The head of the World Health Organization says the swine flu outbreak in Mexico and the United States could develop into a pandemic.

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan says the outbreak has "pandemic potential" because it is infecting people. But she said it is too early to say whether it will turn into one.

Being pregnant, I couldn’t run fast. After about one hundred meters, the settlers caught me. One of them hit me in my right arm and left leg with his stick. The other settler threw a stone at me, which hit me in the left leg. Then one of them pushed me, and I fell onto some thorns. My arm and leg hurt a lot. When I fell, the two settlers left me and ran toward the farmers and other shepherds. I remained there, crying. I was in terrible pain.

Just released from a PA lockup ostensibly in connection with his outspoken criticisms of the Palestinian Authority, Abdul Sattar Qassem has accused his incarcerators of mistreating and humiliating him.

Only in an thoroughly corrupt economy, overseen by a thoroughly corrupt government is it legal to create financial instruments that allow bondholders to collect more money on their bonds if a company fails than if it survives.

A new dirty game of geopolitics has already started in Baluchistan, Pakistan. To understand the recent wave of violence in Baluchistan we must understand the vested interests in Baluchistan. The root cause of violence in Baluchistan is not internal poverty or lack of development but the covert operations of foreign intelligence agencies. Internal issues might act as catalysts to inflame the situation but the root cause is foreign interference in internal affairs of Baluchistan.

One of the key, if underreported, findings in Tuesday’s bombshell Senate committee report on the Bush-era treatment of U.S. military detainees was the role of civilian and military psychologists in devising, directing and overseeing the torture of prisoners.

Understanding the role of these professionals should be a "specific focus" of an investigation into the use of these tactics, according to Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which has condemned the tactics as illegal and medically unethical.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday it was too late to contain the swine flu outbreak in the United States.

I don't carry a gun just because I'm constitutionally guaranteed this right.
I carry a gun because history has proven it to be the final defense against a tyrannical, oppressive, police state-type of government.

Rather than talking about three Iraqis being killed today, or two dozen, we are again talking about several dozen, and over 100 wounded, as we are seeing recently. Each of these Iraqis have been killed as a direct result of the US occupation of Iraq - their blood splattered on the hands of President Obama, who, during a visit to Baghdad's airport on April 7, praised the US military for their "extraordinary achievement" in Iraq.

The swine flu outbreak is likely to benefit one of the most prolific and successful venture capital firms in the United States: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Thomson Reuters Private Equity Week reported on Friday.

The World Health Organization said the virus appears to be susceptible to Roche's (ROG.VX) flu drug Tamiflu, also known as oseltamivir, but not to older flu drugs such as amantadine.

With quiet campaigning and moderate talk, Hezbollah is building its strength for Lebanon's June 7 parliament elections — and the militant Shiite Muslim group and its allies stand a good chance of winning.

Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, has even said that if the coalition wins, it would invite its opponents to join in a national unity government to ensure stability. His deputy, Sheik Naim Kassem, says the West will have to accept the election results.

Early Saturday morning, Israeli troops entered the Western Wall Plaza in Jerusalem’s Old City and cleared the area of it’s usual Shabbat worshipers. They then proceeded to demolish the centuries old structure.

Apparently they were given orders to demolish any structure that was built without a permit in East Jerusalem. King Herod was responsible for the construction of the wall around 1900 BCE. He neglected to obtain the proper building permits.

After days of deliberations, the government on Friday decided to deploy the Pakistan Army troops in the Buner district in an apparent move to launch a military operation against the Taliban, who reportedly quit the town on the appeal of Tehrik Nifaz Shariat-e-Muhammadi (TNSM) chief Maulana Sufi Muhammad.

However, when reached by telephone, Inter-Services Public Relations Director General Maj-Gen Athar Abbas said the military leadership had not yet received any order from the government to launch the military operation in Buner.

Gen. David H. Petraeus warned yesterday that al-Qaeda and Taliban extremists in Pakistan are posing "an ever more serious threat to Pakistan's very existence," and he said that Pakistan's leaders must act to counter the challenge with a well-trained military counterinsurgency force.

The military agency that provided advice on harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects referred to the application of extreme duress as "torture" in a July 2002 document sent to the Pentagon's chief lawyer and warned that it would produce "unreliable information."

In particular, Lieberman insisted that despite America’s support for the “two-state solution” which the Israeli administration has rejected, President Obama will not put forth any new peace initiatives unless Israel wants them to. “Believe me,” Lieberman declared, “American accepts all our decisions.”

The top U.S. military commander in the Mideast says attacks in Iraq will continue for some time, and they may be the work of a network of foreign fighters from Tunisia.

Jordan's King Abdullah on Friday said that Israel must choose between integrating into the region or remaining isolated, and warned that delaying a two-state solution would be disastrous for Israelis and Palestinians.

The Jewish state can "integrate into the region...or to remain fortress Israel, isolated, holding itself and the entire region hostage to continued confrontation," Abdullah said during his visit to Washington.

Even more curious about this breakout is the timing. NYT again:

Mexico’s flu season is usually over by now, but health officials have noticed a significant spike in flu cases since mid-March. The W.H.O. said there had been 800 cases in Mexico in recent weeks, 60 of them fatal, of a flu like illness that appeared to be more serious than the regular seasonal flu.

As if to emphasise the uselessness of more government regulation, to those who call for more government regulation of every aspect of life, if there ever was a time to warn about travel to Mexico, it is now. Yet, because of political reasons it won't happen. The NYT reports one helluva contradiction from the CDC:

As many as 75 students at St. Francis Preparatory School in Queens became sick with flu-like symptoms on Thursday, and more fell ill on Friday, WCBS television reported. Health officials had tested the students and were investigating, and the school canceled its Friday evening programs.

So I went in today to sub for a high school class and I learned something shocking. I was teaching the LD students in the first periods and a woman comes in and gets one of the girls. I find out form another student that she had been selected for a random drug screening as were many other kids that day. I said is that legal? The boy said "well their parents have to sign a form.
And if they don't take the test then it's an automatic failure."
"So guilty until proven innocent then."
" Yep.."

A thought occurs: There has been one momentous upside to Cheney & Co.'s uninterrupted visitations and unprecedented vileness, however. And it is this: By comparison, our visits to just plain Republicans now seem like a walk in the park, almost like a return to the clean world; a bit like dropping in on some hopelessly crazy but essentially harmless old uncle.

A Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C. Circuit ruled Friday that detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are not "persons" according to it's interpretation of a statute involving religious freedom.

Worried about swine flu? There is one easy way to protect against infection, health experts agree -- handwashing.

Global health officials are worried about an unusual new strain of flu that may have killed as many as 68 people in Mexico, with 1,000 showing possible symptoms. It has infected at least eight people in the United States. [ID:nN24462379]

Monsanto is now suing the German government (and, by that, the people) to force them to grow their GM Corn.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to assure Iraqis on Saturday that the Obama administration would not abandon their country even as it presses ahead with plans to withdraw American troops amid a recent surge in violence.

A plane was diverted to Logan Airport just after 10 p.m. Friday after a passenger on a transatlantic flight tried to break into the cockpit and was subdued by passengers, Massachusetts State Police said.

The incident was not terrorism, according to officials at Massport, the agency that runs the airport. The passenger, identified as Itay Atmor, may have been suffering from an anxiety attack, officials said.

There were also two peculiar episodes of heightened security alerts in the US in April and May, which were said at the time to have been based on information obtained from Abu Zubaydah. These vague and ultimately implausible threats gave a strong impression that Abu Zubaydah might have been inventing al Qaeda plots simply to satisfy his interrogators.

In July 2002, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency notified the former administration that torture yields 'unreliable information,' just weeks before the Justice Department authorized use of harsh interrogation techniques, The Washington Post reported.

"The unintended consequence of a US policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured US personnel," the paper quoted from a document attached to a JPRA memorandum.

With a serious deadly flu threat emanating from Mexico, the CDC chooses to warn clinicians about patients who may have been in San Diego County, California or San Antonio, Texas but not a word about patients who may have travelled in Mexico.

"Last year, Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a member of the Court of Appeals panel who issued the decision today, referred to the Court’s holding that detainees are not 'persons' as 'a most regrettable holding in a case where plaintiffs have alleged high-level U.S. government officials treated them as less than human.'"

Why is the media misleading the public about housing? The housing market is crashing. There are no "green shoots" or "glimmers of hope"; the market is worn to a stump, it's kaput. Still, whenever new housing figures are released, they're crunched and tweaked and spin-dried until they tell a totally different story; a hopeful story about an elusive "light in the tunnel". But there is no light in the tunnel; it's a myth. The truth is, there's no sign of a turnaround or a "bottom" in housing at all; not yet, at least. The real estate market is freefalling and it looks like its got a long way to go. So why is the media still peddling the same "rose-colored" claptrap that put the country in this pickle to begin with?

Despite Guzman's parents yelling to the officers that he was a "special boy" with "special needs," one of the officers struck Guzman in the head with a baton, cutting a gash that would require eight staples, his sister said. The parents witnessed the blow being struck, she said.

On the ground, blood pouring from his head, Guzman, who has the mental capacity of a 5th grader, mumbled again and again, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I submit. I submit," his family said.

Executives and insiders at U.S. companies are taking advantage of the steepest stock market gains since 1938 to unload shares at the fastest pace since the start of the bear market.

I meant to get to this earlier in the week. It's so illustrative of the problems with our corporate media that the guy who wins a Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting is ignored - because he was investigating the corporate media for stacking the deck with paid sources to support the Iraq war

Amid the financial crisis sweeping through Russia, the oligarchs, the country's financial and industrial elite, are faced with a dilemma they did not anticipate a mere year ago: how not to go broke? As their wealth plummeted and the cost of borrowing skyrocketed, they are struggling to hold on to their assets and to get out of debt. And they are appealing to the friend of last resort -- the Kremlin.

UK's Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at a high profile global warming hearing on Friday April 24, 2009 at 10am in Washington. Monckton told Climate Depot that the Democrats rescinded his scheduled joint appearance at the House Energy and Commerce hearing on Friday. Monckton said he was informed that he would not be allowed to testify alongside Gore when his plane landed from England Thursday afternoon.

“The House Democrats don't want Gore humiliated, so they slammed the door of the Capitol in my face,” Monckton told Climate Depot in an exclusive interview. “They are cowards.”

Thinktank says tax avoidance and wealthy reining in spending could undermine Treasury plan.

One month before he was murdered in Dallas, President John F. Kennedy told the American Zionist Council (AZC), the Daddy of today's 900 pound AIPAC gorilla, to register as a foreign agent, which was and still is the law for all countries, except Israel.

Seriously America, how is your President supposed to do what is best for America and what is best for the Middle East peace process, when you allow Zionists like AIPAC to run your country?

John McCain is the latest high-profile politician to repeat the diehard American falsehood that the 9-11 terrorists entered the United States through Canada.

The "stress tests" were supposed to triage those banks worth saving from those which were already too far gone to save.

But as Nouriel Roubini, FDIC chief Sheila Bair, Nobel economist Paul Krugman, former senior S&L regulator William Black and many others said, the "stress tests" are a sham.

Well, they've been proven right.

The Fed said today that - instead of letting the insolvent banks fail - which is what virtually all of the independent experts are recommending (see this for example), the Fed will rescue all banks which fail the stress test.

The New York Attorney General says that Bernanke and Paulson forced Bank of America to buy Merill Lynch:

Jamaica's government put police and the army on alert to prevent violent demonstrations as it prepared to announce tax increases on gasoline, cigarettes and other consumer items on Thursday.

It appears that among the real reasons for the university’s attempts to discipline me since September 2005 and for its recent most harsh actions against me under President Allan Rock’s mandate might be the administration’s opposition to my political views about the Palestine-Israel conflict, which, starting in 2005, I have expressed in articles, on radio, in my blog postings, at public venues, and in my classes. In September 2005 the dean cancelled my Physics and the Environment course following a complaint (regarding an email comment about Zionism), channelled through the university’s Canadian Studies Institute director Pierre Anctil to the VP-Academic.

The 23 countries that walked out of the Geneva Conference during Ahmadinejad’s speech are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the UK. The 27 EU members are the above plus Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland, which had already decided not to send delegates at all. The other 5 countries which had already decided not to send delegates at all are Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand and the US. So the formula for the bloc claiming that Ahmadinejad is ‘racist’ is: EU, plus Israel, plus the surviving ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘English-speaking’ — i.e., white colonial — states: Australia & New Zealand, the USA & Canada.

Mexico shut down schools, museums, libraries and state-run theaters across its overcrowded capital Friday in hopes of containing a swine flu outbreak that authorities say killed at least 20 people — and perhaps dozens more. World health authorities worried openly that the strange new virus could become a global epidemic.

She said that the Conference proved to be "a celebration of tolerance and dignity for all", and it produced a "meaningful outcome enshrining a common aspiration: to defy racism in all its manifestations and work to stamp it out wherever it may occur."

Some people have reported the number to be as high as 88 cosponsors, but we can confirm 84 cosponsors through the Library of Congress.

Australia's Miss Universe competition found itself under scrutiny yesterday as doctors and dieticians questioned the inclusion of a finalist they claimed was severely underweight.

Dietician Melanie McGrice told Australia's Daily Mail that at 180cm and weighing just 49kg, 19-year-old Stephanie Naumoska was well under the World Health Organisation's benchmark for malnutrition.

"I would certainly want to be doing an assessment of her diet to make sure she doesn't have some type of eating disorder," she said.

It is genetically different from the fully human H1N1 seasonal influenza virus that has been circulating globally for the past few years. The new flu virus contains DNA typical to avian, swine and human viruses, including elements from European and Asian swine viruses.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were “relocated” briefly while at work at the White House after a small plane strayed into restricted airspace over Washington, administration spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

Now, statistically, it's possible, even likely, that one or two of these microbiologists legitimately were killed in random accidents. But for so many to die in such a short while exceeds all reasonable bounds of statistics. Prudence would demand an investigation, not the "ho hum" attitude of the government which even today continues to issue dire warnings to the general population of how much we are all in danger from "bioterrorism".

So, let's take a moment and step away from the perpetual fear-mongering of the media (and Rumsfeld) as they assure us another attack IS coming (with a certainty which suggests inside information on the subject) and assume for a moment that some party has indeed decided to "liquidate" weapons research infectious disease experts.

Ignore for a moment the lies surrounding torture, AIPAC, 9-11, TWA 800, the USS Iowa, and the Gulf of Tonkin, and step back into horrid history with me.

Friday is the Holy Day for Muslims. Friday is also the day most Muslims are on a day off and can participate in demonstrations against the growing wall of apartheid being built on Occupied Palestinian Lands.

Friday is also the day the Israeli army participates in these demonstrations by shooting at the participants. A month ago an American Solidarity Worker, Tristan Anderson, was seriously wounded by these terrorists. Last Friday, A Palestinian named Bassem Abu Rahama was murdered by these bastards. Today, 11 others were wounded, some seriously, by rubber bullets and tear gas.

All this while the world looks on and DOES NOTHING.