A Michigan school district has had to take the drastic step of firing all of its teachers and shuttering its classrooms before the end of the schoolyear, though it may offer students the option of attending a “skills camp.”

Hundreds of students served by the Buena Vista district will not
finish the academic year in mid-June as planned, as the state is
withholding school aid for three months after accepting money for a
program it was not providing.

According to an investigation by the Huffington Post, the
already struggling district of some 400 mostly black and poor
students began a downward spiral after the state of Michigan froze
school funding to recover $402,000 that was supposed to be spent
running the Wolverine Secure Treatment Center, an alternative
school.

As of last week, representatives for the Michigan Department of
Education stated that they were in touch with the broke district to
come up with an alternative plan, though they emphasized that the
issue was a local responsibility and that they could not legally
assist Buena Vista if the district owed the state money. Michigan
Governor Rick Snyder has thus far not commented on the issue.

For a time it was thought that students would be able to
transfer to neighboring districts to finish out the year, though
that plan appears to have reached an impasse.

Richard Syrek, superintendent of Saginaw County Intermediate
School District (which oversees Buena Vista), said it would too
expensive for other districts to accept Buena Vista students,
citing legal issues.

“The legal parts have kept us
from doing some of the things we wanted to do,” Syrek told
the Huffington Post.

“We’ve hit a dead end,”
he added.

Michigan officials say they’re hesitant to bail out school
districts and set a bad precedent, though Representative Dan
Kildee, the US congressman who represents Buena Vista, thought that
worry was overplayed.

“Governor Snyder can – and
should – immediately act to keep these kids in their classrooms for
the remainder of the schoolyear,” said Kildee.

Kildee also noted that Michigan had bailed out at least one
school district in the past, making the notion of ‘setting a
precedent’ invalid. In February of 2012, the state legislature
responded with $4 million in emergency funding when schools in
Highland Park, a city bordering Detroit, faced a similar
situation.

“It’s tragic,” said
Rae’Onna Barabino, 17, Buena Vista High School’s
valedictorian.

“We have to worry about prom
and graduation and ending our year. It’s very confusing, upsetting.
It’s heartbreaking,” Barabino told the Huffington Post.

Buena Vista teachers had offered to work without pay for a week,
but that was not enough to keep the district’s schools open.
Instead, the

This article originally appeared on : RT

One of the oldest and most famous Mayan pyramids has been destroyed by a construction company in Belize, while digging for crushed rock for a road they were building.

The authorities reported on Monday that the company was using
bulldozers and backhoes to carry out the works, chipping away at
the pyramid’s sides until barely anything was left. Jaime Awe, the
head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, said the construction
had been detected the previous week.

The ceremonial center at what is known as the Nohmul complex is
estimated to be at least 2,300 years old and is considered to be
the most important historical site in northern Belize, on the
border with Mexico.

“It’s a feeling of Incredible disbelief because of the
ignorance and the insensitivity … they were using this for road
fill,” Awe told AP. “It’s like being punched in the stomach,
it’s just so horrendous.”

Nohmul is located in the middle of a privately owned sugar cane
field and its structures lacked the tell-tale signs of a restored
cultural site — like the evenly trimmed stone borders at the sides.
Yet, Awe said this could not possibly have been an explanation for
how the workers had managed not to take note of what they were
doing. The pyramid is 100 feet (30 meters) tall, while the land
around it is flat, so making that kind of mistake is difficult to
imagine. 

“These guys knew that this was an ancient structure. It’s
just bloody laziness”, Awe continued. “Just to realize that
the ancient Maya acquired all this building material to erect these
buildings, using nothing more than stone tools and quarried the
stone, and carried this material on their heads, using tump
lines,” he said. “To think that today we have modern
equipment, that you can go and excavate in a quarry anywhere, but
that this company would completely disregard that and completely
destroyed this building. Why can’t these people just go and quarry
somewhere that has no cultural significance? It’s
mind-boggling.”

An investigation is underway by Belizean police, with criminal
charges looking like a possibility. Although the Nohmul complex is
situated on private land, the law says that any ruins or monuments
of pre-Hispanic origin are exempt from it and are under government
protection.

A community organization calling itself the Citizens Organized
for Liberty through Action has condemned the demolition of the site
as “an obscene example of disrespect for the environment and
history.”

Hundreds of Mayan ruins remain in Belize, which is largely
covered with jungles and counts around 350,000 people among its
population. Although this is not the first case that such lack of
regard was employed in

This article originally appeared on : RT

One of the oldest and most famous Mayan pyramids has been destroyed by a construction company in Belize, while digging for crushed rock for a road they were building.

The authorities reported on Monday that the company was using
bulldozers and backhoes to carry out the works, chipping away at
the pyramid’s sides until barely anything was left. Jaime Awe, the
head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, said the construction
had been detected the previous week.

The ceremonial center at what is known as the Nohmul complex is
estimated to be at least 2,300 years old and is considered to be
the most important historical site in northern Belize, on the
border with Mexico.

“It’s a feeling of Incredible disbelief because of the
ignorance and the insensitivity … they were using this for road
fill,” Awe told AP. “It’s like being punched in the stomach,
it’s just so horrendous.”

Nohmul is located in the middle of a privately owned sugar cane
field and its structures lacked the tell-tale signs of a restored
cultural site — like the evenly trimmed stone borders at the sides.
Yet, Awe said this could not possibly have been an explanation for
how the workers had managed not to take note of what they were
doing. The pyramid is 100 feet (30 meters) tall, while the land
around it is flat, so making that kind of mistake is difficult to
imagine. 

“These guys knew that this was an ancient structure. It’s
just bloody laziness”, Awe continued. “Just to realize that
the ancient Maya acquired all this building material to erect these
buildings, using nothing more than stone tools and quarried the
stone, and carried this material on their heads, using tump
lines,” he said. “To think that today we have modern
equipment, that you can go and excavate in a quarry anywhere, but
that this company would completely disregard that and completely
destroyed this building. Why can’t these people just go and quarry
somewhere that has no cultural significance? It’s
mind-boggling.”

An investigation is underway by Belizean police, with criminal
charges looking like a possibility. Although the Nohmul complex is
situated on private land, the law says that any ruins or monuments
of pre-Hispanic origin are exempt from it and are under government
protection.

A community organization calling itself the Citizens Organized
for Liberty through Action has condemned the demolition of the site
as “an obscene example of disrespect for the environment and
history.”

Hundreds of Mayan ruins remain in Belize, which is largely
covered with jungles and counts around 350,000 people among its
population. Although this is not the first case that such lack of
regard was employed in

This article originally appeared on : RT

The US and Afghanistan are at loggerheads again after new accusations that an American citizen has ‘disappeared’ fifteen people in the province of Wardak, where continued NATO presence has been hotly opposed. Washington has denied any involvement.

Afghan officials say that a man by the name of Zakaria
Kandahari, allegedly an ethnic Afghan, but a US citizen, has led a
pro-government death squad that has terrorized locals in Wardak,
New York Times reports. The newspaper says three officials have
confirmed that he is being sought on charges of torture and murder.
A key piece of evidence is a video tape of Kandahari torturing a
local, while speaking English with an American accent.

Over the past year, Kandahari and his soldiers have also been seen
throughout the area wearing NATO uniforms while riding on quad
bikes in search of alleged insurgents, at least one of whom,
Afghans say, has been found dismembered in a garbage container just
outside the US base in the province, which is located just to the
west of the capital Kabul.

Washington does not deny the existence of the video, but claims
Kandahari operates a rogue Afghan unit, and is not a US
citizen.

“Everybody in that video is Afghan; there are no American
voices,” an unnamed American official told the
newspaper.

The official said that Kandahari was an interpreter for a US
A-Team, based in the Nerkh district, and “went on the lam” as soon
as his extrajudicial anti-Taliban campaign was discovered by the
Americans, following a tip from Afghan officials.

“We would have no reason to try to harbor this individual,”
said the source. “We have done three investigations down there,
and all absolve ISAF [NATO] forces and Special Forces of all
wrongdoing.”

Allegations of extrajudicial justice by the US Nerkh-based
Special Forces unit, which consists of a small core of American
commandos aided by local support staff, in the region first
surfaced in February when President Hamid Karzai said that the
mixed teams had unleashed a reign of terror over the locals and
ordered them out of the province.

This article originally appeared on : RT

Though only officially announced in April, the new political lobbying group spearheaded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has already waded into controversy after a subsidiary sponsored a television ad for the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

FWD.us, the new group comprised of Silicon Valley heavyweights
such as LinkedIn CEO and founder Reid Hoffman, super-angel investor
Ron Conway and counting on the support of the likes of Microsoft’s
Steve Ballmer, began to make headlines after Zuckerberg made the
group’s official debut in a Washington Post op-ed describing the
group’s purported focus on immigration reform.

However, the group became the target of vocal criticism after
two of its subsidiaries, Americans for Conservative Action and the
Council for American Job Growth, sponsored TV ads that criticized
President Obama’s health care policy, and another supporting the
construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Advocacy groups
including the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters and
MoveOn.org all announced last week that they would suspend
advertisement buys on Facebook in response to the Keystone XL
ads.

In response to the controversy FWD.us expressed its intent to
pursue a broad agenda, which seemed confusing considering the
freshly-launched group seemed primarily focused on
immigration:

“We recognize that not
everyone will always agree with or be pleased by our
strategy,” said Kate Hansen, a spokeswoman for FWD.us to The
New York Times.

“FWD.us remains totally
committed to support a bipartisan policy agenda that will boot the
knowledge economy, including comprehensive immigration
reform,” she added. 

Branding issues aside, the group’s bipartisan agenda did not
seem to sit well with Elon Musk, the South African entrepreneur and
founder of SpaceX and co-founder of the Tesla electric car company,
who withdrew his support from Fwd.Us last week. As one of the
country’s most visible proponents of clean energy development, the
lobby group’s connections to the antithesis of those efforts, the
Keystone XL pipeline, likely made his departure all but
inevitable.

Along with Musk, the CEO of social networking company Yammer
also withdrew his support last week, per a Reuters report on the
fallout from the Fwd.Us conservative arm.

According to an investigation conducted by The New York Times
into the recent television advertisements, FWD.us would only say
that it had spent “seven
figures.”

Jim Manley, the former chief spokesman for Senate majority
leader Harry Reid, told the Times that Zuckerberg had the
opportunity to make a correction from the teachable
moment.

“He is finding out it can be
very, very problematic to get your company involved in hot-button
social issues,” said Manley, now a director at the
Washington lobbying and public relations firm Quinn
Gillespie.

“There is going to be
blowback. You are going to pay a

This article originally appeared on : RT

The acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service first learned in May of 2012 that Tea Party-affiliated organizations were being targeted by the agency. When lawmakers alleged that conservatives were being stifled, though, he avoided the issue.

Steven T. Miller, who at the time was the deputy commissioner of
the IRS, wrote to a member of Congress to explain the application
process for political organizations, according to the Associated
Press. He avoided, either intentionally or because of an ongoing
investigation into the agency’s activities, mentioning that Tea
Party groups had been at least partially correct in asserting they
were being stymied in seeking tax exempt status. 

The government’s tax collection arm apologized on Friday for its
“inappropriate” targeting of Tea Party finances, including
requesting a list of donors contributing to the group’s
anti-government cause. Lori Lerner, the IRS division head of
tax-exempt organizations, blamed the error on “low-level
workers” in Cincinnati, Ohio, adding that no IRS leadership was
privy to the wrongdoing. 

It is not known whether the IRS requested a list of donors from
Tea Party groups because of the known presence of major financial
backers. Among those funding the Tea Party was Americans for
Prosperity, the right-wing advocacy group favored by the
billionaire Koch brothers. 

Rep. Charles Boustany, a Louisiana Republican, wrote to Miller
on June 15, 2012 specifically mentioning the Tea Party in a list of
groups that have complained of IRS harassment. Miller responded by
saying that because of the upcoming election the IRS was processing
an influx of tax-exempt requests but was taking “steps to
coordinate the handling of the case to ensure
consistency.”

Miller, as quoted by the AP, never mentions that he was aware of
an investigation into the Tea Party screening. He added that IRS
agents were working with tax attorneys “to develop approaches
and materials that could be helpful to the agents working the
cases.” 

Rep. David Camp (R-Michigan), the chairman of the House Ways and
Means Committee, has scheduled a hearing for Friday, at which
Miller is scheduled to testify. 

“They repeatedly failed to disclose and be truthful about
what they were doing,” Camp said. “They really failed to
disclose to us what they were up to, even though we obviously had a
concern that they were targeting taxpayers for their political
beliefs. Given all of that attention, that had an obligation and
duty to come forward with this information.” 

Lois Lerner learned on June 29, 2011 that screenings were taking
place, according to a draft of a Treasury Department report
acquired by the IRS. She was told that groups that used “Tea
Party,” “Patriot,” and “9/12 Project” in their
applications were flagged. Lerner

This article originally appeared on : RT

Involvement by Western intelligence services has turned Libya into a terrorist playground, the way Iraq has become after the US invasion, geopolitical analyst Patrick Henningsen told RT.

A car bomb has exploded in a crowded area outside a hospital in
Libya’s second largest city, Benghazi, with the blast claiming at
least 15 lives.

Henningsen, from the 21st Century Wire website, believes that US
strategy for the Middle East region is the main reason behind the
disintegration of the countries there. When asked about Syria, he
says one only has to look at Libya and Iraq to picture what would
happen in the event of Bashar Assad’s fall.

RT: There have been a string of attacks in Libya over the
past month – Is there anything the government there can do to
improve the security situation?

Patrick Henningsen: It looks very similar to the situation
we’ve grown used to seeing in Iraq what we’re seeing now in Libya.
Just by the nature of this car bombing where there’s a crowded
hospital area designed to create the most casualties and also
attacks on police stations. There’s a sort of strategy of
instability that we’ve seen in Iraq over the years. So, looking at
Iraq how long the stability took to achieve there and it’s not safe
there a decade onwards. I think we’re looking at the same situation
here in Libya.  

RT: Armed mobs recently surrounded government
ministries in Tripoli. Is there a danger that

A disturbing video which shows a Syrian rebel commander cutting the heart out of a soldier and biting into it shows that the country’s civil war has rapidly descended into sectarian violence and revenge killings, Human Right Watch said on Monday.

According to the New York-based organization, the video shows
the founder of the rebel Farouq Brigade Abu Sakkar cutting into the
torso of a dead soldier. The footage has sparked outrage among both
the opposition and supporters of Syrian President Bashar
Assad.

While the man who is allegedly Sakkar is cutting open the
soldier’s liver, the person filming says, “God Bless you, Abu
Sakkar, you look like you are drawing [carving] a heart of love on
him.”

After he cuts out the corpse’s liver and heart, he is filmed
holding the organs in his hands and speaks into the camera: “I
swear to God we will eat your hearts and your livers, you soldiers
of Bashar the dog.” Off-screen cheers shouting “Allahu akbar
(God is great)” can be heard in the background.

At the end of the video – the content of which cannot be
independently verified – the man is filmed putting the corpse’s
heart into his mouth, as if taking a bite out of it.

Human Rights Watch emergencies director Peter Bouckaert says
that he had seen an original, unedited copy of the video and that
Sakkar’s identity had been confirmed by rebel sources in Homs. He
said that Sakkar had been seen in other videos wearing the same
black jacket which he is wearing in the last video clip, and with
the same rings on his fingers.

Bouchaert said that in the edited version of the film, Sakkar
tells his men to “slaughter the Alawites and take their hearts
out to eat them,” before biting into the heart.

“The mutilation of the bodies of enemies is a war crime. But
the even more serious issue is the very rapid descent into
sectarian rhetoric and violence,” Bouckaert said.

It’s not the first time Sakkar has made an appearance in violent
videos. Previous footage showed him firing rockets at Lebanese Shia
villages on the Syrian border and posing with the body of a soldier
purportedly from the Lebanese Shia militant Hezbollah group, which
is helping Assad’s forces.

The Syrian uprising against Assad is led by the majority Sunni
Muslims. Assad, whose family has ruled for over 40 years, draws
most of his support from his own Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shia
Islam. 

The Syrian conflict, which began in March 2011, has resulted in
the deaths of over 70,000 people, according to UN
estimates.

This article originally appeared on : RT

May 13, 2013
 |

At the age of 19, my mother fastened a red bindi in the middle of her forehead, wrapped herself in a silk sari, and walked seven times around a sacred fire in Karamsad, India with a 26-year-old man she hardly knew.

At 19, I was a single Indian American college sophomore who certainly did not have any plans to have an arranged marriage like my parents. And a relationship was not really an option, because my parents did not allow me to date. For years, they had one strict rule: I was to focus on school until I graduated from college. Meanwhile, most of my friends were in committed relationships and some were even engaged to their high school sweethearts. I resented the rule, and felt that they were limiting me from dating because they did not have any experience themselves.

Arranged marriages have been a common

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

May 13, 2013
 |

After ABC News released emails detailing the evolution of the Obama administration’s talking points on the Benghazi terror attack, much of the right’s ire has focused on Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokesperson who asked for the removal of references to al-Qaida and the CIA’s warnings about the dangers to U.S. diplomats in Libya.

With her name splashed all over the emails and her very public role in Hillary Clinton’s State Department, Nuland serves the useful dual role of scapegoat and proxy for the potential 2016 presidential candidate, who may be the real target of conservative uproar over Benghazi. Naturally, critics ascribe political motives to Nuland’s actions in the Benghazi aftermath. “It’s very clear today that lib Victoria Nuland was not honest with reporters,” conservative blogger Jim Hoft wrote.

But Nuland may prove to be a poor choice of left-wing villain for the right considering that her record suggests

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

May 13, 2013
 |

One of the most effective scare techniques employed to preserve our grotesquely inefficient, overpriced health care system has been to invoke the red peril of “socialized medicine”. Never mind that foreigners in advanced economies fail to recognize the caricatures scaremongers supply, or that Americans who need emergency care while overseas are almost without

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

A fraudster serving 10 years in prison has alleged that two former attorney generals accepted thousands of dollars worth of free meals, hotel stays and other expenses from him after putting him behind bars.

Businessman Marc Jenson, who is serving time for swindling
millions of dollars from investors, claims he has receipts proving
that former Utah Attorney Gen. Mark Shurtleff and his successor,
John Swallow, accepted expenses on his behalf.

“I’m telling you right now: they were extorting me, and they
were from the very beginning,” Jenson told the Salt Lake
Tribune in an interview from prison. The former businessman was
charged with six felonies and was imprisoned after failing to pay
$4 million in restitution.

Jenson claims that Shurtleff and Swallow pressured him to
provide them with costly vacations, meals and other expenses. The
current and former attorney generals allegedly promised to help the
businessman with his legal troubles in exchange for lavish
gifts.

The requests allegedly began after Jenson was convicted in 2009,
but before he was imprisoned for failing to provide the
restitution.

Shurtleff and Swallow vacationed at Pelican Hill, an upscale
southern California resort where Jenson had his own villa, on
multiple occasions. The fraudster says his receipts show both men
signing for thousands of dollars worth of food, massages, golf
outings, and supplies at the Newport Beach resort.

Jenson also claims that Shurtleff forced him to spend $250,000
on a phantom book deal and make consulting payments to a friend of
his. Swallow allegedly also demanded a share an upscale $3.5
billion resort that Jenson had planned to establish in Beaver
County, Pa.

Jenson said he was “scared to death” of the former attorney
general and his successor. He says the men told him that if he had
donated to Shurtleff’s campaign, they would never have prosecuted
him in the first place.

But in response to these allegations, which Jenson relayed to
the FBI, they denied having ever accepting expenses from the
fraudster and claim he is acting out of revenge.

“I was responsible for the investigation, conviction and
sentencing of Jenson,” Shurtleff told the Tribune. ” … He
has sworn revenge. I suggest you consider carefully whether to
believe a desperate, convicted fraudster.”

Tim Lawson, a close friend of Shurtleff, allegedly also accepted
money and ‘gifts’ from Jenson, including a down payment for a piano
and $10,000 in cash. But Lawson claims that nothing the fraudster
says is true.

“Jenson is in prison because he is a pathological liar,”
Lawson said, “because he lied to the people he stole money
from.”

But if the allegations are proven to the true, the news will
strike another blow against Swallow, who was last

This article originally appeared on : RT

This article originally appeared on : RT

May 13, 2013
 |

On Monday the Supreme Court sided with Monsanto in a legal dispute against an Indiana soybean farmer.

Seventy-five-year-old Vernon Hugh Bowman, who inherited his farm from his father, argued that his use of second-generation seeds did not violate Monsanto’s patent. Bowman’s supporters had hoped the Supreme Court would use the case as an opportunity

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

Two people are reported injured after an explosion rocked a supply company in Putnam County, West Virginia Monday. Emergency crews responding to the blast, which came at approximately 3:00 pm local time, reported high flames in the area.

Investigators are still unsure what caused the initial explosion
but a spokesman from the Putnam County, West Virginia emergency
management office told the Charleston Gazette that as many as six
canisters of acetylene, a gas commonly used for welding and
torch-cutting, blew up.

One man suffered burns to his face and the other burns to his
arms. Both victims were hospitalized, although the full extent of
their injuries is not yet known.

The explosion took place at the Airgas supply company, the
largest US distributor of industrial medical and specialty gases,
including welding supplies and other equipment, according to
WOWK-TV in West Virginia. The plant is located in the town of
Bancroft, where surrounding businesses have been evacuated as a
safety precaution.

DETAILS TO FOLLOW

This article originally appeared on : RT

Britain will double support for the Syrian opposition in 2014 with shipping more non-lethal military aid both PM David Cameron and President Obama agreed to pressure on Assad while meeting in Washington.

Cameron has vowed an extra £10 million for non-lethal equipment
and £30 million more for humanitarian assistance for Syrian people
as the two politicians outlined further steps to “bring to an
end the killing” of Syrian people.

“We will double non-lethal support to the Syrian opposition in
the coming year. Armored vehicles, body armor and power generators
are about to be shipped,” Cameron said at the press conference
after an Oval Office meeting with US president Barack Obama.

Britain’s actions in Syria completely coincide with the US plans
that the Obama administration voiced last week. Speaking after a
meeting of the Syrian opposition, US Secretary of State John Kerry
said the United States would double its non-lethal aid to
opposition forces in Syria in the coming year bringing the total
sum to $250 million.

As for arming the Syrian opposition, Britain claims it has not
“made decision to arm opposition groups in Syria”, however,
Cameron said that it “is pushing for more flexibility in the EU
arms embargo”.

“What we have done is we have amended the EU arms embargo in
order that we can give technical assistance and technical
advice,” he said.

He also said that UK will continue to examine the embargo to
“see if we need to make further changes”.

The current sanctions recently amended in April allow the supply
of certain non-lethal equipment as well as technical and financing
assistance related to it. However, a recently leaked six-page long
draft proposal revealed the UK proposed two options to EU diplomats
to amend the current embargo: the first, full exemption of Syrian
National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary forces from the
arms embargo and the second, to remove ‘non-lethal’ language to
allow shipment lethal equipment to Syria.

Cameron said Assad had to realize there could be no military
victory for his forces.

President Obama has backed Cameron’s words. From his side, he said
that the “work to establish the use of chemical weapon in
Syria” will continue and the findings “will help guide”
the next steps.

Obama said the US would be “very persistent” in pursuing a
peaceful political transition that leads to Assad’s exit but leaves
Syria “intact”.

“I’m not promising it is going to be successful. Frankly,
sometimes once the furies have been unleashed in a situation like
we are seeing in Syria, it’s very hard to put things back
together,” Obama said.

Both Cameron and Obama welcomed “successful” talks the Prime
Minister had with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin,

This article originally appeared on : RT

Hunger strikers being force-fed at Guantanamo Bay must wear masks over their mouths while being shackled to a restraint chair for up to two hours. Authorities have revised the way they feed the strikers, comparing their techniques to battlefield tactics.

Nasal tubes are jammed up the prisoners’ noses until a liquid
supplement reaches their stomachs. The tubes, which are 61cm in
length or even longer, stay in the prisoners’ nostrils until a
chest X-ray or a test dose of water show that the nutritional
supplement has reached the prisoner’s stomach. 

The shocking procedure doesn’t stop there. Detainees are then
sent to a “dry cell” with no running water while they undergo
supervision to make sure they don’t vomit. If they regurgitate
their supplement, they’re sent right back to the restraint
chair.

Details of the “chair restraint system clinical protocol” were
published in a newly revised Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for
Guantanamo hunger strikers. The document was obtained by Al
Jazeera, from the United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which
has oversight over the joint task force that operates the highly
controversial prison.

The new policy went into effect March 5, just one month after
Guantanamo detainees launched the hunger strike in response to
alleged mistreatment and mishandling of their Korans.

“Just as battlefield tactics must change throughout the
course of a conflict, the medical responses to GTMO detainees who
hunger strike has evolved with time,” the revised SOP says. Two
weeks ago, 40 more nurses were sent to Guantanamo Bay to assist
with force-feedings.

Force-feeding is an extremely invasive and highly controversial
practice which many human rights activists – and the UN – say is
torturous. But what’s perhaps even more shocking than the procedure
itself is that the final decision regarding who will be force-fed
is left up to Guantanamo Commander John Smith – not physicians.

“In the event a detainee refrains from eating or drinking to
the point where it is determined by the medical assessment that
continued fasting will result in a threat to life or seriously
jeopardize health, and involuntary feeding is required, no direct
action will be taken without the knowledge and written approval of
Commander [Navy Rear Adm. John Smith, Jr.],” the document
says.

While doctors are, in fact, present at the site, they exist
solely to carry out the military’s commands.

According to Leonard Rubenstein, a lawyer at the Center of
Public Health and Human Rights at Johns Hopkins University and the
Berman Institute of Bioethics, the document is alarming because it
makes clear that doctors and nurses are simply “adjuncts of
the security apparatus.”

“The clinical judgment of a doctor or a nurse is basically
trumped by this policy

Large civilian planes remotely operated by a controller on the ground could become a reality within just a few years, after British aerospace giant BAE conducted a successful overland UK flight of an unmanned prototype for the first time.

“I believe we are writing a new chapter in aviation
history,” said Lambert Dopping-Hepenstal, director of the £62
million government-backed ASTRAEA (Autonomous Systems Technology
Related Airborne Evaluation & Assessment) program, which is
developing the sophisticated sensors that allow the plane to
respond to outside conditions without the help of human eyes
on-board.

The Jetstream 31 — an expensive experimental project known as
‘The Flying Testbed’ that looks much like an ordinary 16-seater
training plane — took off from Lancashire in northern England, and
landed safely 500 miles away in Inverness in Scotland.

As a precaution, two pilots sat in the cockpit, while the entire
flight was conducted by an operator back at base.

“The pilots were sitting there having a coffee. They did not
have to do anything,” said a BAE spokesman.

Flying a plane from the ground takes more than just building a
remote control.

Using an automated visual detection system, the plane
automatically steers away from dangerous weather formations as it
sees them, while its antennae pick up signals from nearby aircraft
to avoid them. The Jetstream 31 also scans the ground for potential
safe landing zones in case of emergencies. In the past, the lack of
“sense and avoid” technologies and other features that would
ensure that drones do not cause danger to manned planes were seen
as the key stumbling block for letting them into civilian
skies.

Dopping-Hepenstal admitted that it was “early days”, but
said these on-board innovations “will likely impact all of us in
the next five, ten, 20 years as unmanned aircraft and associated
technology develop and become a part of everyday life.”

UK’s air regulators have already given out permits for several
hundred light drones to share airspace with manned planes. But in
the future larger craft using the technologies piloted by ASTRAEA
could be used for extended rescue, patrol or pursuit missions,
where time would be lost by having to return to base to refuel and
change pilots. Whether eventually passenger planes also become
remotely operated, will depend on more than just engineering
capability, but social attitudes.

“It’s not just the technology, we’re trying to think about
the social impact of this and the ethical and legal things
associated with it,” said Dopping-Hepenstal.

“These latest trials help prove the technology we need to
routinely operate unmanned aircraft in our airspace and also help
the regulators develop the framework in which the aircraft can
operate.”

US air regulator

This article originally appeared on : RT

A global campaign to confiscate firearms is setting its sights on law-abiding gun owners in the United States, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) warned in a statement over the weekend.

Paul, a long-time Second Amendment supporter and strong opponent
of gun control legislation, addressed subscribers of the National
Association on Gun Rights’ email list on Saturday to demand they
speak up about an alleged attempt to disarm Americans by way of a
United Nations treaty supported by the US.

The UN Arms Trade Treaty was proposed with the intent of curbing
mass acts of violence in parts of the world ravaged by uprisings
and civil war. According to Paul, however, it is being endorsed by
US President Barack Obama and his administration because it would
be the beginning of the end for gun ownership in the States.

“But after the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut – and anti-gun
hysteria in the national media reaching a fever pitch – there’s no
doubt President Obama and his anti-gun pals believe the timing has
never been better to ram through the UN’s global gun control crown
jewel,” wrote Paul.

“I don’t know about you, but watching anti-American
globalists plot against our Constitution makes me sick.”

The UN did approve the Arms Trade Treaty last month when the US
and 153 other nations signed on to support the measure, “Yet
because the Constitution requires that two-thirds of the Senate
give its advice and consent to any treaty, Second Amendment
supporters still have a political route to stop the
administration,” the Wall Street Journal acknowledged at the
time.

Sixty-seven of the 100 US senators would need to approve the
treaty before the country can adopt the measure, but 53 of the
lawmakers said as recently as this March that they would vote
against the effort – essentially leaving the treaty unlikely to be
accepted by the US at any time in the near future. But even if the
likelihood of the US adopting the treaty seems grim, efforts in
across the country have been underway for some time to ensure the
president isn’t presented the opportunity to sign on.

“If you sign it, and if the US Senate ratifies the treaty,
Texas will lead the charge to have the treaty overturned in court
as a violation of the US Constitution,” Texas Attorney General
Greg Abbott, a Republican, wrote President Obama earlier this
year.

“I am deeply disappointed with the Obama administration’s
vote today in support of forcing the ominous Arms Trade Treaty
(ATT) through the UN General Assembly,” added Sen. Mike Kelly
(R-Pennsylvania). “For the sake of our national interests and
Constitutional freedom, I strongly urge President Obama to

May 13, 2013
 |

This story was co-produced with Marketplace. Listen to their coverage.

One day late last year, Katrina Sutton stood at a gas pump outside Atlanta and swiped her debit card. Insufficient funds. But that couldn’t be. She’d been careful to wait until her $270 paycheck from Walmart had hit her account. The money wasn’t there? It was all she had. And without gas, she couldn’t get to work.

She tried not to panic, but after she called her card company, she couldn’t help it. Her funds had been frozen, she was told, by World Finance.

Sutton lives in Georgia, a state that has banned payday loans. But World Finance, a billion-dollar company, peddles installment loans, a product that often drives borrowers into a similar quagmire of debt.

World is one of America’s largest providers of installment loans, an industry that thrives in at least 19 states, mostly in the South and Midwest; claims more than 10 million customers; and has survived recent efforts by lawmakers to curtail

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

May 13, 2013
 |

In the immediate aftermath of the Steubenville, Ohio rape trial, many men, both prominent and not, spoke out against sexism, misogyny and what has become known as “rape culture.”

“All men should be feminists,” Grammy-winning singer John Legend announced. “If men care about women’s rights, the world will be a better place.” Olympian sprinter

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

Cocaine addicts may soon have a ‘cure’ for their unhealthy dependence: researchers have successfully created a vaccine that prevents cocaine particles from reaching the brain and inducing feelings of euphoria, thereby helping users break their addiction.

“The vaccine eats up the cocaine in the blood like a little
Pac-Man before it can reach the brain,” Dr. Ronald G. Crystal,
the lead investigator of the Weill Cornell Medical College study
said in a press release.

“We believe this strategy is a win-win for those individuals,
among the estimated 1.4 million cocaine users in the United States,
who are committed to breaking their addiction to the drug,” he
added. “Even if a person who receives the anti-cocaine falls off
the wagon, cocaine will have no effect.”

Cornell researchers have successfully administered the vaccine
to non-human primates and are now much closer to launching human
clinical trials. Human testing is expected to begin within a year,
Dr. Crystal believes.

Cocaine blocks the recycling of dopamine — a neurotransmitter
that is responsible for feelings of pleasure. The drug prevents the
reuptake of dopamine by the neuron that releases it, causing higher
concentrations of dopamine to remain in the synapse and create a
‘high’.

“You get this massive flooding of dopamine and that is the
feel good part of the cocaine high,” Dr. Crystal said.

The new vaccine prevents dopamine accumulation at the brain’s
nerve endings. The vaccine consists of particles of the common cold
virus and particles that mimic the structure of cocaine. Once the
body receives an injection, it recognizes the cold virus and
creates an immune response against both the common cold and the
cocaine ‘impersonator’.

“The immune system learns to see cocaine as an intruder,”
Dr. Crystals said.

In order to feel the drug high that cocaine users seek to
achieve, at least 47 percent of the dopamine transporter needs to
be occupied by cocaine. The Cornell researchers found that in
vaccinated primates, cocaine occupied less than 20 percent of
dopamine receptors — making it impossible for the animals to be
affected by the drug. 

Researchers expect that the vaccine will work in humans, but do
not know how often it needs to be administered to maintain its
effect. The vaccine continued to work effectively for 13 weeks in
mice and seven weeks in primates.

“An anti-cocaine vaccination will require booster shots in
humans, but we don’t know yet how often these booster shots will be
needed,” Dr. Crystal said. “I believe that for those people
who desperately want to break their addiction, a series of
vaccinations will help.”

There are about 1.9 million current and past-month cocaine users
in the US, 1.4 million of which

This article originally appeared on : RT

A man with an explosive device is holding hostages inside Westland City Hall, according to CBS Detroit.

Police have locked-down a section of Westland, Michigan near
Detroit as the bomb squad has been called in to handle a developing
situation at the town’s city hall.

The Michigan State Police bomb squad has been called to the
scene, reported WJBK Monday afternoon, and at least two schools in
the area have been placed on precautionary lockdown.

Reportedly, a man entered Westland City Hall with explosives,
but the police have declined to comment further other than telling
local media there’s “a situation.”

“We heard there’s a bomb situation at City Hall,” Kristen
McRae, who works at Griffith Veterinary Hospital near City Hall,
told the Detroit Free Press. “We have a chopper flying above.
There’s a heavy police presence.”

“I heard it’s a hostage situation,” an employee of a
nearby Boston Market restaurant added.

Westland, MI is located around 16 miles west of Detroit and is
the tenth largest city in the state of Michigan.

This article originally appeared on : RT

May 13, 2013
 |

This week, when tobacco giant Philip Morris International hosts its annual shareholders’ meeting in New York, the company will honor outgoing CEO Louis Camilleri for his years of service. But a look back at Camilleri’s tenure shows a trail of death and destruction unworthy of celebration.

In 2008, parent company Altria Group spun off the

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

May 13, 2013
 |

From BillMoyers.com:

BILL MOYERS:  How do you handle the grim news of inequality, corruption, poverty, dysfunction and buffoonery that washes over us every day? Well, you can tune out and ignore it; pretend it will go away until it’s too late or you can look around, find kindred spirits and throw your energies into the fight for justice. … [Marshall Ganz] is an American maestro of organizing who … has never given in to despair or given over to fear. At Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Marshall Ganz teaches the next generation of organizers, students from all over the world. He tells them: when in doubt, just remember the story in the Bible of little David and his slingshot…

Smiting Goliath might as well be Marshall Ganz’s job description. It began in Mississippi’s Freedom Summer of 1964 when his fury against injustice pulled him out of Harvard and into the struggle for civil rights. From there, he signed on with the legendary Cesar Chavez and the United

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

May 13, 2013
 |

The practice of force-feeding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as a response to the mass hunger strike there has been increasingly criticized. But the military has continued to carry it out. Now, Al Jazeera has revealed in detail how the practice is takes place–and it’s not pretty.

<a target=_blank

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

In a move that is nothing short of formulaic, Seth Meyers is the new face of NBC’s Late Night. Just like his Late Night predecessor, Jimmy Fallon, Meyers is best known for delivering satirical news reports for SNL’s Weekend Update. And just like Jimmy Fallon, Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O’Brien, David Letterman, Craig Ferguson, and every other major network’s late night talk show host for the last 30+ years, he’s a middle-aged white guy.

With Fallon taking Jay Leno’s Tonight Show spot and Meyers stepping up to the Late Night plate, this shift (I’d hesitate to use the more significant word ‘change’) is an unsurprisingly disappointing move to the many people who know that plenty of funny, smart, and prime time-worthy individuals exist outside of the middle-aged white guy mold. In the weeks leading up to the announcement, many news outlets speculated about NBC’s opportunity to break from its boring tradition–suggesting qualified and deserving comedians like Amy Sedaris, Wanda Sykes, Aziz Ansari, Ellen DeGeneres, Amy Poehler, Melissa McCarthy, Sarah Silverman, Chelsea Handler, Tina Fey, and Kenan Thompson. Any one of these names would have offered a fresh break from what CNN called the “white-guy-in-a-suit-sitting-behind-the-desk tradition” that has dominated for over 30 years.

But sadly, and without any offense to the admittedly funny Seth Meyers, NBC took the predictable route in hiring what’s basically a carbon copy of the status quo. Meanwhile, funny women remain banished to daytime talk shows and half-hour shows on less popular networks. As Martha Lauzen of San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film said earlier to CNN, “Perception is reality. I think the perception is still that a network show is higher in status than a cable show, and that those higher status positions remain reserved for primarily white males.” It’s a shame and a disappointment that NBC continues to perpetuate this twisted form of reality in which white guys are the only ones worthy of primetime fame.

The good news is, although white males may dominate the primetime talk show scene, there are other options for viewers who seek insightful comedy and wit from a more diverse set of personalities. Supplement talk shows with Veep, the HBO comedy starring the hilarious Julia Louis-Dreyfus, which makes a delightful mockery of the behind-the-scenes problems of political

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

As America confronts yet another senseless act of barbaric violence, what kinds of security measures will the country be willing to accept on behalf of safety?

On Sunday, during a Mother’s Day parade in New Orleans, at least
two gunmen opened fire into the crowd, injuring 19 revelers.

What is going on here? How can it be that America seems to be
getting more dangerous despite the raft of over-the-top security
measures that have been put in place since 9/11? Could it be that
the authorities are concentrating their efforts on the wrong
people?

Prior to the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15, for example,
which left 3 people dead and 264 wounded, Massachusetts state
officials said they had never received intelligence information
that Moscow had passed to the US about the mastermind of the
attacks, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a Chechen native who was said to have
been motivated by extremist Islamic beliefs.

The FBI had previously opened a probe into Tsarnaev, but closed
the case without concluding he posed any threat – and without
warning Boston officials that a suspected radical extremist was
loose in their town.

Meanwhile, it has been proven that a Boston police counterterror
intelligence unit spent a significant amount of time and money in
2011 using a US Department of Homeland Security-funded fusion
center to conduct surveillance of specific protest groups,
including Occupy Wall Street offshoots and anti-war
demonstrators.

Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis admitted to a congressional
panel following the attacks that federal agents failed to warn his
department of Tsarnaev. Davis told lawmakers “we would have
liked to know” about the Russian tip-off.

In October, the American Civil Liberties Union in Massachusetts
published documents confirming that the Boston Police
Department spied on protesters and even relied on their local
federally funded fusion centers to further their probe.

The American people were given their first taste of the security
state following the terror attacks of 9/11. Before the fires had
been extinguished from the site of the World Trade Center, former
President George W. Bush signed — opportunistically, many critics
say — the Patriot Act.

This massive document, which few members of Congress had
the time or desire to read, allows for roving wiretaps,
court-ordered searches of business records and library book
withdrawals, and surveillance of private citizens.

Washington continues to demonstrate with breathless audacity —
in the heat of an emergency when the country is still dusting
itself off — that the liberties and freedoms of the American people
are chimerical creations, leaves of paper that may blow away on the
wind with a mere nod of Caesar’s head. 

Once a government

This article originally appeared on : RT

The city of Detroit, Michigan is days away from running out of money, and a state-appointed emergency manager says the situation is dire.

Kevyn Orr was hired by Michigan back in March to meet with
leaders in Detroit to try and figure a way to save the
once-thriving city from total bankruptcy. On Sunday he released the
first report to show his findings over the past month and a half,
and his assessment painted a picture of a city in far worse shape
than many thought.

According to Orr’s report, the one-time headquarters of the
automobile industry is one month away from running out of cash yet
owes billions.

“The City of Detroit continues to incur expenditures in
excess of revenues despite cost reductions and proceeds from
long-term debt issuances,” Orr wrote. “In other words,
Detroit spends more than it takes in – it is clearly insolvent on a
cash flow basis.”

“Without a significant restructuring of its debt, the city
will be unable to break the cycle of damaging cutbacks in essential
municipal services and investments,” the study found.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder said in March of Detroit that
“There’s probably no city that’s more financially challenged in
the entire United States.” He declared a state of fiscal emergency at the time and told
Detroit Mayor David Bing that he’d be appointing an emergency
manager – Orr – to assist with operations.

Initially, the Detroit City Council rejected the governor’s
decision.

“We feel like we have the tools necessary to do it, that
somebody else does not have to come in and do it for us,”
Council President Charles Pugh told the Associated Press at the
time.

Ultimately, Snyder sent Orr to assess the situation, a decision
Bing endorsed because, according to him, “we have to learn to
make the best out of a bad situation.” Now with the completion
of Orr’s first report, the details of that dilemma are being fully
revealed.

Orr wrote that a number of issues are keeping Detroit from
staying afloat much longer, including an ever-growing deficit,
loads of liabilities and rampant mismanagement in terms of city
services. At the end of fiscal year 2012, Detroit had “negative
cash flows of $115.5 million” and things have only worsened. By the
end of April the city was holding onto $64 million cash, but was
obligated to the tune of roughly $226 million.

Orr found additionally that the city has liabilities including
pension obligations, bonds and loans totaling $9.4 billion –
including $5.7 billion in unfunded retiree benefit obligations –
and expects the total deficit to top $380 million by June 30. At
that point, the city will have

This article originally appeared on : RT

For years, the IRS has specifically gone after groups that criticized the US government, including tea party organizations and other conservative political groups. News of the targeted audits has caused many Americans to distrust the government.

President Barack Obama on Monday condemned such
actions, announcing that the IRS must be “held fully
accountable” if the agency did indeed screen conservatives
intentionally
— particularly before the November elections. 

Non-profit groups that requested tax-exempt status were more
frequently flagged for audits if they criticized “how the
country is being run” or if they contained key words such as
“Tea Party”, according to an investigative report from the Treasury
Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).

Seeking to “make America a better place to live” and
criticizing government spending were also red flags for IRS workers
deciding which groups to audit. Key words that generated closer
scrutiny also included “Patriot” and “9/12”.

The IRS began to illegally target “Tea Party or similar
organizations” in March 2010, and by June 2011, more than 100
Tea Party-related tax-exempt applications had been flagged for
review by the Cincinnati-based IRS unit responsible for overseeing
them, according to a draft IRS inspector general report.

By July 2011, the IRS had gone from targeting groups with key
words to targeting “organizations involved with political,
lobbying or advocacy” — and by January 2012, the restrictions
were changed to go after “political action type organizations
involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the
Constitution and Bill of Rights, [and] social economic
reform/movement,” the TIGTA report states.

Facing allegations that the IRS was engaged in these practices,
former Commissioner Doug Shulman testified before a congressional
committee in March 2012, claiming that the agency does not target
tax-exempt organizations based on their political affiliations or
ideologies.

But during the month Schulman was testifying, the IRS changed
its criteria for closer examination to include tax-exempt groups
“with indicators of significant amounts of campaign intervention
(raising questions as to exempt purpose and/or excess private
benefit),” the investigative report states.

After news about the IRS scheme was reported on
Friday, lawmakers have condemned the agency for what Sen.
Susan Collins described as a “truly outrageous” breach of
public trust.

“It contributes to the profound distrust that the American
people have in government,” she told CNN, adding that President
Barack Obama should publicly condemn the agency.

Although the IRS practices targeted conservative groups, the
agency established a distrust that could run deep among Americans
of every political party.

“I don’t care if you’re a conservative, a liberal, a Democrat
or a Republican, this should send a chill up your spine,” Rep.
Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said
while he was calling for a full investigation

This article originally appeared on : RT

Republicans, as usual, are in a tizzy over what they say is a big scandal brewing at the Internal Revenue Service, because on Friday, Lois Lerner, the lawyer in charge of the department that reviews applications for tax-exempt organizations, said that the IRS had improperly flagged and scrutinized applications by ‘Tea Party’ and ‘Patriot’ groups.

The problem with this latest dust-up is that GOP outrage over the small but obvious stuff misses the real issues and bigger points. First, Lerner’s testimony– read it–says that her office discovered and tried to correct this. Moreover, does anybody really think that Tea Party chapters were not overt political creatures? They weren’t created to sell cookies.

The real scandal is that Lerner’s disclosure and apology, conveyed at a House Ways and Means Committee hearing Friday, ignores that the agency has not taken any meaningful decisions on the big political fish who hide behind this tax non-profit ruse and hide their donor’s names, notably Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS.

Rove’s group spent more than $70 million on political ads in 2012. Its application to be a social-welfare organization is pending before the IRS–more than two years after it was filed. There are many forms of non-profits, but those at issue here, so-called C-4s, don’t pay taxes or disclose donor names.

The Tea Partiers are political little leaguers. Perhaps their best-known brethren in 2012, “TrueTheVote,” tried to recruit and train volunteers to challenge the credentials of black and brown voters in Democratic strongholds in swing states. They were so sloppy and offensive that election officials in Ohio and Wisconsin barred them from going near voting sites during the November 2012 presidential vote.

But Karl Rove is not a political rookie. He pioneered the latest dark money strategy by creating a major political organization that masqueraded as a social-welfare group just by filing a tax-exempt application. Other GOP political consultants, and then top Democrats, including the Obama campaign’s top allies, and 100s of others all followed suit.

Longtime Washington campaign finance groups have been crying ‘foul’ for years, urging the IRS to issue rulings on the prolifieration of the C-4 ‘dark money’ groups. The fact that the IRS still has not ruled on Rove’s group will not be helped by this latest scandal, as the agency will now be in ‘damage-control’ mode and will be even more cautious.

Similarly, this bureacratic dust-up

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

Republicans, as usual, are in a tizzy over what they say is a big scandal brewing at the Internal Revenue Service, because on Friday, Lois Lerner, the lawyer in charge of the department that reviews applications for tax-exempt organizations, said that the IRS had improperly flagged and scrutinized applications by ‘Tea Party’ and ‘Patriot’ groups.

The problem with this latest dust-up is that GOP outrage over the small but obvious stuff misses the real issues and bigger points. First, Lerner’s testimony– read it–says that her office discovered and tried to correct this. Moreover, does anybody really think that Tea Party chapters were not overt political creatures? They weren’t created to sell cookies.

The real scandal is that Lerner’s disclosure and apology, conveyed at a House Ways and Means Committee hearing Friday, ignores that the agency has not taken any meaningful decisions on the big political fish who hide behind this tax non-profit ruse and hide their donor’s names, notably Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS.

Rove’s group spent more than $70 million on political ads in 2012. Its application to be a social-welfare organization is pending before the IRS–more than two years after it was filed. There are many forms of non-profits, but those at issue here, so-called C-4s, don’t pay taxes or disclose donor names.

The Tea Partiers are political little leaguers. Perhaps their best-known brethren in 2012, “TrueTheVote,” tried to recruit and train volunteers to challenge the credentials of black and brown voters in Democratic strongholds in swing states. They were so sloppy and offensive that election officials in Ohio and Wisconsin barred them from going near voting sites during the November 2012 presidential vote.

But Karl Rove is not a political rookie. He pioneered the latest dark money strategy by creating a major political organization that masqueraded as a social-welfare group just by filing a tax-exempt application. Other GOP political consultants, and then top Democrats, including the Obama campaign’s top allies, and 100s of others all followed suit.

Longtime Washington campaign finance groups have been crying ‘foul’ for years, urging the IRS to issue rulings on the prolifieration of the C-4 ‘dark money’ groups. The fact that the IRS still has not ruled on Rove’s group will not be helped by this latest scandal, as the agency will now be in ‘damage-control’ mode and will be even more cautious.

Similarly, this bureacratic dust-up

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

The unconventional monetary policies of global central banks makes the current economy resemble the game of Monopoly, but the players must remember that in this board game there can be only one winner, with all the rest going bankrupt.

In the game of Monopoly, when you pass ‘Go’ you collect $200.
This keeps the game going by adding liquidity into the system. The
bank in the game is increasing the money supply and this keeps
people rolling the dice; buying up property and paying taxes.

Eventually, due to the luck of the dice, the player who is able to
land on the most expensive properties on the board ends up being
able to extract crippling amounts of rent from the other players
until everyone goes bust except for the lone Monopolist who is
declared the winner. Notice that in the Monopoly economy nobody
works. The only activities are rolling dice and shopping for real
estate, houses, and hotels.

In today’s global game of Monopoly we have Quantitative Easing to
replace the free money give away that occurs when players pass
‘Go.’ But instead of the token $200, players (those who work in the
FIRE economy of Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) get $85 billion
a month from the Federal Reserve Bank in America and similar gifts
of cash from the central banks in Japan, Britain, and most of the
G20.

The asset prices of the houses and hotels keep going up as the free
money given away by the bank: whether in the game of Monopoly or
the game of the Fed is pumped into the economy. Again, nobody who
has wealth in these economies works for a living. They speculate by
rolling the dice and buying up assets knowing that the infusion of
cash will guarantee asset price inflation.

If you play Monopoly you know that eventually the player who
chanced on the opportunity to buy the most expensive real estate on
the board eventually wins as the rent-seeking that comes with that
real estate bankrupts the rest of the players who keep collecting
their free $200 each time they pass ‘Go,’ money that works its way
to the Monopolist with the most powerful monopoly.

Similarly in the global economy we have a situation where none of
the sizeable wealth of the players was garnered through work. A
list of the wealthiest in the world shows virtually all the players
having

This article originally appeared on : RT

Rosneft’s acquisition of TNK-BP has paid off for Russia’s largest state owned oil company, which boosted oil production to 50.983 million tons from January to April 2013, up from 41.1 million tons in 2012.

The results reflect Rosneft’s $55 billion acquisition of TNK-BP, which added
about 9 million tons of oil to the company’s production output.

According to Rosneft president Igor Sechin, Rosneft will produce
210-215 million tons of oil in 2013. Gas extraction will reach 50
billion cubic meters, refined oil will reach 95 million tons, which
will yield a revenue of $160 billion. In 2012, Rosneft increased
oil production by 2.7 percent compared to the previous year.

Rosneft’s Krasnoyarsk oil field led the production output boost,
producing 6.907 million tons of oil, up 24.8 percent from 2012.

Yuganskneftegaz, a fully-integrated subsidiary of Rosneft, upped
production to 21.863 million tons between January and April, the
same time period it cut production costs by 1 percent.

In total, Rosneft subsidiaries produced 44.363 tons of oil
during the first four months of 2013, which is up 21.7% from the
same period last year.

Gregory Birge, co-director of Investkafe’s analytical
department, and Rosneft management peg the benefit of the TNK-BP
acquisition at an estimated $15 billion, which offsets Rosneft’s
poor Q1 profit earnings and increased debt load.

“The acquisition of TNK-BP is very positive for the
shareholders of Rosneft,” Birge told Investkafe.ru

Mixed Q1 results

On April 30th, the night before the markets closed for Russia’s
nine day spring holidays Rosneft quietly released their Q1
earnings.

Profit results were poor having declined 14 percent after taxes
and expenses. On the flip side, output and production surged 82
percent, and crude production rose 73 percent to 4.17 barrels a
day, the company announced.

Sales climbed 7 percent to reach 812 billion roubles ($26
billion), but the net debt ballooned to 1.78 trillion roubles
($56.8 billion)

The Risky Rouble

Russia’s biggest crude producers are upping their spending
efforts to increase production and increase revenue to new
highs.

As the price of Brent declines and the dollar strengthens, the
rouble has dropped. The currency started its negative trend at the
beginning of the Russian holidays, peaked on May 10, and has
dropped 0.26% against the dollar to 31.31 on New York’s exchange
floor Monday. 

However, the plan could backfire with a serious depreciation of
the Russian rouble, since most of capital financing is executed in
dollars, while sales are tendered in
roubles. 

Despite Russia’s slowing economy, inflation rose 7.2 percent in
May, up 0.2 percent from April. The inflation is linked to
seasonably high food prices

Accelerating inflation in April to 7.2 percent year on year
launched a review by investors in

This article originally appeared on : RT

The UN has been working on ways to end world hunger for decades, but their newest idea does not involve economics, politics, or even food: The organization is now advising people to eat more insects.

Insect farming is “one of the many ways to address food and
feed security,” the agency said in a 200-page report released
at a news conference at the UN’s Rome headquarters. The report said
that insects are “extremely efficient” in converting feed
into edible meat for humans. It added that insects are
“particularly important as a food supplement for undernourished
children.”

University biologists agree, claiming that certain types of
beetles, ants, crickets, and grasshoppers offer nearly as much
protein per gram as lean red meat or broiled fish. Crickets need 12
times less feed than cattle to produce the same amount of
protein.

Insects can also be rich in copper, iron, magnesium, manganese,
phosphorus, selenium and zinc. They are also a source of fiber.

The UN said that insects provide a while slew of benefits outside
of nutrition. The report claims that eating insects is also better
for the environment — according to the agency, most insects are
likely to produce fewer environmentally harmful greenhouse gases
than other livestock.

The report pitched the idea of insect farming: “Insects are
everywhere and they reproduce quickly.” Currently, most edible
insects are gathered in forests, and the small amount of insect
farming which does take place serves niche markets such as the fish
bait industry.

The UN even suggests that the restaurant industry could help in
“raising the status of insects” by adding them to their
menus.

Although the idea of eating insects may seem bizarre — and even
revolting — they are considered delicacies in many countries. For
example, some caterpillars in southern Africa are seen as luxuries
and are extremely expensive to purchase.

This article originally appeared on : RT

Dreadful conditions for workers in factories producing goods for the West, and plans for the US Seventh Fleet’s relocation make fertile ground for anti-Americanism in Bangladesh, which may see the country falling into the hands of radical Islamists.

The death toll has been rising in the world’s worst garment industry tragedy. I’ve been
thinking about the last time I was in Bangladesh, a nation that is
now the world’s second-largest clothing producer after China and
one also in the news for deadly Islamist protests.

Back then, I witnessed something that had seemed emblematic of the
neo-colonial status of Bangladesh. After a harrowing journey to the
countryside where the poverty was sub-Sub-Saharan, I found myself
on the top of an office building in the capital, Dacca. Garish U.S.
pop music was blaring out of the nightclub’s speakers and the
lounge area was packed with U.S. military servicemen, mostly U.S.
Navy. As a private went to get a Long Island Iced Tea, two giggling
Bangladeshi teenagers swiped the military walkie-talkie he left on
the sofa and ran off to the bathroom. Later they regaled me with
the story that they had screamed “All soldiers back to
base!” into the communication device, before dismantling it,
piece by piece. They may have liked the U.S. dollar injection into
the local economy but they didn’t like the presence of U.S.
servicemen. Americans have never really ever left Bangladesh
whether their presence be through crippling Bretton Woods
institutions based in Washington, multinational garment brands or
covert killing.

I was in Bangladesh in the 1990s, when the demonstrations in the
cities of this nation of around 150 million were held by the
Communist Party and trade unions, desperately looking for social
justice. Putting faces to appalling statistical human development
indicators was easy. To me, the slums of Mumbai looked rich after
Dacca. As for the fact that Bangladesh now beats India in some
development indicators — as the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has
noted — that fact only emphasises how badly India is run: not how
well Bangladesh is doing. You can tell things are bad in Bangladesh
because The Economist magazine and the World Bank have until very
recently been lauding governance there.

Things have changed in Bangladesh. For a start, the Communist Party
headquarters in Dacca has just been torched as a quarter of a
million Bangladeshis, around the country, marched against
secularism and around fifty were killed in the ensuing

This article originally appeared on : RT

The United States Supreme Court ruled Monday in favor of biotech giant Monsanto, closing the door on a patent case that has pitted a smalltime farmer from Indiana against a titan of the agriculture industry.

The high court said early Monday that 75-year-old farmer Vernon
Bowman of Indiana violated Monsanto’s patent rights when he
purchased a mix of seeds from a grain elevator that he later
planted on his Midwest farm. That mix included patented Roundup
Ready soybean seeds manufactured by Monsanto that are sold under
license because they can hold up against their namesake, a nasty
pesticide regularly used on farms.

Bowman argued that he could do whatever he wanted with the
Roundup Ready seeds since he obtained them rightfully from a grain
elevator and the terms of Monsanto’s licensing agreement under the
patent did not apply to him. Under Monsanto’s terms, Roundup Ready
seeds can only be harvested once and must not be saved or
reused.

“If they don’t want me to go to the elevator and buy that
grain, then Congress should pass a law saying you can’t do it,”
Bowman told RT in February.

“If they then claim that I can’t use that, they’re forcing
their patent on me,” Bowman he said to Huffington Post earlier
this year. “No law was ever passed that said no farmers can’t go
to the elevator and buy grain and use it, so to me they either
forced their patent on me or they abandoned their patent by
allowing it to be dumped it with non-Roundup grain.”

On Monday, the Supreme Court decided unanimously that Bowman
indeed violated the licensing terms.

“By planting and harvesting Monsanto’s patented seeds, Bowman
made additional copies of Monsanto’s patented invention, and his
conduct thus falls outside the protections of patent
exhaustion,” the court ruled. “Were this otherwise,
Monsanto’s patent would provide scant benefit. After Monsanto sold
its first seed, other seed companies could produce the patented
seed to compete with Monsanto, and farmers would need to buy seed
only once.”

“Under the doctrine of patent exhaustion, the authorized sale
of a patented article gives the purchaser, or any sub­sequent
owner, a right to use or resell that article. Such a sale, however,
does not allow the purchaser to make new copies of the patented
invention,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the court. “The
question in this case is whether a farmer who buys patented seeds
may repro­duce them through planting and harvesting without
thepatent holder’s permission. We hold that he may not.”

Monsanto’s practices both in the courtroom and on the farm have
made the company increasingly the target of criticism in recent
months, and a series

This article originally appeared on : RT

May 13, 2013
 |

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Has a weapon ever been invented, no matter how terrible, and not used? The crossbow, the dreadnought, poison gas, the tank, the landmine, chemical weapons, napalm, the B-29, the drone: all had their day and for some that day remains now. Even the most terrible weapon of all, the atomic bomb, that city-buster, that potential civilization-destroyer, was used as soon as it was available. Depending on your historical interpretation, it was either responsible for ending World War II in the Pacific or rushed into action before that war could end. In either case, it launched the atomic age.

During the Cold War, the two superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, relied on a strategy that used to be termed, without irony, “ mutual assured destruction” or MAD. Its intent was simple enough: to hold off a planetary holocaust by threatening to commit one. With their

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

May 13, 2013
 |

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Has a weapon ever been invented, no matter how terrible, and not used? The crossbow, the dreadnought, poison gas, the tank, the landmine, chemical weapons, napalm, the B-29, the drone: all had their day and for some that day remains now. Even the most terrible weapon of all, the atomic bomb, that city-buster, that potential civilization-destroyer, was used as soon as it was available. Depending on your historical interpretation, it was either responsible for ending World War II in the Pacific or rushed into action before that war could end. In either case, it launched the atomic age.

During the Cold War, the two superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, relied on a strategy that used to be termed, without irony, “ mutual assured destruction” or MAD. Its intent was simple enough: to hold off a planetary holocaust by threatening to commit one. With their

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

May 13, 2013
 |

Austerity doesn’t just hurt economies–it contributes to rising suicide rates, infant mortality and H.I.V. infections. That’s the message of a New York Times Op-Ed written by David Stuckler and  Sanjay Basu, authors of a new book titled The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills.

“Fiscal policy, it turns out, can be a matter of

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

In recent times, gold has become a key topic in the world’s media. Interest in this yellow metal is warming up reports about the plans of Germany and other countries to repatriate their gold reserves from the USA and Great Britain, to where they were moved at various times.

Heated debates have begun regarding how responsibly central banks and finance ministries are storing the gold reserves that have been entrusted to them. There are also suspicions that there is less gold there than is being officially reported. This article is going to put forward the theory that there is virtually no gold left in the vaults of central banks in leading economically developed countries…

1. Gold auctions, or the tip of the iceberg

Over a period of four decades, central banks have disposed of their gold reserves. Two types of «disposal» have been used: a) metal auctions; b) covert operations.

Stronghold of Swiss National Bank

The simplest and most obvious is gold auctions, which in 1975 amounted to 36,700 tonnes of all the official reserves of all the countries and international organisations in the world. This represents the visible tip of the iceberg. Auctions began immediately after the gold-dollar standard was abolished, de facto initially and then de jure (in the 1970s). All the gold auctions from official reserves can be divided into three categories:

1. the early auctions in the second half of the 1970s to the beginning of the 1980s. These were auctions organised by the US Treasury and the International Monetary Fund;

2. auctions by central banks as part of the so-called «Washington Gold Agreement», which came into operation in the autumn of 1999; and

3. isolated auctions by individual central banks and international organisations in different years.

In the 1970s, the USA sold 530 tonnes and the IMF sold 732 tonnes — a total of 1,262 tonnes. In the 1980s, the world’s monetary authorities made almost no sales or purchases of gold, its reserves were in a «frozen» state. In the 1990s, net sales of gold from the official reserves of economically developed countries amounted to the already considerable sum of 2,900 tonnes. At the end of 2000, the world’s official gold reserves contained 3,600 tonnes less gold than in 1975.

At the beginning of the new century, sales were predominantly executed under the Washington Agreements. In September 1999, an agreement was signed in Washington between 17 central banks, including the European Central Bank, regarding

This article originally appeared on : Global Research

New Orleans police have released pictures of a possible suspect in the Mother’s Day shooting rampage that injured 19 people, including two children. Stills of the man have been posted on YouTube in the hopes he will be recognized.

Cellphone video obtained by police shows the Mother’s Day parade
crowd suddenly scattering, and some falling to the ground, in front
of a man wearing a white T-shirt and dark pants. He is seen running
away from the crowd while shooting at people.

Gunfire erupted in the Seventh Ward
neighborhood at around 2:00pm local time (1900 GMT) during an
annual Mother’s Day parade attended by up to 400 people. Based on a
preliminary investigation, the FBI has confirmed that the shooting
was likely related to street violence, not terrorism.

Investigators are continuing to conduct interviews, and collect
evidence and surveillance video from the scene. The image of the
shooter is not clear, but police said they hope someone will
recognize him.

Police and local media have called for anyone who recognizes or
may know the possible suspect to contact crime stoppers in the hope
of tracing the gunman, or gunmen. Up to three gunmen are believed
to be at large.

“There were hundreds of people there, and somebody saw
something,” New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu said in a public
appeal.

A $2,500 cash reward was initially offered, which was later
raised to $10,000 amid a massive manhunt. The reward is being
offered to anyone who can provide information that leads to an
arrest.

Former CIA agent Glenn Carle told RT that the violence did not
resemble a terror attack: “It doesn’t have any of the hallmarks
or modus operandi of terrorist groups that I ever worked against,
that we know about in the intelligence community in the United
States. It seems — knowing nothing more than the media reports — to
have been either astoundingly amateurish by a terrorist, and I
don’t think that’s the case, or more likely a gang-related kind

Russians will enjoy almost a third of 2013 off work, leaving behind most of the world in terms of holiday time. Such long holidays mean employers need to spend about a third more on wages.

In 2013 Russians are to spend about 118 days away from their
workplaces, which includes regular vacation, weekends and Russian
public holidays. There are few countries that can compete with
Russia in this respect, with Argentina being one of those rare
examples, according to Aleksey Amyotov, the co—founder of Look At
Media, talking to Business FM.

China has also a lot of holidays, but regular vacation time is
shorter there. The Chinese can enjoy 21 days of paid vacation at
most each year, while in reality about 80% of the population are
“totally employed”.

The number of holidays create extra costs for employers, as
working on such days means double time, says Pavel Grudinin,
general director at the Lenin state owned farm. Working on holidays
increases payroll expenses by about a third overall.

The amount of holidays in Russia exceeds even the dollar
denominated oil price, says Oleg Sysuev, first deputy head of the
board of directors at Alfa — Bank. “These things [the number of
holidays and the oil price] correlate, strange though it may seem.
That’s because we make our living entirely by what we extract from
Mother Earth. That means we can holiday 360 days a year… And , I
think, that’s abnormal. To some extent, that’s just a reflection of
our economy. And when the oil price falls, we, the same way as some
of the South European countries, will undoubtedly have to think
whether we have too many holidays, ” Sysuev concluded.

In 2013 Russians have so far had two long holiday sessions- 10
days during the New Year festive period and 9 days in May. In an
effort to make the country look more industrious, Russia’s Ministry
of Labour published draft regulations cutting the number of May
holidays to 7 in 2014.

Long New Year holidays became a tradition back in 2005 and since
then the initiative has been largely criticized by experts and
businessmen. They complain on the losses it creates and ask to cut
the number of days off.

On the other hand, social data shows that more than a half of
Russians support the idea of the Ministry of Labor to transfer part
of the New Year holidays to the May ones, according to a
Superjob.ru poll. 56 percent of people questioned said it was much
more pleasant to enjoy days off in the spring than in the winter,
but didn’t say they wanted to

This article originally appeared on : RT

It was Muammar Gaddafi`s dream to provide fresh water for all Libyans and to make Libya self-sufficient in food production.

Libyans called it the eighth wonder of the world. Western media called it a pet project and the pipe dream of a mad dog. The “mad dog” himself in 1991 prophetically said about the largest civil engineering venture in the world:

After this achievement, American threats against Libya will double. The United States will make excuses, but the real reason is to stop this achievement, to keep the people of Libya oppressed.

Gaddafi’s dream

It was Muammar Gaddafi’s dream to provide fresh water for all Libyans and to make Libya self-sufficient in food production. In 1953, the search for new oilfields in the deserts of southern Libya led to the discovery not just of significant oil reserves, but also of vast quantities of fresh water trapped in the underlying strata. The four ancient water aquifers that were discovered, each had estimated capacities ranging between 4,800 and 20,000 cubic kilometers. Most of this water was collected between 38,000 and 14,000 years ago, though some pockets are believed to be only 7,000 years old.

After Gaddafi and the Free Unitary Officers seized power in a bloodless coup from the corrupt King Idris during the Al-Fateh Revolution in 1969, the Jamahiriya government nationalized the oil companies and spent much of the oil revenues to harness the supply of fresh water from the desert aquifers by putting in hundreds of bore wells. Large farms were established in southern Libya to encourage the people to move to the desert. It turned out that the majority of the people however preferred life in the northern coastal areas.

Therefore Gaddafi subsequently conceived a plan to bring the water to the people instead. The Libyan Jamahiriya government conducted the initial feasibility studies in 1974, and in 1983 the Great Man-Made River Authority was set up. This fully government funded project was designed in five phases, each of them largely separate in itself, but which eventually would combine to form an integrated system. As water in Gaddafi’s Libya was regarded to be a human right, there has not been any charge on the people, nor were any international loans needed for the almost $30 billion cost of the project.

In 1996, during the opening of Phase II of the Great Man-Made River Project, Gaddafi said:

This is the biggest answer to America and all the evil

This article originally appeared on : Global Research

In terms of population and economy, the German State of Bavaria is bigger than many European countries. It has over 12 million people and an annual GDP of over €440 billion. German politician Wilfried Scharnagl is calling for independence for the state.

“Bavaria is a ‘free state’ by virtue of its history, economic
power, population size and constitutional set-up. Ever since the
Federal Republic of Germany was established in 1949, Bavaria has
lost considerable independence and authority as the European Union
was assuming more and more powers,” the author of the book
“Bavaria Can Go It Alone” Wilfried Scharnagl told RT.

RT: What would be the benefit of an independent
Bavaria?

WS: With its population of 12.5 million, Bavaria is
Germany’s second most populated state after North Rhine-Westphalia.
It also has the strongest economy, and boasts outstanding progress
in science and technology. So why can’t a state like that take
charge of its own future? If we look at the European Union, 20 out
of its 27 member states are smaller than Bavaria in terms of
population, economic power and efficiency. Why can’t we have
more control of our political and economic standing in Europe?

RT: How do you see Bavaria going about trying to achieve
independence?

WS: There is a brilliant democratic solution for that: the
people should decide. Certainly, I would never agree to an
independent Bavaria that would not be conscious about its
responsibilities as part of Germany, and as part of Europe. But
Bavaria should have more say as regards its political and economic
status. This is all the more important since Brussels, as well as
Berlin, have been continuously taking on new powers in the past
decades. A case in point as far as finance is concerned is the
German inheritance tax, which is levied in all of the states by the
federal government. Even on fiscal matters, it isn’t the states who
get to make decisions, but the federal policy makers in Berlin.
This cannot last forever.

RT: Have you looked at the independence campaigns in
other parts of the world?

WS: What we can learn from history is that political maps
are not set in stone: nations can have their boundaries altered
through a peaceful process based on the will of the people. Take
the former Czechoslovakia, which was dissolved peacefully, forming
two independent states, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic.
There are more examples. Scotland will be holding an independence
referendum in 2014, and a similar initiative is currently being
debated in Catalonia. There are movements with a similar agenda in
many European countries. Brussels, which I am especially critical
of

This article originally appeared on : RT

More than any recent U.S. president, Ronald Reagan has been lavished with honors, including his name attached to Washington’s National Airport. But the conviction of Reagan’s old ally, ex-Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt, for genocide means “Ronnie” must face history’s judgment as an accessory to the crime.

The conviction of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt on charges of genocide against Mayan villagers in the 1980s has a special meaning for Americans who idolize Ronald Reagan. It means that their hero was an accessory to one of the most grievous crimes that can be committed against humanity.

The courage of the Guatemalan people and the integrity of their legal system to exact some accountability on a still-influential political figure also put U.S. democracy to shame. For decades now, Americans have tolerated human rights crimes by U.S. presidents who face little or no accountability. Usually, the history isn’t even compiled honestly.

By contrast, a Guatemalan court on Friday found  Rios Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced the 86-year-old ex-dictator to 80 years in prison. After the ruling, when Rios Montt rose and tried to walk out of the courtroom, Judge Yasmin Barrios shouted at him to stay put and then had security officers take him into custody.

Yet, while Guatemalans demonstrate the strength to face a dark chapter of their history, the American people remain mostly oblivious to Reagan’s central role in tens of thousands of political murders across Central America in the 1980s, including some 100,000 dead in Guatemala slaughtered by Rios Montt and other military dictators.

Image:  Rios Montt with Ronald Reagan

Indeed, Ronald Reagan — by aiding, abetting, encouraging and covering up widespread human rights crimes in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua as well as Guatemala — bears greater responsibility for Central America’s horrors than does Rios Montt in his bloody 17-month rule. Reagan supported Guatemala’s brutal repression both before and after Rios Montt held power, as well as during.

Despite that history, more honors have been bestowed on Reagan than any recent president. Americans have allowed the naming of scores of government facilities in Reagan’s honor, including Washington National Airport where Reagan’s name elbowed aside that of George Washington, who led the War of Independence, oversaw the drafting of the U.S. Constitution and served as the nation’s first president.

So, as America’s former reputation as a beacon for human rights becomes a bad joke to the rest of the world, it is unthinkable within the U.S. political/media structure

This article originally appeared on : Global Research

This article originally appeared on : RT

For anyone who has been critical of the Western narrative on Syria, the ongoing diplomatic circus begs a very basic question: How can the countries that have bankrolled and armed the insurgency honestly broker a meaningful peace deal? Well, they can’t.

The joint effort recently announced by Moscow and Washington to
bring the government and insurgents to an international conference in line with the Geneva
Communiqué is a welcoming development, but some major issues have
already come to the fore. There is an ongoing disagreement over who
should represent the opposition in a Syrian peace process; in
addition to the blatant Qatari proxies in the Syrian National
Coalition, Russia has requested that the National Coordinating Body
also be present. In stark contrast to the foreign-based SNC (lined
with figures who have spent the past few decades in the West), the
NCB is the internal opposition, and it has caught a lot of flak
because it opposes the armed uprising and also talks to the Syrian
government.

The SNC has maintained it could not accept an invitation to
dialogue unless President Assad’s removal was guaranteed. Russia
will not allow for Assad’s departure to be a precondition of talks,
and US Secretary of State Kerry looks to have shifted the US
position by saying Assad’s exit should be the outcome of
negotiations on a transitional government, rather than a starting
point. Let’s be clear — before this conflict started in 2011, Assad
oversaw a political system that was certainly authoritarian. The
economy was stagnant, the state poorly handled overpopulation
issues, the agricultural sector was suffering from long periods of
drought. When Bashar Assad took over from his father, he granted
more political breathing space to dissidents, and then
back-pedalled on reforms when popular movements fast took shape. In
combating the insurgency, Syrian forces killed many of their own
citizens in the crossfire. No matter what anybody thinks of Assad,
it is not the place of Washington, London, or Doha to decide his
political fate.

Let’s look at the situation on the ground; after more than two
years of fighting, the Ba’ath establishment is firmly intact and
functioning. The state controls the vast majority of territory,
there are no major defections, and the business communities in the
major cities support Assad. No one denies that many Syrian
civilians want to see the end of Ba’athist rule, but the swathes of
Assad supporters and their plight are almost universally obfuscated
from the mainstream narrative.

<a target=_blank href="http://rt.com/news/us-syria-assad-rebels-032/"

This article originally appeared on : RT

A Russian man was brutally beaten to death for being gay after coming out to his friends, investigators confirmed, stating that he was a victim of a homophobic gang. The victim sustained serious injuries in the assault, including to his genitals.

“The motive for the crime was the [victim’s] non-traditional
sexual orientation,” senior regional investigator Andrey
Gapchenko said, adding that two suspected attackers have been
arrested and another man is a witness in the case.

The naked body of the deceased 23-year-old man was discovered in
the courtyard of an apartment building in Volgograd on May 10, the
day after Russia celebrated Victory Day, which commemorates the end
of World War II.

According to one of the suspects, the victim came out as a
homosexual to his friends while they were drinking beer on a bench
outside. His friends reportedly decided to taunt him by making him
walk home naked, and began ripping off his clothes. “When they
were done, the men decided not to stop there,” Gapchenko
said.

The victim’s skull was smashed with a 20-kilogram (44-pound)
rock, and the body was apparently raped with beer bottles, local
media reported. The suspects also tried and failed to burn his body
by putting pieces of carton boxes underneath it and lighting them
on fire.

After brutally assaulting the victim, the men left, but later
returned after realizing that the victim would call the police if
he regained consciousness. After returning to the scene, the
perpetrator decided to beat the victim to death. One of the
suspects picked up a rock and hit the victim with it eight times in
the head.

Currently, there are two suspects in the case: A 22-year-old
man, who went to school with the victim, and his 27-year-old
friend, who has a criminal record for theft. The latter man has
confessed to the murder, according to investigators. A third person
is being treated as a witness in the investigation. If convicted,
the perpetrators face up to 15 years in jail.

The investigators’ confirmation that homophobia was a motive in
the murder is a rare acknowledgement in Russia, as most such cases
are investigated as domestic crimes, RIA Novosti reported, citing
LGBT activists. 

Nikolay Alekseyev, a leader in Russia’s LGBT community, said he
will be lobbying to tighten accountability for crimes committed on
the basis of hatred of sexual orientation, Interfax quoted him as
saying.

“The brutal incident that occurred in Volgograd, demonstrates
the results of the ongoing national homophobic policy, which
initiated banning the promotion of homosexuality,” Alekseyev
said. “If the policy does not change then every year there will be
more of such crimes.”

This article originally appeared on : RT

Julian Assange’s newly formed Australian WikiLeaks Party (WLP) announced that if elected, it will immediately introduce a national shield law to protect a reporter’s right not to reveal a source, as current state-based shield laws are “inadequate.”

“Only a uniform shield law covering the whole Commonwealth is
acceptable,” WLP spokespersons Cassie Findlay and Sam Castro
said. “Government agencies, at federal, state and local level,
are increasingly gaining powers to obtain information about
individual citizens.”

The proposed law is the WLP’s first major policy announcement
since it was formed as part of WikiLeaks founder Assange’s bid to
become an Australian senator in the September 2013 elections in
Victoria State.

The WLP plans to compete for Senate seats in Victoria, New South
Wales and Western Australia in the September 14 election, with
Assange running for one of the six Senate seats being contested in
Victoria. 

Findlay and Castro explained that journalists need to have an
“unhindered access” to their sources so they could expose
corruption, waste and incompetence. “Uniform shield laws
legislated by federal parliament are the answer. That is what we
stand for and that is what we will fight for if elected. Effective
national shield laws go hand-in-hand with uniform whistle-blower
laws, particularly covering media disclosures,” the
spokespersons added.

The move is WLP’s challenge to proposed federal whistleblower
laws, which they say fail to protect those who expose corruption or
government crimes: “The proposed laws are not only
unsatisfactory, they are a clumsy attempt by the major parties to
protect themselves from embarrassing scrutiny.”

In March 2011, the Australian Senate introduced federal shield
laws that recognize circumstances in which journalists do not have
to reveal their sources. However, they do not apply to public
service whistleblowers, the Australian reported. Court suppression
order against whistleblowers have continued after the laws were
adopted, mainly in Victoria State, where 270 orders were issued
last year.

The WikiLeaks Party submitted its registration to the Australian
Electoral Commission in April and has secured over 1,000 fee-paying
members, more than double the 500 members required for
registration.

Assange, who has been holed up in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy
since June 2012, is preparing for a tough remote campaign. If
elected Australian Senator, Assange still might not be physically
present at the Australian Senate if he remains trapped in the
embassy. Assange’s running mate could sit in for the WikiLeaks
founder if he wins the race but is unable to leave the embassy,
where he claimed asylum in a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden,
where he is wanted for questioning on sexual assault
allegations.

British authorities have vowed to detain him if he sets foot
outside of the embassy, in light of the European Arrest

This article originally appeared on : RT

Athens has threatened to arrest high school teachers if they carry out a strike this week, in a move seen as reassurance to Greece’s foreign bailout creditors that the country will not abandon its harsh austerity measures and unpopular reforms.

The announcement marks the third time this year that the Greek
government has invoked emergency laws to force strikers to return
to work.

Greece is due to receive €7.5 billion in loans soon, the latest
tranche of a €240-billion rescue package signed in 2010; Athens
currently has no money to pay pensions and wages. To cope with the
personnel gaps, Athens plans to require two additional hours of
work each week from high school teachers, and plans to transfer
4,000 of them to remote regions of the country.

The government broke a longstanding taboo last month by agreeing to
dismiss some 15,000 public-sector workers by the end of 2014, a key
demand by the EU and International Monetary Fund for Greece to
qualify for further rescue loans, Reuters reported.

According to OLME, the union representing the teachers, about
10,000 part-time teachers could be dismissed once their temporary
contracts expire. The union has called for a 24-hour strike when
university exams start on May 17.

However, under Greek law the government has the right to forcibly
mobilize workers in the event of a civil disorder, natural disaster
or public health risk.

“This is a very authoritarian move from the government because
it has issued civil mobilization orders for secondary education
teachers in the public school system even before they decided to
stage a strike during the university entry exams. Geek law is very
explicit that civil mobilization refers to wars and natural
disasters, not forms of civil protest,” Panagiotis Sotiris,
sociology lecturer at the University of the Aegean, told RT.

“It’s really interesting to see that one of the legal experts,
who has insisted for many years on the unconstitutionality of these
emergency laws, is no other than the current Minister of Justice in
the Greek government, Mr Antonis Roupakiotis,” he said.

Education Minister Constantine Arvanitopoulos justified the ban by
arguing that students had a right to take exams without disruption;
teachers will be served a civil mobilization order to go to work on
that day, or risk arrest.

“These threats by the prime minister and his government are
directly against the overwhelming majority of workers and
society,” Greece’s Syriza party, which opposes the bailout,
said in a statement.

The Greek government has in recent months intervened frequently to
shut down mounting anti-austerity strikes. Earlier this year, it
interrupted week-long walkouts by local sailors that led to food
shortages on Greece’s islands, and strikes

This article originally appeared on : RT

Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest palladium producer, expects the shortage of the precious metal to increase by 25 percent in 2013 due to a less supply.

Anton Berlin, the Deputy Director of Norilsk subsidiary
Normentimpex, told Reuters that Norilsk anticipates a 1
million ounce palladium shortfall in 2013, which will boost
prices.

Norilsk forecasts it would cut 2013 palladium production to
between 2.63 and 2.64 million ounces from 2.73 million ounces last
year, according to Reuters.

In 2012 the palladium shortage was approximately 0.8 million
ounces, according to Berlin.

Berlin pointed to the dwindling supply from the Russian
government’s palladium reserves as an indicator of a 2013
shorfall.

Established in 1920 as a secret state precious metals supply,
Gokhran currently operates under the Finance Ministry, and is used
to soothe any outstanding budget deficits. Exact deposit figures
are only speculation.

“We don’t see Gokhran’s supplies on the market. Even if it
still has something in stock, the volume can’t be significant,”
said Berlin, who estimates Gokhran sold about 400,000 ounces of
palladium last year.

Its holdings are not part of Russia’s more than half a trillion
dollars in gold and foreign exchange reserves held by the Central
Bank.

“Prices will rise, this is obvious, it’s just not very clear
when,” said Berlin.

This year palladium prices hit their highest versus platinum in
10 years, slightly fuelled by the deficit Berlin mentioned, which
attracted a buying spree. But, along with gold, silver, nickel, and
other metals, the palladium market is weakened by the strong
dollar.

NYMEX palladium for June delivery rose $16.50, or 2.4 percent,
to settle at $714.75 a troy ounce. The palladium spot index traded
at $704.0 on the London exchange, down 0.42 percent.

Norilsk Nickel, which is also the world’s largest producer of
nickel and a major copper producer, was trading in the red on
Monday, down 1.18 percent at $155.18 at 13:50 Moscow
Standard Time.

The success of the palladium market performance is closely tied
to the automotive industry output, and is heavily dependent on
automobile production and sales. Palladium climbed to a three-week
high last week on strong China car sales, which rose 13 percent in
April.

Palladium has long offered a cheap and affordable alternative to
gold jewelry plating, and also is used in electronics, but faces
tough competition from non-precious metals, such as nickel, which
has decreased demand.

The predicted shortage is also paired with strong Chinese
factory and retail sales, according to data released Monday.

Year-on-year April industrial output expanded 9.3 percent, up
8.9 percent from March, and retail sales grew 12.8 percent, up 0.2
percent from March.

This article originally appeared on : RT

Cyprus is expected get its first €3 billion bailout tranche approved at a meeting of eurozone finance ministers on Monday. The meeting in Brussels is also due to sign off on the next instalment for Greece.

Eurozone officials are due to make the decision on the first 3
billion euro tranche of the 10 billion euro bailout loan to Cyprus
from the troika of international creditors — the European Central
Bank (ECB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European
Commission (EC). The financial aid comes with around 2.5 percent
interest and is to be paid back over a 12-year period after a grace
period of a decade.

The restructuring of banks and the gradual lifting of
restrictions on capital movement were among the priorities for the
island’s aid programme, as a senior eurozone official told the
Cyprus Mail.

Depositors in the island’s biggest banks – Bank of Cyprus and
Laiki Bank will practically pay for the bailout. To collect the
money, Nicosia decided to tax of up to 60 percent on deposits of
over 100,000 euro in the two big banks.

Russia, one of the closest business partners with Cyprus, also
agreed to assist the troubled island. Moscow agreed to
cut the interest rate to 2.5 percent from 4.5 percent on a loan it
fixed in 2011. Maturity dates remain under discussion, even though
Cyprus’s Foreign Minister Ioannis Kasoulides said Russia had agreed
to extend the terms of the loan. “Requests for an
extension were received, and we promised that the request would be
dealt with. If anyone wants to draw the conclusion from that
promise that a deal has already been signed, let them do so,”
Russian Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak told journalists on
the sidelines of the annual congress of the European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development. Under the initial terms the money
should be paid back within four and a half years.

Greece will also be on the agenda of Monday’s meeting, as the
Eurogroup ministers will decide on the next two installments to
Greece totalling 7.4 billion euro.

A week ago the International Monetary Fund said Greece is
“making progress” in overcoming “deep-seated
problems”, adding that country still needed to find ways to
tackle its financial problems with structural reform rather than
draconian cuts. “Progress on fiscal adjustment has been
exceptional by any international comparison,” the IMF said in
its regular report. But this primarily came as a result of slashing
jobs and salaries, which caused “unequal distribution of the
burden of adjustment,” the IMF said.

The Brussels meeting will take place amid continued concerns for
Slovenia which is seeking ways to avoid the need for

This article originally appeared on : RT

UK intelligence agency MI5 reportedly terminated a failed multimillion-dollar IT project to centralize the agency’s data stores. The system was supposed to be ready ahead of last year’s London Olympics, but the consultants hired by MI5 failed to deliver.

The new digital records management (RM) system was supposed to
allow for search queries and returns of various MI5 data and
records, from intelligence reports to older paper archives. The RM
was intended to replace the existing system, which the agency has
deemed outdated and unfit in light of the threats the country
currently faces.

The new RM was supposed to go online by time the Summer Olympics
began in London last year, in order to help the UK’s intelligence
agencies identify possible terrorist threats to the games. But in
July 2012, only weeks before the event, MI5 fired the IT consulting
firm responsible for the system’s development, as it had failed to
meet deadlines.

Then-director of MI5 Sir Jonathan Evans said the system would be
implemented at a later date, and the agency hired new IT
consultants to finish the job.

But according to the Independent, the project failed to play
out, and earlier this year Evans decided to scrap it altogether and
restart from scratch with a new generation of IT specialists. The
newspaper reported that the abandonment of years of progress means
the loss of about £90 million pounds (about $140 million). The UK’s
Home Office would not comment on either the fate of the project or
the reported loss figure.

In 2012, when the RM’s troubles were first revealed, some
British media estimated the cost of the project to be considerably
lower; the Daily Mail believed the program’s cost to be about £1
million (over $1.5 million).

This article originally appeared on : RT

As Turkey and Syria trade blame for the twin bombings that killed 46 people in a Turkish border town, RT’s Maria Finoshina travels to the Turkey-Syria border to investigate how the former allies have become bitter enemies.

Turkey shares its longest border with its one-time ally Syria.
The Turkey-Syria border is now closed, and both sides are trading
blame for the bombing in Reyhanli, Turkey, on Saturday.

Turkey accused Damascus of perpetrating the attack, while the
Syrian government has denied its involvement, and said the attack
is being used to justify a foreign intervention.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu claimed that those
behind the attacks were from an “old Marxist terrorist
organization” with ties to the Assad government. “It is time
for the international community to act together against this
regime,” he said in a news conference on Sunday.

Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi dismissed Turkey’s
accusations: “No one has the right to make false accusations…
Syria did not commit and would never commit such an act because our
values would not allow that.”

Relations were not always so strained between the two countries,
Finoshina reported from the Turkey-Syria border.

“It’s hard to imagine now but in 2009 the two countries even
held joint military drills across that frontier, in what was a
brief thaw in relations between the two,” Finoshina reported.
In 2003, the two nations inked a free trade agreement, visa-free
movement and held several presidential visits.

Residents in the border regions of both countries grew close,
with families on both sides feeling that they shared a common home.
But now, with warlike rhetoric and accusations in the air,
“relations between the two neighbors are strained like never
before,” Finoshina said.

Watch her full report above.

This article originally appeared on : RT

As Europeans become increasingly outraged with draconian cuts at home, officials have started to speak about the need to ease the austerity measures. Now the question is how to come up with a middle ground between cuts and economic growth.

Officials across Europe have begun talking about the need to
soften the measures adopted by the debt — ridden economies as a
security for financial help from the troika of international
creditors – the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European
Commission (EC) and the European Central Bank (ECB).

The latest from French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici, said
that the country was about to finish its austerity, shifting the
focus to growth.

“We’re witnessing the end of the dogma of austerity” as the
only tool to fight the euro debt crisis, Moscovici said on
Europe 1 radio. “Austerity on its own impedes growth,” he
added.

The current trajectory of austerity had “reached its
limits” as European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso put
it.

“…in the early phase of the crisis, it was essential to
restore the credibility of fiscal policy in Europe… Now, as we
have restored the credibility in the short term, that gives us the
possibility of having a smoother path of fiscal adjustment in the
medium term,” explained Olli Rehn, the EU commissioner for
economic and monetary affairs.

‘Cut or grow’ dilemma

Official say that economic stimulus, not painful cuts, are
needed to make the indebted countries grow again.

“An economy is recovering only provided stimulus to speed up
growth is there,” Martin Schulz, from the European parliament,
told Belgian newspaper L’Echo in an interview.

A usual deficit reduction mix includes higher taxes and lower
spending. The aftermath of such belt tightening keeps knocking the
citizens for six. The unemployment rate in the EU reached its
all-time high of 12.1% in March 2013, which is making some people
across the affected countries take to the streets to express their
outrage at the measures.

Slovenia, Spain and Portugal are the most recent “hot points.”
Protesters flooded Ljubljana, Madrid and Lisbon to voice
disappointment with the troika of international lenders, whom the
public are increasingly blaming for the economic hardship in their
countries.

“Troika means austerity and we have been experiencing for
more than a year and a half the austerity measures which have
destroyed every good prospect of social state, of welfare state.
Now we have over a million and a half unemployed,” said Joao
Camargo, an anti-troika activist in Portugal.

“… it does seem clear that much of Europe has cut too deeply
and this has killed growth, so completely there will be no
recovery. So, some easing does seem appropriate,” Ben Aris,
editor-in-chief at

This article originally appeared on : RT

With little news expected from Europe and the US on Monday, macroeconomic data from China is expected to be the main driver of global markets on Monday.

The Asian economic powerhouse is expected to release data on
retail sales, industrial manufacturing and April’s urban investment
figures. “Forecast readings are shadowing forth a slight growth
for all of the free indicators,” Investcafe analyst Darya
Pichugina said, adding that some analysts are not quite so
optimistic.

“There’s no visible improvement in the macro situation,”
analyst Liu Guangming of Beijing’s Dongxing Securities Co. said,
according to Bloomberg.

China’s overall economic performance has been largely
disappointing: Despite recent trade figures showing an improved
economic climate, fears persist of a downturn in the world’s
second-largest economy.

In April, Chinese exports rose 14.7 percent year-on-year and
imports increased 16.8 percent, both outperforming analyst
expectations, the People’s Republic Customs Administration reported
last Wednesday. However, Citigroup economist Ding
Shuang warned that the improved figures may be reflecting
“over-invoicing [by exporters].”

China also faces a brutal GDP forecast in 2013. In March,
China’s projected GDP growth was cut from 7.9 percent to 7.7
percent, due to weak global export demand. April manufacturing data
was also disappointing, with an HSBC report on the service sector
showing its weakest expansion since August 2011.

Across Asia, Japanese shares are trading higher on Monday, with
the Nikkei 225 gaining 1.24 percent; floors in Hong Kong and
Shanghai are currently closed.

Russian stocks closed Friday’s session in the red, with the RTS
falling 1.54 percent to 1,429.78 and the MICEX declining 0.47
percent to 1,426.25. A sharp cut in economic forecast for Russia
issued by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
(EBRD) on Friday could be one of the main reasons the selloff on
Russian floors, Investcafe analyst Anna Bodrova explained. The EBRD
revised its forecast for the Russian economy, predicting GDP growth
of 1.8 percent in 2013 — a sharp downgrade from the previous
forecast of 3.5 percent.

European markets finished higher on Friday, with French stocks
leading the region. The CAC 40 was up 0.64 percent, London’s FTSE
100 added 0.49 percent and Germany’s DAX gained 0.19 percent to
close at a record high of 8,278.59 points.

North and South American markets have traded mixed recently: The
S&P 500 and the Dow Jones remained above key psychological
levels last week — 15,000 and 1,600, respectively. The Nasdaq rose
1.7 percent for the week, and the Latin American Bovespa lost 0.61
percent.

This article originally appeared on : RT

May 12, 2013
 |

Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” fantasizes a world in which anti-government citizens reject taxes and regulations, and “stop the motor” by withdrawing themselves from the system of production. In a perverse twist on the writer’s theme the prediction is coming true. But instead of productive people rejecting taxes, rejected taxes are shutting down productive people.

Perhaps Ayn Rand never anticipated the impact of unregulated greed on a productive middle class. Perhaps she never understood the fairness of tax money for public research and infrastructure and security, all of which have contributed to the success of big business. She must have known about the inequality of the pre-Depression years. But she couldn’t have foreseen the concurrent rise in technology and globalization that allowed inequality to surge again, more quickly, in a manner that threatens to put the greediest offenders out of our reach.

Ayn Rand’s philosophy suggests that

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/murder_is_our_national_sport_20130512/

Posted on May 12, 2013