Now, German soldiers who shoot Afghan civilians must no longer reckon with an automatic investigation by the state prosecutor. The latter only needs to be involved if the killing is “disproportionate.” AWIP/Chris Floyd: All Systems Go: No Disfunction in Profitable Afghan Enterprise. + Lethal Nato bombing details leaked.

Ayatollah Khamenei further pointed out that Western countries spread lies about the Iranian nuclear energy program and the state of democracy and human rights in Iran because Tehran is determined to maintain its rights. Meanwhile, the Leader slammed US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's comments during her recent tour of the Persian Gulf region, saying that "yet again the Americans have sent their agent (Clinton) like a traveler to the Persian Gulf to repeat the same lies about Iran." "However, nobody will believe their words anymore, as the United States has never cared about the interests of regional nations," the Leader said, adding that "quite to the contrary, [Washington] has trampled on the rights of the regional countries." PressTV: 'West must accept Iran is 'master of enrichment': Envoy. AWIP: US gave up war plans because of Iran's might.

President Barack Obama welcomed the Dalai Lama for closely-watched White House talks Thursday, risking fallout in China over the get-together and Obama's statement supporting preservation of Tibet's identity and human rights. ConnectMidMichigan: Obama and Dalai Lama "discuss" Tibet.

[Editor's Comment:] Ahh, human rights...yeah, right! The war criminal that recently has has assassinated hundreds of innocent people in occupied Afghanistan now wants to support human rights in Tibet. (But not in Afghanistan or Palestine.) -Obama is no better than Bush. That much is clear.

A pilot intentionally crashed a small aircraft into a building next to an FBI office in the Texas state capital of Austin, it has been reported. An offiical told the CNN television network that the pilot had set his own house on fire before flying a small plane and crashing it into a seven-story building at about 10 am. Two people were hospitalized in the incident, Austin police said. The fate of the pilot was not immediately clear. No terrorist link was suspected, the Department of Homeland Security said. CNN: Austin plane crash was deliberate, officials say -Video. MSNBC: Pilot was upset with IRS, act may have been intentional.

Americans of both parties overwhelmingly oppose a Supreme Court ruling that allows corporations and unions to spend as much as they want on political campaigns, and most favor new limits on such spending, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

On Monday, Feb. 15th, Cinema du Parc received an email insisting that CJPME’s Photo Exposition, Human Drama in Gaza, be immediately removed from the Cinema. The email was from a legal representative of Gestion Redbourne PDP Inc., the owners of the building housing Cinema du Parc. The Cinema has hosted dozens of expositions in the past three years, and this is the first time that such action has been taken. This move on the part of Redbourne seems entirely political, to muzzle the message of Human Drama in Gaza. If you live outside Montreal, click here to protest this action.

Gilad Atzmon argues that, given the close relationship between the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and the Mossad intelligence agency, Premier Binyamin Netanyahu must be held to account personally for the murder of a Hamas official in Dubai by Israeli Mossad agents travelling on cloned European passports. ABC News: All signs point to an Israeli hit squad, using fake passports and elaborate disguises. Daily Telegraph: Mossad's licence to kill. + British threat to Israel over Dubai Hamas assassination. TimesOnline: Dubai points finger at Mossad over Hamas assassination. The Guardian: UK calls in Israeli ambassador as Dubai killing row escalates. They're just going through the motions. Nothing will come of it. WRMEA: Israel's Mossad is known to take the foreign passports of new immigrants for use by its assassination squads. LiveLeak: CCTV footage: The assassination of Mahmoud al Mabhouh in Dubai. InterPol: INTERPOL issues Red Notices to assist in identification of 11 Dubai murder suspects.

Fascism on the rise: Canada: Dude arrested for lighting a cigarette on the olympic torch. South Africa: Police Ministry spokesperson Zweli Mnisi said Chumani Maxwele pointed his middle finger at the president. The US: Homeland Security targets bus traffic in Tampa. Sweden: After recent police harassment of a blogger in the subway of Stockholm, voices are being raised regarding swedish drug laws. Apparently, the Police can hold anyone for six hours and get blood, urine and saliva tests on the mere suspicion of having drugs in your system.

Here is the description of this picture from the AP website: “TSA officer Robert Howard signals an airline passenger forward at a security check-point at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Monday, Jan. 4, 2010, in SeaTac, Wash.”

I think that it rather pictures the future of the TSA. Will anal exams soon be required before boarding airline flights? We are certainly headed in that direction. And the tragic thing is that if the TSA put an ad in the New York Times or USA Today wanting to hire people to do anal exams, it would probably be flooded with applicants. WeThePeople: Homeland Security targets bus traffic in Tampa [VIDEO to be watched with caution -the propaganda is thick & heavy.] + TSA to Swab Airline Passengers' Hands In Search For Explosives.

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins's child was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

According to the study, male prisoners were more likely than females to report sexual activity with facility staff, but less likely than females to report forced sexual activity with other youth. Surprisingly, a whopping 95 percent of all youth reporting staff sexual misconduct said they had been victimized by female staff members. In the most troubling facilities, between 20 and 30 percent of incarcerated youth reported abuse.

Top U.N. climate change official Yvo de Boer told The Associated Press on Thursday that he was resigning after nearly four years, a period when governments struggled without success to agree on a new global warming deal. His departure takes effect July 1, five months before 193 nations are due to reconvene in Mexico for another attempt to reach a binding worldwide accord on controlling greenhouse gases. De Boer's resignation adds to the uncertainty that a full treaty can be finalized there. WUWT: U.N. Climate Chief Resigns.

Dick Cheney says he "was a big supporter of waterboarding." Is that a damning admission? Some liberals want to put former Vice President Dick Cheney on trial for war crimes for advocating torture, but Cheney doesn't appear worried. In his Sunday interview on ABC's "This Week," Cheney said that in the Bush administration, he "was a big supporter of waterboarding," and thinks it should still be used, when necessary, to get information from terrorism suspects. But with President Obama and many legal experts saying waterboarding is torture under U.S. and international law, did Cheney just write the opening statement for the prosecution in a war-crimes tribunal?

Eurostat now suspects that other European nations, potentially even crisis-stricken Italy, could be hiding the extent of their debt problem using swaps just like Greece has. If multiple nations have been fooling the Eurozone's own statistical office, then we really can't be sure what the Eurozone's aggregate financial situation really is, now can we. AWIP: GREECE: Goldman Sachs involved in another country's economic collapse. + Profiteers of the Greek finance crisis. + Riot police fire tear gas on protesters in Athens as EU plans Greek bailout.

For years, ships from other countries, laden with oil, machinery, clothes and cargo, sped past this small town near India as part of the world’s brisk trade with China. Now, China is investing millions to turn this fishing hamlet into a booming new port, furthering an ambitious trading strategy in South Asia that is reshaping the region and forcing India to rethink relations with its neighbors.

Al Gore trumpets the latest conclusions of Climate Change Advocate David Barber. “Sea ice in Canada’s fragile Arctic is melting more quickly than anyone expected,” says University of Manitoba Prof. David Barber, the lead investigator of the Circumpolar Flaw Lead System study released Friday. Barber is the lead investigator in the largest climate change study done in Canada. Barber said before the expedition, scientists were working under the theory that climate change would happen much more slowly. AWIP: Another IPCC Error: Antarctic Sea ICE INCREASE Underestimated by 50%.

The current offensive in Marja is a critical stepping stone for what is likely the most important fight of the Afghan surge in the coming months: securing Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban and the most important city in southern Afghanistan, according to defense officials and analysts. The military is using the Marja offensive to destroy an important Taliban "safe haven", but also to test a strategy that emphasizes strong partnership with Afghan security forces and security for Afghan civilians. And some of the same techniques will be used in future offenses like securing Kandahar.

[Editor's Comment:] The Taliban are Afghans and they belong there; the Americans do not. All of Afghanistan should be a "safe haven" for the Afghans, the Taliban included. The US bases there should be destroyed. There should be no safe haven for the Americans in Afghanistan.

Junior Foreign Affairs minister Peter Kent is suggesting Canada stands ready to throw its full military weight behind Israel, telling a Toronto publication that “an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada.” His office says Mr. Kent, the minister of state for Foreign Affairs of the Americas, was merely “paraphrasing” what Stephen Harper has said in the past regarding Israel. But the junior minister’s statement would appear to be evidence that the Harper government is shifting to an ever more solidly pro-Israel & treasonous stance.

NASA stonewalled my request for more than two years, until Climategate prompted me to offer notice of intent to sue if NASA did not comply immediately. On New Year’s Eve, NASA finally provided the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) with the documents I requested in August 2007. The emails show the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and suspect data management and integrity of NASA, wildly spinning in defense of their enterprise. The emails show NASA making off with enormous sums of taxpayer funding doing precisely what they claim only a “skeptic” would do. The emails show NASA attempting to scrub their website of their own documents, and indeed they quietly pulled down numerous press releases grounded in the proven-wrong data. The emails show NASA claiming that their own temperature errors (which they have been caught making and in uncorrected form aggressively promoting) are merely trivial, after years of hysterically trumpeting much smaller warming anomalies.

“When the US realized the capabilities of Iran's armed forces and the military maneuvers they can hold, it changed its mind and gave up plans to attack Iran," the Commander of Iran's Ground Forces Brig. Gen. Ahmad-Reza Pourdastan said. He noted that the US has carried out terrorist attacks in order to use them as pretexts to launch wars in the Middle East to control the world economy. “The US planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks with support from Zionists," Fars news agency quoted Pourdastan as saying on Wednesday. Yahoo: US has no plan for military action against Iran: Clinton.

Congressman Jason Chafetz just said that we need to be vigilant and continue to investigate 9/11. A nutjob, right? Maybe. But he joins quite a few other Congressmen:

Yesterday evening, the district court in Washington, D.C. ruled against two men who died in Guantanamo in June 2006 and their families in a case seeking to hold federal officials and the United States responsible for the men’s torture, arbitrary detention and ultimate deaths at Guantánamo. Following a two-year investigation, the military concluded that the men had committed suicide. Recent first-hand accounts by four soldiers stationed at the base at the time of the deaths, however, raise serious questions about the cause and circumstances of the deaths, including the possibility that the men died as the result of torture.

Steve Jacobs, Australias Funniest Weather Man, was Doing His Weather Report Live From Taronga Zoo, in Sydney, When a Nasty Pelican, Chomped on His Behind.