Predictably, recent polling found that white evangelical Christian Americans are more likely to support torture, followed by white Catholics, other white protestants, and trailing far behind: the non-religious.

The next speaker from the floor challenged to the Archbishop’s strong assertion that God never favors killing. This bible educated churchgoer set out to prove that God does endorses killing if he wants to. Drawing on a large Study Bible, the floor speaker said Joshua received direct instructions from God to annihilate entire tribes in the course of land acquisition. By inference he imputed this same authority to political Israel now, which presumably may also annihilate the present day Philistines with God’s Blessing. Elias Chacour simply objected to his interpenetration.

One of the leading business schools in America - the Wharton School of Business - has written an essay on the psychological causes and solutions to the economic crisis. Wharton points out that restoring trust is the key to recovery, and that trust cannot be restored until wrongdoers are held accountable:

“Al-Qaida is the top secret code name of special covert operations of the U.S. CIA, Israeli Mossad, British SIS, Indian RAW. Al-Qaida is a fake name, an imaginary illusion, a deceptive fraud, a fictitious hoax and a fraudulent scam of the unlawful war of terror, which is still being cunningly and clandestinely supported and promoted by the CIA, Mossad, SIS, RAW, and the Corrupt Mercenary Media (CMM) to frame, blame, defame, harm and kill Pakistanis, Kashmiris, Afghans, Arabs, Muslims and other innocent humans by falsely and maliciously labeling them as the Al-Qaida militants, extremists, or terrorists. Actually, Al-Qaida or Al-CIA-da is the CIA. Al-Qaida is the Mossad. Al-Qaida is the SIS. Al-Qaida is the RAW. Al-Qaida is the ISI. Al-Qaida is the CMM.

Is there opposition? [Laughter] Congratulations! As you've observed, the democratic process has worked without a flaw

The experts think the Republican Party can get up off the canvas and stage a comeback, but don’t bet on it. The poor GOP isn’t really even a party anymore; it’s more like a vaudeville troupe scuttling from one backwater to the next performing the same worn slapstick. No wonder party membership is in the tank. Who wants to stick with a loser. George Bush drove a stake through the heart of the Party with his gratuitous wars and his reckless spending. He left behind a bloated, intrusive, out-of-control Federal government and an economy in tatters. Things have gotten so bad, the Party has a hard time fielding a second place candidate in a two-person race.

Lebanese security forces have arrested two more people suspected of spying for Israel, bringing the total number of suspected collaborators detained since the beginning of the year to 16. A police statement published late on Monday said Lebanese policeman Haissam al-Sahmarani and his wife were arrested during a raid on their house in Beirut's Bourj al-Barajneh neighborhood on Sunday evening.

And so now Republicans are blackmailing Holder, saying they will focus the spotlight on his role in approving renditions if Holder pulls back the cover to far on torture under the Bush administration.
This pretty much ties into Sibel Edmonds' allegations that virtually everyone in Washington is being blackmailed by someone else not to rock the boat. Are most members of Congress being blackmailed on torture, spying, and other issues of national security? Is the White House?

The government will begin taking land from seven Somerset County property owners so that the Flight 93 memorial can be built in time for the 10th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, the National Park Service said.

For AIPAC, that message is ensuring that campus student organizations toe a pro-Israel line and that all campus initiatives to disinvest in Israel are defeated.

But it is not just America’s college students who are being subjected to AIPAC’s right-wing propaganda blitzkrieg. This editor overheard a conversation by another AIPAC attendee about continued non-profit funding for a network of summer camps to stress support for Israel and “Jewishness” among the generation following in the footsteps of college students and the generation following that. Clearly understood in the conversation was that the effort was planning for 30 years into the future.

Evidence "suggests that Mr. Morgan may be focused on the Wesleyan University campus as well as the Jewish community," Middletown Police Chief Lynn Baldoni said. "Investigators have been in contact with Wesleyan University and leaders of the Jewish community, urging both to be extra vigilant."

A group of thrill-seekers have developed a 'hot' new adrenaline sport called 'volcano boarding', in which participants race at speeds of up to 50mph down the side of an active volcano.

Rahm Israel Emanuel hasn’t been mopping floors at the White House.
As soon as he gets the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 passed, it will become a crime for any American to tell the truth about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and theft of their lands.

It will be a crime to report the extraordinary influence of the Israel Lobby on the White House and Congress, such as the AIPAC-written resolutions praising Israel for its war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza that were endorsed by 100 per cent of the US Senate and 99 per cent of the House of Representatives, while the rest of the world condemned Israel for its barbarity.

It will be a crime to doubt the Holocaust.

Although Gov. Brad Henry vetoed similar legislation 10 days earlier, House members Monday again approved a resolution claiming Oklahoma’s sovereignty.

"We’re going to get it done one way or the other,” said the resolutions’ author, Rep. Charles Key, R-Oklahoma City.

"I think our governor is out of step.”

However, political analyst Naomi Klein doesn’t trust the stress tests. “It still feels like they’re playing with the numbers,” she told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Wednesday, “that they’re trying to delay the moment of truth — and I think that that’s why that confidence is really, really tentative.”

Klein is concerned that “the poorest and most vulnerable people in the country are being asked to bail out the most wealthy.”

The clear suggestion was, if any criminal investigation is opened, Republicans would push to get it expanded beyond events during the Bush administration. Alexander, for example, asked several times whether members of Congress, who were told about the interrogation methods, should also be investigated.

Mayor Gavin Newsom's acceptance of an all-expense-paid trip to Israel this week exhibits poor moral and political judgment.

Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, also told US troops that, as followers of Christ, they all have “a responsibility to be witnesses for him” (Jesus). Evidently, God’s covenant entails torture too. A recent survey conducted in the US found that the more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists. Over 60 percent of Evangelical Protestants strongly justified the use of torture, such as waterboarding, beatings, and electrical shock. It seems lately though, “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” has turned into “Praise the Lord and Start Waterboarding and Proselyting.”

On April 21, Philip Zelikow, who was counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the Bush administration, revealed on Foreign Policy's "Shadow Government" blog that he wrote a memo in 2005 disputing the conclusions of Bush Justice Department lawyers that torture was legal. The existence of such a memo was a surprise. But Zelikow also disclosed that the "White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo."

This story is not over. Zelikow tells Mother Jones that he doesn't know for sure who in the White House ordered the suppression of his memo, but he says that his "supposition at the time" was that the office of Vice President Dick Cheney was behind the cover-up.

Our friends at The Patriot Depot just received a call from Rosemarie in Ball, Louisiana alerting Patriot Depot that her brother-in-law was stopped by small town Louisiana police and detained by the roadside for half an hour. A background check was conducted to determine whether he was a member of an "extremist" group. Why? Her brother-in-law (name not disclosed for privacy) had purchased and displayed a conservative "Don't Tread on Me" bumper sticker on his car.

Highly sensitive details of a US military missile air defence system were found on a second-hand hard drive bought on eBay.

The test launch procedures were found on a hard disk for the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence) ground to air missile defence system, used to shoot down Scud missiles in Iraq.

The disk also contained security policies, blueprints of facilities and personal information on employees including social security numbers, belonging to technology company Lockheed Martin - who designed and built the system.

In short, here's what Kerry says: Blah blah blah blah blah blah time we examine the future of journalism in the digital Information Age blah blah and what it means to our Republic and to our democracy.

Blah blah blah blah blah newspapers blah entertained us; they enraged us, but always, they have informed us.

Speaking before a group of Jewish leaders and diplomats in New York today, Israeli President Shimon Peres says the nation will not “cross out any other options” in dealing with the Iranian nuclear program in the event that the US diplomatic endeavor fails to see the program dismantled.

Yesterday’s comments by Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller, suggesting that the Obama Administration would like every nation, including Israel to join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) came as a considerable shock to the Middle Eastern nation, which has for the past 40 years kept its nuclear arsenal one of the most poorly-kept secrets in the world.

Israeli officials dismissed the call, citing Iran’s membership in the NPT as proof that the pact is not “a miracle cure for the world’s ills.” The Israeli Foreign Minister has reportedly contacted the US for confirmation, unwilling to believe that a US officials could possibly suggest they should be a party to the non-proliferation agreement.

Speaking to about 300 Marines at Camp Leatherneck in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, Gates assured them that they wouldn't be fighting in the neighboring sovereign nation.

As the world teeters on the brink of financial disaster, leaders are calling for a new world order. As early as the late 1990s, David Rockefeller, author of the idea of private power that is due to replace the governments, said that the world was on the threshold of global changes. He invoked the need of "some large-scale crisis that will make people accept the new world order..." Is the current crisis being used as a mechanism to stoke civil fear and unrest, inducing people to succumb to a system of transnational private power? Olga Chetverikova believes we are in the final stage of that long-time planned ?global control? agenda.

The unemployed Detroit autoworker moved to Florida last year hoping he'd have better luck finding a job. He didn't, and he spent three months sleeping on sidewalks before landing in a tent city in Pinellas County, north of St. Petersburg, on Feb. 26.

The signature shift in President Barack Obama's handling of the wars he inherited from the Bush Administration has been to reverse their order of priority. The campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan has eclipsed the stabilization of Iraq in Washington's focus, which is hardly surprising given the trend lines in the two wars. While Afghanistan and Pakistan have been sharply deteriorating, the assumption has been that Iraq is on course to a more or less acceptable outcome.

However, in recent weeks, insurgents in Iraq have begun to challenge their relegation in the order of U.S. strategic priorities...

Steve Rosen, the former foreign policy chief for AIPAC who was charged with illegally disclosing classified information, said ulterior motives against "Jews, Israel and AIPAC" were behind the case against him.

Former UK ministers and MPs from all UK parties are set to back a bill later on Wednesday outlawing the activities of vulture funds, hedge funds which divert debt relief from the poorest countries into their own pockets.

I am proposing a bill to outlaw profiteering by financial firms who make millions from the debts of developing countries Cracking down on the excesses of our financial services must include controls on the vulture funds that profiteer out of developing countries' debt. Because in the history of corporate greed, there's a special place for the funds that scavenge on the debts of the poorest people in the world. Like Donegal International, which paid $3.3m (£2.2m) to buy up some Zambian debt, sued for $55m, and settled for $15.5m. Or FG Hemisphere, which bought up $44.1m of Democratic Republic of the Congo's debt and settled for a $100m recovery.

U.S. President Barack Obama met this week with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, while another U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan resulting in dead civilians set the tone for the visit.

Foxman was invited to the studio to comment on Kofi Annan's announcement that four UN observers had been apparently killed by Israel deliberately. From the odd choice of "expert" for this subject to the style and content, the "interview" – in a prestigious foreign news weekly magazine – looked like propaganda from the darkest regimes. Moderator Yaakov Achimeir stated time and again as a matter of fact that the observers had been killed "by accident," so that the only realm left to investigate was Annan's personal psychopathology for suggesting otherwise.

Ezra Nawi was ridiculed and arrested for trying to protect people’s homes. Only international attention can help him now

Jay Rockefeller: Internet should have never existed….. all because of ’some kid in Latvia’.

I have reluctantly concluded, after detailed study of the evidence presented by the IPCC, that there are no convincing scientific arguments to support the claim that increases in greenhouse gases are harmful to the climate. [...]

The IPCC “central/benchmark projections” are based on a combination pf ridiculously oversimplified models and unrealistic futures scenarios. The projections themselves conflict with the current fall in global temperatures, the absence of any warming in New Zealand, and the lack of local evidence of sea level change. [...]

Recalling his trips to Israel, he cited images from Sderot’s “campus filled with bomb shelters”; teachers “unsure whether their schools or homes would be standing the next day.“

The Israeli military occupation around Bethlehem is severely restricting its growth, undermining its economy and compromising its future, according to a UN report.

New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that although he's not an expert on proliferation, many such experts were consulted in the financial probes "and it comes out loud and clear: It is late in this game and we don't have a lot of time to stop Iran from developing long-range missiles and nuclear weapons."

More than 700 Palestinian workers in Gaza who suffered on-the-job accidents inside Israel used to receive monthly disability payments from Israeli employers. But in January 2009, workers stopped receiving these payments as the Israeli courts decided that Israeli insurance companies are no longer liable towards Palestinians living in what the state has declared a "hostile entity."

In some ways, the controversy concerning John Yoo and Jay Bybee — the former Bush administration lawyers who wrote memos sanctioning the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation techniques, is dying down.

To forecast global warming, we need to know how the average climate state — and especially clouds — will change in response to the little bit of warming from the extra CO2. Indeed, the model that best replicates the average climate of the Earth might be the worst one at predicting future warming.

This fact gets glossed over – or totally ignored – as the IPCC dazzles us with the level of effort that has been invested in computer modeling of the climate system over the last 20 years. The IPCC can show how many people they have working on improving the models, how many years and how much money has been invested, how big and fast their computers are, and how many peer-reviewed scientific publications have resulted.

Steven Rosen, formerly of the America Israel Public Action Committee, told Israel's Channel 10 TV that the charges against him were part of an anti-Israel, anti-Jewish search for Israeli "spies under every bed."

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch expects News Corporation-owned newspaper Web sites to start charging users for access within a year in a move which analysts say could radically shake-up the culture of freely available content.

Backed by Mayor Thomas M. Menino and Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley, the Patrick administration asked lawmakers yesterday to allow prosecutors to hold suspects in gun cases without bail and to bar gun owners from buying more than one firearm within 30 days or face 2 1/2 years in prison.

In Feb. 2007, military judge Lieutenant Colonel John Head halted Watada’s case following possible inconsistencies concerning a “stipulation of fact” agreed before the hearing. The decision led to a mistrial, ending Watada’s court martial. The Army appealed, but a judge said Watada could not be tried again on the same charges, as it would violate his right to be free of double jeopardy.

The Justice Department is dropping its appeal of that judge’s decision.

The US government’s handouts should not be taken lightly considering recent revelations that the US is expanding its secret detention centres for terror suspects to Mauritania, Ethiopia, some countries in North Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

A Japanese court sentenced an Israeli to eight years in prison on Friday after convicting him of attempting to smuggle Ecstasy into the country, according to friends of his family.

A man suspected of being one of Israel's most powerful crime bosses is charged with using a Los Angeles gang to distribute a million Ecstasy pills and paying one of the gang's members to kill a man for stealing a large drug shipment.

Spanish public prosecutors appealed Wednesday a decision taken by a judge two days earlier to press ahead with a probe into a deadly Israeli air raid in Gaza in 2002, a move which angered Israel.

According to the statistics provided by the Bureau, 75.5% of Israel’s residents at this time are Jewish, while only 24.5% of the country’s residents are not Jewish.

However, it appears that these figures were tainted by a regrettable error. The source of the error has to do with the strange existence of what is known around here as the Green line. Yes, that same Green Line , which has seemingly passed away a long time ago, has reemerged from its grave yet again (and perhaps it was even pulled out of the grave by force) – this tends to happen every time the country’s statistical or public relations needs require it.

Real figures paint different picture: A total of 49% Jews and 51% non-Jews currently live across the territory of the Israeli empire.

In a statement, Winfrey says she made the decision because the footage focused too heavily on killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. But other issues were also in play. Randy Brown, the father of a Columbine student, confirmed in this space that he and other parents complained to producers about the guests in the pre-taped segment -- Kate Battan, Jefferson County's chief Columbine investigator; Dwayne Fuselier, an FBI profiler whose son, also a Columbine student, made a parody video depicting the destruction of the school two years before the assault; and Dave Cullen, author of the book Columbine.