Washing-machine centrifuges in uranium enrichment facilities disguised as barns and chicken coops! And Americans believed it. And so we were stampeded into war against a nation that did not threaten or attack us, to strip it of weapons it did not even have.

That war has cost 4,500 American dead and 35,000 wounded. It has brought death to perhaps a hundred thousand Iraqis. Four million people have been driven from their homes, 2 million, including half the Christians, into exile. Hundreds of thousands of fatherless Iraqi children are being raised by women widowed by that war.

Undaunted, the War Party has a new war planned for us.

Target: Tehran. And Obama may just have boxed himself in.

Al-Fayçal summed up the report in a very short and succinct manner: 'Ennahar, the Algerian daily, asserted that the Jewish State is recruiting al-Qaeda Islamists in Europe who originated in the Maghreb (the Maghreb, or the Western part of Africa, is considered to encompass the countries of Morocco, Tunisia, Lybia and Algeria) and providing them with training in Israeli camps, in order to use them in terrorist attacks next summer.

The Pirate Party, a Swedish political party set up to promote internet piracy and reform copyright laws, is set to win several seats in the European parliament, according to reports.

The Times reported that the pro-file-sharing party is now Sweden’s third largest political party, according to a new poll which put support at eight per cent, enough to give the party a number of seats in Brussels.

The National Socialists ran brothels in the concentration camps. The work of the forced prostitutes was ment to increase the productivity of the inmates. A study shows the little known side of the Nazi terror.

We gave sceptical gulli users the chance to ask their questions directly to Dr. Niels Harrit, one of the scientists. The gulli users asked really tough questions and didn't censor anything. We gave all those questions to Mr. Harrit and were really curious how he would respond. He answered. So now, here's the promised interview.

When Alex Hill and 40 of his colleagues were corralled into a conference room at Dell's Austin, Texas, headquarters last November, he was a little nervous. "I started cracking jokes that gas was going to start coming down in James Bond fashion or something," he said.

Close. Everyone in the room was fired, their jobs shipped overseas. While Hill understands the business reasons behind what happened, the 38-year-old Web designer still feels betrayed. "It kind of felt like I’d made a deal with my company that if I did a good job they wouldn’t fire me," he said.

"It wasn't a lie," he told "GMA." "It was my imagination. And in my imagination, in my mind, I believed it. Even now, I believe it, that she was there and she threw the apple to me. ... In my imagination, it was true."

Venezuela and Bolivia are supplying Iran with uranium for its nuclear program, according to a secret Israeli government report.

US President Barack Obama said the international community must act after North Korea's "reckless" nuclear and missile tests on Monday, as calls grew for tougher action against Pyongyang.

"North Korea's nuclear ballistic missile programs pose a great threat to the peace and security of the world and I strongly condemn their reckless action," Obama said ahead of a Memorial Day ceremony to honor war dead.

Friends just rang as they crossed the border into Gaza!!!
OMG They are crossing the border RIGHT NOW!!!

SIEGE IS BROKEN

I’m so excited I can’t type right now

In a detailed investigation of South Carolina’s Inspiration Network, the Charlotte Observer reports that the network’s on-air promises that viewers can obtain prosperity and “God’s debt cancellation” by donating $200 or more have made its CEO David Cerullo a wealthy man and his cable network “one of the world’s fastest growing Christian broadcasters.”

A Tampa woman refused to be a carjacking victim when she was approached by an armed man who jumped into her car on Thursday.

The woman, who only wants to be identified as Adrianna, pulled out her own gun. "I just leaned forward and punched him in the forehead with my gun," she said. The man "screamed like a girl and almost dropped his gun" as he ran away, she added.

During the Gaza war this year, Schmuel Kaufman, a military rabbi from a West Bank settlement, used to stride between the Israeli soldiers’ tents and urge them to fight what he deemed an “obligatory war” ordained by ancient scripture.

“It’s a holy war to protect women and children from the south of the country after a long period of endurance on our side,” he told The Times. “The commander of the battalion asked me to blow the shofar [a ram’s horn] every time before going into the fighting. I’m blowing the shofar while 500 soldiers stand behind me praying. They went in wrapped in holiness.”

Obviously it is 8:30PM now in Egypt and getting dark and late, so I assume the 20 and the aid vehicles will cross in the morning, although I will get confirmation of that later, I forgot to ask LOL!!

Lastly, as soon as they get inside and have internet access I will have loads of photos to post here as well.

"The picture in Palestine today is worthy of a surreal masterpiece: dialogue between factions in Cairo has come to nil, though it may well have been their last chance; there is an old government in Gaza, usually referred to as dissolved; then there is a new government in the West Bank, ordered by Mahmoud Abbas, which predictably piqued Hamas and spurred, for the first time ever, opposition from within Fatah itself," wrote Mamdouh al Sheikh in an opinion piece for the Emirati daily Al Bayane.

“Across the street in this black middle-class neighborhood, Patrick Nicholas, a surgical technician in blue scrubs, shakes his dreadlocks and shrugs. He rents but is moving out. ‘The owner got foreclosed and told us to leave,’ he said. Six doors away, past two foreclosed and boarded-up homes, a burly man in a blue union jacket declines to give his name but his problem is evident. A foreclosure notice is pasted to the door of his house. His tone is mournful. ‘Tough times, man,’ he says, ‘Tough, tough times.’”

I know people are anxious for news, I don’t have that much, but here’s all I have so far this morning. People had a comfortable night, the Egyptian security people supplied convoy members with mattresses and bedding, also food and water and kettles for tea making (Important necessities for Irish people LOL)

But there is not really anything to say today except that negotiations continue this morning to get in to Gaza today. I expect an answer in a few hours time as to what the next steps will be.

Egyptian Authorities blocked the entry of “Hope” into Gaza

Fatah leaders have accused Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his allies of seeking the “dismantling” and “disintegration” of the movement in order to facilitate “the liquidation” of the Palestinian cause.

Some of these leaders have charged that the Fatah organization Abbas is trying reconstruct is “closer to Netanyahu than it is to the Palestinian people and their struggle for freedom and independence.”

Last month the National Archives, formerly known as the Public Record Office, released MI5 Security Service files showing that Zionist terror groups planned to set up cells in London and assassinate the post-war Labour government’s British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin.

YEHOSHUA Zettler, the commander in Jerusalem of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, or Lehi — known to the British as the Stern Gang — who planned and supervised the assassination of the United Nations mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948, has died in Israel. He was 91.

Yehoshua Zettler, one of the founding members of a violent pre-state Jewish movement and mastermind of the assassination of a top U.N. envoy in 1948, has died in Israel. He was 91.

By asking earlier this month for $2.775 billion in military aid to Israel in his FY2010 budget request, it would seem that on this important policy issue President Obama?s commitment is more rhetorical than substantive. Since 1949, according to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has provided to Israel more than $100 billion in military and economic assistance. In 2007, the United States and Israel signed an agreement for $30 billion in additional military aid through FY2018.

By the time Ghada's husband reached the house, his brother Ahmad and some relatives had only minutes ago rushed into the house, carrying away the dead sons and their father on a cart, seeking for an ambulance help. Ahmad (Umm Muhammad's son) said: "By the time we heard the blast, my relatives and I took my father and brothers on a cart, thinking we could save their lives. I didn't know that they all were dead by the time we arrived! We were looking for an ambulance but an Israeli tank appeared in front of us; the Israeli soldier who got out of it ordered us to leave the bodies and run for our lives ... while running away I looked back to see him pouring down sand on them."

As Israel seeks to win Washington’s support for waging war on Iran, the top US military officer warns of serious unintended consequences of military strikes on the country at the present time.

“I think the unintended consequence of a strike against Iran right now would be incredibly serious, as well as the unintended consequences of their achieving a weapon,” Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a Sunday interview with ABC television.

The head of the World Bank has warned that the global economic crisis could lead to serious social upheaval.

Robert Morgenthau, the New York district attorney who is heading a long-term investigation into the Islamic regime's complex web of illicit overseas financial operations, told US senators there was little time left to halt Tehran's atomic weapons programme.

Video was released late last week of an innocent man being slammed head first into a wall by a Seattle police officer, in an exchange that has left the victim in a coma.

Mr Harris had been pursued by deputies after a witness wrongly identified him as a suspect in an assault.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing to completely eliminate the state’s welfare program for families, medical insurance for low-income children and Cal Grants cash assistance to college and university students.

Under a decree published in the Venezuela’s official gazette on May 21, the joint venture, named PetroMacareo S.A., is also allowed to process heavy oil and extra heavy oil pumped from the 248 sq. km Junin block 2 in the Orinoco belt. The belt is considered to have the world’s largest oil reserves.

The Israeli exhibition violates international conventions or protocols that Canada has ratified and that protect cultural property during armed conflict. The State of Israel seized the Jordanian-owned Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem in 1967 to take possession of the scrolls and has continued to loot similar Palestinian cultural property from the Occupied Territories ever since. Under the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property and the 1954 Hague Convention along with its two associated protocols, Canada is legally obliged "to take appropriate steps to recover and return any such cultural property" at the request of the wronged party.

The United Nation’s watchdog on torture has criticised Israel for refusing to allow inspections at a secret prison, dubbed by critics as “Israel’s Guantanamo Bay”, and demanded to know if more such clandestine detention camps are operating.

In a report published on Friday, the Committee Against Torture requested that Israel identify the location of the camp, officially referred to as “Facility 1391”, and allow access to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Findings from Israeli human rights groups show that the prison has in the past been used to hold Arab and Muslim prisoners, including Palestinians, and that routine torture and physical abuse were carried out by interrogators.

So it is of somewhat sickening irony, as the New York Daily News' Mike Lupica points out on this Memorial Day, that the draft-dodging, torture-endorsing, war-instigating "toy soldier" likes of a Dick Cheney -- "whose idea of a foxhole is Fox News" -- should now be dictating what kind of a person bodies forth a patriotic Republican in good standing.

Cheney of course does, and Gen. Powell doesn't.

Russia's foreign minister said Sunday that Hamas is following a more realistic path after Israel's crushing war against the militant Palestinian group controlling the Gaza Strip.

Sergei Lavrov, who met with the top Hamas political leader in Syria's capital on Saturday, urged the group to agree to a formal truce with Israel, noting that since the end of the war in mid-January there has been less rocket and mortar fire from Gaza into Israel.

PEERS are claiming hundreds of thousands of pounds in expenses for staying overnight in London when they already own homes with no mortgages near the House of Lords.

Instead of seeing older workers staying on the job longer as the economy has worsened, the Social Security system is reporting a major surge in early retirement claims that could have implications for the financial security of millions of baby boomers.

Ms Suu Kyi faces five years in prison if she is convicted of the charges that she broke the conditions of her current house arrest by allowing an uninvited visitor, a US citizen named John Yettaw, who swam across a lake to her back door this month, to stay and gave him food and drink. “I am not guilty because I have not committed any crime,” Ms Suu Kyi told the court on Friday, according to her lawyer.

A million homeowners have paid the wrong council tax for years in a funding scandal ministers tried to cover up.

New documents have shown that more than 700,000 households may have been overcharged to the tune of tens of millions.

Ministers and officials have known since at least 2005 that many homes were in the wrong tax bands.

“Zionism,” writes Philips, “is simply the movement for the self-determination of the Jewish people. And its significance is greater than any other movement of national liberation because Judaism itself rests upon three legs — the people, the religion and the land. If one is lopped off by having its legitimacy denied, the whole thing collapses. That is why anti-Zionism is far more than an unpleasant political position. It is a direct attack on Judaism itself.”

As the war went on the civilian toll in Gaza dwarfed the toll against the police working for the Hamas-run government. Still, criticism of the indiscriminate destruction of police stations and the killing of police en masse was enough of a thorn in then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s side to order an investigation into the background of the slain police. Now, roughly four months after the end of the siege, the report claims that the vast majority of those police, though indeed indiscriminately killed, happened to be “terrorists” of one stripe or another.

Iran has sent six warships to international waters, including the Gulf of Aden, to show its ability to confront any foreign threats, its naval commander said on Monday.

Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, quoted by the ISNA news agency, made the announcement five days after Iran said it test-fired a surface-to-surface missile with a range of 2,000 km (1,200 miles), putting Israel and U.S. bases in the area within reach.

The war of choice that is still Iraq---its utter devastation and inhumanity---brought into focus for my self what the Vietnam generation recognized decades ago. Not only is the current Iraq War brutalizing and tearing apart the lives of millions of Iraqis and squandering the lives of thousands of Americans but it is also an illegal war.

The CIA lied to her, she said on Thursday. She was not told about waterboarding in her briefings. Nor, for that matter, was she told directly about CIA interrogators using any enhanced interrogation techniques.

She was never briefed, she says, but was "told" about them by a staff member. As if there is a lick of difference between those split hairs.

And she raised no objections to what she learned because she was too busy trying to gain a majority for her party in Congress.

Israeli aircraft have scattered pamphlets over the Gaza Strip warning residents to stay away from the border.

The Arabic pamphlets warn Gazans to stay out of areas 300 meters to 500 meters (yards) from the border fence, saying they risk being shot.

What is most interesting about this is not that we were protected from a supposed terrorist attack, but that the whole “plot” was invented by an FBI informant:

The defendants, in their efforts to acquire weapons, dealt with an informant acting under law enforcement supervision, authorities said. The FBI and other agencies monitored the men and provided an inactive missile and inert C-4 to the informant for the defendants, a federal complaint said.

In June 2008, the informant met Cromitie in Newburgh and Cromitie complained that his parents had lived in Afghanistan and he was upset about the war there and that many Muslim people were being killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan by U.S. military forces, officials said.

This would normally be my time for a quiet Memorial Day at home.

But even as we seek calm, investors overseas are doing precisely the opposite.

They’re dumping U.S. assets.

They’re driving those assets down in price.

And they’re threatening to sink our entire economy into a THIRD phase of this crisis.

Vilnai made the comments during a session of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, in which he said the Home Front Command would simulate defending against such an assault as part of a large-scale drill to be held next week.

"This isn't an imaginary situation. This isn't detached from reality and if there is a war, it's very likely that this is what will happen," said the deputy minister.

This film is astonishing, it goes in detail through the untold history of The Project for the New American Century with tons of archival footage and connects it right into the present.

This film exposes how every major war in US history was based on a complete fraud with video of insiders themselves admitting it.

The Food and Drug Administration said in a warning letter to General Mills that language on the Cheerios box suggests the cereal is designed to prevent or treat heart disease by lowering cholesterol. Regulators say that only FDA-approved drugs are allowed to make such claims.

Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, said: "Senior officials of the Chinese government grilled me about whether or not we are going to monetise the actions of our legislature."

His recent trip to the Far East appears to have been a stark reminder that Asia's "Confucian" culture of right action does not look kindly on the insouciant policy of printing money by Anglo-Saxons.

While millions of Americans will go to national cemeteries today to visit departed loved ones and to cry their hearts out, one has to ask just what those brave souls died for.

America the Beautiful? Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Fighting and dying so the Fed can steal trillions and trillions of OUR money?

Or is it what former Secretary of State Kissinger said, referring pointedly to military men as "dumb, stupid animals to be used" as pawns for foreign policy?

The General Electric CEO said he favored a cap-and-trade system to regulate carbon emissions versus a carbon tax.

"Look, I've said it - there's got to be a price for carbon," Immelt said. "I've come to the conclusion that cap-and-trade is the most effective way to create a market and go. There's going to be people that argue for taxes. But, I - I just think cap-and-trade is the more practical approach. But let's debate all that stuff, but let's get it done."

Elsewhere in the nation, tent cities and shelters from California to Massachusetts report growing demand from the newly homeless. The National Alliance to End Homelessness predicted in January that the recession would force 1.5 million more people into homelessness over the next two years. Already, "tens of thousands" have lost their homes, Alliance President Nan Roman says.

"We're hearing from shelter providers that the shelters are overflowing, filled to capacity," says Ellen Bassuk, president of the National Center on Family Homelessness.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday rejected a Western proposal for it to "freeze" its nuclear work in return for no new sanctions and ruled out any talks with major powers on the issue.

The interest yield on 10-year US Treasuries – the benchmark price of long-term credit for the global system – jumped 33 basis points last week to 3.45pc week on contagion effects after Standard & Poor's issued a warning on Britain's "AAA" credit rating.

The Obama administration needs to raise $2 trillion this year to cover the fiscal stimulus plan and the bank bail-outs. It has to fund $900bn by September.

The Obama administration has appealed to China to provide training and even military equipment to help Pakistan counter a growing militant threat, U.S. officials said.

The proposal is part of a broad push by Washington to enlist key allies of Pakistan in the effort to stabilize the country. The U.S. is seeking to persuade Islamabad to step up its efforts against militants, while supporting the fragile civilian government and the nation's tottering economy.

The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush's invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and "wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs".

In the same year he spoke to Chirac, Bush had reportedly said to the Palestinian foreign minister that he was on "a mission from God" in launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and was receiving commands from the Lord.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak will fly to Washington next week for talks with his counterpart Robert Gates and senior officials set to focus on Iran's nuclear ambitions, an official said.

The defence minister was also planning to meet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Obama's National Security Adviser James Jones and special Middle East envoy George Mitchell, the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

In the latest phase of the nation’s real estate disaster, the locus of trouble has shifted from subprime loans — those extended to home buyers with troubled credit — to the far more numerous prime loans issued to those with decent financial histories.

Hezbollah media relations’ bureau issued a statement on Sunday in which it dismissed allegations published by the German magazine Der Spiegel and broadcast by Al-Arabiyya Channel saying that it is nothing less than “police fabrications”.

Der Spiegel claimed on Saturday that the UN special Tribunal for Lebanon probing the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005, had new evidence that Hezbollah special forces "planned and executed" the Beirut car bombing that killed the former premier and 22 others.

Looking back on that time, while the US Government declared political victory in the war, and the "Captains of Industry" grew rich turning looted war material into corporations that could hardly fail in competing with nations whose industrial bases had been bombed into rubble, I recognize that the town I grew up in had been defeated in that war. It had been eviscerated. It had had its very heart cut out of it; a gaping hole that never healed, but could only be forgotten.

So, here is one veteran; not a glyph on a wall, but a man with a name, a face, and a history. To his friends and family he was a real human being, even though to the War Department he was just another statistic.

But as I think back on him, I know for a fact that he and the millions of others who served in all the various wars the United States became entangled in would be shocked and saddened to see that the government for which they sacrificed so much has become the very embodiment of all that they fought so hard against. No more First Amendment, warrantless spying on Americans, show trials, confessions extracted by torture; for this Walter gave up a lung?

Following the suicide of a 12-year-old boy on Thursday, Thailand's Criminal Court has ordered the closure of 72 websites.

The Bangkok Post reports that Pongsathorn Wattanabenjasopha leaped to his death from the sixth floor of his school building, after being banned from playing video games by his father.

Oddly enough, the 72 sites shuttered by the Thai government include both online game and gambling venues. The Post reports comments by a government official who said that game-addicted children were more likely to commit suicide.