Two men on death row for masterminding an Al-Qaeda truck bombing that killed 88 people on June 20 were recruited in a US-run prison camp, a senior Iraqi police commander said on Thursday. Adnan Jassim Ali al-Hamdani and Hawas Falah al-Juburi were among three people sentenced on Tuesday to death by hanging for their part in the bombing in the predominantly Shiite Turkmen town of Taza in northern Iraq which also wounded 265 people, according to a police toll. "The convicts were recruited by the terrorist organisation during their detention in Camp Bucca," a US-run detention centre near the southern port of Basra that was closed in September, police commander Ahmed Abu Rarif told a Baghdad news conference.

The Lithuanian foreign ministry and former elected officials are still attempting to deny what the Lithuanian parliament has now openly admitted. Former President Paksas claims that he was impeached and ousted in 2004 because he opposed the black sites. This would have amounted to a NATO coup d’etat.

According to reports, troops were looking for high value targets among both the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The one that became widely known in September 2008 was condemned as a provocation by the Pakistani government. Ethnic groups from Pakistans Belugistan province where most of the raids occurred blame the government in Islamabad for allowing these things to happen, said RT LIVE investigative journalist Webster Tarpley. He pointed out that President Obamas West point speech of December 2 is a thinly veiled declaration of war against Pakistan in the sense that it announces the intent of the US to promote the dismemberment, the partition of Pakistan along ethnic lines and in order to do that you have to create trouble on the ground. VoltaireNet: Obama Declares War on Pakistan.

Kai Eide warned against nighttime actions by coalition forces ''given that they often result in lethal outcomes for civilians." The UN representative urged US-led NATO forces to make every effort to "minimize" civilian casualties in Afghanistan. He was referring to the alleged killing of ten civilians at the hands of foreign troops on Sunday in northeast Afghanistan. The US military insists that the victims were "armed militants". PressTV: In Pakistan, more civilians fall victim to US drones. AntiWar: NATO Kills at Least Eight Afghan Civilians in Fresh Air Strike. URUKNET: Video: Afghan tensions rise amid civilian and CIA deaths.

"The UN has not been willing [yet] to give what's needed to exert significant pressure on Israel to lift the blockade that under any circumstances is unlawful," Richard Falk told Press TV on Thursday. "The only thing that could be more effective would be a move toward economic sanctions that would include military assistance" to Israel, the UN diplomat underlined. The UN independent expert on Palestinian rights has also criticized the international community for its failure to end the Israeli blockade against the Gaza Strip.

"A federal judge dismissed all charges against five Blackwater Worldwide security guards charged in a deadly Baghdad shooting. U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina said Thursday that the Justice Department overstepped its bounds and wrongly used evidence it wasn't allowed to see." PBS Newshour: Blackwater Guards Cleared of Iraq Shooting Charges by Federal Judge. PressTV: Iraq 'regrets' US court ruling on Blackwater.

"The latest Rasmussen poll indicates that a majority of Americans support hard-line attitudes towards the would-be terrorist who attempted to blow up an airliner on Christmas day. Of those polled, 71% would like to see the crime investiged by military rather than civilian authorities, and 58% believe that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, should be subjected to "aggressive" interrogation techniques in order to gain information. Men, younger voters, and Republicans were most strongly in support of the use of harsh methods." SOTT: CROTCH BOMBER: Evidence Mounts for US Complicity in Terrorism: Mutallab's father is no ordinary 'banker'. + The Underwear Bomber - Crushing Freedom With Phony Arab Terrorism. AWIP: America's regression.

Michigan attorney Kurt Haskell's partial account. The rest can be read from the article: For the last five days I have been reporting my story of the so called "sharp dressed man." For those of you who haven't read my account, it involves a sharp dressed "Indian man" attempting to talk a ticket agent into letting a supposed "Sudanese refugee" (The terrorist) onto flight 253 without a passport. I have never had any idea how it played out except to note that the so called "Sudanese reefugee" later boarded my flight and attempted to blow it up and kill me. At no time did my story involve, or even find important whether the terrorist actually had a passport. The importance of my story was and always will be, the attempt with an accomplice (apparently succesful) of a terrorist with all sorts of prior terrorist warning signs to skirt the normal passport boarding procedures in Amsterdam. By the way, Amsterdam security did come out the other day and admit that the terrorist did not have to "Go through normal passport checking procedures".

Some 1,000 people, among them all of Israel's Arab MKs and community leaders, gathered Thursday at the Israeli side of the Gaza border to express solidarity with the residents of Gaza, one year after Israel's offensive there. MK Taleb A-Sana relayed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh's message to the Israeli side via a mobile phone. During the rally, Israeli Arab MK Jamal Zahalka directed harsh criticism at Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who he said enjoys "classical music and killing children in Gaza."

Despite the construction freeze, dozens of settlements in the West Bank are experiencing a building boom, even on the eve of another visit to the region by U.S. envoy George Mitchell to try to restart talks for a final settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians. Construction is being carried out mostly to the east of the separation fence; it began shortly after warrants were issued on November 26 freezing construction.

Thirty-seven priests, nuns and missionaries were killed worldwide in 2009, nearly twice as many as 2008 and a record high for a decade, the Vatican's news agency said. The report, published on the Fides website, lists 30 priests, two nuns, two seminarians and three lay volunteers "killed in a violent way" in 2009. Most deaths occurred in Latin and North America, where 23 of the Catholic workers were killed, 11 died in Africa, two in Asia and one in Europe.

China has sentenced a Tibetan Buddhist lama to more than eight years in jail for "illegal possession of ammunition and embezzlement". The monk, Phurbu Tsering Rinpoche, denies all charges, his lawyer said. The man described as a Living Buddha was arrested after nuns at his temple protested against a crackdown on Tibetan Buddhism. This had followed anti-China riots that erupted in Lhasa in 2008 and spread through the Himalayan region.

Global Warming Emerging Science and Understanding Part 5
Global Warming Emerging Science and Understanding Part 4
Global Warming Emerging Science and Understanding Part 3
Global Warming Emerging Science and Understanding Part 2
Global Warming Emerging Science and Understanding Part 1

Eighty percent of the American population now believe that man is responsible for global warming. Emerging science, however, is providing important new understanding of this issue. Yet, this information is not getting out to people, especially to our school children. It has not been proven that man is responsible for global warming or cooling. Rock Creek Free Press: Climategate: Science Scandal of the Century -The World’s Most Influential Climate Scientists Get Caught “Fudging” the Data. AWIP: Copenhagen climate change conference: 'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation'

A SUICIDE bomber has infiltrated a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan, killing at least eight Americans in what is believed to be the deadliest single attack on US intelligence personnel in the eight-year-long war and one of the deadliest in the agency's history.