White House, it is unlikely the gagging orders will be lifted. To date, no major US contractor faces trial for fraud or mismanagement in Iraq.

"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency," the original draft of the proposed bill says.

And with those words, the Treasury secretary - whoever that may be in a few months - would be vested with perhaps the most incredible powers ever bestowed on one person over the economic and financial life of the United States. It is the financial equivalent of the Patriot Act, after 9/11.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr.'s $700 billion proposal to bail out Wall Street is both the biggest rescue and the most amazing power grab in the history of the American economy.

In many ways, it is classic Wall Street: a big, bold roll of the dice that one trade can save the day. But at the same time, the hypocrisy is thick. The lack of transparency and oversight that got our financial system in trouble in the first place seems written directly into the proposed bill, known as TARP, or the Troubled Asset Relief Program. House price crash goes global

THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is , where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.

What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

New Cycle 24 Sunspot and SSN wavelet analysis

Maybe there is some hope for SC24 ramping up this year yet. This appears to be the largest SC24 spot to date. Previous SC24 spots have faded quickly, we’ll see how long this one lasts. In other news, Jan Jansens reports that SC23-24 continues to behave much more like cycles in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Bolivia: Indigenous government defies US-backed fascists

Relative calm has returned to Bolivia following a three-week offensive of violence and terrorism launched by the US-backed right-wing opposition denounced by Bolivian President Evo Morales as a “civil coup”.

This campaign of terror, centred on the four resource-rich eastern departments (Santa Cruz, Pando, Beni and Tarija) known as the media luna (half moon), was initiated following a national referendum in which Morales’s presidency was endorsed by 67.4% of the vote — greater than the almost 54% that voted for him in 2005 and with a higher voter turnout.

The violence was an attempt to impose by force what was lost at the ballot box.

Violently assaulting civilians, police officer and soldiers, occupying and burning public buildings, blowing up gas pipelines, and blockading roads were among the tactics of the pro-neoliberal forces of the opposition, which utlitised fascist shock troops of racist armed youth gangs, such as the Santa Cruz Youth Union (UJC).

Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall Street Journal solution to the crisis: dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses--many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What's not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction?

If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public--all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called "responsible opinion." If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics--exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice.

“So Sambo beat the bitch!”

This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama’s win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

According to Lucille, the waitress serving her table at the time and who asked that her last name not be used, Gov. Palin was eating lunch with five or six people when the subject of the Democrat’s primary battle came up. The governor, seemingly not caring that people at nearby tables would likely hear her, uttered the slur and then laughed loudly as her meal mates joined in appreciatively.

“It was kind of disgusting,” Lucille, who is part Aboriginal, said in a phone interview after admitting that she is frightened of being discovered telling folks in the “lower 48” about life near the North Pole.

Palestinian relatives of killed Hamas fighter Hisham Shomer, 25, cry during his funeral in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya, 6 May 2008. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) strongly condemns the killing of a mother in front of her children yesterday, during an Israeli incursion into New Abasan town, east of Khan Younes.

PCHR investigations indicate that at approximately 14:30pm on Wednesday, 7 May, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) troops raided the house of Majdi Abd al-Raziq al-Daghma during an incursion into New Abasan.

The troops opened the outside metal door, then blew up the wooden interior door. The force of the blast killed 33-year-old Wafa Shaker al-Daghma instantly. The IOF troops then stormed into the house and covered her body with a rug, having ascertained that she was dead. The troops then detained her three children, who had all witnessed the killing of their mother...

Video: Afghans Civilians Killed by U.S

By every measure, U.S. workers are facing a more difficult struggle to make ends meet. Lee Sustar looks at two new books that document the deteriorating conditions of life for working people today.

THE AMERICAN Dream is long gone.

The expectation of rising living standards for each generation of workers has given way to a low-wage economy in which young workers will struggle just to match their parents' income--and are increasingly likely to end up worse off.

Even before the current economic crisis took hold, workers were working harder for less and carrying big debts to compensate for falling income. Record numbers of workers endured long and fruitless searches for employment, while those who had jobs are plagued with insecurity over their employment, health care and retirement.

Today’s “Global War on Terrorism” is a modern form of inquisition. It has all the essential ingredients of the French and Spanish inquisitions.

Going after “Islamic terrorists”, carrying out a Worldwide preemptive war to “protect the Homeland” are used to justify a military agenda.

“The Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT) is presented as a “Clash of Civilizations”, a war between competing values and religions, when in reality it is an outright war of conquest, guided by strategic and economic objectives.

The GWOT is the ideological backbone of the American Empire. It defines US military doctrine, including the preemptive use of nuclear weapons against the “state sponsors” of terrorism.

The preemptive “defensive war” doctrine and the “war on terrorism” against Al Qaeda constitute essential building blocks of America’s National Security Strategy as formulated in early 2002. The objective is to present “preemptive military action” –meaning war as an act of “self-defense” against two categories of enemies, “rogue States” and “Islamic terrorists”, both of which are said to possess weapons of mass destruction.

(GAZA COASTAL WATERS) An Israeli military gunboat rammed an unarmed Palestinian fishing vessel today at high speeds. The gunboat smashed through the upper hull of the fishing boat, careened over the top, and landed on the other side.

Extensive damage was caused by the impact to the fishing boat. The hull was badly damaged, and virtually the entire deck area, all the equipment on it, and the canopy above the deck were severely damaged. Unusually, all of the crew happened to be in the cabin or at the fore at the time. Had they been on deck they would have had little chance of survival.

Via a megaphone, the Israeli military aboard the gunboat then made the threat that: "When the internationals leave Gaza, you will all be made to pay." Human rights observers from the International Solidarity Movement and from the Free Gaza Movement have recently been accompanying Gazan Fishermen during their work. Photographs

Seven guided missiles have been fired from US spy planes in North Waziristan, killing three persons and injuring 15 others, including women and children. According to Pakistani sources, the guided missiles targeted a madrassa, or Muslim school, and the house of Afghan commander Jalaluddin Haqqani.

A drone operated by US-led forces in Afghanistan allegedly fired six to seven guided missiles at the madrassa in north Waziristan. It then shot at the house of Commander Haqqani, who first surfaced as a guerilla during the war against Russia in Afghanistan.

North and South Waziristan tribal regions are considered strongholds of the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan's tribal belt has witnessed a sharp increase in attacks by drones operated by the US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan over the past week. More than 40 people have died in these attacks.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, during the week of September 1st-4th the right to protest and peacefully assemble was greatly impinged upon by local, state and federal officials. It was also greatly diminished in Denver, Colorado but to a lesser extent. At the Republican National Convention protests I personally witnessed peaceful protesters demonstrating against war being beaten by police, nearly trampled by horses, dispersed with tear gas and concussion grenades, and everywhere treated as dangerous criminals and as a threat to the government.

I participated in a march led by mothers with children in strollers that was blockaded on several occasions by national guard troops in full paramilitary gear. I witnessed homeless people marching for the right to housing being dispersed by security police in riot gear wearing gas masks and carrying beating sticks that were in excess of two feet long. I witnessed journalists and legal observers rounded up by the police and detained prior to mass arrests of hundreds.

A government that cannot tolerate the dissent of its citizens is a terrible burden upon freedom and democracy. The right to dissent plays a healthy, vital role in the national dialogue. It is only through dissent that we can often see the ugly face of actions which the wealthy and powerful would prefer to remain hidden.

Most people had never heard of Sarah Palin when she was named Republican VP nominee. But I’d been hearing her name all too often, because I belong to a group called Defenders of Wildlife–and in her time as governor of Alaska, Palin has used her position as governor of Alaska to ruin the Alaskan wilderness in every way she could.

Her most recent “victory” came on August 26 when Alaska’s voters defeated Measure 2, an initiative that would have banned hunting wolves from airplanes for sport.

Palin organized a campaign against Measure 2, and funded it with $400,000 of state money. For most of us, the idea of zooming around in a private airplane over snowbound wilderness just for the chance to spot a terrified wild dog and blow it apart with a high-powered rifle is insane. But there’s a whole culture out there in love with the idea. Palin did her part by playing the tired old Alaskan pioneer card, saying that lower-48 naysayers who dared to object to the idea of divebombing wildlife didn’t “understand rural Alaska.”

While serving as CentCom commander between March 2007 and March 2008, Adm. William Fallon consistently pressed the Bush administration for more engagement with Iran and criticized the calls for another war. “This constant drumbeat of conflict is what strikes me which is not helpful and not useful,” Fallon told al Jazeera last year.

In his new book “The War Within,” Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward details a telling White House meeting on Iran in spring 2007 (p. 334):

“I think we need to do something to get engaged with these guys,” Fallon said. Iraq shared a 900-mile border with Iran, and he needed guidance and a strategy for dealing with the Iranians.

“Well,” Bush said, “these are assholes.”

Fallon was stunned. Declaring them “assholes” was not a strategy.

ROSS: Around the time Palin became mayor, [Palin's] church and other conservative Christians began to focus on certain books available in local stores and in the town library, including one called "Go Ask Alice," and another one written by a local pastor, Howard Bess, called "Pastor, I am Gay."

BESS: This whole thing of controlling, you know, information, censorship, yeah. That's a part of the scene.

ROSS: Not long after taking office, Palin raised the issue at a city council meeting of how books might be banned according to news accounts and a local resident, a Democrat, who was there.

ANNE KILKENNY: Mayor Palin asked the librarian, what is your response if I ask you to remove some books from the collection of the Wasilla Public Library?

ROSS: The Wasilla librarian, Mary Ellen Edmonds, the then president of the Alaska Library Association, responded with only a short hesitation.

KILKENNY: The librarian took a deep breath and said, the books in the collection were purchased in accordance with national standards and professional guidelines, and I would absolutely not allow you to remove any books from the collection.

"A few weeks after the council meeting, the mayor fired the librarian, although she was reinstated after a community uproar," Ross reported. "The Wasilla librarian, Mary Ellen Edmonds, left two years later, and according to friends, because it was just too hard working for Sarah Palin."

MANTA, Ecuador — When U.S. officers stationed in this humid coastal city give reasons they should continue their decade-old airborne surveillance mission, they talk not only about fighting drug runners on the open seas but about the $71 million they’ve spent to renovate and maintain the city’s airport, and the $6.5 million they inject each year into the local economy.

But the government of Ecuador has decided, and Washington has apparently agreed, that one of the most important foreign outposts in the United States’ war on drugs will close. The 450 U.S. Air Force personnel and contractors stationed at a military base that shares the airport’s runway will be leaving next year.

This decision reflects both the prevailing political climate here — standing up to the United States tends to be widely popular — and a new economic reality. With major projects underway in Manta by the Venezuelan government and a Hong Kong company, the U.S. dollars don’t amount to much.

St. Paul is a window into our future. It is a future where, as one protester told me by phone, "people have been pepper-gassed, thrown on the ground by police who had drawn their weapons, had their documents seized and their tattoos photographed before being taken away to jail." It is a future where illegal house raids are carried out. It is a future where vans containing heavily armed paramilitary units circle and film protesters. It is a future where, as the protester said, "people have been pulled from cars because their license plates were on a database and handcuffed, thrown in the back of a squad car and then watched as their vehicles were ransacked and their personal possessions from computers to literature seized." It is a future where constitutional rights mean nothing and where lawful dissent is branded a form of terrorism.

Since the impeachable installation of George W. Bush as President in January of 2001 by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Gang of Five, the peoples of the world have witnessed a government in the United States that has demonstrated little if any respect for fundamental considerations of international law, human rights, and the United States Constitution.

What the world has watched instead is a comprehensive and malicious assault upon the integrity of the international and domestic legal orders by a group of men and women who are thoroughly Machiavellian and Straussian in their perception of international relations and in their conduct of both foreign policy and domestic affairs. Even more seriously, in many instances specific components of the Bush administration’s foreign policies constitute ongoing criminal activity under well-recognized principles of both international law and U.S. domestic law, and in particular the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles, as well as the Pentagon’s own U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 on The Law of Land Warfare (1956), all of which apply to President Bush himself as Commander-in-Chief of United States Armed Forces under Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution.

According to a report by the Organic Consumers Association, a toxic chemical that is a byproduct of rocket fuel is rapidly poisoning the food and water supply in the United States. Known as perchlorate, this chemical has been found in 93% of the nation's milk and lettuce supply in a recent FDA study. It has also been found in the drinking water for at least 22 states at extremely alarming levels. Perhaps the scariest statistic is that perchlorate has been found in the breast milk of 97% of the mothers who were tested. What are Americans supposed to eat? Unfortunately, lettuce and milk weren't the only foods that were found to be contaminated. Perchlorate was found in tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, spinach, citrus, melons and more. Sadly, even organic vegetables were affected, because most crops are irrigated from polluted water sources.

Minnesota ACLU Takes Legal Action ST. PAUL - In response to reports of widespread civil liberties abuses in connection with mass arrests, police raids on private homes and the detention of several journalists during the Republican National Convention (RNC), the American Civil Liberties Union renewed its call for an investigation into the actions of law enforcement there.

"Attempts by law enforcement to squelch lawful political speech and stifle the press have no place in our democracy and are unacceptable," said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. "Political conventions should be a showcase for free expression, not a venue for bullying and intimidation."
The ACLU specifically called for an investigation into possible violations of the First and Fourth Amendments, including:

• the arrest of reporters trying to gather the news;
• the mass arrest of hundreds of peaceful protestors;
• the surveillance and subsequent raids on several activist groups and private homes; and
• the confiscation by law enforcement agents of constitutionally-protected private property.

The ACLU affiliate office in Minnesota has assembled legal counsel for many of the reporters and peaceful protestors arrested since Monday. The ACLU of Minnesota has also filed a lawsuit in federal court calling for the release of boxes of literature that were confiscated during Monday's raids.

In this study, both an older neuroleptic (Haldol or "haloperidol") and a newer atypical neuroleptic (Zyprexa or "olanzapine") caused significant shrinkage in the higher level parts of the brains in monkeys. Source: Neuropsychopharmacology 9 March 2005

Former RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli said the United States effectively "threw away the rule book" in dealing with Canadian authorities on the Maher Arar affair. In an interview with the CBC broadcast Tuesday night, Zaccardelli blamed a post 9-11 hardline attitude in the United States for the Ottawa software engineer's detention and subsequent deportation to his native Syria. After Arar was detained in New York in the fall of 2002, Zaccardelli told the CBC that American authorities indicated to Canadian officials that they didn't have enough evidence to lay charges and asked whether he would be detained upon returning to Canada. "The discussion centres around: 'If we let him go and he comes to Canada, can you arrest him or detain him?' And we keep reaffirming, 'No we can't'," Zaccardelli said in the CBC interview, conducted in Lyons, France, where he is a senior official with Interpol. The Americans then led Canadian officials to believe Arar was going to be released and sent back to Canada, prompting the RCMP to put together a surveillance team to watch him. "We are waiting in Montreal for the plane to arrive with Mr. Arar getting off the plane. The plane arrives. Mr. Arar never got off," he said. Arar spent about a year in Syrian custody where he said he was tortured.

A chunk of ice shelf nearly the size of Manhattan has broken away from Ellesmere Island in Canada's northern Arctic, another dramatic indication of how warmer temperatures are changing the polar frontier, scientists said Wednesday. Derek Mueller, an Arctic ice shelf specialist at Trent University in Ontario, told The Associated Press that the 4,500-year-old Markham Ice Shelf separated in early August and the 19-square-mile shelf is now adrift in the Arctic Ocean. "It was a shocking event that underscores the rapidity of changes taking place in the Arctic," said Muller. Muller also said that two large sections of ice detached from the Serson Ice Shelf, shrinking that ice feature by 47 square miles — or 60 percent — and that the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf has also continued to break up, losing an additional eight square miles.

The world's biggest and most expensive scientific experiment has been hit by a last minute legal challenge, amid claims that the research could bring about the end of the world.

Four years after the tragedy in School Number One, which left more than 300 people dead, Beslan remains a small town filled with immense grief. Its cemetery contains the graves of 186 children. On September 3, 2004, Russian forces attempted to release hostages in the school building where terrorists were holding more than 1,000 people. The small town is marking the anniversary of one of Russia's deadliest hostage takings with candles, tolling of bells and tears. Hundreds of mourners assembled at the ruins of School Number One, left untouched since the tragedy, to lay flowers and light candles in memory of those who died in September 2004. The sad day was marked by one minute's silence and the release of 334 white balloons in the air – one for each victim. Then the ceremony moved to Beslan’s Memorial Cemetery, where the list of victims was read out. For many residents of Beslan the days of mourning bring back their bad dreams and memories.

After two years on its humiliating defeat in Lebanon by the Islamic resistance fighters, Israeli army is still trying to figure out what really happened and its leaders are still trying to find excuses for the failure of the “strongest army in the Middle East”. Israeli army Chief Intelligence Officer Brig.-Gen. Yuval Halamish told Israeli daily The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday that the army's Military Intelligence has dramatically increased its relevance and capabilities since the Second Lebanon War, when some field units went into combat with outdated maps of Hezbollah strongholds. "When we look back today at the past two years we are without a doubt in a different place," Halamish said in a rare interview he granted the Post in honor of MI's 60th anniversary. "Like the rest of the IDF at the time, MI was busy focusing on the Palestinian arena and that is where we invested our resources." Incidents such as units being given outdated maps before going into combat should never have happened, he said, revealing that today MI has established an advanced computerized database that stores all of the maps and other intelligence material that is continuously updated and can be distributed to relevant units on short notice.

Released through the Official Secrets Act after 60 years, the Plan that Britain would Hatch with Germany to Rule the World. The attempt to discredit this as the work of an amateur and maverick WILL NOT WASH. Re: Britain planned Collusion with Nazis to Rule the World. (by setfree69): In fact I have always contended that Edward VIII was forced to resign as King of the UK, for his close ties with the Nazis and personal friendship with Hitler, of course it was easy to blame his choice of Wife! Churchill and Hitler were alike in MANY ways however painful that might be to hear, and it needed someone like Churchill to defeat Hitler. Churchill advocated the forced sterilisation of people deemed as disabled or retarded, and another interesting point was that people often ask why did Hitler never use Gas on London? because oddly enough he hated the use in warfare and Churchill had threatened to respond in like if he did. Wether this is actually true I do not know but have found no hard evidence either way. One last point they say that the Victors are the ones who write the History and the nanquished are demonised, one of Churchill quotes is "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."

[ENLARGE] Appearing with other member of the Congressional Black Caucus at the Democratic National Convention tonight for a moving tribute to their recently deceased colleague Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee John Conyers brings the issue of fair elections and election integrity to the convention. Speaking after Charles Rangel of New York, Chairman Conyers said: "I knew Stephanie Tubbs Jones as a constant voice for justice and peace. She was known to others for her work as a prosecutor, a judge and chairwoman of the Ethics Committee of the House of Representatives. She was a stalwart Democrat, a real leader and an enthusiastic supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s bid for the nomination. After Senator Obama prevailed, the Congressional Black Caucus met with Senator Obama, and Stephanie Tubbs Jones led us in standing rock-solid in support of him as our candidate for president. She knew the importance of making sure that every vote counts and every vote is counted."

The families of 12 Nepali men killed by Iraqi insurgents have filed a federal lawsuit accusing defense contractor KBR Inc. and a Jordanian subcontractor of human trafficking, saying the men were sent to work in Iraq against their will after being promised jobs in a posh hotel in Jordan. The lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court alleges the workers were being taken to work at a U.S. air base in Iraq in 2004 when insurgents intercepted their caravan and killed them days later. A Nepali worker whose car survived the attack is also a plaintiff; Buddi Prasad Gurung, now back in Nepal, claims he was forced to work at Al Asad Air Base as a warehouse loader for 15 months. The 13 Nepali men were recruited by Daoud & Partners and other subcontractors with promises of work at an Amman hotel before their passports were taken and they were sent to Iraq, according to the lawsuit.

NATO has been increasing its naval presence in the Black Sea during the recent several days. “The US Navy destroyer USS McFaul, which is currently docked in the Georgian port of Batumi, carries about 50 Tomahawk cruise missiles on board. They are outfitted with nuclear warheads and are meant to hit ground targets. The remaining NATO ships are currently concentrated in the northern part of the Black Sea,” a source in the military intelligence of the Russian Federation said.

[ENLARGE] Three years ago, on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the US Gulf Coast. The storm devastated nearly 100,000 square miles and displaced over a million people. New Orleans, Louisiana, bore the brunt of this disaster, after the levee system failed and nearly 80 percent of the city was submerged. Overwhelmingly those most deeply affected by Katrina were among the poorest layers of the working class in a long-impoverished and neglected region of the United States. In the days following the hurricane’s landfall, the initial tragedy in New Orleans was compounded by official neglect, incompetence, and military repression. The storm and its aftermath exposed in the starkest way the gross inequality at the heart of American social life. Thousands of New Orleans residents stayed behind after a last-minute evacuation was ordered—many of them extremely poor, without means of transportation, disabled or elderly. The low-income and minority neighborhoods—low-lying and long neglected—were virtually obliterated when adjacent levee walls gave way.

New Orleans has been busy reinventing itself as a post-Katrina tourist Mecca. But scarce attention has been paid to an invisible wall cutting across the city. Way beyond the renewed glitz of the French Quarter and downtown casinos the true post-Katrina story is actually told by homeless people living in a tent city under a flyover, or by struggling families trying to rebuild their homes and their lives in the Lower Ninth Ward.

["Emprisoné, torturé, tué puis mutilé par des bourreaux français." (Imprisoned, tortured, killed [and] then mutilated by French butchers.)] A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 by Alistair Horne (Author) (A book review by "Doginfollow"): The cover of the 2006 paperback reissue of Alistair Horne's astounding "A Savage War of Peace" boasts that the book is "on the readings lists of President Bush and the U.S. military." All I can say is, too bad it wasn't on their reading lists in 2003. In his new preface, Horne bluntly acknowledges that the book has found unexpected relevance in today's Iraq. No matter where you stand on that conflict, you will learn something from Horne's harrowing chronicle of the Algerian struggle for independence from France in the 1950s and early 60s. In fact, if (like most of us) your view of the war in Iraq is filtered through some sort of partisan lens, Horne's book provides an opportunity to step back and take a clearer look at how others walked many hard miles in a similar set of shoes. Horne's book has it all.

Before 9/11, the Bush administration’s national security focus was on missile defense, not terrorism. In fact, on 9/11, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was set to deliver a speech that focused “largely on missile defense.” Writing at the Huffington Post, Joe Cirincione — president of the Ploughshares Fund — recalls this quote from Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) on Sept. 10, 2001, warning against the Bush administration’s approach: We will have diverted all that money to address the least likely threat while the real threats come into this country in the hold of a ship, or the belly of a plane, or are smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack.

In his first broadcast interview, Steve Kurtz discusses the bizarre case of how he became the focus of an FBI bioterrorism investigation. On May 11, 2004, his wife Hope Kurtz tragically died in her sleep. When he called 911 for help, a nightmare that would last for the next four years began to unfold. The police became suspicious of his art supplies and harmless bacteria cultures that he was using for an antiwar project about the public health impact of germ warfare programs. His home was raided by the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force and Homeland Security. His belongings, his cat, and even his wife’s body were seized. [includes rush transcript] AMY GOODMAN: Why don’t you tell us your story, beginning that day, May 11, 2004? STEVE KURTZ: Well, that was a very dark day for me. I woke up that morning and found that my wife had died in her sleep. And kind of after a moment of shock that slowly broke into a kind of panic, I made my way to the telephone, called 911. They came quite rapidly. And as they looked around, they did as they had to do when a woman who, quite young at this age, forty-five, dies in their home and called the police. And the police came out and secured my home, and then three detectives showed up. And for the rest of that day, I was pretty much interrogated as a murder suspect.

On May 11, Steve Kurtz phoned 911 to report his wife of 20 years was unresponsive. When paramedics came to his house, one of them noticed that Kurtz had laboratory equipment, which he used in his art exhibits. The paramedics reported this to police and the FBI sealed off his house. Authorities later said that Kurtz's wife had died of "heart failure," but he wasn't allowed to return to his home for two days while the FBI confiscated his equipment, and biological samples. They also carted off his books, personal papers and computer. The contradiction between the charges for possessing harmful substances and the county health commissioner assessing that no hazardous substances were found in the house leaves only the conclusion - that ideas, when misunderstood or disagreeable, are toxic.

Steve Kurtz is not someone who should be sitting across the interrogation table, submitting to random drug tests and regularly meeting with his parole officer. He is an artist and educator who masterfully subverts the aesthetic to serve his goals. Kurtz, an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at SUNY, Buffalo, is the founding member of the Critical Arts Ensemble (CAE), a group of artists “whose multi-media projects fuse the political pedagogy of Bertolt Brecht with the madcap performance of Mr. Wizard. Donning lab coats and armed with household supplies and high school lab equipment, they assume the persona of amateur scientist. Their aim is to demystify the shadowy world of bio-weapons, trans-genetic manufacturing and the corporate appropriation of visual culture as well as more broadly, the public sphere itself,” writes Gregory Sholette, former Chair of the Art Administration Department at SAIC. The CAE take their performances into museums, festivals and the streets. They are actively engaged in theorization of their practice and regularly publish manifestoes advocating “tactical media activism.” They are “specialists in revolt,” according to Gregg Bordowitz, Assistant Professor, Film Video and New Media.

Meet Zardari: Killer, Looter, Pluderer: I told everyone as soon as I found out about Bhutto's murder that it was probably her husband, Asif Ali Zardari. Everyone looked at me like I was nuts and all the troofer lemmings were claiming she was killed for revealing Bin Laden's death, as if that wasn't obvious for 6 years. Zardari, according to many, killed his first wife also. In addition, he and Benazir conspired to kill Fatima (Benazir's niece) Bhutto's father, Murtaza, who was vocal against their corruption and THEFT of BILLIONS in $US DOLLARS$. He stood to benefit from the murder and is now about to become crowned as the president of Pakistan with no one left standing in his way. He even tricked fellow looting goon Nawaz Sharif by promising to settle the issue of the judges within 24 hours of the "coalition's" threat of impeachment on Musharraf which lead to his abdication from the throne, and then retreated from it once Busharraf was out of the way, causing the breakup of the "coalition"

New documents from within the Bush administration and US intelligence community during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq reveal that the White House began assembling a case for war before it had compiled the intel that ostensibly formed the basis of that case. A new report on the documents from George Washington University's National Security Archive also presents compelling evidence that the Bush administration pressured the CIA and other intelligence agencies to tailor their reports to back-up Bush's desire to invade. The report suggests the bulk of this effort was run out of Vice President Dick Cheney's office, backing up numerous other post-war examinations of the path to invasion that saw Cheney as the mastermind of the plan to oust Saddam Hussein. In addition to the Archive's newly obtained documents, Dr. John Prados, who compiled the report, examined previous investigations of pre-war intelligence manipulation such as the recently completed Senate Intelligence Committee "Phase II" report on administration officials' pre-war rhetoric and books on the subject such as former White House spokesman Scott McClellan's memoir.

DALLAS – More than 200,000 US public school students were punished by beatings during the 2006-2007 school year, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union said in a joint report released today. In the 13 states that corporally punished more than 1,000 students per year, African-American girls were twice as likely to be beaten as their white counterparts. A culture of beatings and torture dating back to slavery in pre civil war America.

Najwa Sheikh in Gaza - As if the Israelis well practiced the devices and techniques to kill the hope inside us the Palestinians, the last operation in Gaza, proves that the killing machine of the Israelis is now created to put more pain and bitterness on the people of Gaza by targeting their small tiny buds, the innocent children, from infants up to toddlers, to even teenagers, and the only reason is that they are Palestinians.

Four boys killed while playing football

I still can not erase the images that stuck on my mind of the killed children of Dardouna family who were playing football in their house yard in Jabalia.

Like an addicted I was searching for the story details, as if the images with all its sorrow, grieve, and bloody color was not enough for me.

“I was playing with my cousins” said Yehya, “Suddenly we were targeted. Ahmed’s head was far away from his body. I did not feel my legs. I was screaming as well as the other kids. We were not kids anymore”

Earlier this month, a thirty-four-year-old Chinese computer engineer, Hiu Lui Ng, who overstayed his visa, died in a Rhode Island immigration detention center. He had cancer in his liver, lung and bones, and a fractured spine. Despite repeated complaints of severe pain, Mr. Ng was refused independent medical evaluation by immigration officials. Before Mr. Ng died on August 6th, he told his sister that the nurses at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Center in Rhode Island had told him to “stop faking” his illness. We speak to immigration attorney Joshua Bardavid, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Renee Feltz, co-creator of the site BusinessOfDetention.com. [includes rush transcript]

1986: A deadly cloud of carbon dioxide sweeps down the slopes of an African volcano, smothering more than 1,700 people. Volcanoes can kill in many ways, but this one is pretty weird. A volcanic lake in the West African nation of Cameroon degassed violently (you could say it burped, or worse) in the middle of the night. Carbon dioxide is odorless and heavier than air. Most of the victims died in their sleep. Lake Nyos sits in the crater of a volcano that hadn't erupted in centuries ... and probably didn't actually erupt the night of Aug. 21, 1986. Magma deep underneath the lake releases carbon dioxide into its depths. Lake Nyos is 690-feet deep, enough for the water pressure to keep the CO2 dissolved in the lake water, rather than letting it bubble up and escape to the surface. And the crater rim towers above the lake, blocking winds which could otherwise stir the surface and create convection currents that would circulate the deep, CO2-saturated water upward to areas of lower pressure. The lack of seasonal variation less than seven degrees north of the equator also contributes to the lake's placidity.

[Investigators have since identified 1,222 probable instances of mass killings during the Korean War, after canvassing witnesses and excavating remains. This archive photo shows South Korean military police shooting political prisoners in a hole dug near Daegu, South Korea, in April 1951.] Shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, Kim Man Sik, a military police sergeant, received an urgent radio message from the South Korean Army's Counter-Intelligence Corps: Go to local police stations, take custody of scores of Communist suspects held there and execute them. Kim complied. And what he did and saw in those days are etched permanently in his mind. "They were all tied together with military communications wire. So when we opened fire, they all pulled at each other to try to escape," said Kim, now 81. "The wire cut into their wrists. Blood was splattered all over their white clothes." That Kim's story has emerged after half a century is due to South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a body conceived in the same genre as the South African body set up in the 1990s to shed light on atrocities and injustices committed during the apartheid era. Unlike the South African agency, Korea's commission has no power to prosecute crimes or grant immunity.

According to ABC News and the Associated Press, the passport of hijacker Satam Al Suqami was found a few blocks from the WTC. 1 2 The Guardian was skeptical: "the idea that Atta's passport had escaped from that inferno unsinged [tests] the credulity of the staunchest supporter of the FBI's crackdown on terrorism." 3 Note the passport did not belong to Atta, as is commonly claimed. Satam Al Suqami was supposedly on Flight 11, the plane that hit the North Tower. In that collision, the building's core absorbed almost the entire airplane, which hit the northeast wall nearly dead center.

People who lived through the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 50 million worldwide are still producing antibodies to the virus 90 years later, researchers report. "Most people have a notion that elderly people have very weak immunity or they have lost immunity," said lead researcher Dr. James E. Crowe Jr., a professor of pediatrics, microbiology and immunology at Vanderbilt University. "This study shows that extremely elderly people have retained memory of being infected with the 1918 flu, even 90 years later," Crowe said. This is the first evidence that shows that people developed significant immunity to the 1918 flu virus, Crowe said. "It's important to know that you can develop immunity to such a pandemic virus. That has implications for new pandemic viruses," he said. The report is published in the Aug. 17 issue ofNature.

Survivors of the devastating 1918 influenza pandemic are still protected from the virus, according to researchers in the US. American scientists found that people who lived through the outbreak can still produce antibodies that kill the deadly strain of the H1N1 flu. The study, published in the journal Nature, could help develop emergency treatments for future outbreaks. The Spanish flu outbreak of 1918 killed an estimated 50 million people.

What’s wrong with this picture? Everyone hates George W. Bush. Everyone wants change. Over 65 percent of the American people agree the nation is headed in the wrong direction. One candidate is brilliant, inspiring, charismatic and represents change. The other is aging, inarticulate, incoherent and stands for the status quo. The first has been running a brilliant campaign, the other a campaign in virtual chaos. Each day one candidate offers serious solutions for significant problems, while the other makes a fool of himself. Yet the polls say, “McCain is gaining ground” and “Obama is losing ground.” One national poll even has them running neck and neck or shows McCain ahead of Obama. McCain has already been selected to be the world war III president. The election system is hopelessly rigged. The neocons will never relinquish America. Their plans for war, world domination, and depopulation will move forward, along with economic enslavement and poverty for the American people.

MOSCOW: Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Monday harshly criticized the United States for airlifting Georgian troops from Iraq back home.

Putin said the U.S. move would hamper efforts to solve Russia's conflict with Georgia over the breakaway province of South Ossetia.

"It's a pity that some of our partners, instead of helping, are in fact trying to get in the way," Putin said at a Cabinet meeting. "I mean among other things the United States airlifting Georgia's military contingent from Iraq effectively into the conflict zone."

The U.S. military started flying some 2,000 Georgian troops home from Iraq on Sunday after Georgia recalled them. Georgian officials haven't said how many have come back, but a Russian general said eight U.S. military transport planes had already flown home some 800 Georgian troops.

Putin's comments reflected Russia's growing irritation with Western condemnation of Russia's military action against Georgia.

"The scale of their cynicism causes surprise," Putin said. "It's the ability to cast white as black and black as white which is surprising, the ability to cast the aggressor as the victim and blame the victims for the consequences."

Putin remarks also reflected deep anger at Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili.

"Of course, Saddam Hussein ought to have been hanged for destroying several Shiite villages," Putin said. "And the incumbent Georgian leaders who razed ten Ossetian villages at once, who ran elderly people and children with tanks, who burned civilian alive in their sheds — these leaders must be taken under protection."

Putin and other Russian officials have accused Georgian forces of committing atrocities against civilians in South Ossetia — claims that could not be independently verified.

And he said unto his people "thou must not invade another´s sovereign lands, nor kill the innocent people that dwell on these pastures. Only I, your God, hast the heavenly right to taketh life (Ex. Order: 666) and walketh on the pastures, partaking of its fruits and sweet milk and honey oil.

And thou shalt know that I am a just God, for I share my glory with the leaders of my kingdom and those anointed by me and entered in my good book (Old Testimonial), O Israel hear me. Heed my disciples, for they speak my words in the main stream of media and saith the truth according to thy God.

Hath faith in thy God and I will lead thee to a New and better World with Order. Fear not the title of fool as those who hath been fooled twice or thrice, can be fooled again and feel the shame on thou.

As my kingdom groweth, thou must heed the warnings of my disciples and reject Satan. Rush Here as I Ran to the temple, and Put In these words on the axis of evil. Have faith my children, thy God hath a New Clear path for thou to follow, for mine is the power, the glory and the W. Post"

If the reports found in the Mainstream Media over the last few days are anything to go by (regarding the Russia/Georgia conflict), Bush does indeed walk on water and clearly is completely innocent of any wrongdoing. I guess that must make him God?

[Franz Kafka by Antony Hare, 2003.] The German-speaking world of Kafka scholars hit out yesterday over a British academic's claims that the writer had a penchant for hard porn. James Hawes, a Kafka expert and novelist, claims in his book Excavating Kafka, published in Britain yesterday, that the writer was a subscriber to upmarket pornography. Furious German academics reacted by accusing Hawes of prudishness, sensationalism and even antisemitism. "Hawes has given us a look through the keyhole of a Kafka with his trousers down ... but to call the illustrated magazines he subscribed to as hardcore porn, is like comparing a poem by Heinrich Heine with an advertising slogan for McDonald's," wrote Anjana Shrivastava, a Kafka researcher on Spiegel Online, calling Hawes a "prude". She said he had made himself a "preacher of hate" in the world of Kafka scholars. Critics also dismissed Hawes' claim that Kafka kept his pornography under lock and key in a safe on his bookshelf, saying it contained instead a savings book he did not want his family to know about.

(Shouldn't you have your own "60-Day Plan" for how to rescue your family and yourself from the onrushing madness? Click on "read more" to get an outline of one that will get you out of the country in less than 60 days with more than the shirt on your back.)

Your 60-Day Plan

We're going to make this as simple and straightforward as possible. There are three aspects to leaving the country:

• Choosing a destination that will be both safe and open for immigration.
• Assembling the documents you will need to start your new home abroad.
• Gathering your assets and making them transportable to your new home.

You're going to need to proceed along all three fronts at once, so we'll use the color-coding listed above to help you keep things in their proper category.

We've divided this up into eight one-week periods. In less than 60 days, you can be out of the country with the doucments you need to obtain residency in your new home and some money available for a new start.

Week 1

(1) If you don't have a passport, apply for one immediately and pay for the expedited process.

(2) Apply for new copies of birth certificates for everyone who is going.

(3) Go to these websites to begin researching destinations:

In a fresh postmortem on Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential bid, newly published staff memos and e-mails reveal a campaign hobbled by internal rivalries, faulty planning, bloated spending - and perhaps most important, Clinton's own failure to make the hard decisions. Clinton offered herself to voters as a hyper-competent executive ready to be president from day one. But atop her own campaign, she was a hesitant leader, who allowed bitter infighting to fester among staffers over whether to go negative against Barack Obama, according to the Atlantic magazine. The most bare-knuckled lines of attack came from Clinton's chief strategist, Mark Penn, who urged Clinton to highlight Obama's "lack of American roots" due to his upbringing in Indonesia and Hawaii - saying he could only win if he faced Attila the Hun.

Atlantic.com has an extraordinary property - a large number of original memos from Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign, which they have put online to accompany Joshua Green's assessment of her campaign's failings. I didn't entirely agree with Green's thesis. He argues that the memos show the candidate is entirely unable to make up her mind. Should she or should she not attack Obama? Should she or should she not pitch to the "invisible America" identified by her chief strategist Mark Penn?

It seems the majority of Bush supporters, according to recent polls, still believe Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda and even to 9-11, and that the United States found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Many of you are asking how that could possibly be, since everybody knows...

But everybody doesn't know. There it is. And if you are wondering why everybody doesn't know, you can either blame it on the media, always a shrewd move, or take notice that the administration is STILL spreading this same misinformation.

Both Donald Rumsfeld and Bush have publicly acknowledged there is no evidence of any links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. However, as Dick Cheney campaigns, a standard part of his stump speech is the accusation that Saddam Hussein "had a relationship" with Al Qaeda or "has long-established ties to Al Qaeda." He makes this claim up to the present day. The 9-11 Commission, however, found that there was "no collaborative relationship" between the two.

Although much has been written about the neo-cons who dot the Bush administration, their ties to Israel have generally been treated very gingerly. Although much has come to light recently about the fact that ridding Iraq both of its leader and of its weapons inventory has been on the neo-con agenda since long before there was a Bush administration, little has been said about the link between this goal and the neo-cons’ overriding desire to provide greater security for Israel. But an examination of the cast of characters in Bush administration policymaking circles reveals a startlingly pervasive network of pro-Israel activists, and an examination of the neo-cons’ voluminous written record shows that Israel comes up constantly as a neo-con reference point, always mentioned with the United States as the beneficiary of a recommended policy, always linked with the United States when national interests are at issue.

An Iranian commander says the global community turned a blind eye to the downing of a passenger jet by the US navy in the Persian Gulf. The Deputy Head of Iran's Armed Forces Headquarters, Brigadier General Seyyed Masoud Jazayeri, said Saturday that July 3 is a 'shameful day' for the so-called US democracy. Iran Air Flight 655 was destroyed by the US Navy's guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes between Bandar Abbas and Dubai on Sunday July 3, 1988, over the Strait of Hormuz. The US warship patrolling Iran's maritime territory killed all 290 passengers, including 66 children, and crewmembers. The White House claims the incident was an honest mistake on behalf of the US Navy. Iran, however, says there is no way that an Airbus A300 can be mistaken for an F-14 Tomcat fighter. "What is most disgraceful and shameful is that the criminal commander of the ship was awarded the Legion of Merit medal," Gen. Jazayeri continued.

Attorney: "Jeane was very clear with me that if she was ever found dead of an apparent suicide, I was to make sure that all the evidence was publicly disseminated so that it could be independently evaluated." Citizens For Legitimate Government has learned that Deborah Jeane Palfrey's lawyer, Montgomery Blair Sibley, has intervened to stop a lawsuit seeking to prevent the Tarpon Springs, Florida, Police Department from releasing information requested by Sibley pertaining to the investigation of Jeane's death. On July 22, 2008, Sibley requested under the Florida Public Records Act, "copies of any and all records, including without limitation police reports and photographs, related to the investigation of the death of Deborah Jeane Palfrey on May 1, 2008, at [redacted] Tarpon Springs, Florida. This request includes copies of every document related to the matter, regardless of the format in which the information is stored. I note that information stored on a computer is as much a public record as a written page in a book or stored in a filing cabinet."

Washington is deeply concerned about an opportunity for Russia to use Cuban air bases to deploy its strategic bombers there in response to US missile defense plans in Europe. Gen. Norton Schwartz stated that Russia would be crossing a red line with such an intention.

"I certainly would offer best military advice that we should engage the Russians not to pursue that approach," Schwartz told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"And if they did, I think we should stand strong and indicate that that is something that crosses a threshold, crosses a red line for the United States of America."

Russia’s Izvestia newspaper reported this week that Moscow was considering an opportunity for strategic bombers to fly to Cuba in response to USA’s intentions to deploy the missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

On the 27th of June 2008, the Education minister " Khudayer al-Khuza'i"of Iraq was touring one of the final examination centers on the campus of the college of Education situated in the "Seba' Abkar" district of Adhamiya city. As the minister entered the center, the students began complaining about the center's very bad conditions: there was no power to run the fans, the temperature was 130 degrees, and there was no water to drink. The students also mentioned to the minster many other problems they were facing which made it very hard for them to take their final exams. Hearing the complaints of the frustrated students, the education minister took out his gun and started shooting real bullets at the students. Simultaneously his body guards started shooting randomly at the students. Scores of innocent Iraqi students were killed and injured in this horrible incident.

Brothers and sisters in humanity all over the world, I ask you in the name of whatever you worship or believe in, have you ever heard of something like that ever happening anytime in history? Have you ever heard of an education minister shooting real bullets at unarmed students? I suppose things like that could happen only in the disastrous era of Mr. Bush's externally imposed "democracy" in Iraq. What Mr. Bush imposed on Iraq was a bunch of criminals and ex-cons, and one of them is this so-called Education Minister Khudayer al-Khuza'i. Now let me spotlight a little bit of his background to let you, dear readers, know something about the so-called Iraqi government which is empowered and heavily supported by Mr. Bush.

Amazing revelations have emerged concerning already existing government plans to overhaul the way the internet functions in order to apply much greater restrictions and control over the web.

Lessig also revealed there is already in existence a cyber equivalent of the Patriot Act waiting for a cyber terrorism event in order to implement its provisions.

Lawrence Lessig, a respected Law Professor from Stanford University told an audience at this years Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Half Moon Bay, California, that “There’s going to be an i-9/11 event” which will act as a catalyst for a radical reworking of the law pertaining to the internet.

Lessig also revealed that he had learned, during a dinner with former government Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, that there is already in existence a cyber equivalent of the Patriot Act, an “i-Patriot Act” if you will, and that the Justice Department is waiting for a cyber terrorism event in order to implement its provisions.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Monday said it was time for Russia to rebuild links with former Cold War ally Cuba, news agencies reported.

The Kremlin is angry at U.S. plans for a missile defence system in Eastern Europe, and last month a news report suggested Russia might use Cuba, a thorn in America's side for half a century, as a refueling stop for nuclear-capable bombers.

The Russian Defence Ministry denied the report and said it had no plans to open any military bases abroad, but a top U.S. general was drawn to say such a move would cross a "red line".

ACLU Says Deeply Flawed System Means No True Justice. After a trial filled with overwhelming constitutional and procedural flaws, a jury of military officers today found Salim Hamdan guilty of providing material support for terrorism. The American Civil Liberties Union has been at Guantánamo Bay observing the Hamdan proceedings, which lacked the fundamental legal safeguards found in traditional U.S. courts or military courts governed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice

New York Times. Published: July 6, 1987. After several decades of growth in size and sophistication, the leading pro-Israel lobby in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has become a major force in shaping United States policy in the Middle East. After several decades of growth in size and sophistication, the leading pro-Israel lobby in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has become a major force in shaping United States policy in the Middle East. Operating from tightly guarded offices just north of the Capitol, the organization has gained the power to influence a Presidential candidate's choice of staff, to block practically any arms sale to an Arab country and to serve as a catalyst for intimate military relations between the Pentagon and the Israeli Army. Its leading officials are consulted by State Department and White House policy makers, by Senators and generals. The committee, known by its acronym Aipac, is an American lobby, not an Israeli one - it says its funds come from individual Americans -and it draws on a broad sympathy for the cause of Israel in the Administration, Congress and the American public. As a result, it has become the envy of competing lobbyists and the bane of Middle East specialists who would like to strengthen ties with pro-Western Arabs.

“For the last 30 years, I have witnessed and experienced the severe restraints on any free and balanced discussion of the facts. This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American-Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices. “It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine, to suggest that Israel comply with international law or to speak in defense of justice or human rights for Palestinians.”

SANTIAGO, Chile — During the darkest years of this country's military dictatorship, Mariana Callejas was an up-and-coming writer and the hostess of the era's most glamorous literary salon. Chile's leading authors trekked up to Callejas' hillside mansion every Thursday night to talk literature, have a few drinks and sometimes dance until the next morning. The salon offered a respite from the fear and violence of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's Chile, in which nearly 3,200 dissidents died or disappeared at the hands of government agents. Writer Carlos Iturra, who attended the meetings, said in an e-mail that he'd always remember those nights for "the good writers who were formed there" amid the "dances, drinks, laughs and debates." Horror lay just below the glittering surface, however, as it often did during the 1973-90 military dictatorship.

The media has told us repeatedly that some Middle Easterners hate the U.S. only because of our "freedom" and "prosperity." Missing from this explanation is the historical context of the U.S. role in the Middle East, and for that matter in the rest of the world. This basic primer is an attempt to brief readers who have not closely followed the history of U.S. foreign or military affairs, and are perhaps unaware of the background of U.S. military interventions abroad, but are concerned about the direction of our country toward a new war in the name of "freedom" and "protecting civilians." The United States military has been intervening in other countries for a long time. In 1898, it seized the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico from Spain, and in 1917-18 became embroiled in World War I in Europe. In the first half of the 20th century it repeatedly sent Marines to "protectorates" such as Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. All these interventions directly served corporate interests, and many resulted in massive losses of civilians, rebels, and soldiers. Many of the uses of U.S. combat forces are documented in A History of U.S. Military Interventions since 1890.
civilians.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has concocted a remarkable new policy: It reserves the right to seize for an indefinite period of time laptops taken across the border.

A pair of DHS policies from last month say that customs agents can routinely--as a matter of course--seize, make copies of, and "analyze the information transported by any individual attempting to enter, re-enter, depart, pass through, or reside in the United States." (See policy No. 1 and No. 2.)

DHS claims the border search of electronic information is useful to detect terrorists, drug smugglers, and people violating "copyright or trademark laws." (Readers: Are you sure your iPod and laptop have absolutely no illicitly downloaded songs? You might be guilty of a felony.)

This is a disturbing new policy, and should convince anyone taking a laptop across a border to use encryption to thwart DHS snoops. Encrypt your laptop, with full disk encryption if possible, and power it down before you go through customs.

Here's a guide to customs-proofing your laptop that we published in March.

Tallahassee Democrat senior writer Stephen Price on Friday was singled out and asked to leave a media area at the Panama City rally of presidential candidate Sen. John McCain.

Price was among at least three other reporters, and the only black reporter, surrounding McCain's campaign bus — Gov. Charlie Crist and his fiancee, Carole Rome, were already aboard — when a member of the Arizona senator's security detail asked the reporter to identify himself. Price had shown his media credentials to enter the area.

Price showed his employee identification as well as his credentials for the Friday event.

"I explained I was with the state press, but the Secret Service man said that didn't matter and that I would have to go," Price said.

When another reporter asked why Price was being removed, she too was led out of the area. He hasn’t even been appointed president yet and he is allready silencing the press and walking on the constitution.

HOUSTON (AP) - Oil giants Chevron Corp. (CVX) (CVX) and Total SA (TOT) wrapped up a string of gargantuan, record-breaking earnings reports Friday, a stretch in which six of the major international oil companies topped $50 billion in combined profit for the first time. While the profits of unparalleled size have brought withering criticism from Washington and disgust from consumers across the country, very few were surprised. Crude prices during the second quarter were nearly double what they were a year ago.

Biljana Plavsic, the former Bosnian president, was renowned throughout the 1990s as an uncompromising apologist of ethnic cleansing. The self-styled "Serbian Iron Lady" once defended the purge of Bosnian non-Serbs as "a natural phenomenon" not a war crime. But a decade later, she pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity, and apologised to "all the innocent victims of the Bosnian war - Muslims, Croats and Serbs alike". Her change of heart was seen by some as a calculated manouevre to win a reduced sentence, and by others as part of a sincere and steady evolution of her attitudes to the Balkan wars. She herself said that she had nothing to gain by seeking a reduced sentence, because at her age (72) even moderate 10-year jail term would in practice mean spending the rest of her life behind bars. In the event, she got 11 years.

Something is going to break, and soon. Banks are insolvent and failing by the hundreds if not thousands. Hedge funds are on the edge of oblivion. Only a tiny percentage of toxic waste losses in real estate and other asset classes of collateral, which will eventually amount to over $1.4 trillion in the US alone, has to date been recognized by the lying bankster fraudsters. Bonds are producing negative rates of return even based on ludicrously understated official rates of inflation (until this month, when we finally got some data bordering on the truth). Credit markets are frozen, and few can get financing at favorable rates. Banks won’t even lend to one another because they do not trust each other’s financial statements, which are all bogus.

The comprehensive bankruptcy of the United States, at every level, in all corners, atop each hill and mole-hill, and down not a few rat-holes, is preceding like some kind of hideous multi-media, inter-dimensional cosmic grand opera as produced and directed by the Devil. Every week, some bizarre new subplot is introduced by the stage managers, each turn and twist geared to produce maximum pain and carnage in the US economy, as if to foreclose any possibility of redemption on the way down. Well, the absence of hope is, after all, the essential nature of Hell (setting aside, for the moment, J.P. Sartre's quaint notion that Hell is other people).

Madam Speaker, I have, for the past 35 years, expressed my grave concern for the future of America . The course we have taken over the past century has threatened our liberties, security and prosperity. In spite of these long-held concerns, I have days--growing more frequent all the time--when I'm convinced the time is now upon us that some Big Events are about to occur. These fast-approaching events will not go unnoticed. They will affect all of us. They will not be limited to just some areas of our country. The world economy and political system will share in the chaos about to be unleashed.

Halliburton Co. failed to protect the water supply it is paid to purify for U.S. soldiers throughout Iraq, in one instance missing contamination that could have caused “mass sickness or death,” an internal company report concluded.Video

►Here is what was revealed:

1. The imminent collapse of the U.S. Economy to occur sometime in late 2008

2. The imminent collapse of the U.S. Government finances sometime in mid 2009

3. The possibility of Civil War inside the United States as a result of the collapse

4. The advance round-ups of “insurgent U.S. Citizens” likely to move against the government

An interesting crop circle appeared July 15, 2008 that has the position of the planets around Dec 21, 2012.

UBS caved in to mounting pressure from the US Government yesterday and announced plans to close the Swiss bank accounts of all its American customers and prepared to lift the veil of secrecy that has protected its clients for centuries.

Mark Branson, the chief financial officer of UBS's global wealth-management unit, told a Senate hearing into tax evasion in Washington: “We have decided entirely to exit the business. UBS will no longer provide offshore banking or securities services to US residents through our bank branches.”

Recruiters are pushing military service on youngsters and violating the law, says ACLU - Children as young as 11-years-old are targets of military recruiters, who dangle video games, drive flashy SUVs, spin tales of adventure, promise money for college and other pipe dreams and trinkets in a campaign to entice youngsters into military service, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The U.S. is violating its own laws in failing to safeguard children under 18 from military recruitment, while high school girls have been raped and groped by recruiters in some instances. The report, “Soldiers of Misfortune: Abusive U.S. Military Recruitment and Failure to Protect Child Soldiers,” found military recruiting practices violate international protocols for the recruitment of child soldiers

On January 8, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the Bush administration could continue to detain Yaser Esam Hamdi as an “enemy combatant.” Hamdi is a US citizen discovered among men taken prisoner in late 2001 by Northern Alliance forces allied with the US military in Afghanistan.

The decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld sanctions the indefinite, incommunicado imprisonment of US citizens on US soil—without criminal charges, legal representation or meaningful judicial review.

The ruling was widely denounced by human rights organizations, charging that it dismantled basic constitutional safeguards against police state methods. “The decision is a shocking abdication of responsibility by the court,” said Elisa Massimino, director of the Washington office of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (LCHR). “The court has adopted a ‘we’ll-look-the-other-way’ posture in this case, which leaves unfulfilled its duty to act as a check on administrative power.”

“A rolling tsunami of social unrest is underway as we speak—hungry people are desperate people capable of taking desperate actions,” warned the UN representative for CIVICUS, an international alliance for citizen participation.

“This tsunami is rapidly enveloping the global South, and it won’t take much longer before it knocks at the door of the global North,” added the representative, Vicente Garcia-Delgado.

At a forum on the world food crisis held at the United Nations May 16, civil society groups stressed that more than 800 million people are now at risk of starvation, while 100 million have joined the ranks of the extremely poor in just the last few months and are now living on less than $1 a day.

The American Civil Liberties Union applauded a federal appellate court ruling today that school officials violated the constitutional rights of a 13-year-old Arizona girl when they strip searched her based on a classmate’s uncorroborated accusation that she possessed ibuprofen. Today’s 6-5 ruling from an en banc panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reverses an earlier decision by a divided three-judge panel of the same court.

Disclosed here is the true account of the slaying in Mississippi of a Negro youth named Emmett Till. Last September in Sumner, Miss., a petit jury found the youth's admitted abductors not guilty of murder. In November, in Greenwood, a grand jury declined to indict them for kidnapping. Of the murder trial, the Memphis Commercial Appeal said: "Evidence necessary for convicting on a murder charge was lacking." But with truth absent, hypocrisy and myth have flourished. Now, hypocrisy can be exposed; myth dispelled. Here are the facts. Carolyn Holloway Bryant is 21, five feet tall, weighs 103 pounds. An Irish girl, with black hair and black eyes, she is a small farmer's daughter who, at 17, quit high school at Indianola, Miss., to marry a soldier, Roy Bryant, then 20, now 24. The couple have two boys, three and two; and they operate a store at a dusty crossroads called Money: post office, filling station and three stores clustered around a school and a gin, and set in the vast, lonely cotton patch that is the Mississippi Delta.

It was a wolf whistle that turned into a racial whirlwind. It was a cheeky moment when a high-spirited, 14-year-old black kid visiting from Chicago forgot where he was and, while buying bubblegum with his cousins at the store in the dirt-poor, redneck village of Money, Mississippi, acted "sassy" before the white storekeeper's pretty, young wife. Emmett Till paid for it a few nights later with his life, suffering a grotesque, tortuous lynching. Finally, shot through the head, wrapped in barbed wire and weighed down, he was thrown into the Tallahatchie River. Only the signet ring left him by his late father could safely identify him. That took place in August 1955, as we see in The Murder of Emmett Till, a grimly riveting documentary from black American filmmaker Stanley Nelson.

In a secret report last year, the International Committee of the Red Cross found that the CIA's interrogation techniques were "categorically" torture, a new book reveals. From the New York Times: The book, "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals," by Jane Mayer, who writes about counterterrorism for The New Yorker, offers new details of the agency's secret detention program, as well as the bitter debates in the administration over interrogation methods and other tactics in the campaign against Al Qaeda. Citing unnamed "sources familiar with the report," Ms. Mayer wrote that the Red Cross document "warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted."

The dean of Massachusetts School of Law at Andover is planning a September conference to map out war crimes prosecutions, and the targets are President Bush and other administration officials.

The dean, Lawrence Velvel, says in a statement that “plans will be laid and necessary organizational structures set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and, if need be, to the ends of the Earth."

Other possible defendants, he said, include federal judges and John Yoo, the former Justice Department official who wrote one of the so-called torture memos.

“We must insist on appropriate punishments,” he continued, “including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top German and Japanese war criminals in the 1940s."

Velvel elaborates in an introduction to a series of articles published in The Long Term View (PDF). He writes “there is no question” that Bush and other officials are guilty of the federal crime of conspiracy to commit torture.

The "horror of the shrieking boys" gets a rubber stamp from the boot-licking U.S. Congress & Senate as America officially becomes a dictatorship.

Slamming the final nail in the coffin of everything America used to stand for, the boot-licking U.S. Senate last night gave President Bush the legal authority to abduct and sexually mutilate American citizens and American children in the name of the war on terror.

There is nothing in the "detainee" legislation that protects American citizens from being kidnapped by their own government and tortured.

Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman states in the L.A. Times, "The compromise legislation....authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights."

Similarly, law Professor Marty Lederman explains: "this [subsection (ii) of the definition of 'unlawful enemy combatant'] means that if the Pentagon says you're an unlawful enemy combatant -- using whatever criteria they wish -- then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to 'hostilities' at all."

A 70-YEAR-OLD Indian woman has become the world’s oldest mum after giving birth to twins. Omkari Panwar, the wife of a retired farmer, delivered a boy and girl by caesarean section on Friday. The frail pensioner, who has two adult daughters and five grandchildren, underwent IVF treatment to produce a male heir to the family’s smallholdings.

The U.N. chief has agreed to Pakistan's request to establish an independent commission that will investigate the killing of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's office confirmed the agreement moments after it was announced by Pakistan's top diplomat. "The objectives are for the commission to identify the culprits, perpetrators, organizers and financiers of the assassination," Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told reporters Thursday, just after a brief, private meeting with Ban. Qureshi said Ban would appoint "well-respected, eminent people" to the independent commission. "We have reached an understanding, and there is a concrete decision on that," the foreign minister said. "What is being discussed and further consultations are required are on the modalities." Ban's office said in a statement that "broad understanding had been reached" on the nature of the commission, including: how to pay for it; who its members should be; how to protect its independence and impartiality; and that its members should have unfettered access to the information it needs. Various postings by The People's Voice with regard to the killing of Ms. Benazir Bhutto: HERE and HERE.

In 1960, the Secret Team, terrified that President Eisenhower was coming to terms with the USSR, resolved that there must be no peace. A surefire plan was needed to destruct the upcoming summit conference. What better way to show American bad faith than by arranging for a US "spy" plane to be forced down over the USSR on the Russian's most important national holiday. More than one-third of all the Federal Taxes you and I pay goes into something called "Defense"; yet, we have almost no defense at all. We do have some offense, though, and that offense is supposed to operate on a "fail-safe" system. The power of the Presidency is elusive and Presidents are never sure when they really have it. Momentous acts, presumably carried out with Presidential knowledge and approval, can in fact be committed without the President's authorization. In many cases, the presumption of authorization is standard operating procedure for action. After a lifetime of Government service, President Eisenhower went to bed on the night of April 30th, 1960 secure in the belief that he, Macmillan of Britain, DeGaulle of France, and Khrushchev of the USSR would meet in Paris on May 16th in a summit conference that would seal agreements for peace throughout the world. Eisenhower was believed to be a powerful world figure whose dedication to this Crusade for Peace would succeed. But as he slept, fail-safe failed.

A third undersea cable has been cut, effectively eliminating the Internet in the Middle East. But according to CNN that cable outage does not extend to Israel, Lebanon and Iraq. Is it a coincidence that these three countries, who represent the next phase of the war on terrorism, were spared in the communications blackout that is affecting the rest of the Middle East? With the reemergence of the shadowy Fatah Al Islam organization, which has been linked to Saudi Prince Bandar, Saad Al-Hariri, the Mossad and neocon Elliot Abrams, it becomes clear that the pre-invasion of Lebanon scenario from last summer has nearly been reset. Bush laid claim to Lebanon with his recent executive order criminalizing criticism of US/Israeli actions in Lebanon, just as he did with the previous one on Iraq. These two orders claimed that the entire war of terror hinged on these sideshows, declaring that failure in either represents “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” It is obvious to the casual observer that things are really starting to heat-up in Lebanon, with the recent attack upon a US Embassy vehicle, the car-bombing of the Hariri investigator, even another fake Osama bin Laden video about Lebanon. The assassination of Lebanese investigator Capt. Wissam Eid, who reportedly suspected Israeli involvement in recent assassinations blamed on Syria, such as Rafik Hariri, is very likely another Mossad false flag attack, carried-out to entertain the gullible sheep of the United States.

Before clinching the Democratic Party presidential nomination, Barack Obama contrasted his vision for the future role of the U.S. Supreme Court to rival John McCain's, arguing that the current Court's consistent bias in favor of "the powerful against the powerless" has allowed corporate and government interests to ride roughshod over "what ordinary people are going through." In that populist vein, Obama went on to describe as his models for Supreme Court appointments Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter--who he claimed are "people on the bench who have enough empathy, enough feeling" for those trampled on by Corporate America. Once securely anointed in June, Obama immediately lost interest in ordinary people and began panting for corporate support. Perhaps for this reason, he felt no need to criticize the Court for its June 25 ruling on behalf of ExxonMobil that reduced to a mere pittance the amount in punitive damages that the most profitable corporation in history owes to the nearly 33,000 Alaskan fishermen, cannery workers and Natives whose livelihoods were destroyed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, the worst environmental disaster in corporate history.

Summary: During a segment in which Fox & Friends co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade labeled New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg and editor Steven Reddicliffe "attack dogs," Fox News featured photos of Steinberg and Reddicliffe that appeared to have been digitally altered -- the journalists' teeth had been yellowed, their facial features exaggerated, and portions of Reddicliffe's hair moved further back on his head. (Fair and balanced?)

Mark Klein, the retired AT&T engineer who stepped forward with the technical documents at the heart of the anti-wiretapping case against AT&T, is furious at the Senate's vote on Wednesday night to hold a vote on a bill intended to put an end to that lawsuit and more than 30 others.

Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious 'colony collapse' of bees.

It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.

Once oil passed $140 a barrel, even the most rabidly right-wing media hosts had to prove their populist cred by devoting a portion of every show to bashing Big Oil. Some have gone so far as to invite me on for a friendly chat about an insidious new phenomenon: "disaster capitalism." It usually goes well--until it doesn't. If you're looking for a sure bet in the new growth market, sell solar and buy surveillance. Forget wind, buy weapons. For instance, "independent conservative" radio host Jerry Doyle and I were having a perfectly amiable conversation about sleazy insurance companies and inept politicians when this happened: "I think I have a quick way to bring the prices down," Doyle announced. "We've invested $650 billion to liberate a nation of 25 million people. Shouldn't we just demand that they give us oil? There should be tankers after tankers backed up like a traffic jam getting into the Lincoln Tunnel, the Stinkin' Lincoln, at rush hour with thank-you notes from the Iraqi government.... Why don't we just take the oil? We've invested it liberating a country. I can have the problem solved of gas prices coming down in ten days, not ten years."

You remember the anthrax attacks – or do you? It often seems, to me at least, that this important catalyst for the invasion of Iraq and our supremely wrong-headed post-9/11 foreign policy has been flushed down the collective memory hole. For all the attention that's been paid to that spooky chapter in the history of the "war on terrorism" in the intervening years, it may as well have never occurred. That's why news of the former prime suspect's ultimate vindication – and his victory in a $5.8 million lawsuit in which he accused the feds of unfairly targeting him as a "person of interest" (as John Ashcroft put it) – seems like a visitation from another time, the ghost of 9/11 past, haunting and mocking us. It sends chills down my spine – because, you see, the real culprits are still out there.

Sweden joins the "War on Terror" by approving a law that gives the government a carte blanche for surveillance of all citizens. The law was passed by a 143 to 138 votes in the Swedish Parliament. The law was earlier referred for consideration by several institutions that in unison bashed it harshly, fearing for the privacy of the citizens, news sources and corporations. Despite the criticism by the considering instances, the law was hastily forced through overshadowed by the European Championship of Football, conveniently keeping the people glued to their TV’s. It was reported that the Prime Minister of Sweden, Fredrik Reinfeldt, was rather attending the Swedish Football match than attending the voting in the parliament. If this was due to indifference or certainty of the result was not stated. The snooping on the public will be done by the civil authority "Försvarets RadioAnstalt" FRA, roughly translated "Radio Institution for Defense", who earlier this year bought one of the worlds fastest supercomputers from Hewlett-Packard.

For years, congressional Democrats dreamed of getting a crack at a man they saw as a key player behind the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods against detainees in the war on terrorism -- methods the critics say amount to torture. On Thursday, they finally got their wish: Thickly bearded and glaring out through half-rimmed glasses, David S. Addington, a top aide to Vice President Cheney and alleged master-mind of the legal rationale for the harsh techniques, appeared before a House subcommittee. But rather than eliciting new information or forcing damaging admissions from the long-sought witness, the hearing turned into an emotion-charged demonstration of the hostility and mutual disdain between the most liberal critics of the Bush administration's war policies and one of the architects of those policies. For his part, Addington provided little specific information on his role in pressing for controversial interrogation tactics at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and with CIA prisoners. At the same time, he made it clear that he had played a central role in the matter. And he lectured the committee on the continuing nature of the terrorist threat. "No American should think we're free, the war is over, Al Qaeda is not coming and they're not interested in getting us," Addington told the Constitution, civil rights and civil liberties subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. "Because that's wrong." Yet when Democrats tried to pin him down on the moral and legal issues they considered crucial, Addington brushed them aside with barely concealed disdain. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who later characterized Addington's attitude as "smug," asked whether, if the interrogation program was found to be illegal, he would bear any responsibility. "Is that a moral question or a legal question?" Addington asked, then said he bore no responsibility, legal or moral.

Future referendums will be ignored whether they are held in Ireland or elsewhere, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the architect of the European Union Constitution said. The former President of France drafted the old Constitution that was rejected by French and Dutch voters three years ago before being resurrected as the Lisbon EU Treaty, itself shunned by the Irish two weeks ago. Mr Giscard d'Estaing told the Irish Times that Ireland's referendum rejection would not kill the Treaty, despite a legal requirement of unanimity from all the EU's 27 member states. "We are evolving towards majority voting because if we stay with unanimity, we will do nothing," he said. "It is impossible to function by unanimity with 27 members. This time it's Ireland; the next time it will be somebody else." "Ireland is one per cent of the EU". Mr Giscard d'Estaing also admitted that, unlike his original Constitutional Treaty, the Lisbon EU Treaty had been carefully crafted to confuse the public. "What was done in the [Lisbon] Treaty, and deliberately, was to mix everything up. If you look for the passages on institutions, they're in different places, on different pages," he said. "Someone who wanted to understand how the thing worked could with the Constitutional Treaty, but not with this one."

As historians ponder George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, they may wonder how Republicans perfected a propaganda system that could fool tens of millions of Americans, intimidate Democrats, and transform the vaunted Washington press corps from watchdogs to
lapdogs. To understand this extraordinary development, historians might want to look back at the 1980s and examine the Iran-Contra scandal’s “lost chapter,” a narrative describing how Ronald Reagan’s administration brought CIA tactics to bear domestically to reshape the way Americans perceived the world. That chapter – which we are publishing here for the first time – was “lost” because Republicans on the congressional Iran-Contra investigation waged a rear-guard fight that traded elimination of the chapter’s key findings for the votes of three moderate GOP senators, giving the final report a patina of bipartisanship. Under that compromise, a few segments of the draft chapter were inserted in the final report’s Executive Summary and in another section on White House private fundraising, but the chapter’s conclusions and its detailed account of how the “perception management” operation worked ended up on the editing room floor. The American people thus were spared the chapter’s troubling finding: that the Reagan administration had built a domestic covert propaganda apparatus managed by a CIA propaganda and disinformation specialist working out of the National Security Council.

White House Weighs Striking Iran's Nuclear Complex, Which Could Trigger 3rd War In Region. Israel Poised To Strike Iran. Israel has made it clear it intends to end Iran's nuclear program with or without U.S. support ? and before President Bush leaves office. David Martin reports on mounting tensions in Mideast. Is Israel Poised To Attack Iran? Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen leaves Tuesday night on an overseas trip that will take him to Israel, reports CBS News national security correspondent David Martin. The trip has been scheduled for some time but U.S. officials say it comes just as the Israelis are mounting a full court press to get the Bush administration to strike Iran's nuclear complex. CBS consultant Michael Oren says Israel doesn't want to wait for a new administration. "The Israelis have been assured by the Bush administration that the Bush administration will not allow Iran to nuclearize," Oren said. "Israelis are uncertain about what would be the policies of the next administration vis-à-vis Iran."

The latest surge in the spot price of crude oil (to US$139 a barrel — 87.4 cents a litre) dramatises the urgent need for society to wean itself off “black gold”. The longer we remain hooked the greater the devastation both to our environment and to the living standards of millions, especially the poorest peoples of the planet.

The controversy surrounding the Swiss government's shredding of documents seized as part of a nuclear smuggling investigation continues to grow. On Friday the federal criminal court rejected a bail application by two Swiss brothers accused of supplying parts for Libya's nuclear weapons programme. Experts criticise the lack of separation of powers and mounting speculation that the United States, concerned that its agents were implicated, had demanded the documents be destroyed. "The government is not above the law – even when the security or the interests of the country are involved," said legal expert Thomas Fleiner, director of the Federalism Institute at Fribourg University. He said that neither the government nor parliament could interfere with the competency of the courts. Niklaus Oberholzer, president of the St Gallen board of indictment, also believed the separation of powers had been breached, describing the incident as a "monstrosity".

Declared unfit for military service, Dylan Thomas spent much of the war writing film and radio scripts for the Ministry of Information. One of these, The Art of Conversation, is published here for the first time. Andrew Lycett explains its significance. Tom and Viv, Ted and Sylvia, and now Dylan and Caitlin: there is something about poets and their spouses that fascinates film-makers. Dylan Thomas, the self-styled "Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive", is the latest to get the celluloid treatment. The rackety four-way relationship between the Welsh poet, his wife, an old girlfriend (Vera) and her husband (Captain William Killick), played out in the heightened emotional atmosphere of the second world war, is examined in primary colours in John Maybury's fine new film The Edge of Love, which went on general release this week. If that were not enough, we are promised Caitlin, in development by Pierce Brosnan, with Miranda Richardson in the title role. Another biopic, The Map of Love, has long been mooted by Mick Jagger's company, Jagged Films, but is not yet in production.

Before I became a chronicler of the men detained without charge or trial in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, I wrote a book about the British counter-culture, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, which told the story of Britain’s most iconic ancient monument from the point of view of those who have sought to make it their own in the face of opposition from the government and the archaeological establishment: festival-goers, travellers, anarchists, eco-activists, Druids and other pagans. I also compiled, edited and contributed chapters to The Battle of the Beanfield, produced to commemorate the 20th anniversary of that brutal day in June 1985, when, having destroyed Britain’s mining communities, Margaret Thatcher turned her jack-booted attention to another “enemy within”: the travellers and political activists who had replicated the Greenham Women’s anti-nuclear protest at Molesworth in Cambridgeshire, and who were viciously set upon by police from six counties — and the Ministry of Defence — as they tried to make their way to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th annual free festival, an anarchic free-for-all, the likes of which are now but a distant memory.

I, Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States of America, do declare that said national emergency still continues to exist and pursuant to said section to do hereby prohibit the hoarding gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States by individuals, partnerships, associations and corporations and hereby prescribe the following regulations for carrying out the purposes of the order: Section 1. For the purpose of this regulation, the term 'hoarding" means the withdrawal and withholding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates from the recognized and customary channels of trade. The term "person" means any individual, partnership, association or corporation. Section 2. All persons are hereby required to deliver on or before May 1, 1933, to a Federal Reserve bank or a branch or agency thereof or to any member bank of the Federal Reserve System all gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates now owned by them or coming into their ownership on or before April 28, 1933.

In an interesting film review of "The Last King of Scotland," former Uganda resident Richard Dowden finds it likely that it was the Israelis who brought dictator Idi Amin to power. This was not in the script— If the British did have a hand in the events of 25 January 1971, the plotters neglected to tell the British high commissioner in Kampala, Richard Slater. Foreign Office telegrams reveal a man shocked and confused at reports of shooting in the streets. As the day rolls on, Slater reports that the man who knows all about the coup is Colonel Bar-Lev, the Israeli defence attaché - the ambassador was away. Quoting Bar-Lev as the source, Slater reports: "In the course of last night, General Amin caused to be arrested all officers in the armed forces sympathetic to Obote ... Amin is now firmly in control of all elements of [the] army ... the Israeli defence attaché discounts any possibility of moves against Amin." In the following days, the Israelis take the lead. Bar-Lev is in constant contact with Amin. Slater tells London that Bar-Lev has explained to him "in considerable detail [how] ... all potential foci of resistance, both up-country and in Kampala, had been eliminated." How does he know this? The Uganda military radio network had been provided by the Israelis. Soon afterwards, Amin made his first trip as president - to Israel.

Idi Amin Dada (January 1, 1923 - 16 August 2003), commonly known simply as Idi Amin, was a military dictator and the President of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. Amin joined the British colonial regiment, the King's African Rifles in 1946, and advanced to the rank of Major General and Commander of the Ugandan Army. He took power in a military coup in January 1971, deposing Milton Obote. His rule was characterized by human rights abuses, political repression, ethnic persecution, extra-judicial killings and the expulsion of Asians from Uganda. The number of people killed as a result of his regime is unknown; estimates from human rights groups range from 100,000 to 500,000.

Back in the day when communism was a politically viable economic program, its capitalist enemies used to love to rail against the evils of "Marxism-Leninism".

Interestingly, they almost always attacked it for all the wrong reasons, citing, for example, the lack of political freedom in societies where it was being practiced, the aggressive tendencies of national leaders in those countries seeking to conquer their neighbors, or the ideology's hostility to religion. That last one in particular was always a good one for getting Americans to rise out of their pews in disgust and anger. Those commies don't even have Jesus!

The fact that none of these critiques had anything at all to do with the economic system that communism actually is was always telling. It's not so easy to attack the idea of sharing and community, is it? Better to wrap it up instead inside the godless thugs - sometimes real, sometimes not - who embraced it abroad. What could be more un-American?

On Tuesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held an eight-hour hearing that exposed the role of top Bush administration officials in authorizing the use of harsh interrogation techniques. Meanwhile, Retired Major General Antonio Taguba, the Army general who first investigated the abuse at Abu Ghraib, has accused the Bush administration of committing war crimes. “The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture,” Taguba said. [includes rush transcript] Real Video Stream | Real Audio Stream | MP3 Download

JUAN GONZALEZ: Retired General Antonio Taguba, who led the US Army’s investigation into the Abu Ghraib abuses, has accused the Bush administration of “a systematic regime of torture” and war crimes. Taguba’s accusations appear in the preface to a new report released by Physicians for Human Rights. The report uses medical evidence to confirm first-hand accounts of eleven former prisoners who endured torture by US personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.

Taguba writes, “There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

A wig used to disguise a communist leader, censored poems written by the current culture minister and a list of prisoners facing the firing squad are just a few of the treasures within 157,000 boxes of archives highlighting both the dark and ridiculous sides of the Spanish civil war and Franco's dictatorship. Now the documents, which stretch 109 miles back to back, are to be sent from an archive in Madrid to a new Centre for Historical Memory in Salamanca, the wartime headquarters of Franco, to go on view when the centre opens in two years after refurbishment. Among the artefacts will be the wig used by Santiago Carrillo when he secretly returned to Spain after Franco's death in 1975. Visitors will also be able to pore over lists of dates of the executions by firing squad of enemies of Franco's regime. The proceedings of kangaroo courts, which condemned opponents on trumped-up charges, also form part of this testament to one of Spain's darkest chapters. The archives reveal that about a million people were imprisoned between the end of the civil war in 1939 and the latter days of the Franco regime in 1973. Crosses next to prisoners' names meant they were executed. The archive was saved by civil servants who ignored orders to destroy them, putting themselves at risk.

La vida de los combatientes de las Brigadas Internacionales en la retaguardia, del archivo del general Walter, centran la exposición de fotografías inéditas que, desde hoy jueves hasta el 18 de mayo, se podrá contemplar en el edificio antiguo de la Universidad de Valencia.

El fondo fotográfico de la Junta Delegada de Defensa de Madrid, denominado también Archivo Rojo, compuesto por más de 3.000 imágenes de la Guerra Civil, está desde hoy a disposición del público a través del Portal de Archivos Españoles PARES. Entrando en la pestaña Catálogo se pueden descargar cientos de instantáneas que muestran la devastación en las fachadas de la ciudad, algunos rostros de milicianos e sin descartar algunas escenas brutales, como la de los restos de un aviador arrojado desde el aire por un soldado faccioso.

Este valioso conjunto fotográfico, fue creado por la Junta de Defensa de Madrid como Fondo propagandístico para denunciar los desastres de la Guerra Civil. Posteriormente, fue ocultado y utilizado por el otro bando como instrumento de represión de las ideas políticas. Hoy, sus imágenes, nos acercan más a los actos encaminados para el recuerdo y homenaje de las víctimas de los bandos en guerra y para que la sociedad actual reafirme los lazos de convivencia política y social recogidos en el espíritu de la Constitución de 1978.

Urban Moving Systems Inc received almost $500,000 in a loan from the American government in fiscal year 2001. The loan was a small business loan from the Small Business Administration and was made on June 22, 2001. Urban Moving Systems Inc is most famous now as the employer of the 'dancing Israelis', who videotaped and celebrated the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. They arrived at the scene - somehow knowing in advance that there would be something interesting to videotape - in a van marked 'Urban Moving Systems'. Curiously, 'Middle Eastern' men, who turned out to be called Moshe Elmakias and Ron Katar, were detained (or here) and turned over to the INS (!) for acting suspiciously and having video footage of the Sears Tower, and were driving a tractor-trailer marked 'Moving Systems Incorporated'. There was another incident near York, Pennsylvania on September 12, another police stop of suspicious persons, involving another Urban Moving Systems vehicle. One of the drivers was a former Israeli paratrooper. The other "is given polygraph tests and claims to have satisfied his questioners except on the issue of who sent him to the US." (my italics) Dominick Suter (whose name is misspelled in some of the whatreallyhappened postings), the 'owner' of the company, immediately fled to Israel.

Shortly After 8:46 a.m. September 11, 2001: Neighbor Sees Suspicious Men Documenting First WTC Attack and Cheering, Calls Police. A homemaker living near Liberty State Park, Jersey City, New Jersey sees three men behaving strangely on a nearby roof and alerts the authorities. This homemaker, who has given only her first name Maria, is called by a neighbor shortly after the first plane has hit the WTC and is told about the impact. She has a view of the WTC from her apartment building so she gets her binoculars and watches the disaster. However, she also notices three young men kneeling on the roof of a white van in the parking lot of her apartment building. Maria will later recall, “They seemed to be taking a movie.” They are taking video or photos of themselves with the WTC burning in the background. But what strikes Maria is their expressions: “They were like happy, you know… They didn’t look shocked to me. I thought it was very strange.”

U.S. CHUCK HAGEL NOW ADMITS OWNERSHIP IN VOTING MACHINE COMPANY SENATE ETHICS COMMITTEE DIRECTOR RESIGNS. On October, 10, 2002 Bev Harris, author of the upcoming “Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering” in the 21st Century, revealed that Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has ties to the largest voting machine company, Election Systems & Software (ES&S). She reported that he was an owner, Chairman and CEO of Election Systems & Software (called American Information Systems until name change filed in 1997). ES&S was the ONLY company whose machines counted Hagel’s votes when he ran for election in 1996 and 2002. The Hill, a Washington D.C. newspaper that covers the U.S. national political scene, confirmed her findings today and uncovered more details. Hagel’s campaign finance director, Michael McCarthy, now admits that Senator Hagel still owns a beneficial interest in the ES&S parent company, the McCarthy Group. ES&S counts approximately 60 percent of all votes cast in the United States. According to the Omaha World-Herald which is also a beneficial owner of ES&S, Hagel was CEO of American Information Systems, now called ES&S, from November 1993 through June 2, 1994. He was Chairman from July 1992 until March 15 1995. He was required to disclose these positions on his FEC Personal Disclosure statements, but he did not. Hagel still owns up to $5 million in the ES&S parent company, McCarthy Group. But Hagel’s office, when interviewed by Channel 8 News in Lincoln, Nebraska for the evening news on October 22, 2002, said he had sold his shares before he was elected. His office issued a fact sheet claiming that he had made full disclosure.

The 2000 presidential election was not decided by hanging chads, recounts, a flawed felon list, or intervention by the Supreme Court. It was decided by a far worse scandal that remains unknown to the American people but stands as a warning that our votes are still not safe and secure. Al Gore lost Florida's vote and the presidential election because Florida officials tossed into the trashcan as invalid more than one out of every ten ballots cast by African-Americans throughout the state. In some counties, nearly 25 percent of ballots cast by blacks were set aside as invalid. In contrast, officials rejected less than one out of every fifty ballots cast by whites statewide. Most of the rejected ballots cast by African-Americans were not under-voted ballots on which no vote could allegedly be discerned, but over-voted ballots that allegedly included marks for more than one candidate. Ballots were also rejected as over-votes if voters wrote in the same candidate they marked on the ballot. Over-votes were not included in Florida's recount process. Florida's vast racial disparity in ballot rejection rates defeated Al Gore. If black ballots had been rejected at the same minimal rate as white ballots, more than 50,000 additional black votes would have been counted in Florida's presidential election. Given that more than 90 percent of blacks favored Gore over Bush, Gore would have won Florida by at least 40,000 votes, prevailed in the Electoral College, and become President of the United States on January 20, 2001.

When a news organization as venerable as the BBC censors the reportage of a story as important as the assassination of Benzir Bhutto --a highly visible critic of Bush/British policy with regard to the "War on Terrorism" et al --it is fair to ask: who is the BBC protecting? Are they covering up the motive for her murder? Are they protecting the regimes that engineered her assassination? Here is the original, unedited version in which Bhutto states that Bin Laden had been murdered. [...] That portion is missing from the BBC clip found on the BBC website. Again --Bhutto's words are: “...he also had dealings with Omar Sheik, the man who murdered Osama bin Laden“. A clarificatdion of my own. Some have referred to the tape as an Al Jazeera video. I categorize it as a BBC video (though they censored it) because BBC owns the copyright on it. The BBC is ultimately responsible for its content and, of course, the misleading manner in which it was edited. Al Jazaeera, it must be point out, ran the complete interview including that single paragraph that BBC censored.

The current food crisis reflects not only financial events of recent years, but longer-term policies of world imperialism. Instead of allowing for a planned improvement of infrastructure and farming techniques, globalization on a capitalist basis has resulted in a restriction in many parts of the world of farm production. This has been carried out in order to lessen competition and prevent market gluts from harming the profit interests of the major powers.

One major aspect of imperialist policy was to limit farm production in the so-called “First World” to prevent sudden falls in world prices. In the US, this policy took the form of the federal government’s Conservation Reserve Program, first passed as part of the 1985 Food Security Act. Lowest Food Supplies in 50-100 Years: Global Food Crisis Emerging

Babies born in Fallujah are showing illnesses and deformities on a scale never seen before, doctors and residents say.

The new cases, and the number of deaths among children, have risen after "special weaponry" was used in the two massive bombing campaigns in Fallujah in 2004.

After denying it at first, the Pentagon admitted in November 2005 that white phosphorous, a restricted incendiary weapon, was used a year earlier in Fallujah.

In addition, depleted uranium (DU) munitions, which contain low-level radioactive waste, were used heavily in Fallujah. The Pentagon admits to having used 1,200 tonnes of DU in Iraq thus far.

Many doctors believe DU to be the cause of a severe increase in the incidence of cancer in Iraq, as well as among U.S. veterans who served in the 1991 Gulf War and through the current occupation.

"The most worrying is that many of our women have suffered loss of their babies, and some had babies born with deformations."

The mainstream media is now acknowledging "Operation Northwoods" [see link at bottom of page], a (declassified) secret plan to kill innocent civilians in the US: The objective was to "create a useful wave of indignation", blame Fidel Castro for the civilian deaths, with a view to building a pretext to invade Cuba. Terrorist Attacks on Cubans and American Citizens. -This sounds familiar does it not? Was Operation Northwoods a dress rehearsal? On September 11, 2001, "a mass casualty producing event" as it is described in military-intelligence circles was used to galvanize public support for a war on Afghanistan. That war, which was already in the advanced planning stages was launched less than a month after 9/11, on October 7, 2001. While 911 researchers have extensively analyzed the logic of Operation Northwoods, and its role in the construction of the "Global War on Terrorism" the mainstream media has largely remained silent.

[ICTS = International Consultants on Targeted Security] It's one of those times when an innocuous comment in an unrelated news report triggers a revelation. In the article at http://afrocubaweb.com/news/israelispying.htm there is the following paragraph:"To make the situation worse, a private security company called ICTS, owned by an Israeli, Ezra Harel, and registered in the Netherlands, was employed at Charles de Gaulle airport to screen passengers boarding US planes. Most of its personnel are ex-Shin Bet officers. The company covers security at Boston's Logan airport, where the American Airlines plane came down after flight attendants and passengers overpowered Reid." The point of the article was that ICTS knew shoe bomber Richard Reid was dangerous, but allowed him on board a flight from Tel Aviv to Paris. Maybe they did and maybe they didn't. But the idea that an Israeli owned company had inside access to the airport used to launch an abortive terror attack brought to mind the strange message Odigo Systems, another Israeli owned company with offices near the World Trade Towers, received that warned of the impending attacks before the hijacked planes had even left the ground.

I've already been over on this blog why the Colombian revolutionaries really have no alternative but to fight. When they tried to lay down their weapons, they were slaughtered like flies. As long as there is no open space for peaceful dissent in Colombia, armed struggle will be a sensible option. Via a couple of articles out of People's Movement Support Group, we now learn a lot more about Sure Shot - Manuel Marulanda. The essential moment in the Colombian struggle and the one that actually gave rise to the FARC 16 years later was the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the presidential candidate that the people had pinned their hopes on. Colombia has always been ruled by two ruling class parties - the Liberals and the Conservatives. Although they hated each other, there was never much different between the two. Gaitán was a new kind of Liberal - a leftwing populist that was actually going to work for the people and not the oligarchy for once. Even his own Liberal party condemned him, and he was quickly assassinated by unknown parties. The killing set off La Violencia, a conflict between the Conservatives and Liberals that killed 200,000 people in a small country over the next 16 years. The peasants in the countryside split off to form militias to slaughter each other. The Conservatives represented the older oligarchy, and the Liberals represented some nouveau riche up and coming members of the oligarchy who wanted in. However, the Liberals were joined by many peasants and Communists. The two parties finally signed a peace treaty in 1963 and decided to declare war on the Communists.

Lenni Brenner: Below is a letter of mine, published in the Spring/08 issue of COLUMBIA, that University's magazine. It is in response to a review of Michael Makovsky's new book, Churchill's Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft, by alumnus Dore Gold, Israel's UN ambassador, 1997-99. Gold's review is below, but the feature of this documentary collection is Churchill's 1920 article, "Zionism Versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People." World War II is history's most written about era. After Hitler's defeat, scholars rushed to study the Austrian and German societies that generated his fantastic personality. Eventually historians analyzed the mistakes and crimes of the winners, "the big three." The cold war generated massive research into Stalin's crimes. With the triumph of America's civil rights movement came full exposure of Roosevelt's racially segregated military. Then Reagan acknowledged Roosevelt's shameless interning of West Coast Japanese-American citizens in concentration camps and compensated the victims. But Churchill got off lightly in America. It is conceded that he was an imperialist, but his resistance to Hitler is still seen as he put it, the British empire's "finest hour." His paintings and mementos sell well here. Few rich buyers have any serious knowledge of his pre-war politics. Did Israel's ambassador know of Churchill's sordid record when he heeped praise on the scoundrel? Read Churchill and Gold. Decide for yourself.

Today, June 8, marks 41 years since the Israeli attack on a U.S. Navy spy ship, the USS Liberty, during the Six Day War in 1967. The attack occurred on a clear, sunny day after Israeli forces had observed the Liberty for three hours, during which time the air crews and sailors had waved greetings to each other. Suddenly and without warning, the ship was attacked by unmarked aircraft of the Israeli Air Force, which strafed the ship several times before departing. At this time the American flag, which had been flying the entire time, was replaced by a larger flag. Subsequently, three Israeli torpedo boats arrived and proceeded to fire five torpedoes at the Liberty, only one of which actually hit the ship, nearly sinking it. The ship’s crew launched rubber life rafts in preparation to abandon ship. These rafts were then machine gunned by the torpedo boats before they, too, departed. Out of the crew of 210 Marines and sailors, 34 were killed and many were wounded. Approximately one hour after the attacks, an Israeli helicopter arrived and asked if the Liberty needed any assistance. The crew responded in very rough terms that no assistance would be needed from Israeli forces. U.S. Navy forces in the Mediterranean had launched aircraft to assist the Liberty, but were recalled before reaching the area. Some have claimed that this attack on a U.S. Navy ship in international waters was a tragic mistake. This scenario is plausible only if you firmly believe the Israeli forces are the military equivalent of the Keystone Cops — a view not shared by the world’s military experts. Not one surviving crew member of the Liberty agrees this was any kind of mistake.

If this was a mistake by Israel, like they still try to say, then why would they spray paint out the insignia on their attacking Jets and launch 3 different kinds of attacks on her? All trying to sink her and kill the 300 man crew. And why would Johnson and McNamara call off US Jets on their way to help?

The nation's unemployment rate jumped to 5.5 percent in May - the biggest monthly rise since 1986 - as nervous employers cut 49,000 jobs.

The latest snapshot of business conditions showed a deeply troubled economy, with dwindling job opportunities in a time of continuing hardship in the housing, credit and financial sectors.

With employers worried about a sharp slowdown and their own prospects, they clamped down on hiring in May, said Friday's report from the Labor Department. The unemployment rate soared from 5 percent in April to 5.5 percent in May. That was the biggest one-month jump in the rate since February 1986. The increase left the jobless rate at its highest since October 2004.

LA ORCHILA, Venezuela — Venezuela fired live missiles from fighter jets and ships Friday during exercises intended to demonstrate the firepower of President Hugo Chavez's military.

Smoke rose from ships off the La Orchila island military base as Otomat MK2 missiles arced into the sky and Russian-made Sukhoi fighter jets flew in formation.

The televised war games allowed the military to showcase some of the hardware bought under Chavez, who says Venezuela's main threat is the United States. A U.S. Navy plane last month flew over the same Caribbean island base, drawing a diplomatic protest from Venezuela.

The most expensive crash in Air Force history — the $1.4 billion loss of a B-2 Spirit bomber Feb. 23 — was caused by water clogging aircraft sensors, according to an Air Combat Command report issued Thursday. Moisture in three of the 24 sensors that feed information into the bomber’s computer system caused the sensors to send bad information about the plane’s speed and altitude, and how far up or down the bomber’s nose was pointed. As the jet took off from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, the onboard computer thought the B-2 was pointed downward, causing the nose to jerk suddenly upward. The two pilots couldn’t regain control of the bomber and as the left wing struck the runway, the pilots safely ejected. WATCH AIR FORCE VIDEO: B-2 crash from surveillance camera + B-2 crash from ground camera The investigation didn’t fault the performance of pilots Maj. Ryan Link and Capt. Justin Grieve, both assigned to the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo. The report also cleared maintainers of any missteps. Maintainers were aware that high humidity on Guam could result in sensors clogging up with water but thought the sensor problems were solved prior to takeoff. Also, the pilots saw no avionics readings that would have led to aborting the takeoff.

How has George Bush reacted to the hell he created in Iraq, to the thousands of lives that have been lost in the war, and to the enormous and endless suffering that the survivors of the victims — their loved ones — have had to endure? I’ve always felt that impressions are very important in life, and other than “first impressions,” they are usually right. Why? Because impressions, we know, are formed over a period of time. They are the accumulation of many words and incidents, many or most of which one has forgotten, but which are nonetheless assimilated into the observer’s subconscious and thus make their mark. In other words, you forgot the incident, but it added to the impression. “How do you feel about David? Do you feel he’s an honest person?” “Yeah, I do.” “Why do you say that about him? Can you give me any examples that would cause you to say he’s honest?” “No, not really, at least not off the top of my head. But I’ve known David for over ten years, and my sense is that he’s an honest person.”

As I mentioned in the previous chapter of the present series, I was 11 years old and in my 6th grade classroom when the news of John F. Kennedy's assassination was first broadcast. I was not ignorant of the idea that evil existed in the world, but I thought about it as something that was personal, local even, not some sort of global juggernaut stalking whole societies. John Kennedy's assassination was the event that changed all that. Even though I was not able to fully comprehend it then, years later I was better able to articulate the raw, horrifying face of evil I had seen on that sunny November day in 1963. I didn't know then that Kennedy himself had already seen it and described it: For we are opposed, around the world, by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy...Well, of course, George W. Bush says the same thing, doesn't he? The difference is, Kennedy died for saying it, Bush didn't. That suggests that Kennedy had in mind the real conspiracy, and Bush either doesn't have a clue, or is busy directing attention away from it.

"In another exchange, after assuring that comments are "off the record," Rumsfeld and one of the military analysts agree that Iraq could use a "Syngman Rhee" to take control of Iraq. Speaking of the role model of South Korea advocated by the above:
"Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation's U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950. With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head, dumping the bodies into hastily dug trenches. Others were thrown into abandoned mines or into the sea. Women and children were among those killed. Many victims never faced charges or trial. "

Syngman Rhee or Yi Seungman (March 26, 1875 – July 19, 1965) was the first president of South Korea. His presidency, from August 1948 to April 1960, remains controversial, affected by Cold War tensions on the Korean peninsula and elsewhere. Rhee was regarded as an anti-Communist and a strongman, and led South Korea through the Korean War. His presidency ended in resignation following popular protests against a disputed election. He died in exile in Hawaii.

Families in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are calling for an investigation into their claims of a rise in the number of birth defects. They have raised concerns about the weapons used by American forces in 2004 - when Fallujah suffered one of the heaviest bombardments of the entire war in Iraq. The evidence is anecdotal because there are no records from the era of Saddam Hussein to compare their stories against. But Hikmat Tawfeeq, deputy chairman of the Fallujah-based human rights group Alakhiyar said: "We have around 200 cases of deformities recorded by our society. Most of these cases are birth deformities which have arisen after the bombing of Fallujah." Campaigners say officials are reluctant to speak out publicly, but at Fallujah's children's hospital one doctor told Sky News in the past month she has seen one or two cases of birth deformities every day. An opthalmologist said he deals with four or five cases of newborn babies every week suffering from some form of eye deformity - and that has risen in the last two years. At one of the cemeteries in Fallujah, undertaker Mahmoud Hummadi said he usually buries four to five bodies of newborns every day and most of them are deformed.

The blame cannot be shifted solely onto the shoulders of our political leaders. The American people cannot claim that they were “misled” by their leaders and don’t know the truth. While they were indeed misled, the truth wasn’t long behind the lies. Whether it its the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, the food crisis, the loss of our civil liberties or the sinking of our economy, the American people have been informed and apprised of everything. We know who the people behind the curtain are. We know how they did the things that they did. There are no great secrets that the American people don’t have access to. Everything is in plain sight.

The mainstream media has failed in its responsibility to accurately report the truth, still, the American people have known of its duplicity for years now. The propaganda and outright distortion of the truth has been part and parcel of just about every major network in the United States. The majority of Americans realize that they have been lied to and deceived for a long time. I believe however, that most Americans know how to find the truth behind the lies. There are many independent news sources outside the MSM. The truth as I see it, is that most Americans don’t really want to hear or see the truth. The truth puts responsibility into the hands of the people. Responsibility for the actions of their leaders and the conduct of their government is not palatable to most Americans.

U.S. food prices will rise a stiff 9 percent a year through 2012, the largest increase since 1979 and the result of record-high crop prices, the head of an economic consulting company said on Thursday.

The projections by Bill Lapp of Advanced Economic Solutions are higher than the latest U.S. Agriculture Department forecast of 5 percent for this year. USDA and Lapp have increased their estimates by 1.5 percentage points since February.

During a telephone news conference, Lapp said he was completing a new analysis of food and commodity prices. He foresaw average corn prices of $5.25 a bushel through 2012, with wheat around $6.50 and soybeans near $11.

"When I do that analysis and look at the relationship between that and food prices, I get a 2008-12 average annual rate of increase in the consumer price index for food of 9.0 percent," he said.

Twenty-five former U.S. military officers have severely criticized the official account of 9/11 and called for a new investigation. They include former commander of U.S. Army Intelligence, Major General Albert Stubblebine, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Col. Ronald D. Ray, two former staff members of the Director of the National Security Agency; Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, PhD, and Major John M. Newman, PhD, and many others. They are among the rapidly growing number of military and intelligence service veterans, scientists, engineers, and architects challenging the government’s story. The officers’ statements appear below, listed alphabetically. Lt. Col. Robert Bowman, PhD: “A lot of these pieces of information, taken together, prove that the official story, the official conspiracy theory of 9/11 is a bunch of hogwash. It’s impossible,” said Lt. Col. Robert Bowman, PhD, U.S. Air Force (ret). With doctoral degrees in Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering, Col. Bowman served as Director of Advanced Space Programs Development under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. “There’s a second group of facts having to do with the cover up,” continued Col. Bowman. “Taken together these things prove that high levels of our government don’t want us to know what happened and who’s responsible. Who gained from 9/11? Who covered up crucial information about 9/11? And who put out the patently false stories about 9/11 in the first place? When you take those three things together, I think the case is pretty clear that it’s highly placed individuals in the administration with all roads passing through Dick Cheney.”

June 5th marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy in the kitchen area of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, as Hillary Clinton so insensitively reminded us recently. The facts of the assassination reveal a web of lies and deceit that continue to this day, not only in the continued refusal to release documents and re-examine evidence that might expose the truth of that horrific night, but in the continued manipulation of events and public perception that moves the world closer each day to economic collapse and keeps it in a state of perpetual war. It was shortly after midnight. An exhausted Kennedy had just finished addressing the crowd gathered to celebrate his victory in the California primary for the Democratic nomination to the presidency. His next stop was Chicago. If he won in Illinois, the nomination was his. It's difficult to imagine, today, what Robert Kennedy meant to many in the U.S. in 1968. There is really no parallel that can be drawn with any politician since. Following the death of his brother, John, in Dallas less than 5 years previous, the nation has been brought almost to the brink of civil war under the Johnson administration. Millions were taking to the streets across the country to protest the war in Vietnam, political factions were springing up like wildflowers after a rain, the yippies were engaging in irreverent "political theater," the hippies were tuning in, turning on and dropping out, the Black Panther's Bobby Hutton, only 17 years old, was killed by the Oakland, California Police. His house was set on fire, forcing Hutton, unarmed, to run into a hail of bullets. He was hit ten times.

Before we get back to our story, a few words on the word conspiracy. Given the definition of the word that seems to be in vogue with those who seem to have a vested interest in debunking any notion of conspiracy these days, I'd have to say that I am no believer in conspiracy theories. As they'd have it, a conspiracy implies managing to get a whole lot of people, from the top to the bottom and sideways in both directions, to knowingly maintain a consistent lie over a long period of time. This would include everyone from the lowest on the totem pole to all of the attorneys, reporters and witnesses involved in an incident. Ain't gonna happen. As a comedian once quipped about the idea of a vast Jewish conspiracy, anyone who has ever sat at the dinner table of a Jewish family knows how ridiculous that idea is. No one agrees about anything. The same goes for the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK, along with the tragedy of 9/11 and countless other politically motivated killings. There was not a vast conspiracy of everyone involved to keep a secret. Plenty of people in all of these cases and others have come forward with bits of information that diverge from the official story. So, rather than refer to conspirators, we will refer to perception managers, or PMs.

As we dig deeper into the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, things get curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say. It seems there are some things that people just "know." There are no such things as ghosts, astrology and psychic powers are just ploys used to get money from the gullible, the chances that Earth will be hit by a comet within our lifetimes are astronomical (forgive the pun) and everyone deep inside is basically the same: just trying to be good as they understand it. The strange thing about this kind of "knowing" is that no one can tell you just how they know. Ask them how they know that two plus two equals four and they will have at least a vague recollection of their early school years. But ask them how they know about ghosts, astrology, psychics, comets and the psychology of the rest of humanity and you'll likely get a response that is something akin to, "Everybody just knows that." But the question bothers me. Just when did "everyone" learn these things and why can't they remember having learned them?

In Part 3 we looked at one way in which people, manipulated by beliefs that have been programmed into them throughout their lives, can become unwitting accomplices in a conspiracy. However, that is the soft side of this thing. There is a hard side, too. Many more people that hold positions of trust are very willing accomplices.

We conclude our look at the Robert Kennedy assassination with a view to revealing new evidence and a few hints at just how wide the spider's web is. The 1966 Simon and Garfunkel album 'Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme', ends with a haunting track titled 7 O'clock News/Silent Night. On that track, the pair sing a pretty, though straight-forward, rendition of Silent Night as a sound clip from a 7 o'clock news broadcast plays in the background.

JOHN PILGER: ... Sirhan leapt up on a serving area, pointed a gun at him and fired. He was wrestled. Kennedy fell. He was wrestled to the ground, and then there were other shots. There’s no question that there was another gunman, because one of the people who was hit, just grazed, was standing next to me, and that happened when Sirhan Sirhan had been wrestled to the ground. So that’s the interesting thing. There was another assassin or another several assassins. And then it was bedlam. And as you know, Kennedy died about twenty-four hours later. AMY GOODMAN: John Pilger, what about Robert Kennedy’s views of Vietnam? Also, of course, your view is not the standard one, that there were other assassins.

Marxism, globalism, the new world order, liberalism...All these are euphemisms for a phenomenon embodied in the invisible empire of the Rothschild family. The Rothschilds do not die, they simply depart into history, and their place is inconspicuously taken by their sons and grandsons. Word goes that the old master Jacob has left the scene, and that his place has been occupied by his son Nathan (Nathaniel Philip Rothschild, who bears the name of the founder of the English Rothschilds). The heavy burden has fallen on the frail shoulders of the young heir. But Nathan is not alone. In the running of the empire he will be aided by his uncles Evelyn and Edmund and the other members of the English branch of the family (Catherine, Emma, Leopold), but also his French cousins (David, Eduard...). The Rothschild family has produced governors, prime ministers, ministers, supervisors who are making sure that everything goes according to the big plan. The European Union was created by the Rothschilds (Schumann, a Khazar). The EU is an exploiter of Russia, which should be freed from the Siberian burden. With the aim of completing this job the Rothschilds have employed Soros, Berezovski, Hodorkovski, Kasparov, the Mitals...If we wish to unveil the background and causes of these events, we must delve into the dark history of the Khazar dynasty Rothschild, identify the agents, the grey eminences, the greedy politicians, as well as the mechanisms of their actions. Let us start with the Rothschilds, the main characters. They are the ones sitting at the head of the table.

Facing a tough reelection fight in 2004, George W. Bush expressed outrage over leaked photos showing U.S. military police at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison abusing detainees, who were paraded naked before female guards, threatened by attack dogs, chained in “stress positions” and forced to wear ladies underpants on their heads. President Bush assured the American people that he “shared a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated.” Other administration officials pinned the blame on a “few bad apples” and dismissed the prison guards’ claim that they were told to “soften up” the detainees for interrogation. Now, a report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General reveals that months before those abuses at Abu Ghraib, nearly identical tactics were used against “war on terror” detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at CIA prisons – and that FBI complaints about the tactics went up the chain of command back to Washington.

The most stunning revelation in a 370-page Justice US Department Inspector General’s report released this week was that agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had formally opened a “War Crimes” file, documenting torture they had witnessed at the Guantánamo Bay US prison camp, before being ordered by the administration to stop writing their reports.

Bush is a rotten, transparent bald-faced liar and anyone still believing him is either stupid or complicit. Bush said: "We do not torture!" And all the while, his administration was working to 'legalize' the capital crimes that Bush himself had clearly ordered. What followed was an organized campaign of lies to justify torture even as the practice of it was made official policy and often called by its Orwellian euphemism: 'enhanced interrogation'. The practice of torture was carried out at Abu Ghraib, GITMO, and various US gulags and hell-holes throughout Eastern Europe. By any Orwellian name given it by Bush or his minions, it is torture. Torture is a crime which if it results in death, the penalty is death. That law applies to the architects and defenders of the policy of torture. It applies to Bush --its chief architect, defender and practitioner.

For all practical purposes, the United States and Britain are Zionist-occupied nations. Because the American and British people are generally ignorant of what Zionism is, the meaning of this statement is not widely understood or appreciated. The lack of understanding by the public, however, doesn't change the fact that these once great nations have become Zionist-controlled states. The evidence is clearly seen in the self-destructive foreign policies these nations have pursued for the past 40 years or so. The Anglo-American "leadership" positions in the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq and their support of the costly Zionist fraud known as the "War on Terror" is further proof that Zionists control these nations – as if any were needed. How did these powerful and independent nations become Zionist controlled? Unlike Palestine, where Eastern European Zionist immigrants used brutal terrorism to ethnically "cleanse" and conquer the land, in Britain and the United States the Zionists gained power gradually through "dumbing down" and effectively disenfranchising the native populations. In Britain and the United States, the Zionists saved the use of terrorism for later, after they already controlled the media and the levers of power and government.

The Department of Defense announced Monday that Naval Petty Officer 1st Class Jennifer A. Valdivia of Cambridge has died of a non-combat injury while supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The Gulf Daily News in Bahrain reported that her death was a suicide, and that a memorial service is planned on Wednesday in Bahrain

The newspaper said her body was discovered after the Criminal Investigation Directorate (CID) received a report that she was missing, according to CID director general Brigadier Farouk Al Ma'awda.

The story quoted a spokeswoman for the Fifth Fleet, who said Petty Officer Valdivia was last seen Jan. 11 and that she was due to report for duty Jan. 14. http://iraq.pigstye.net/article.php/ValdiviaJenniferA

Army Cover-Up of Rape and Murder? US In Bahrain, on January 16, 2007, US Navy Petty Officer First Class Jennifer A. Valdivia, 27, assigned to the naval security force for Naval Support Activity, Bahrain, was found dead three days after she was to report for duty on January 14. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service has classified her death as a suicide. Valdivia was kennel master of the largest military kennel in the world. In 2005, she was named Sailor of the Year at the Bahrain Naval Base.

The circumstances surrounding each of these deaths warrants further investigation by the US military. Congress can compel the military to reopen cases and provide further investigation. I strongly urge Congress to demand further investigation of the deaths of these women.

The Department of Defense statistics are alarming - one in three women who join the US military will be sexually assaulted or raped by men in the military. The warnings to women should begin above the doors of the military recruiting stations, as that is where assaults on women in the military begin - before they are even recruited.

But, now, even more alarming, are deaths of women soldiers in Iraq and in the United States following rape. The military has characterized each death of women who were first sexually assaulted as deaths from "noncombat related injuries," and then added "suicide." Yet, the families of the women whom the military has declared to have committed suicide strongly dispute the findings and are calling for further investigations into the deaths of their daughters. Specific US Army units and certain US military bases in Iraq have an inordinate number of women soldiers who have died of "noncombat related injuries," with several identified as "suicides."

Ninety-four US military women have died in Iraq or during Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). Twelve US civilian women have been killed in OIF. Thirteen US military women have been killed in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). Twelve US Civilian women have been killed in Afghanistan.

Of the 94 US military women who died in Iraq or in OIF, the military says 36 died from noncombat related injuries, which included vehicle accidents, illness, death by "natural causes" and self-inflicted gunshot wounds, or suicide. The military has declared the deaths of the Navy women in Bahrain, which were killed by a third sailor, as homicides. Five deaths have been labeled as suicides, but 15 more deaths occurred under extremely suspicious circumstances.

Critics charge that the Macquarie purchase of American Consolidated Media is designed to silence critics of a Texas toll road project.

Australian toll road giant Macquarie agreed Wednesday to purchase forty local newspapers, primarily in Texas and Oklahoma, for $80 million. Macquarie Bank is Australia's largest capital raising firm and has invested billions in purchasing roads in the US, Canada and UK. Most recently the company joined with Cintra Concesiones of Spain in a controversial 75-year lease of the 157-mile Indiana Toll Road.

Sal Costello, the leading opponent of toll road projects as head of the Texas Toll Party, says the move is directly related to a 4000-mile toll road project known as the Trans-Texas Corridor. It will cost between $145 and $183 billion to construct the road, expected to be up to 1200 feet wide, requiring the acquisition of 9000 square miles of land in the areas through which it will pass.

"The newspapers are the main communication tool for many of the rural Texan communities, with many citizens at risk of losing their homes and farms through eminent domain," Costello wrote.

On April 30th, reporters flocked to the penthouse suite of a Midtown Manhattan hotel where fifteen representatives of the Rockefeller dynasty were holding court. There, the Rockefellers chastised oil giant Exxon-Mobil for failing to invest in “alternative energy” sources, invoking their own moral authority as Exxon-Mobil’s longest standing shareholders. Family spokesperson Neva Rockefeller Goodwin sanctimoniously recalled the memory of her great-grandfather, John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil and originator of the family fortune. “Kerosene was the alternative energy of its day when he realized it could replace whale oil,” she argued. “Part of John D. Rockefeller’s genius was in recognizing early the need and opportunity for a transition to a better, cheaper and cleaner fuel.” But the indignation of today’s generation of Rockefellers—who inherited their own exorbitant wealth from Standard Oil, Exxon-Mobil’s parent corporation—is aimed more at ensuring the continued financial health of the family’s trust funds than concern for the future of the world’s population. As Peter O'Neill, great-great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, commented at the press conference, “I have a world of respect for what the company has done well. In fact, if the next 20 years of the energy business were just going to be about oil and gas, we probably wouldn't be here today.” Nevertheless, the corporate media obediently described the Rockefellers as concerned environmentalists.

The Canadian government has set aside money for an education program and monument memorializing the shameful rejection of the Jewish refugee ship St. Louis in 1939. No official apology is in the works for the incident, which epitomized a period of anti-Semitic Canadian immigration policy in the 1930s and '40s. But Canada's Jewish lobby has been campaigning since the late 1980s to have the story of the St. Louis memorialized, and a government official is confirming that's about to happen. A spokesman for Conservative MP Jason Kenney, the secretary of state for multiculturalism, told The Canadian Press on Tuesday that Kenney's weekend announcement on historical recognition programs will include a St. Louis memorial. Kenney announced in Vancouver that an official apology is coming from Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government regarding the 1914 Komagata Maru incident, when 376 mostly Sikh immigrants were barred from landing in Vancouver and eventually ordered to sail away. The settlement to the Indo-Canadian community could also involve as much as $2.5 million.

Georgia's breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, are a live issue in the general election due to be held on 21 May. Here two BBC correspondents report from either side of the border of Abkhazia, which has been beyond Tbilisi's control since the early 1990s. [...] The Kodori Gorge may be beautiful but its history has been tragic. When Georgian forces lost the war against the separatists in Abkhazia in the early 1990s, thousands of ethnic Georgians fled in panic over the mountains and through Kodori in freezing temperatures. Scores of them died in the snow. A local engineer called Shota said some of the wrecks of old Soviet Lada cars which lie scattered around the fields of the gorge were abandoned by people who were escaping the fighting - rusting monuments to a conflict which has still not been resolved, almost 15 years later. "We don't know what will happen here next," he said, "but what we all want is peace."

America today is burdened with deeply rooted and unsustainable economic challenges. From credit debts and loss of manufacturing nationwide, to foreign nations buying our best companies and proping up the economy with loans, these issues impact every citizen. Here are the 16 major problems America faces today:

1. Wholesale sellout of core strategic assets to foreign acquirers: according to official figures, more than 8,815 American companies have been sold to foreign corporations in the last 10 years for at least $1.3 trillion.

2. Subprime Fallout: Millions of Americans took mortgage rates that reset to a higher value, resulting in a steep rise in foreclosures nationwide and over 161 subprime lenders have gone bankrupt as of October, 2007. It also shook the 6.5 trillion mortgage-backed investment market, notably causing two Bear Stearns hedge funds to lose nearly all their value. Worries remain about contagion and subprimes fallout on the housing market and broader U.S. economy.

3. Housing Bubble Burst: market value of residential real estate was inflated to a record-high 38 percent of household net worth, now real estate value is in a free fall nationwide. In October, 2007 the National Association of Realtors estimated that home sales will drop 10.8%, the lowest level in a decade

4. Decline of vital industries through bankruptcy, foreign predatory competition, and foreign acquisition: examples include steel, publishing, textiles, machine tools, automobiles, electronics, movies and others

5. Inability to manufacture competitively: American manufacturers suffer a 22 percent structural cost disadvantage compared to overseas competitors through taxes, health and pension benefits, litigation, regulation, and unequal environmental protection

6. Overdependence on imports: $1 in $4 of US consumption of manufactured goods now goes immediately and directly to imports

7. Massive wealth transfer to foreign ownership: our trade deficit, at $765 billion in 2006, equal to almost $1.5 million per minute...

Bush’s "war on terror" quickly became Bush’s war on Iraqi civilians. So far over one million Iraqi civilians have lost their lives because of Bush’s invasion, and four million have been displaced. Iraq’s infrastructure is in ruins. Disease is rampart. Normal life has disappeared.

Self-righteous Americans justify these monstrous crimes as necessary to ensure their own safety from terrorist attack. Yet, Americans are in far greater danger from their own police forces than they are from foreign terrorists. Ironically, Bush’s "war on terror" has made Americans less safe at home by diminishing US civil liberty and turning an epidemic of US police brutality into a pandemic.

The only terrorist most Americans will ever encounter is a policeman with a badge, nightstick, mace and Taser. A Google search for "police brutality videos" turns up 2,210,000 entries. Some entries are foreign and some are probably duplications, but the number is so large that a person could do nothing but watch police brutality videos for the rest of his life. A search on "You Tube" alone turned up 2,280 police brutality videos. PrisonPlanet has a selection of the most outrageous recent cases.

Police brutality has crossed the line from using excessive force against a resisting Rodney King to unprovoked gratuitous violence against persons offering no resistance, such as the elderly, women, students, and elected officials. Americans are not safe anywhere from police. Police attack Americans in university libraries, in public meetings, and in their own homes.

A bible student at a large Christian college in Mount Vernon, Texas, related a story of intimidation as Department of Homeland Security goons dressed in black accused him of engaging in terrorism for teaching a group of Boy Scouts about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The student and interim pastor, going by the name “Jeff,” told Alex Jones he was assigned last September the task of talking to a group of Boy Scouts, specifically concerning “Americanism” in higher education. Jeff told the boys they need to “reorient” themselves to the Constitution because such knowledge will “make or break the country.”

After tutoring the boys, Jeff was called into the university president’s office. There he was confronted by a “man in black” wearing sunglasses from the Department of Homeland Security who was accompanied by another federal official in a gray suit. In addition, state police were present during the interrogation and Jeff was told the FBI were also involved. Jeff was informed “every word” of his conversation with the Boy Scouts was recorded and he had a transcript of the conversation. Jeff’s talk was, the DHS official in a gray suit declared, “terror and espionage” and if he continued to engage in such behavior he would be arrested and “we can have your head on a silver platter.” Moreover, the feds threatened to intervene in the process of the college’s accreditation, a threat that apparently disturbed a “high level university official,” who was so “agitated” he was shaking.

Havin' a good time, guys? SWAT operators wearing Nazi-style bucket-head helmets enjoy a mirthful moment on the YZF Ranch as child "protection" workers prepare to kidnap the FLDS community's children. What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique ("a great task that occurs once in two thousand years"), which must therefore be difficult to bear. This was important, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did...Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler — who apparently was rather strongly afflicted by these instinctive reactions himself — was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!

Princeton University professor Bernard Lewis publishes an article in the influential journal Foreign Affairs called “Rethinking the Middle East.” In it, he advocates a policy he calls “Lebanonization.” He says, “[A] possibility, which could even be precipitated by [Islamic] fundamentalism, is what has late been fashionable to call ‘Lebanonization.’ Most of the states of the Middle East—Egypt is an obvious exception—are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common identity.… Then state then disintegrates—as happened in Lebanon—into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions, and parties.” Lewis, a British Jew, is well known as a longtime supporter of the Israeli right wing. Since the 1950s, he has argued that the West and Islam have been engaged in a titanic “clash of civilizations” and that the US should take a hard line against all Arab countries. Lewis is considered a highly influential figure to the neoconservative movement, and some neoconservatives such as Richard Perle and Harold Rhode consider him a mentor.

Yinon's strategy was based on this premise. In order to survive Israel must become an imperial regional power and must also ensure the break-up of all Arab countries so that the region may be carved up into small ineffectual states unequipped to stand up to Israeli military might. Here's what he had to say on Iraq: "The dissolution of Syria and Iraq into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon is Israel's primary target on the Eastern frontIraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run, it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel." "An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and Lebanon." "In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul and Shiite areas in the South will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north." Sound familiar?

The New York Times published an editorial on November 25, 2003 carrying Leslie Gelb's by-line. He's an influential man who, until recently, presided over the very important Council of Foreign Affairs, a think tank that brings together the CIA, the secretary of state and big shots from U.S. multinational corporations. -Gelb's plan? Replace Iraq with three mini-states: "Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south." The objective? "To put most of its money and troops where they would do the most good quickly -- with the Kurds and Shiites. The United States could extricate most of its forces from the so-called Sunni Triangle, north and west of Baghdad.... American officials could then wait for the troublesome and domineering Sunnis, without oil or oil revenues, to moderate their ambitions or suffer the consequences." In short, starve the central state around Baghdad because the Sunnis have always spearheaded the resistance to U.S. imperialism.

Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi'ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north. It is possible that the present Iranian-Iraqi confrontation will deepen this polarization.

Nazi collaborator and racist advocate of mass genocide Prince Philip, a man who has often expressed his desire to return to the earth as a "deadly virus" to thin the human population, says that there are too many people in the world as he attacked large families in a television interview set to air this week. "The duke hints that curbing family sizes may be the best means of keeping the soaring cost of staple food products, such as bread and rice, in check," reports the London Times. “Food prices are going up,” he tells his interviewer, Sir Trevor McDonald. “Everyone thinks it’s to do with not enough food, but it’s really that demand is too great – too many people. Basically, it’s a little embarrassing for everybody. No one quite knows how to handle it. Nobody wants their family life to be interfered with by the government.” Overlooking the fact that Prince Philip himself has four children and eight grandchildren, the article couches his comments in the fallacy that HRH is an "eco-warrior" and completely fails to point out that the Duke of Edinburgh's enthusiasm for culling the human herd actually stems from his warped advocacy of eugenics.

Mary Tillman, the mother of former professional football player Patrick Tillman, denounced the continued cover-up and whitewash of her son’s “friendly fire” killing in Afghanistan. She spoke in Birmingham, Michigan last week as part of the promotion for her new book, Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman. Tillman read a section of her book and discussed the death of her son and its aftermath. Pat Tillman was killed on April 22, 2004. Though officials within the military and Bush administration were soon aware that the death came at the hands of US soldiers, this fact was covered up for weeks. Pat Tillman’s death was exploited in an attempt to bolster support for US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. “This deception was not just a deception of our family; it was a public deception used to rally the public behind the war,” Tillman said. “Pat would have been horrified that his life and death had been used in this way.” Mrs. Tillman said she had been disappointed by the reaction from both the Democratic and Republican Parties.

On the murderous road to "racial purity" Hitler encountered unexpected detours, largely due to his own crazed views and inconsistent policies regarding Jewish identity. After centuries of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage in German society, he discovered that eliminating Jews from the rest of the population was more difficult than he'd anticipated. As Bryan Mark Rigg shows in this provocative new study, nowhere was that heinous process more fraught with contradiction and confusion than in the German military. Contrary to conventional views, Rigg reveals that a startlingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or "partial-Jews" (Mischlinge), in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Rigg demonstrates that the actual number was much higher than previously thought--perhaps as many as 150,000 men, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals. As Rigg fully documents for the first time, a great many of these men did not even consider themselves Jewish and had embraced the military as a way of life and as devoted patriots eager to serve a revived German nation. In turn, they had been embraced by the Wehrmacht, which prior to Hitler had given little thought to the "race" of these men but which was now forced to look deeply into the ancestry of its soldiers.

Play Video for Channel 3 News Investigator Tom Meyer's report | Trouble Viewing? Using a Mac? Click here to launch the stand-alone player

STARK COUNTY -- A Stark County woman told Channel 3 News Investigator Tom Meyer that she was told to remove all her clothes inside the Stark County Jail after deputies made several off-color remarks. "Elizabeth" fears reprisals for speaking out so she prefers we not use her last name.

She says a Stark County Sheriff's deputy pulled her over one night for failing to signal during a lane change. Elizabeth says she had to undergo a field sobriety test. According to the officer's incident report, she failed some aspects of the test. She was arrested for driving under the influence and taken to the station for further testing.

She was told to blow into a breathylyzer, but she suffers from asthma. When she failed to produce enough air, she says a deputy told her, "Baby we both know you can blow harder than that. She says a second deputy laughed. The officer marked her as a "refusal" for not blowing harder.

Elizabeth decided to tell her story when she saw video of Hope Steffey strip searched by both male and female deputies. Steffey was left naked in a cell for 6 hours.

When Elizabeth was told to remove all her clothes, she did so voluntarily saying she worked at a medium security prison in Ohio and knew her clothes would be forcibly removed if she failed to obey.

The incident report says Elizabeth wanted to commit suicide. But she says that's just not true. "I've never been suicidal. I'm not suicidal. I was terrified," she told the Investigator. The Sheriff's office said medical personnel decide if an inmate should be placed on suicide watch, not sheriff deputies.

Elizabeth was charged with drinking and driving, and assault for kicking a deputy. She decided to defend herself when a deputy placed his hands on her hips. She explained that she had been the victim of a sexual assault while employed at the prison.

The assault charge in the Stark County case was dropped on the condition she plead guilty to operating a vehicle while intoxicated. She reluctantly took the deal. Initial story | #2 | #3 | #4

According to counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke and others, Vice President Dick Cheney goes from his White House office to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), a bunker below the East Wing of the White House, at about this time. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, after initiating a video conference with Richard Clarke in the West Wing, goes to the PEOC to be with Cheney. There is no video link between response centers in the East and West Wings, but a secure telephone line is used instead. [New York Times, 9/16/2001; Daily Telegraph, 12/16/2001; ABC News, 9/14/2002; Clarke, 2004, pp. 3-4] One eyewitness, David Bohrer, a White House photographer, says Cheney leaves for the PEOC just after 9:00 a.m. According to some accounts, Vice President Cheney is in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) below the White House by this time, along with Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and National Security Adviser Rice. Mineta says that, while a suspicious plane is heading toward Washington, an unidentified young man comes in and says to Cheney, “The plane is 50 miles out.” Mineta confers with Acting FAA Deputy Administrator Monte Belger, who is at the FAA’s Washington headquarters. Belger says to him, “We’re watching this target on the radar, but the transponder’s been turned off. So we have no identification.” According to Mineta, the young man continues updating the vice president, saying, “The plane is 30 miles out,” and when he gets down to “The plane is 10 miles out,” asks, “Do the orders still stand?” In response, Cheney “whipped his neck around and said, ‘Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?’”

Gotta do something to pull the Republicans out of the election tank. -Interestingly, while searching for a photo for this post, I stumbled on this article from almost a year ago. Pentagon ‘three-day blitz’ plan for Iran The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert. Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said. Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”. President George Bush intensified the rhetoric against Iran last week, accusing Tehran of putting the Middle East “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust”. He warned that the US and its allies would confront Iran “before it is too late”.

Three weeks after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then-under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith's recently published account of the Iraq war decisions. Feith's account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country's top military leaders. Feith's book, War and Decision, released last month, provides excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W Bush on September 30, 2001, calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing "new regimes" in a series of states by "aiding local peoples to rid themselves of terrorists and to free themselves of regimes that support terrorism".

Fox News' Geraldo has Alex Jones on to examine the evidence that shows that DC Madam Deborah Jean Palfrey was murdered-- despite the official claim that she committed suicide. Jones points out the numerous statements Palfrey made in refutation of suicide, as well as the criminology that women rarely hang themselves, generally preferring pills. Geraldo and two co-hosts admit they agree with Alex Jones-- that claims of Palfrey's suicide are "stinky" and suspicious and that the case should be further investigated. One woman even says that the John's on Palfreys list-- including many high-level politicians-- should be revealed and prosecuted. Palfrey's hi-rise apartment manager in Florida says he saw Palfrey only days before her death when she told him a contract may be out on her life. Additionally, she made arrangments to secure her apartment for the next six years-- the approximate time she expected to be in prison--seemingly pointing to the idea that she expected to stay alive.

Maybe it's the booze they serve at Cafe Milano in Georgetown. Maybe it's just Madsen being Madsen. After all, journalists and writers with any lick of integrity have been shamed, shocked and traumatized by the "suicides" of both Hunter S. Thompson and Gary Webb -- not to mention the sudden "fading into the discredited bastion of mental health treatment" of Mike Ruppert.

Making a sadder story just a little bit sadder still, today the cops have revealed D.C. Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey's suicide note. Instead of blowing the lid of Dick Cheney's particular perversions or David Vitter's favorite style of Depends (logo of Elmo in wheelchair, masturbating), the two-page note is a heartbreakingly dull list of trivialities in grade-school girlish handwriting.

In the The Godfather II, Mrs. Corleone leaves her husband: he was, she observed with understatement, "evil." If Cherie Blair ever had such misgivings about her spouse, she has kept them to herself. The fact that she remains married to a man who, if not by the courts, but in the court of public opinion, has been named a war criminal, testifies instead to the shared beliefs of a happily married couple. None can fault her for such attachment; love is, after all, a many-splendoured thing. But when such a woman visits a Third World country and lectures the people there on "the rule of law" and "human rights," she has gone beyond decency and humanity, and made a mockery of the deaths of over a million people in Iraq. “I am aware that Bangladesh borders with Burma, a country which is not known as a supporter of the rule of law. And in Burma, there is a woman leader in a political party, who is being detained,” said Blair, who arrived in Dhaka, Bangladesh on Tuesday, 22 April. “I would not like to think that Bangladesh was going along that route. I am sure that the government and the people of Bangladesh want to be applauding human rights and the rule of law." No one initially knew the reason for her visit, but it turned out that she was here to help one of the two arrested political leaders, Sheikh Hasina.

A variety of current and former high-level officials have recently warned that the Bush administration is attempting to instill a dictatorship in America, and will itself carry out a fake terrorist attack in order to obtain one. The former assistant secretary of treasury in the Reagan administration, called the "Father of Reaganomics", who is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service, and said: "Ask yourself: Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging "terrorist" attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda?" He goes on to say: "If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the "unitary executive" at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush's declaration of "national emergency" and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance." A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconsevatives' Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel's complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel. Think about it. If another 9/11-type "security failure" were not in the works, why would Homeland Security czar Chertoff go to the trouble of convincing the Chicago Tribune that Americans have become complacent about terrorist threats and that he has "a gut feeling" that America will soon be hit hard?

The increase in incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans from 2003 to 2005 exceeded the total income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans, data in a new report by the Congressional Budget Office shows.

The poorest fifth of households had total income of $383.4 billion in 2005, while just the increase in income for the top 1 percent came to $524.8 billion, a figure 37 percent higher.

The total income of the top 1.1 million households was $1.8 trillion, or 18.1 percent of the total income of all Americans, up from 14.3 percent of all income in 2003. The total 2005 income of the three million individual Americans at the top was roughly equal to that of the bottom 166 million Americans, analysis of the report showed.

A new poll suggests that George W. Bush is the most unpopular president in modern American history.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Thursday indicates that 71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush his handling his job as president.

"No president has ever had a higher disapproval rating in any CNN or Gallup poll; in fact, this is the first time that any president's disapproval rating has cracked the 70 percent mark," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

"Bush's approval rating, which stands at 28 percent in our new poll, remains better than the all-time lows set by Harry Truman and Richard Nixon (22 percent and 24 percent, respectively) but even those two presidents never got a disapproval rating in the 70s," Holland added. "The previous all-time record in CNN or Gallup polling was set by Truman, 66 percent disapproval in January 1952."

CNN Senior Political Analyst Bill Schneider adds, "He is more unpopular than Richard Nixon was just before he resigned from the presidency in August 1974." President Nixon's disapproval rating in August 1974 stood at 67 percent.

The for-sale listings on the online hub Craigslist come with plaintive notices, like the one from the teenager in Georgia who said her mother lost her job and pleaded, "Please buy anything you can to help out."

Or the seller in Milwaukee who wrote in one post of needing to pay bills - and put a diamond engagement ring up for bids to do it.

Struggling with mounting debt and rising prices, faced with the toughest economic times since the early 1990s, Americans are selling prized possessions online and at flea markets at alarming rates.

To meet higher gas, food and prescription drug bills, they are selling off grandmother's dishes and their own belongings. Some of the household purging has been extremely painful - families forced to part with heirlooms.

"This is not about downsizing. It's about needing gas money," said Nancy Baughman, founder of eBizAuctions, an online auction service she runs out of her garage in Raleigh, N.C. One former affluent customer is now unemployed and had to unload Hermes leather jackets and Versace jeans and silk shirts.

Tookie Williams left the California prison system a few hours ago. He must be feeling pretty good right about now. It may be that he suspected it all along; that he knows what I and some few others know… That death ends nothing. I am sure he now knows that everything really is backwards; that the body was a coffin, that you wake up when you die, that it is 'more real' in the after life and that it is 'less real' here. He went out with a calm dignity that further convinces me that he didn't do the murders that he was charged with and that the state set him up. In consideration of the personalities of his accusers and their subsequent careers I smell more than one rat. The tale of the shotgun under the bed at the home of James and Ester Garrett, who were being investigated for the murder of their crime partner…well that charge was dropped. And the shotgun shells came from a store that Garrett had robbed the year before. But I won't bore you with all the inconsistencies, not when you got Fox News and all the other big gang media to help you form an opinion

Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams stands accused of shot-gunning a convenience store clerk for the princely sum of $120.00 and then a series of 3 Asian motel owners for a grand total of $100.00. Tookie was at the same time one of the founders, along with Raymond Washington and (according to vox media) head of The Crips; a blue headscarf wearing gang who was the counterpoint to The Bloods; a red headscarf wearing gang. The Crips were formed to combat random neighborhood violence. So far as I know, shot-gunning convenience store workers and motel owners wasn’t in the charter. The question you have to ask yourself is, “Would the head of what came to be the largest, most organized gang in the United States really go out and small time murder for chump change?” It doesn’t make sense does it?

Georgia's breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, are a live issue in the general election due to be held on 21 May. Here two BBC correspondents report from either side of the border of Abkhazia, which has been beyond Tbilisi's control since the early 1990s. The Kodori Gorge may be beautiful but its history has been tragic. When Georgian forces lost the war against the separatists in Abkhazia in the early 1990s, thousands of ethnic Georgians fled in panic over the mountains and through Kodori in freezing temperatures. Scores of them died in the snow. A local engineer called Shota said some of the wrecks of old Soviet Lada cars which lie scattered around the fields of the gorge were abandoned by people who were escaping the fighting - rusting monuments to a conflict which has still not been resolved, almost 15 years later. "We don't know what will happen here next," he said, "but what we all want is peace."

Regarding the current controversy about Rev. Wright and U.S. Presidential candidate Barack Obama, Rev. Wright is actually quite correct about the U.S. government's exploitation of black Americans for medical experiments (and worse). What Rev. Wright is saying about the way the U.S. government has treated blacks in the last 200 years is remarkably accurate to anyone who has bothered to actually study American history. For starters, I recommend you read A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, which will give you quite a horrifying account of how the FBI sought to assassinate black leaders, how law enforcement authorities looked the other way when crimes were committed against blacks, and many other difficult-to-believe (but true) facts about the history of America. But that's just the beginning. The real horrors become even more clear when you look at the history of blacks being used for medical experiments in the United States. The Tuskegee experiments only scratch the surface. In reality, the history of conventional medicine in the U.S. is filled with true accounts of black women, black prisoners and black babies being openly used in extreme medical experiments where they were injected with deadly substances, denied medical treatment to see what might happen as the disease progressed, and even used in government-sanctioned experiments like the EPA's recent experiments on toxic chemicals in low-income children, which happened just a few years ago in New York.

After police fished the body of Riad Hamad out of Lady Bird Lake in East Austin, Texas, they told the media the non-violent Palestinian activist and directing coordinator of the Palestine Children’s Welfare Fund had committed suicide. “Right now, the indications are that this was not, there was not foul play involved,” police Sgt. Joseph Chacon told KXAN, never mind Mr. Hamad was found bound with duct tape. “Parkgoers who saw the body said the death did not look accidental. They said the man’s face was wrapped with duct tape, and his arms appeared to be tied in front of his body.” KXAN did not bother to explain how Hamad managed to wrap himself in duct tape.