Thirteen suspects have been arrested as the death toll from the horrific church and hotel attacks in Sri Lanka climbed to 290 people, with no group claiming responsibility. RT sums up what we know so far of the tragedy.

The entire world remains confronted with the horrors that unfolded yesterday throughout Sri Lanka. Whilst the country remains under curfew, the authorities have pinned the blame for the attack on an obscure group called National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTJ). NTJ is reportedly an Islamist terror group that as noted by Sri Lankan authorities, has multiple links to foreign countries. The links to foreign countries appears to hold the key to determining who is really behind the attacks. Notably, it has been reported by journalists that the group trains in Chennai in Tamil Nadu – the same location where LTTE had previously trained. Others yet claim that NTJ is such a small and obscure group that even if it wanted to pull off such an attack, it did not have the capacity to do so.

In the last 20 years, Wikilieaks has done more worthwhile reporting than ALL over other news outlets COMBINED.

If Zelensky is sworn in as president, his prime minister will be Volodymyr Groysman, a Jewish politician who was the mayor of the city of Vinnytsia.

A wave of bombings that killed 290 people in Sri Lanka on Sunday was carried out with the support of an international network, officials said.

The government has blamed a little-known local jihadist group, National Thowheed Jamath, although no-one has yet admitted carrying out the bombings.

Another 500 people were injured in the suicide attacks on churches and hotels.

Police arrested 24 people in a series of raids and the president's office declared a state of national emergency.

The emergency declaration, which comes into effect from midnight (18:30 GMT) on Monday, will give police and military extensive powers to detain and interrogate suspects without court orders.

No group has yet to take credit for the Easter Sunday bombings that killed nearly 300 people in Sri Lanka, though authorities have pinned the attacks on a home-grown jihadist group called the National Thowheeth Jama’th, which was likely aided by an international jihadist network. But according to early unconfirmed reports, the alleged mastermind of the attack was NTJ Imam and prolific lecturer Moulvi Zahran Hashim. Reports alternatively identified him as the mastermind of the bombings, and as one of the suicide bombers who carried them out.

Have you ever noticed how whenever someone inconveniences the dominant western power structure, the entire political/media class rapidly becomes very, very interested in letting us know how evil and disgusting that person is? It’s true of the leader of every nation which refuses to allow itself to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized power alliance, it’s true of anti-establishment political candidates, and it’s true of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are being roundly criticized for their apparently coordinated decision not to use the word 'Christian' to describe the victims of the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka, which targeted three Catholic churches, among other targets. Some even speculated whether Obama's and Clinton's decision was intended to undermine the Christian faith in the US.

Instead of using the label "Christians", Obama and Clinton referred to the victims of the attacks as "Easter Worshippers", elicited ridicule from conservatives on Twitter.

We learned last Wednesday that Shlomo Aviner, a prominent Zionist rabbi and Yeshiva leader, suggested the fire that gutted Notre-Dame may have been divine retribution for the burning of Jewish manuscripts in 1242.

In the eyes of His followers, the Jewish almighty is an elastic substance. He morphs occasionally to fit with the needs of His favourite sons and daughters. Early Zionists, for instance, demoted God into an ‘estate agent’ as they reduced the Torah into a ‘title deed’. The early Zionists were secular Jews, they didn’t believe in God but were happy to expel the indigenous Palestinians in ‘His name’ and on ‘His behalf.’ But Rabbi Aviner takes us one step further. He made the Jewish God into a lazy but revengeful arsonist. The rabbi practically makes the Jewish God into a church burner who takes eight centuries to ‘hit back.’

Such a "progressive" place! Like, all those "ignorant" red states are like sooooooooo "backward" and stuff using those white supremacist modern toilets. Honk Honk!

The US Peace Prize recognizes the most outstanding Americans who have publicly opposed military solutions rather than diplomacy and global cooperation to solve international problems. Successful candidates will have taken a stand against military interventions such as invasion, occupation, production of weapons of mass destruction, use of weapons, threats of war, or other actions that threaten peace.

We hope to inspire others to speak out for peace and to work to end the hatred, ignorance, greed, and intolerance that lead to war by honoring courageous role models and leaders. Previous recipients and nominees are documented below. The details of the nomination process are included at the end of this chapter.

Our condolences to the families of Sri Lanka bomb attacks victims

Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange has finally been imprisoned, an objective long sought by powerful parties he helped to expose over the past dozen years.

Assange’s “crime” was revealing deep, embarrassing, sometimes deadly, malfeasance by numerous actors, including the U.S. government, the media, the Democratic Party-Clinton machine, and Israel.

Wikileaks revealed the U.S. government’s cover-up of torture, cruelty, the killing of civilians, spying on its own citizens and others. It exposed Democratic Party cheating and manipulation, the fraudulence of “Russiagate.” It unmasked Israeli plans to keep Gaza on the brink of collapse, to use violence against Palestinian nonviolence, to make war upon civilians. All of this will be detailed below.

Most of all, I learned that history is messy. Studying history reveals many things that make people uncomfortable to discuss. Anything that involves human beings, human institutions and human behavior rarely is all bad or all good, either in the collective or individual sense.

That brings me to the controversy surrounding the late Kate Smith and the decisions taken by the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Flyers to stop playing her rendition of "God Bless America," and the Flyers' additional decision to cover and then remove a statue commemorating her unique relationship to the team both during and after her lifetime tied to her rendition of Irving Berlin's patriotic song. The controversy has nothing to do with "God Bless America" but, rather, to two songs that Smith sang in the early 1930s: "That's Why Darkies Were Born," and "Pickaninny Heaven."

Let's start by applying historical context.

The U.S. ambassador to Poland sparked a wave of angry comments on Twitter after she wished Jews a happy Passover in Polish on Friday.

Ambassador Georgette Mosbacher, who also wished Poles a happy Easter on Sunday, was accused of offending the mostly Roman Catholic country with the tweet, with some calling it a “provocation.”

According to exit polls, millions of voters - weary of war and economic hardship - have thoroughly rebuked the incumbent elites, overwhelmingly voting for 41-year-old TV comedian Volodymyr Zelenskii in Ukraine's presidential election today.

"I voted for Zelenskii because everything he said is true," said Viktoriia Bengalska, a 45-year-old secretary in Kiev.

"It's impossible to survive on this salary, prices have increased like crazy, and we were promised something totally different."

SOURCE: WASHINGTONSBLOG.COM
By David Swanson and Pat Elder

According to statements in February by the Secretary of the Army, various U.S. high schools are barring military recruiters from access to students. The Secretary of the Navy this past December said that public school boards are keeping military recruiters out of 1,100 high schools.

The two of us are offering a $1,000 prize (details below) to any public U.S. high school that can identify itself as fitting this description.

Peace activists who struggle to gain admittance to high schools to present the case against military enlistment have not in recent years encountered a school that barred admittance to the military. The military has not publicly named a single example from its claimed list of 1,100 public high schools.

In fact, federal law requires schools that receive federal funding under the Every Student Succeeds Act to allow in military recruiters if they allow in college or job recruiters.

SOURCE: TRUEPUBLICA.ORG.UK
Reprieve is a legal charity which seeks to uphold the rule of law and the rights of individuals around the world—with a specific focus on death penalty cases and abuses committed under the umbrella of the “War on Terror”. It has submitted written evidence to Parliament’s Defence Committee in this regard. It makes strong reference to Britain carrying out covert air strikes outside of declared war zones—primarily, in Pakistan, Somalia and the like. Reprieve’s investigations have included the role played by the UK in facilitating the covert strikes carried out by US bodies including the CIA and JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command). As part of its work, Reprieve also represents a number of relatives of civilians killed—in Reprieve’s view, illegally—in such covert strikes. You can read the submissions HERE.

SOURCE: MICHAEL SNYDER @ ENDOFTHEAMERICANDREAM.COM
The bombings in Sri Lanka have once again put a spotlight on the rising tide of violence against Christians all over the world. According to Open Doors USA, an average of 105 churches and/or Christian buildings are burned or attacked every month. That is more than three per day, and almost all of those attacks get ignored by the mainstream media in the western world. In addition, an average of 345 Christians are killed for faith-related reasons every single month. Of course these numbers will soon be out of date, because violence against Christians continues to escalate all over the globe, and the horrifying attacks that we just witnessed in Sri Lanka are a perfect example. The following comes from CBS News…

Contained in the steady drip of documents handed over to the Center was something the NYPD Wasn't supposed to release in unredacted form. It took almost a month for the department to realize it had screwed up. Rather than let uncensored bygones be bygones, the NYPD took it up with the judge presiding over the case. The NYPD's legal rep wasn't too thrilled with the department's inadvertent transparency.

City attorney Jeffrey Dantowitz conceded that the disclosure was a fiasco.

“That a few documents were inadvertently produced without the intended redactions, while careless, was neither an intelligent nor voluntary disclosure," he wrote in court papers.

A generation ago, the national debt stood at just a smidgen over USD $4 trillion and a young presidential candidate named Bill Clinton was discussing a great plan he had to have it entirely paid off by now. Oops. The national debt is now 5.5 times bigger.

More than anything, this astoundingly bad public policy is the fault of Barack Obama, undoubtedly the most irresponsible president in our history…who added on more to the national debt than all other presidents combined in an orgy of Washington, DC, debauchery that saw the size of the federal government mushroom while hundreds of thousands of new bureaucrats were added to federal payrolls, and Washington, DC, housing prices skyrocketed as federal government employees and private industry sub-contractors paid for by the government reveled in their six-figure paychecks and outrageously lavish healthcare and pension plans… all paid for by us, the taxpayers.