Press TV's journalist Amina Taylor, searches for the truth behind the headlines of the most important stories in the UK. This time it is the Jewish Lobby. [Thanks to Gilad Atzmon.]

NATO Secretary General expressed condolences to Afghan people today after Afghanistan's government condemned a NATO air strike on a convoy of vehicles in the south of the country, which killed at least 27 civilians. NATO in a statement earlier said it had hit a suspected insurgent convoy, but troops then found "a number of individuals killed and wounded", including women and children in Uruzgan province. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he spoke to Afghan President Hamid Karzai “to express, through him, my deep condolences to the Afghan people for the tragic loss of innocent Afghan lives in recent military operations.”?? AWIP: US [Nato] raid kills 27 Afghan civilians. The Independent: Karzai warns Operation Moshtarak is killing "too many" civilians.

[Editor's Comment:] NATO's Secretary General has offered his "condolences" and Gen. McChrystal is "deeply saddened". That's a lot of tears & grief, even for crocodiles like these. Then we take it 27 dead civilians are not "too many", after all, Mr. Karzai?

Abdolmalek Rigi, ringleader of the Pakistan-based terrorist group of Jundallah, was captured in an operation on Tuesday. Reports say Rigi was captured on a flight from Dubai to Kyrgyzstan. Iranian Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar told reporters that Rigi was arrested outside the country as he was preparing for a new act of sabotage. The minister added that he was consequently transferred to Iran. APA: Iran arrest Jundollah rebel leader Abdul Malik Rigi. PressTV: Iran expounds on Rigi's links with CIA, Mossad. + Rigi's brother exposes US ties with Jundullah.

The Torture Memos will forever be known as the work of John Yoo, the former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer who took the lead in preparing them. But the internal Justice Department report on the memos, released Friday, reveals that a less experienced OLC attorney, working under Yoo, played a key role in the process -- in some cases writing initial drafts of the opinions before getting feedback from Yoo and others. The name of that lawyer is redacted throughout the report. But in what appears to be an oversight in the redaction process, a footnote identifies her as Jennifer Koester. Political Friendster: Jennifer Koester Hardy's Friends. Slate: Jennifer Koester Hardy helped John Yoo write the torture memos. Harper's: Scott Horton: Unredacting the OPR Report. [You can find the Office of Professional Responsibility Report HERE.]

THE .50 CALIBER Bushmaster bolt action rifle is a serious weapon. The model that Pvt. 1st Class Lee Pray is saving up for has a 2,500-yard range and comes with a Mark IV scope and an easy-load magazine. When the 25-year-old drove me to a mall in Watertown, New York, near the Fort Drum Army base, he brought me to see it in its glass case—he visits it periodically, like a kid coveting something at the toy store. It'll take plenty of military paychecks to cover the $5,600 price tag, but he considers the Bushmaster essential in his preparations to take on the US government when it declares martial law.

A YouTube comedy classic here, as random Americans on the street are stopped by a fake news reporter who is in fact part of an Australian TV program geared towards making fun of the United States. Yes, these morons may have been cherry-picked and anyone who gave an intelligent answer to the questions asked were probably left on the cutting room floor – but its still both funny and revealing to watch such epic levels of ignorance. As a side note, it also shows how a guy like George W was re-elected for a second term as well as the future base for Tea Baggers.

The incomes of the very rich in the US grew phenomenally between 1992 and 2007, while their tax rates plummeted, according to recently uncovered IRS statistics. The figures were published on the IRS web site in December of 2009, but received little notice because they were not announced. The report only became widely known when Tax Analysts, a news outlet for tax information, discovered the document and wrote about it on its web site, tax.com, on Thursday.

With CO2 driven global warming becoming more discredited by new scientific evidence every day, the world's meddling climate regulators are casting about for a new gas to demonize. Last year the US Environmental Protection Agency was reportedly thinking of even classifying water vapor as a pollutant, due to its central role in global warming. Because water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, accounting for the majority of the Earth's natural greenhouse effect, water vapor emissions during human activities—such as the processing and burning of fossil fuels—are again coming under increasing scrutiny by government regulators.

Bill Nye the Science Guy was totally clobbered in a debate against meteorologist Joe Bastardi from AccuWeather over global warming on the O'Reilly Factor last night. The utterly mortifying results of this debate are what occur when an actual scientist with a degree in meteorology, Joe Bastardi, debates a pro-global warming, self-professed "scientist" in Bill Nye whose biggest claim to fame, ridiculously, was hosting a pre-teen kids show on PBS during the 90s. Bill Nye, of course, shocked his one or two, remaining fans (who can even remember him) from his 90s TV show when he went on Rachel Maddow's program on MSNBC on February 10 and assaulted Americans who disbelieve in global warming as somehow being unpatriotic. WUWT: Bill O’Reilly hosts Bill Nye The Science Guy and AccuWeather’s Joe Bastardi in Fox News Debate. Watch the segment HERE.

Cheney has had four heart attacks, starting when he was 37. He has had quadruple bypass surgery and two artery-clearing angioplasties.

This a damning chart. It implicates a lot of people, including some of the same Democrats who are now joining Republicans in assailing the president for budgeted deficits, but who voted for the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Feb 16th, 2010: The Salvation Army has launched “The Truth isn’t Sexy” campaign to raise public awareness about human trafficking in the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. As Trisha Baptie, a former sex-trade worker said, “It’s human slavery. There are women in brothels in Vancouver right now, and more will come before the Games.”

The Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad, will neither deny nor accept responsibility for the murder of Hamas weapons dealer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. But one of the alleged Dubai assassins, a man working under the alias Michael Bodenheimer, left traces in Cologne, Germany and Herzliya, Israel.

Israeli soldiers have clashed with protesters in the West Bank town of Hebron after two disputed shrines were listed as Israeli heritage sites. Palestinian protesters threw bottles and stones at soldiers who responded with tear gas and stun grenades. The protesters say the move to list the shrines as heritage sites would restrict Muslims access to them, but this has been denied. AWIP: Israel does not only steal lands, Israel steals also History and Heritage with no shame!

A fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Martin Kramer, has called for “the West” to take measures to curb the births of Palestinians, a proposal that appears to meet the international legal definition of a call for genocide. Kramer rejects common views that Islamist “radicalization” is caused by US policies such as support for Israel, or propping up despotic dictatorships, and stated that it was inherent in the demography of Muslim societies such as Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Too many children, he argued, leads to too many “superfluous young men” who then become violent radicals. Kramer proposes that the number of Palestinian children born in the Gaza Strip should be deliberately curbed, and alleged that this would “happen faster if the West stops providing pro-natal subsidies to Palestinians with refugee status.”

Since Israel occupied the East side of the city of Jerusalem in 1967, it continued to construct Israeli settlements in and around the city; an act that is illegal under international law.

[Dying breed: One of the emaciated tigers in a cage at the Xiongshen Tiger and Bear Mountain Village in Guilin, China] Behind rusted bars, a skeletal male tiger lies panting on the filthy concrete floor of his cage, covered in sores and untreated wounds. His once-fearsome body is so emaciated it is little more than a pitiful pile of fur and bones.

Death is surely a matter of days away and can only come as a welcome release. Wardens at the wildlife park in southwest China say, indifferently, that they do not expect him to see the start of the Year of the Tiger which began last Sunday.

'What can we do?' a female park official asks a small huddle of visitors with a sigh and a casual shrug. 'He's dying, of course, but we have to keep feeding him until he does. It's against the law to kill tigers.'

At the highest levels of the US military, a quiet discussion is going on about putting in place a legal framework that would permit the US government to strip American citizenship from terrorists. The case of Las Cruces, New Mexico born al Qaeda commander Anwar al-Aulaqi, who has been a key organizer and recruiter for the terrorist organization in Yemen is the primary driver of this exploration of possibly modifying US law to allow "de-citizening."

Cluster bombs have killed 12,000 people in the 37 years since they were dropped on Laos. As nations ratify a ban on the explosives, a team of women is taking on the responsibility of clearing them.

1000 US "soldiers" killed so far. AOL News: US Death Toll Reaches 1,000 in Afghanistan. ABC News: 4 more NATO soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

[Editor's Comment:] They came to kill & maim for Empire. They got what they deserved. We certainly hope the Afghans can manage to kill as many of the occupants as it takes to get the rest of them out. No more, no less, until the cost/benefit estimate becomes unfavorable to the attacking nations. This occupation is a war crime in itself. The "Security" Council is under US and Zionist control. Its "mandates (ISAF) are illegitimate and based upon lies.

The youngest exo-planet to orbit a solar-type star has been discovered, astronomers announce. The planet has been named BD+20 1790b and was found by an international team, including astronomers from University of Hertfordshire, Dr. Maria Cruz Gálvez-Ortiz and Dr. John Barnes.

The newly discovered planet is about six times the size of Jupiter and is only about 35 million years old. BD+20 1790b orbits a relatively young and active central star even closer than Mercury orbits the Sun.

"The planet was detected by searching for very small variations in the velocity of the host star, caused by the gravitational tug of the planet as it orbits -- the so-called 'Doppler wobble technique.' Overcoming the interference caused by the activity was a major challenge for the team, but with enough data from an array of large telescopes the planet's signature was revealed." said Dr. Cruz as she explained how the planet was discovered.