US Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said on Wednesday that government agencies have a policy of assassinating Americans overseas as required by the “war on terror.”

According to one US official, “there’s a good likelihood that he’s dead.” At the same time, the official conceded that there was no body, no photographic evidence, and not even any reliable witnesses to verify the claims. Pakistan’s government seems pretty sure about Hakimullah’s death, but they have been pretty sure no less than six times in the last six months that Hakimullah has died. Other “confirmed” deaths from the Pakistani government, including at least two deaths of TTP second in command Wali Rehman, have likewise turned out to be false. AntiWar: US Commanders Reprimanded for Afghan Battlefield Failures. Wired: 200 Fools & moral pygmies on the Ground in Pakistan.

Over the past four decades Israel has defrauded Palestinians working inside Israel of more than US $2 billion by deducting from their salaries contributions for welfare benefits to which they were never entitled, Israeli economists have alleged. A new report, "State Robbery," to be published later this month, says the "theft" continued even after the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994 and part of the money was supposed to be transferred to a special fund on behalf of the workers. According to information supplied by Israeli officials, most of the deductions from the workers' pay were invested in infrastructure projects in the Palestinian territories – a presumed reference to the massive state subsidies accorded to the settlements.

[Editor's Comment:] Apart from the 700-800 000 people the fascist Jewish leadership terrorized into leaving Palestine in the late forties, the many thousand Palestinians they have killed & maimed in recent years and also the countless Palestinian homes they have demolished over the years, all in all, the Israeli government seems to steal a lot: the land belonging to the Palestinians, their organs (!) and now apparently, their money too. Soon they will have ethnically "cleansed" occupied Palestine and there'll be precious little left to steal anymore. Maybe then the few remaining Palestinians will be left alone, or is even that too much to ask?

A deadly airstrike in Afghanistan's Kunduz province last September did not comply with Nato's rules of engagement, according to the military organisation's own investigators. In a leaked document published by the German newspaper Der Spiegel this week, it was revealed that crucial information was withheld from US pilots by the German military, who ordered the attack that killed scores of Afghan civilians. The newspaper says Nato investigators looking into the September 4 bombing, which claimed 142 lives, found that US fighter pilots were inappropriately ordered to attack two fuel tankers that had been hijacked by the Taliban in northern Kunduz. Civilians from the nearby village of Omarkhail were collecting fuel from the tankers when Nato jets were ordered to drop two 500 pound bombs on the lorries. 'Going kinetic': One of the US F-15 pilots, whose name has not been released but has been referred to as Dude 15, told Nato investigators later that he "had an uneasy feeling about everything". "Both of us could tell the ground commander was really pushing to go kinetic," he said, using a military slang term for the release of bombs on a target. Reports now say that the German commander on the ground withheld vital information from the pilots of the US jets before they dropped their bombs. Der Spiegel obtained a secret Nato report on the incident, saying that Germany's army knewat the time of the bombing at least one of the drivers of the hijacked tankers was still alive and at the scene. When questioned, pilots were told all individuals on the ground were "insurgents".

Iran's ambassador to Russia says Moscow has guaranteed that it will deliver the S-300 missile defense system to Iran. "Iran is ready to receive this system and our Russian colleagues have assured us that they will meet their obligations," Ambassador Seyyed Mahmoud-Reza Sajjadi said at a press conference at the main office of RIA Novosti in Moscow on Thursday. The S-300 system, which can track targets and fire at aircraft 120 kilometers (75 miles) away, features high jamming immunity and is able to simultaneously engage up to 100 targets.

The Supreme Court’s seismic January ruling that corporations are free to spend unlimited amounts of their profits to advertise for or against candidates may have been the latest shakeup of campaign finance – but gaping holes already allow corporations to spend enormous sums without leaving a paper trail, a Raw Story investigation has found. Campaign finance experts confirmed that though disclosure rules remained intact in the new Supreme Court decision, there are effective methods to circumvent them.

A lot of people are very upset about the rapidly increasing U.S. national debt these days and they are demanding a solution. What they don't realize is that there simply is not a solution under the current U.S. financial system. It is now mathematically impossible for the U.S. government to pay off the U.S. national debt. You see, the truth is that the U.S. government now owes more dollars than actually exist. If the U.S. government went out today and took every single penny from every single American bank, business and taxpayer, they still would not be able to pay off the national debt. And if they did that, obviously American society would stop functioning because nobody would have any money to buy or sell anything. AWIP: List of countries by current account balance. PressTV: Poll: Americans worried, angry about deficit.

One in eight Americans does not have enough to eat and requires emergency food assistance. This staggering number is revealed in a report released on Tuesday by Feeding America (FA), a network consisting of thousands of food pantries, soup kitchens and similar agencies serving 37 million people in the US. The report, entitled Hunger in America 2010, paints a devastating portrait of the social misery faced by millions of American working people. Economic Policy Institute: A long and persistent middle-class squeeze. NYT: 20,000 Jobs Lost in January as Jobless Rate Falls to 9.7%.

[Excavations several years ago at an ancient cemetery in Mongolia uncovered a man's skeleton, including this skull, that has yielded genetic evidence of Indo-Europeans reaching eastern Asia at least 2,000 years ago.]

Dead men can indeed tell tales, but they speak in a whispered double helix. -Consider an older gentleman whose skeleton lay in one of more than 200 tombs recently excavated at a 2,000-year-old cemetery in eastern Mongolia, near China’s northern border. DNA extracted from this man’s bones pegs him as a descendant of Europeans or western Asians. Yet he still assumed a prominent position in ancient Mongolia’s Xiongnu Empire, say geneticist Kyung-Yong Kim of Chung-Ang University in Seoul, South Korea, and his colleagues.

On the basis of previous excavations and descriptions in ancient Chinese texts, researchers suspect that the Xiongnu Empire — which ruled a vast territory in and around Mongolia from 209 B.C. to A.D. 93 — included ethnically and linguistically diverse nomadic tribes. The Xiongnu Empire once ruled the major trading route known as the Asian Silk Road, opening it to both Western and Chinese influences. [Scientific article here.]

An elite US interrogation unit will conduct "scientific research" to find better more efficient ways of "questioning" top "suspected terrorists", US intelligence director Dennis Blair said Wednesday. "It is going to do scientific research on that long-neglected area," Blair told the House Intelligence Committee, without elaborating on the nature of the torture techniques being tested. Existentialist Cowboy: Why the CIA is the World's Number One Terrorist Organization.

[Editor's Comment:] This "scientific" research probably already has morphed with what was and continues to be the Monarch, Manchurian, Mind Control business, the purpose of which is to transform people into monsters that obediently do whatever their controllers want them to do or even to kill people, or to participate in Islamist "front" organizations, if this is what their controllers want. What the media refer to as "suspected terrorists" may in most of the reported cases be normal, innocent, people that DOD/CIA agents snatch from groups of normal people, whose only crime it is to have lived their everyday life like the rest of us. The United States Department of Defense & the CIA "encourage" their compliant media refer to these people as "suspects", but they really are not. Rather, they are possible candidates for one of their mind control programs. This might happen to anyone of us, but here the ususal racist criteria apply: being Muslim, dark-skinned, (usually) male, from some poor Third World country...you get the picture. The dual nature of this operation is clear: on the one hand this criminal business succeeds in alternately scaring us and reassuring us -they seem to catch an ever greater number of "terrorist" all the time and thus seem able to "protect" us. On the other hand, by their criminal, covert activity, plus the compliant co-operation from their media, they create an ever fresh supply of the hated & feared 'Other' -the Muslims, the Islamists- from which they can snatch their pray, people they can torture and subject to their "scientific" techniques. After these people have been programmed in this way, they are quietly being inserted into the targeted population again for the purpose of murder, mayhem & destruction. All of this happens in front of our very eyes and we blithely see nothing, and understand nothing of what's really going on. -Would it not be fair to say that if we choose to be ignorant, to look the other way or to do nothing about it, that we would be complicit in all of this?

Zumante Lucero, a 9 year-old Denver boy with asthma, died in July after a severe attack. His family had previously been on Medicaid, but was unexpectedly cut off from the program, and lost access to medication as a result. Zumante's doctors believe that access to a prescription that helped control inflaming in his lungs could have saved his life. Since Zumante's death, it has become clear that the Lucero family should have had prescription drug benefits under Medicaid, and the State of Colorado erred in cutting them off of coverage.

Full, unedited video of Jon Stewart on 'The O'Reilly Factor'

A United Nations report wrongly claimed that more than half of the Netherlands is currently below sea level. In fact, just 20 percent of the country consists of polders that are pumped dry, and which are at risk of flooding if global warming causes rising sea levels. Dutch Environment Minister Jacqueline Cramer has ordered a thorough investigation into the quality of the climate reports which she uses to base her policies on. Daily Telegraph: India to 'pull out' of UN global warming panel because it 'cannot rely' on scandal ridden UN science. EU Referendum: The Prince of Wales: A sad little figure. US News: Penn State Whitewash: Panel Clears ‘Climategate’ Prof of Three Claims. The Morning Call: Politics fuel flap over climate prof's work.

The mothers and fathers of five teenage boys who repeatedly raped a young girl have been ordered to pay her compensation totalling €450,000 because of their failure to give their sons an "education in feelings and emotions". Judge Bianca La Monica awarded the damages against all the boys' natural parents, including those who had separated from their partners and no longer had custody of their sons.

A set of the most detailed images taken of Pluto has been released today by NASA. The images of the dwarf planet were taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and show Pluto's icy and brownish colored surface, which is undergoing seasonal changes. The dwarf planet has become redder and its northern hemisphere is getting brighter. Pluto's dramatic color changes took place during a two year period from 2000 to 2002. The center image on the set of three Pluto faces shows a mysterious bright spot that has an unusual amount of carbon monoxide frost. Due to its distance and small size, Pluto is the hardest planetary objects to capture. Hubble's images are not resolved enough to be able to understand the geology of the planet, however, the color and brightness that is revealed shows a very complex world. The general color of Pluto is thought to be from ultraviolet radiation that the distant sun produces when it breaks up the methane on the dwarf planet's surface, which leaves a dark and red residue made of mostly carbon.

President Traian Basescu said the plan was approved by the defence council. It still needs parliamentary approval. The US scrapped a previous missile shield, based in Poland and the Czech Republic, which had infuriated Russia. Instead the new system would provide better defence from "the emerging threat" of Iranian short- and medium-range missiles, a US official said.