A Secret Afghanistan Mission Prepares for War with Iran...

World powers will in the coming days offer a revised package of incentives to Iran but Washington has refused to send its own envoy to help present the deal, diplomats and a U.S. official said on Thursday.

As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it - so last year he wrote a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and factual canter through the major human rights reports. There is nothing there you can't read in the mainstream Israeli press every day. Carter's comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human rights group B'tselem says this "bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime". Yet for repeating these facts in the US, Carter has widely called "a racist". Several universities have even refused to let the ex-President speak to their students.

A new hospital superbug resistant to all antibiotics could be killing hundreds of patients, experts have warned.

The infection, known as 'Steno', is on the increase and could be harder to tackle than MRSA and C.difficile.

The bug spreads almost exclusively in hospitals through wet areas such as taps and shower heads, and is thought to kill a third of the people it infects after entering the bloodstream.

Even with countless media outlets available these days, a Sunday New York Times cover story could always be counted on to send a jolt through the television news cycle.

But apparently that's no longer the case. Indeed, reporter David Barstow's 7,600-word investigation of the Pentagon's military analyst program -- whereby ex-military talking heads, often with direct ties to contractors, parroted Defense Department talking points on the air -- has been noticeably absent from television airwaves since the story broke on April 20.

A U.S. judge ordered the Central Intelligence Agency on Thursday to submit to the court a 2002 memo said to specify harsh interrogation methods used on suspected terrorists held abroad.

The White House yesterday confirmed that it has opposed a meeting between President Bush and Israeli and Palestinian leaders next week in Egypt, and said the peace process can go forward even if Israel's prime minister is ousted from office.

But even as a union official called, offering to represent her in a wrongful dismissal charge, and while outraged coffee drinkers were blasting Tims, Lilliman had been hired back on the company payroll.

Citigroup Inc, hit hard by the global crunch, will announce plans to sell roughly $400 billion of non-core assets when it meets investors and analysts on Friday, people familiar with the situation said. Newly installed Chief Executive Vikram Pandit, scrambling to slash Citi's costs and overcome credit market problems, also intends to reaffirm his promise to cut annual expenses at the largest U.S. bank by some 20 percent, one of the sources said.

The world's largest insurer - American International Group, Inc. - reported a massive net loss of US$7.81bil or US$3.09 per diluted share, due to fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States.

In Northeast Philadelphia Thursday morning, Vice President Dick Cheney said that America's economy "remains the envy of the world," and that a recent economic "slowdown" could have been much worse without President Bush's economic policies.

One dead as mystery illness prompts quarantine of train...

Ohio Man Goes To Prison For Sharing Snack Cake...

harvest of despair ukraine...

Cheney: Bagdad's Disneyland-Style Amusement Park Is Evidence That Things Are Going 'Swimmingly' In Iraq...

More than 43,000 U.S. troops listed as medically unfit for combat in the weeks before their scheduled deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan since 2003 were sent anyway, Pentagon records show.

No longer is it the governments job to serve the public with courteous employees. It's the general public which must be conditioned to be servile to the typically rude TSA agents. Enjoy the new police state folks, you voted for it...

No one wants another war - so why does it seem inevitable?

After failing to anticipate Hamas's victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.

Crude, pump prices keep rising...

Taser win in court puts chill on doctors...

Unfortunately the action of the manager of this location was not appropriate nor grounds for dismissal. With an apology from management Ms. Lilliman has been rehired by the franchisee.

The US government has, since 1991, and without regard to party, has shown itself capable of unthinkable crimes against mankind. Are we Americans capable of understanding this without first feeling the impact of a complete collapse in our economy? A certain pastor, who would have once been unassailable by the press because of his profession, his race, and his record of military service, was recently vilified for saying something like this.

Is there anything, short of seeing the church parking lot and the collection plate stand empty, that will arouse "men of God" to demand that politicians respect human life and honor Jesus' call for peace?

The Internet is now becoming a new front in the phony terror war. Legislation like the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 that is in the forms of HR 1955 and S 1959 which seek to give the government powers to define thoughts and belief systems as homegrown terrorism, is on the brink of being pushed down our throats.

Black uniformed death squads seem to be everywhere now, from Peruvian riot police, to SWAT teams, to the Robocop police outfits of the future. The power elite that rule this world want us to indulge in evil and partake in our own destruction, and it would seem that evil is now good and back in black.

Canada's largest doughnut chain fired a woman in London, Ontario, for giving a customer's toddler a 16-cent doughnut nugget for free.

Global inflation has re-emerged as a major threat to the world economy, the International Monetary Fund said on Thursday in a stark warning that marked an abrupt change of tone from its emphasis on the risks to growth.

John Lipsky, IMF deputy managing director, said "inflation concerns have resurfaced after years of quiescence" due to soaring energy and food prices. Mr Lipsky said global growth was slowing but headline inflation was "accelerating."

As 55 people died in Iraq on Saturday, the holiest day on the Shiite Muslim religious calendar, Sen. Hillary Clinton said that much of Iraq was "functioning quite well" and that the rash of suicide attacks was a sign that the insurgency was failing.

In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, May 22, New Yorker magazine investigative journalist Seymour Hersh repeated charges he published in that magazine in March, that the Bush Administration has been working with Saudi Arabia to arm Sunni fundamentalist cells, to fight Hezbollah. The recent explosion of violence in northern Lebanon between the Lebanese Army and the previously little-known group Fatah al-Islam, is but the latest example of this rotten collusion, Hersh charged.

The United States, which is involved with major powers in the negotiations, has made clear it will not join the mission to present the offer, which is expected to be given to Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki.

Weekly Report: On Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory No. 19/2008 (30 April- 07 May 2008)...

Josef Fritzl has blamed the Nazis for fostering the twisted morality that led him to imprison his daughter, Elisabeth, in a cellar for 24 years.

The initiative was said to cover the country's nuclear program, the security of energy supplies in the Middle East, counter-terrorism and joint efforts to control the drugs trade.

The ambassador said Iran's proposal would address western concerns that the rapidly developing nuclear project could be used to make weapons, but insisted his country would not surrender the right to enrich uranium.

Sen. Hillary Clinton and members of her entourage, including daughter Chelsea and husband Bill, will be seen by many West Virginians during the next few days, as Clinton attempts to woo voters in the Tuesday primary election. Increasingly, however, it is becoming apparent that Clinton is fighting a losing battle. Her campaign is doing nothing more than deepening a rift in her party -- and we don't think the staunch Democrats of the Mountain State like that idea.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert admitted on Thursday taking cash from a U.S. businessman but resisted calls to resign over a police investigation into alleged hefty bribes over almost a decade.

They eat from the same dishes and sleep in the same beds, but they seem to be operating in two different economies. From last November through this April, American women aged 20 and up gained nearly 300,000 jobs, according to the household survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). At the same time, American men lost nearly 700,000 jobs. You might even say American men are in recession, and American women are not.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation to let a federal agency insure up to $300 billion in mortgages to help homeowners avert foreclosure, a day after the White House threatened to veto the measure.

The five major nuclear-armed powers said on Friday the Non-Proliferation Treaty was under threat and cited Iran's uranium enrichment campaign in a rare joint call for action to shore up the NPT.

A lawsuit by the makers of Taser stun guns has prompted an Ohio court to order a chief medical examiner to delete any reference to the use of a stun gun as a contributing factor in the deaths of three men, a move rebuked as "dangerously close to intimidation" by the National Association of Medical Examiners.

For anglers it's what separates heaven from nirvana. Ice too thin for a fish house, too thick for a boat.

"You're looking at a lot of ice out there," says Leech Lake resort owner Roy Huddle. One day from the fishing opener, Huddle is still missing his lake.

Oil rose above $126 a barrel for the first time Friday, bringing its advance this week to nearly $10, as investors questioned whether a possible confrontation between the U.S. and Venezuela could cut exports from the OPEC member.

Hezbollah overruns west Beirut as Lebanon on brink...

ABC News' Karen Travers Reports: For the first time this campaign season, Barack Obama has surpassed Hillary Clinton's support among superdelegates, according to the ABC News delegate estimate.

Sen. Obama, D-Ill., picked up two superdelegates this morning giving him a new metric to tout in addition to his current commanding leads in pledged delegates, popular votes, states won, and money raised.

The fear in Wednesday's stock decline was palpable. Wall Street was responding to the specter of transparency the way it always does -- with alarm. Big brokerage firms, led by Merrill Lynch and Lehman Bros., plunged after the nation's top securities cop called for more disclosure of Wall Street's finances. The decline was the biggest in two months for financial stocks.

The F.B.I. is still not certain whether the ring's actions were for profit or part of a state-sponsored intelligence effort. The potential threat, according to the F.B.I. agents who gave a briefing at the Office of Management and Budget on Jan. 11, includes the remote jamming of supposedly secure computer networks and gaining access to supposedly highly secure systems. Contents of the briefing were contained in a PowerPoint presentation leaked to a Web site, Above Top Secret.

"I can't believe Sen. Clinton would say anything that dumb," Rangel told The News as he headed to the House floor, where earlier he had embraced Obama.

Obama built up his insurmountable lead over Clinton because he was the only candidate for the No More Wars For The Jews Party. Clinton had been able to build a tiny bit of momentum after Pennsylvania. Why then did she court disaster by reminding the voters of North Carolina and Indiana that she was the candidate for the More Wars For The Jews Party by raising the issue of the obliteration of Iran? Suddenly, Americans were reminded of why Obama built up his big lead.

Over half of your Congressional Representatives will be there with feedbags on.

ISRAELI Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is suspected of taking bribes from a US businessman, the country's judiciary said today in a case that threatens to shake up the political landscape as the country marks its 60th birthday.

VIDEO - The FBI Busts Tommy Chong... for DVD's!...

Contributing Editor Catherine Austin Fitts, who was a Managing Director at Dillon Read before becoming Assistant Secretary of Housing under George Bush and who holds an MBA from Wharton makes things very simple. She points out that the four largest states for the importation of drugs are New York, Florida, Texas and California. She then points out that the top four money laundering states in the U.S. (good for between 100 and 260 billion per year) are New York, Florida, Texas and California. No surprise there. Then she rips the breath from your lungs by pointing out that 80 per cent of all Presidential campaign funds come from - New York, Florida, Texas and California.

The pro-Israel group, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (Camera) has called for volunteers to edit entries that display notable bias on the site.

Eavesdropping is easy. All it takes is a two-minute software install and someone can record your calls and monitor your text messages. They can even set up systems to be automatically alerted when you dial a certain number, then instantly patched into your conversation. Anyone who can perform a basic internet search can find the tools and figure out how to do it in no time.

But the scarier stuff is what your phone can do when you aren't even using it.

The companies market "detoxification products," meant to help someone pass a drug test.

But Chong says agents seized 10,000 DVDs of his documentary.

Iran on Friday accused the United States and Israel of fueling the deadly sectarian fighting in Lebanon between its Shiite militant Hezbollah ally and the Western-backed ruling majority. ADVERTISEMENT "Adventurous efforts and interventions by the United States and the Zionist regime are the main cause of the continuous chaotic situation in Lebanon," foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said.

One practitioner in Virginia, who hates Obama like a dog hates cats, led a reporter through his efforts. Because the man is a retired clandestine CIA officer, identifying him could endanger officers or operations that remain classified, so McClatchy will not reveal his name.

In late 2006, convinced that an Obama presidency would be disastrous for America, he decided to start an anti-Obama operation. He combed the public record on Obama. He used a couple of allies and informants -- half-jokingly dubbing his group "The Crusaders" -- to learn about Obama's background, especially his Africa connection and how he came to be the editor of the Harvard Law Review.

He assembled a dossier on Obama, including allegations that Obama attended a madrassa, or Islamic religious school, in his youth in Indonesia.

A former Atlanta police officer testified Thursday that narcotics officers routinely lied under oath when seeking search warrants; a practice that led to police killing a 92-year-old woman.

The U.S. military on Friday denied Iraqi government claims that the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq was captured and said a man with a similar name had been arrested in the northern city of Mosul.

The Iranian-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah took control of the Muslim half of Beirut on Friday, tightening its grip on the city in a major blow to the U.S.-backed government.

Iraqi security forces, after more than of 40 days of intense fighting, on Thursday told residents to evacuate their homes in the northeast Shiite slum of Sadr City and to move to temporary shelters on two soccer fields.

As I mentioned a few times, this year's Independence Day celebrations were non participatory events in Israel. Hardly a flag was flying, hardly a song was sung..... but the government and the press here completely ignored that phenomenon, as does most of the Western governments.

WHILE the Patriot Act has raised fears about government spying on ordinary citizens, the growing threat to civil liberties posed by corporate spying has received much less attention. During the late 1990s, a private security firm spied on Greenpeace and other environmental groups, examining activists' phone records and even sending undercover agents to infiltrate the groups, according to an article in Mother Jones. In 2006 Hewlett-Packard was caught spying on journalists. Last year Wal-Mart apologized for improperly recording conversations with a New York Times reporter.

And now it turns out that the Burger King Corporation, home of the Whopper, hired a private security firm to spy on the Student/Farmworker Alliance, a group of idealistic college students trying to improve the lives of migrants in Florida.

The following are merely some examples of Zionist terrorism prior to the creation of the Zionist state in 1948: The list doesn't include the bigger massacres such as Dir Yasin, Dawaymeh, Tantura and others.

With the US and Israel telling Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas that keeping away from Hamas is a sine qua non for the continuation of the "peace process," many in Fatah are now realising that Israel and its US guardian-ally are only utilising Palestinian national disunity to further weaken the Palestinian negotiating position.

ISRAEL CELEBRATING EVIL...

It's important to understand that almost all of the misery Kurnaz endured at Guantanamo came after he had been cleared of any connection to terrorism. As early as February 2002, German intelligence officials had concluded that there was no "direct" evidence that he was involved in terrorism; a September 2002 memo written by a German intelligence officer confirmed that Kurnaz was among the "considerable number" of Gitmo detainees who were "not part of the terrorist milieu."

... So for nearly four more years, this innocent man was beaten, starved, tortured, subjected to endless persecution in the form of interrogations designed to elicit perjured self-incriminating testimony. On September 30, 2004 -- two years after his innocence had been established -- Kurnaz was brought before a Combatant Status Review Tribunal staffed with officers who had access to the exculpatory 2002 memoranda. That august panel designated Kurnaz an "enemy combatant" on the basis of "evidence" it didn't deign to share with the detainee or his assigned military lawyer, who was utterly inert during the proceedings.

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence -- and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.

'Respect atheists', says Cardinal...

According to these officials, the book includes "previously undisclosed information about Hillary Clinton's connections to the Whitewater scandal, travel office firings, and Democratic fundraising efforts." Given that the book has not been shared with us, we've been unable to confirm this assertion. Furthermore, the Republican officials would not describe the nature of the "new information."

What a Wonderful World: Life in 2008...

Aloha to Aloha Airlines...

Now, faced with a mathematical mountain climb that even Stephen Hawking could not ascend, the Clintons -- and it is indeed both of them -- are just about to paste a bumper sticker on the rear of the collapsing vehicle that carries her campaign. It reads: VOTE WHITE.

"It's full speed on to the White House." --Hillary Clinton following her narrow win in Indiana

Defiant or delusional?

PALESTINIANS IN ISRAEL ARE NOT CELEBRATING TODAY...

DEFINE 'PALESTINIAN'...

The European campaign to lift the siege on Gaza has charged that the rising number of patients who die in Gaza as a result of the Israeli occupation authority's siege was "cold-blooded execution".

American forces have bombed fleeing refugees, slaughtered innocent herdsmen and destroyed villages in attempts to assassinate a handful of individual alleged, on shaky and specious evidence, to be "part of" or "associated with" or "linked to" al Qaeda. American agents have seized refugees from the Somali war, including U.S. citizens, and had them "renditioned" to the notorious prisons of the Ethiopian dictatorship. And as we have noted here many times, the Bush Administration has sent in death squads to "kill anyone left alive" after American strikes.

The entire Washington power structure has lined up to support this hideous project: military aggression, murder, destruction and rampant atrocity. Somalia -- already one of the world's most fragile and ravaged nations -- is being battered into utter destruction before our eyes....and in our names.

I asked myself the other day, when our child is finally born, what will the hospital records read; height, weight, Muslim, and Palestinian? What does Palestinian mean now? It means no clean water, no security, no freedom of movement and no certainty.

Just how far will Hillary go?...

Russia has ordered the expulsion of two military attaches from the American embassy in Moscow, US officials say.

Iraq's parliament has begun debating a bill on provincial elections that will ban any party from competing in the Oct. 1 polls if they have a militia.

If the law passes, as is expected, it could spark a major showdown with Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose movement should do well in the elections but who has refused to disarm his Mehdi Army militia despite an order from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to do so.

An outbreak of large-scale battles would draw in more American troops at a time when U.S. force levels are being cut. Heavy clashes in Baghdad and the Shi'ite south could put an end to any more major U.S. drawdowns until a new U.S. president has taken office in Washington in 2009.

Peace between Israel and Syria is not on the neo-cons' agenda for the Middle East, and what better way to derail it than to accuse Syria of trying to make nuclear weapons? Kristol and company know that, were Olmert to falter, right-wing hawk and former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is waiting in the wings.

According to Silverstein, the neo-cons want Olmert to fail, Netanyahu to take over, followed by war with Syria. "The neo-cons would rather have a war that bled an ally than a peace that rewarded their foes. It's called cutting off your friend's nose to spite his face," he says.

In the last seven weeks around 1,000 people have died, and more than 2,500 others have been injured, most of them civilians.

The fighting so far in Sadr City has been fierce - street to street, and house to house.

IAEA boss Mohamed ElBaradei says recent talks with Iran about its 'alleged studies of weaponization' have resulted in 'good progress'.

It began as a low rumble on Tuesday night, but soon giant chunks of land "the size of cars" were cascading into the sea off Dorset. By yesterday morning, a 400m section of the World Heritage Jurassic Coast between Lyme Regis and Charmouth had disappeared, in what has been described as the biggest landslide Britain has seen in a century.

The CIA is having a growing problem with their analysts and spies being recruited away by corporations. One unpleasant, for government intelligence agencies, development of the last few decades has been the growing popularity of "competitive intelligence" (corporate espionage.) It's a really big business, with most large (over a billion dollars of annual sales) corporations having separate intelligence operations. Spending on corporate intel work is over $5 billion a year, and is expected to more than double in the next four years.

A nonprofit digital library has successfully fought an FBI attempt to seize information about one of its users, and is calling on other groups to challenge government agencies attempting to obtain online customer information without a judge's order.

Hospitals struck by new killer bug...

Eight thousand pages of documents related to the Pentagon's illegal propaganda campaign, known as the Pentagon military analyst program, are now online for the world to see, although in a format that makes it impossible to easily search them and therefore difficult to read and dissect. This trove includes the documents pried out of the Pentagon by David Barstow and used as the basis for his stunning investigation that appeared in the New York Times on April 20, 2008.

Virtually every abuse of the last eight years has its roots in the Bush/Cheney view of the President as Monarch, and John McCain clearly endorses its fundamentals. Indeed, when responding to a questionnaire on executive power circulated to all the candidates by The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage earlier this year, McCain (while paying lip service to nice principles and even taking the extreme position that he would never issue a signing statement) refused to say that there was even a single aspect of Bush's use of executive power that he found unconstitutional or otherwise objectionable:

Local villagers reported that the battle lasted for nearly two hours, as Ethiopian soldiers exchanged a barrage of gunfire and artillery with Islamist insurgents.

There were heavy casualties on both sides of the conflict, according to villagers, but casualty figures were difficult to obtain because of the fierce fighting.

Microsoft releases Windows XP Service Pack 3...

A university has withdrawn a researcher's fellowship after he published an article claiming that the gas chambers of Auschwitz never existed.

In a heated phone call with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi late last month, Hillary Clinton supporter Harvey Weinstein threatened to cut off campaign money to congressional Democrats unless Pelosi embraced a new plan by the movie mogul to finance a revote of the Democratic presidential primaries in Florida and Michigan, according to three officials who were briefed on the contents of the conversation.

Lakesha S. Lilly, 26, of 1306-B King St., was charged Tuesday with felony larceny after shoes and a cell phone were taken from James Porter as he lay dying, police said.

"We are staying here," said a protester who gave his name as Abu Rish. "We have money and support from Iran and Syria and we can go on like this for another 50 years."

Excuse me if a look of bewilderment crosses my face when a surrogate of Sen. Hillary Clinton's starts off on the "we need hard-working white workers to win in November" mantra.

The United States has been Israel's staunchest, often (it has seemed) its only, friend. It has sacrificed money, material and political capital to bolster the Jewish state. It will likely have that role for generations to come.

McCain's "Spiritual Guide" Wants America to Destroy Islam...

Look the problem is not so much her acknowledgment of her support among whites of lower socioeconomic status, which is true to some degree if not somewhat tacky to bring up the way she did. It's her characterization of "WORKING, HARD WORKING AMERICANS,WHITE AMERICANS."

Google can't really be hurt by any imaginable economic protest to their new censorship tactics, but they (the Zionists) really hate it when they are made to look bad. Whenever Zionists manipulate events and people around them, they seem to be as worried about appearances as they are about results. The inner businessman's concern for image is always at war with the fascist bastard's desire to kill the opposition.

Haitham Sabbah, Mary Rizzo and Gilad Atzmon are very pleased to announce their new site, Palestine Think Tank. It is a site containing news, analysis, art and more to further the cause of justice for Palestinians. It concentrates on many aspects of the resistance, but also focuses on the issues affecting the entire Middle East. Please visit us at

U.S. forces have increased air power and armored patrols in an attempt to cripple Shiite militia influence in Sadr City, a slum of 2.5 million people that serves as the Baghdad base for the Mahdi Army led by anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Seventeen militants were killed in clashes since Wednesday, the military said Thursday.

Moore said after the premiere that movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, a personal friend and supporter of the Clintons whose company financed the film, "begged" him to remove a scene exposing Hillary Clinton as the second-highest recipient of campaign donations from the health-care industry.

Paul J. Balles argues that, in contrast to the mainstream media where the truth is often gagged, the internet offers a medium where commentators are free to be honest and incorruptible.

The speculation that Hillary's campaign might try to override the voting process to get the nomination ignores DNC rules.

Obama plans to declare victory May 20...