Two more US-led troops have been killed in separate incidents in volatile southern Afghanistan amid the climbing casualty counts among foreign troops. US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement that one of its soldiers died in a Thursday bomb strike in an area where Operation Moshtarak is continuing. According to the ISAF statement, the other soldier was killed in a vehicle accident. With the latest incidents, the death toll this year for foreign soldiers stationed in Afghanistan has hit 111. Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan: Two Americans shot dead in Garmsir, 7 coalition soldiers sustain loss of life and injuries.

Police will have powers to enter private homes and seize posters, and will be able to stop people carrying non-sponsor items to sporting events. "I think there will be lots of people doing things completely innocently who are going to be caught by this, and some people will be prosecuted, while others will be so angry about it that they will start complaining about civil liberties issues," Chadwick said.

Every police force in England and Wales will be equipped with mobile fingerprint scanners to check the identity of suspects anyone in the street. Up to 3,000 devices, the size of a mobile phone, will enable officers on patrol to cross-reference prints with national records. Senior officers claimed the scheme would speed up criminal inquiries, bring more people to justice and save thousands of hours of police time. But fears have arisen the technology could contribute to the so-called "surveillance state" and encourage random searches. Police said scanned fingerprints would only be stored for a short time while they were checked and would not be added to any databases.

[Editor's Comment:] They will be permanently stored in multiple databases. The police and the media are lying about this. Let us not fool ourselves.

Daily Mail: Spy chips hidden in 2.5 MILLION dustbins: 60pc rise in electronic bugs as council snoopers plan pay-as-you-throw tax.

The far-right politician Geert Wilders is poised to become the next Dutch prime minister after making major gains in regional elections. "We are going to conquer the entire country we are going to be the biggest party in the country," he said after the vote. "The leftist elite still believes in multiculturalism, coddling criminals, a European superstate and high taxes. But the rest of the Netherlands thinks differently. That silent majority now has a voice."

The election of a far-right British National party councillor in the Isle of Dogs in September 1993 still stands as the most graphic justification of what the liberal urban elite has come to hold as an article of faith: that many of the white working-class inhabitants of "cockney" east London are socially regressive and profoundly, irredeemably xenophobic. That simmering racial tension between the white working class and the large Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets has existed for more than 30 years is indisputable. But while conventional liberal opinion has tended to attribute its causes solely to white racism, the truth is far more complex.

On March 9 and 10, there will be a Haiti conference in Miami for private military and security companies to showcase their services to governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working in the earthquake-devastated country.

Prompted by the controversy over the showing of the film Rachel at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the federation just announced this stunning set of McCarthyite policy guidelines which seek to sever any public ties that ANY Bay area grantees -including progressive synagogues and arts and educational organizations- have with groups that support Boycotts, Divestment or Sanctions in whole or part, or who “delegitimize Israel”

A video obtained by Ynet depicts Jewish residents of east Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood during their Purim celebrations singing songs of praise for Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish terrorist who murdered 29 Palestinians 16 years ago at the Cave of the Patriarchs.

Harry’s Place has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with someone over the last two days to bring you this video of the homophobic lunatic Abdul Karim Hattin speaking at the East London Mosque.

Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be "an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach" to gut the credibility of skeptics. In private e-mails obtained by The Washington Times, climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of "being treated like political pawns" and need to fight back in kind. Their strategy includes forming a nonprofit group to organize researchers and use their donations to challenge critics by running a back-page ad in the New York Times.

It was supposed to be a bit of fun during recent heavy snow, but one family's snow sculpture has earned a frosty reception. Maria Conneran and her family had worked hard to create their armless, nude snow lady in the front garden of their home in Rahway, New Jersey. But despite several compliments on their chilly version of the Venus de Milo, the family were forced to cover up her blushes after complaints from other residents. The icy goddess, which was visible from the roadside, had attracted admiring glances from passing motorists.

But Rahway police sent a patrolman to the Conneran home after they received an anonymous complaint 'of a naked snow woman', according to Sergeant Dominick Sforza. Elisa Gonzalez, a court reporter who built the snow goddess with her daughter Maria, 21, and son Jack Shearing, 12, was shocked after being asked to cover up her assets. She said: 'She was curvaceous, bodacious and booty-licious. But she had a six-pack! 'I thought she looked more objectified and sexualised after you put the bikini on.'

A cat has survived four weeks in a freezer by eating frozen peas and licking ice. The one-year-old cat was miraculously found alive by RSPCA workers but lost both of its ears and his tail to frostbite, The Sun newspaper reports. The cat, which has been nicknamed Frosty, is thought to have gotten into the warehouse freezer of a food distribution centre in Northamptonshire, central England, on the back of a truck.

The training of mine detection rats is one of APOPO's daily core activities. The procedure consists of several consecutive training phases, starting from early socialization at the age of four weeks, to final internal accreditation on real mines on APOPO's test and training fields. At each training stage the rats have to pass a "blind" test before continuing to the next level. When the rats have learned how to discriminate the TNT scent, they are trained on a soil-covered surface to search for small containers containing TNT among other targets. From there they will move on to detect surface-laid mines and will gradually search for deeper buried mines, covering larger areas until they are ready for an accreditation test on 400 square meters of mined area. Only when they successfully pass this test will they be licensed for export to the operational areas.

Tony Baldry MP has set libel lawyers Olswang on British bloggers who have had the temerity to refer to this extremely interesting article from Sahara Reporters. Olswang state that Baldry has been hired as a QC to defend the truly horrible James Ibori on charges of money laundering. Ibori was Governor of Delta State in Nigeria, scene of appalling environmental devastation, dreadful human rights abuse, and massive corruption from the oil industry. Ibori chose to launder millions of pounds of his looted wealth through London. The Nigerian government refused to extradite him to the UK, but family and associates of his in London face money laundering charges.

Turkey has recalled its ambassador from the US and condemned a Washington panel's move to declare the killing of Armenians by Ottoman forces in the first world war a "genocide". "We condemn this resolution which accuses the Turkish nation of a crime it has not committed," Ankara said in a statement on Thursday. "Following this development, our ambassador to Washington, Namik Tan, was recalled to Ankara for consultations." PressTV: Turkey recalls its US envoy over 'genocide' resolution.

Joseph Stiglitz - former head economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a nobel-prize winner - said yesterday that the very structure of the Federal Reserve system is so fraught with conflicts that it is "corrupt" and undermines democracy. Stiglitz said: If we [i.e. the IMF] had seen a governance structure that corresponds to our Federal Reserve system, we would have been yelling and screaming and saying that country does not deserve any assistance, this is a corrupt governing structure.

The following people question the government's version of 9/11, or the government's openness in providing information about the September 11 attacks.

[Girls smeared with colored powder are splashed with colored water as they celebrate Holi in the southern Indian city of Chennai on March 1, 2010. (REUTERS/Babu) #]

Last Monday (March 1st), people in India and other countries with large Hindu populations celebrated Holi, the Festival of Colors. A welcoming of Spring, Holi is celebrated as the triumph of good over evil. Hindu devotees and others enthusiastically drop their inhibitions, and chase each other in temples and through the streets, playfully splashing colorful paint, powder and water on each other. People also attend bonfires to commemorate the story of Prahlada, a Hindu figure and devout follower of Lord Vishnu who prevailed over his father and the demoness Holika with the power of his devotion. Collected here are a handful of images from this year's Festival of Colors. (37 photos total)