Ward Harkavy Attention, planet Earth: Your future is being decided today at the annual Bilderberg Group conference. This year's five-star resort site is the Klassis Hotel in Silivri, Turkey, 40 miles from Istanbul. Conspiracy theorists have long thought that the Bilderbergers were a shadowy cabal of pols and industrialists trying to rule the planet and even establish a New World Order. And some of the attendees would smugly agree with that assessment. ...

AMANDA GARDNER It was a disaster that defied all imagination. And now, more than five years after two jetliners plunged into New York City's twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, there is much experts don't know and may never know about the health consequences of that unforgettable day. "The real issue is the uncertainty of what we don't know," said Dr. Len Horovitz, a pulmonary specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York ...

Pakistan receives the most post-9/11 U.S. military funding, yet has failed to ferret out al Qaeda, Taliban leaders Sarah Fort The runaway winner of the post-9/11 race for new U.S. military aid dollars is Pakistan, but where did the money go? Human rights activists, critics of the Pakistani government and members of Congress all want to know, but most of the money — totaling in the billions — came through a ...

The American Civil Liberties Union today filed a federal lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing Company, on behalf of three victims of the United States government's unlawful "extraordinary rendition" program. The lawsuit charges that Jeppesen knowingly provided direct flight services to the CIA that enabled the clandestine transportation of Binyam Mohamed, Abou Elkassim Britel and Ahmed Agiza to secret overseas locations where ...

Stephen Lendman Probably no word better defines or underscores the Bush presidency than "terrorism" even though his administration wasn't the first to exploit this highly charged term. We use to explain what "they do to us" to justify what we "do to them," or plan to, always deceitfully couched in terms of humanitarian intervention, promoting democracy, or bringing other people the benefits of western civilization Gandhi thought would be a good ...

Press Association The man accused of murdering former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko has claimed that the British security services were involved. Andrei Lugovoy, also a former spy, said he holds evidence that MI6 had a hand in Litvinenko's poisoning by polonium-210. He also said MI6 tried to recruit him to collect information on President Putin and that both Litvinenko and exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky were in its pay. Lugovoy ...

Police today shut off public access to the Baltic Sea resort of Heiligendamm, the venue for next week’s Group of Eight summit in Germany. Authorities have built a seven-mile fence around Heiligendamm at a cost of £8.5million. Police closed off public access to the resort at about 7am (0600BST), said spokesman Manfred Luetjann. Only residents, police and others with business involving the June 6-8 summit will ...

Despite the Bush administration’s firm stance on granting immunity to telephone companies, Congress hopes to raise the issue again to find out exactly what the phone companies provided to the government, reports Ars Technica. The Bush administration has asked for retroactive immunity for telephone companies regardless of the legality of their actions. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, intends to hold hearings in order ...

*An Open Letter to Chris Matthews on: Political Assassinations, 9/11 and the Media* Kyle F. Hence Executive Producer, 9/11: Press for Truth http://www.911pressfortruth.com Dear Mr. Matthews, What has happened to you? On your Sunday show this past weekend you showed you remain in lock step with all or most of your colleagues and continue to demonstrate ignorance rather than the facts. How can you be so grossly out of step with most ...

 Schools in England have been given the legal right to search pupils who are suspected of carrying knives. The Department for Education and Skills will also give heads guidance on how to use airport-style metal detectors to screen young people. The guidelines state that a pupil can be refused entry to a school if he or she ...

Mark Ballard The Office of Government Commerce has appealed against an order by the Information Tribunal that it must publish official documents that assess the justification for the government's identity card scheme. Meanwhile, speculation over Prime-Minister-in-waiting Gordon Brown's support for the programme has been see-sawing for lack of any real substance. The clerk of Mr Robin Tam QC, the OGC's legal representative, ran round to the high ...

Melanie Reid We are living in the surveillance age but 90 per cent of Britain’s 14.2 million closed-circuit television cameras may be failing to comply with the law. A new national advisory body for the industry, CameraWatch, which has the backing of the police and the Information Commissioner’s Office, claimed yesterday that the vast majority of CCTV is used incorrectly and could potentially be inadmissable in court. The organisation’s chairman, Gordon ...

TOBY STERLING, Associated Press Writer AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Coffee shops licensed to sell marijuana in the southern Dutch city of Maastricht will begin fingerprinting customers and scanning their IDs this summer to help prove they‘re following rules governing such sales. "This is not something that we are doing willingly, but with pain in our hearts," Marc Josemans, chairman of the Union of Maastricht‘s Coffee Shops, said Wednesday. He said shops in Rotterdam ...

The Bilderberg Group, which brings together people of influence from around the world, will begin its 2007 meeting in Turkey today. Bilderberg is an annual conference of the global elite, the location of which changes every year. Power brokers from industry, oil companies, politics, banking, business, academia, royalty and the media get together to privately discuss the course of the world with no outside press coverage whatsoever. The secrecy of the ...

Jane Sutton in Miami A SAUDI Arabian prisoner died of an apparent suicide at the Guantanamo Bay naval base yesterday, the US military said "The detainee was found unresponsive and not breathing in his cell by guards. The detainee was pronounced dead by a physician after all lifesaving measures had been exhausted," the US Southern Command in Miami said in a statement. The military did not ...