I urge you to reject the Obama health care bill. This is not reform; it is a bailout of bankrupt insurance companies at the expense of average working people, obtained through coercion and extortion. Forcing Americans to buy insurance from private, for-profit, deregulated companies is clearly unconstitutional. The idea of a mandate to purchase insurance is a reactionary Republican invention, and we want no part of it. Furthermore, this bill’s $500 billion in Medicare cuts are a direct attack on the economic rights of Americans implemented under the New Deal and the Great Society, and will cause incalculable suffering and human tragedy. These colossal Medicare cuts will inevitably result in rationing, delay, and the denial of care, causing patients to die needlessly. The spirit of this bill is that of OMB Director Peter Orszag, the sinister Malthusian bureaucrat who is behind recent attempts to deny Americans Pap smears, mammograms, and PSA tests – as cost-cutting measures.

Israel 'approves' 1600 homes in occupied East Jerusalem homes - just as 'peace talks' start, whilst the US vice president is visiting, following on from the 100+ new homes in the occupied West Bank. No doubt it will again be the fault of the Palestinians the "peace process" fails? BBC: Israel announces East Jerusalem homes as Biden visits. Al Jazeera: At least 3,000 protesters, including Israelis and Palestinians, have rallied in an Arab quarter of east Jerusalem to protest the eviction of Palestinians from their homes there in favor of Jewish settlers. PressTV: New Israeli settlements could derail talks: PA. Alan Hart: Two humiliations – Can Obama live with a third? Marco Villa: Israel Announces 1,600 Settlements as VP Biden Lands in Tel Aviv. AntiWar: Israel Shames Biden With Massive New Settlement Announcement Latest Announcement Came After Biden Praised Israel.

Talk To Action: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and John Hagee Share Stage as Biden Arrives in Israel: The late Jerry Falwell claimed in an interview with Vanity Fair that the Mayflower Hotel event in 1998 was planned by Netanyahu.

Israel is to begin officially monitoring "incitement" in the Palestinian Authority and will periodically issue a report on it, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee last week. "We will set parameters by which to measure the level of incitement," Netanyahu told the committee. "People must know exactly what is happening on this issue, because for a peace agreement, education toward peace and acceptance of Israel are needed."

[Editor's Comment:] And this is from a state that callously murdered 1400 people , of whom 300 were children. This war criminal state may have the power to one-sidedly decide about the "parameters of incitement" but clearly lacks the moral authority to say even a single word about the "parameters of peace". -True peace would include dignity & justice. Israel's sociopathic leaders are incapable of knowing what this means. What they want is ever more Palestinian land, and that accomplished, "peace", i.e. the silence of the ethnically cleansed and the vanquished. This has nothing to do with peace at all.

Goldstone Report: ISRAEL WAR CRIMES GAZA 3/5 -Mass Killings in Gaza -Video.

The government protested to the US over the torture of terror suspects, the former head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller revealed last night. She also said the Americans concealed from Britain the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 2001 attacks. "The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing," Lady Manningham-Buller told a meeting at the House of Lords.

[Editor's Comment:] This lady's being disingenuous. -Any intelligence agency worth its salt will pass this hurdle easily. After all, can they reasonably expect people from the dog-eat-dog underworld of intelligence to hand it to them on a silver plate? Either the MI5 is not worth shit or this lady's lying through her teeth.

Craig Murray: E-liar Manningham Buller. AWIP: Stomach-churning details of CIA waterboarding crimes - Internal CIA documents reveal a meticulous protocol that was far more brutal than Dick Cheney's "dunk in the water".

Reports continue to come in since the weekend that US surveillance drones have been flying overhead in the Somali capital city of Mogadishu, providing intelligence to the self-proclaimed government that soon hopes to launch a major attack across the city. Global Research: Decade Of The Drone: America’s Aerial Assassins.

An Observer investigation reveals how rich countries faced by a global food shortage now farm an area double the size of the UK to guarantee supplies for their citizens. "We are seeing dispossession on a massive scale. It means less food is available and local people will have less. There will be more conflict and political instability and cultures will be uprooted. The small farmers of Africa are the basis of food security. The food availability of the planet will decline."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has accused the US of playing a "double game" in Afghanistan after the US used the same term to condemn Iran's role. Mr Ahmadinejad said the US had "created terrorists and now say they are fighting them", as he appeared with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul. PressTV: Iran urges Germany to end support for terrorists. BBC: US woman indicted on terror charges.

(FULL VERSION-with Schulz & Farage reply)

Do you know how awkward it is to have a political argument with a naked man?' asked Massa. He described the scene: 'I am showering, naked as a jaybird, and here comes Rahm Emanuel, not even with a towel wrapped round his tush, poking his finger in my chest, yelling at me because I wasn’t going to vote for the president’s budget.' Marco Villa: The Biggest Congressional Phony. HuffPo: Nancy Pelosi: Massa Is 'A Very Sick Person'.

When a tsunami crashed into an asylum in Chile, two unlikely heroines, one schizophrenic, the other mentally disabled, formed a team to save their friends' lives. With water up to their necks, they dragged other patients to safety. Boston.com: The Big Picture: Chile, nine days later (41 photos total).

Non-doctors would be trained to administer a lethal potion to elderly people who 'consider their lives complete'. The radical move would be a world first and push the boundaries even further in the country that first legalised euthanasia. The Dutch parliament is to debate the measure after campaigners for assisted suicide collected 112,500 signatures in a month.

A public inquiry opened in London yesterday into claims that up to 20 Iraqis were unlawfully killed and others tortured by British troops after a firefight in 2004. The inquiry, chaired by a retired High Court judge, got under way less than 24 hours after the armed forces minister, Bill Rammell, announced a wide-ranging investigation into all allegations of abuse by UK forces after the 2003 invasion. It means that there will now be three separate inquiries going on simultaneously into claims that British troops ill-treated and even murdered Iraqi prisoners, prompting fears that the glut of investigations could undermine the reputation of the country’s armed forces.

WikiPedia: GLOBAL ANTI-SEMITISM REVIEW ACT OF 2004. GovTrack.us: Text of H. Res. 364: Condemning all forms of anti-Semitism and reaffirming the support of Congress for the mandate of... JudeoFascism.com: Orwellian "Global Anti-Semitism Review Act" makes it a crime in America to tell the truth about Zionism.

Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a "a dunk in the water." But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial "enhanced interrogation" practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney's description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty. LA Times: The Supreme Court justice has a history of dismissing prisoner brutality. And it's his former law clerk who was investigated for authorizing harsh interrogation tactics as a Justice Department lawyer.

Giving evidence to the public inquiry into Britain's role in the war on Monday, Miliband insisted that many Arab countries now respected Britain more for following through on threats of military force in Iraq. Miliband also claimed that the UK is now in a "stronger position," believing that UK decisions on Iraq have not "undermined our relationships or our ability to do business" in the region. AWIP: "It was the right decision" -Video. AntiWar: British Foreign Secretary: Arabs ‘Respected’ Attack on Iraq.

The United States backs Israel's authorization of new construction projects in the West Bank, saying Washington's Middle East ally has not violated its settlement moratorium. The decision received a chilly welcome from the Palestinians as the freeze fails to give the Palestinian demand of a full, permanent halt for it does not stop the work on some 3,000 houses, nor does it include the ones in East Jerusalem Al-Quds.

Jonathan Cook reports that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is set to accept Israel as a member – thus conferring legitimacy on its illegal occupation of Arab lands – despite Israel’s failure to meet a number of OECD criteria, including on corruption, copyright and wealth disparity.

In weeks to come, I am going to insist on the importance of Shlomo Sand’s book, the Invention of the Jewish People. Caricatured in the U.S. as a tract on the Khazar theory of Jewish genetics, the book is in fact a liberal’s assault on the racial politics of identity in Israel and the diaspora, a work of brilliant synthetic scholarship about nationalism and identity construction and the roots of Zionism that will resonate in Jewish and Palestinian life for decades. (By the way, the other criticism of Sand, that he was recycling others’ discoveries about the migration of the Jewish religion through Europe, is horse feathers. AWIP/Pierre Assouline: Comment Shlomo Sand a réinventé le peuple juif.

A dozen previously unknown shipwrecks, some of them believed to be up to 1,000 years old, were discovered in the Baltic Sea during a probe of the sea bed to prepare for the installation of a large gas pipeline, the Swedish National Heritage Board said Monday. "We have manage to identify 12 shipwrecks, and nine of them are considered to be fairly old," Peter Norman, a senior advisor with the heritage board, told AFP. "We think many of the ships are from the 17th and 18th centuries and we think some could even be from the Middle Ages," he said, stressing that "this discovery offers enormous culture-historical value.

The shipwrecks were discovered during a probe by the Russian-led Nord Stream consortium of the sea bed route its planned gas pipeline from Russia to the European Union will take through the Baltic. "They used sonar equipment first and discovered some unevenness along the sea bottom ... so they filmed some of the uneven areas, and we could see the wrecks," Norman explained. The discovery was made outside Sweden's territorial waters, but within its economic zone, he said. None of the wrecks were in the actual path the Nord Stream pipeline is set to take, but they were in its so-called anchor corridor, meaning they are in the area where ships laying the pipeline might anchor,

The greenhouse gasses keep the Earth 30° C warmer than it would otherwise be without them in the atmosphere, so instead of the average surface temperature being -15° C, it is 15° C. Carbon dioxide contributes 10% of the effect so that is 3° C. The pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 ppm. So roughly, if the heating effect was a linear relationship, each 100 ppm contributes 1° C. With the atmospheric concentration rising by 2 ppm annually, it would go up by 100 ppm every 50 years and we would all fry as per the IPCC predictions. But the relationship isn’t linear, it is logarithmic. In 2006, Willis Eschenbach posted this graph on Climate Audit showing the logarithmic heating effect of carbon dioxide relative to atmospheric concentration. WUWT: NSIDC Reports That Antarctica is Cooling and Sea Ice is Increasing.

The Brazilian government has announced trade sanctions against a variety of American goods in retaliation for illegal US subsidies to cotton farmers. The World Trade Organization (WTO) approved the sanctions in a rare move.

LIFE and Google have teamed up to put 10,000,000 historic images online -- about 20 percent of the images are live now. The Disneyland images are great -- here's the old Submarine Ride. LIFE photo archive hosted by Google.

The US wants to deny that Turkey's slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 was genocide. But the evidence is there, in a hilltop orphanage near Beirut, reports Robert Fisk. Barack Obama and his pliant Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton – who are now campaigning so pitifully to prevent the US Congress acknowledging that the Ottoman Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians was a genocide – should come here to this Lebanese hilltop village and hang their heads in shame. For this is a tragic, appalling tale of brutality against small and defenceless children whose families had already been murdered by Turkish forces at the height of the First World War, some of whom were to recall how they were forced to grind up and eat the skeletons of their dead fellow child orphans in order to survive starvation.

Wang Cuyun was attempting to prevent a demolition team from knocking down her house when she was allegedly beaten by a worker with a wooden stick and then pushed into a ditch that had been dug around the property. A bulldozer then covered Mrs Wang with earth, burying her alive. By the time her relatives dug her up, she was dead. The incident occurred last Wednesday in Maodian village in Huangpi district.

XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’ “Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail.