US President Barack Obama plans to release a review of the US nuclear arms strategy that purportedly restricts the use of its nuclear arms against most non-atomic states except Iran and North Korea. The Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which the US Congress requires all US administrations to submit at least once during their tenure, will be issued one day before Obama leaves for Prague to sign a new nuclear-arms treaty with Russia.

Israel, India, and Pakistan are the only regimes with nuclear warheads that have refused to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But, Obama made no reference to any of those nuclear-armed powers. Although Israel has not declared its possession of nuclear weapons, it has neither denied it, nor has it submitted to any international inspection. The Israeli regime is widely believed to possess over 200 atomic warheads. AntiWar: Obama Policy Retains "Right" to Nuke Iran.

The Obama administration should be seriously considering a strike on Iran, according to neoconservative Fox News contributor Bill Kristol. An Israeli Deputy Defense Minister said last week that he expected Israel would have to attack Iran within a year. Kristol believes it would be better for the US to attack first. "I think we have to have a credible threat of force and the preparation to use force against Iran. It would be much better if we used force against -- to delay the Iranian nuclear program than if Israel did and there is no evidence that the US government is being at all serious about the use force there," Kristol told Fox News' Chris Wallace Sunday.

[This video shows men gathering on a Baghdad street on July 12, 2007, shortly before they were fired upon. View related photos wikileaks.org] A senior U.S. military official said Monday that a gritty war video that shows U.S. forces firing repeatedly on people along a Baghdad street was authentic. However, the Pentagon would not confirm the video's authenticity. The incident on July 12, 2007, happened the same day and in the same area that a Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, and his driver were killed. Two children also were wounded. The senior military official said that the video posted Monday at Wikileaks.org was of a 2007 incident in the New Baghdad District of eastern Baghdad. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the video and a Pentagon investigation have never been released. PressTV: New video shows US choppers mowing down Iraqis. AntiWar: Wikileaks Releases Video of US Copters Killing Iraqi Civilians. AWIP: Collateral Murder -Video [MSNBC Video HERE] Uruknet: Video: Wikileaks - New background material from Iraq. Collateral Murder: Select your source: Transcripts/Downloads.

RAWA/The Guardian: Wikileaks reveals video showing US air crew shooting down Iraqi civilians:

Footage of July 2007 attack made public as Pentagon identifies WikiLeaks as "threat to national security." A secret video showing US air crew falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight in Baghdad and then laughing at the dead after launching an air strike that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for Reuters news agency, was revealed by Wikileaks today. The release of the video from Baghdad also comes shortly after the US military admitted that its special forces attempted to cover up the killings of three Afghan women in a raid in February by digging the bullets out of their bodies.

IMEMC: The Palestinian Center for Defending the Detainees (PCDD) issued a press release on Monday stating that Israel is holding captive nearly 340 Palestinian children, depriving them of their basic rights and subjecting them to ongoing violations. The center said that while the Palestinians mark the Palestinian Child day, detained children are still facing abuse and violations, including torture and solitary confinement in dark tiny cells. Redress: Israel’s choice of lawlessness and defiance.

[In this Sept. 19, 1996 file photo, Wilma Mankiller, former Cherokee Nation chief, speaks during a news conference in Tulsa, Okla. Mankiller, was one of the few women ever to lead a major American Indian tribe, died Tuesday April 6, 2010 after battling pancreatic cancer. She was 64. (AP Photo/Michael Wyke)]

Former Cherokee Nation Chief Wilma Mankiller, one of the nation's most visible American Indian leaders and one of the few women to lead a major tribe, died Tuesday after suffering from cancer and other health problems. She was 64. Mankiller, whose first taste of federal policy toward Indians came when her family ended up in a housing project after a government relocation project, took Indian issues to the White House and met with three presidents. She earned a reputation for facing conflict head-on. As the first female chief of the Cherokees, from 1985 to 1995, Mankiller led the tribe in tripling its enrollment, doubling employment and building new health centers and children's programs. Mankiller, whose first taste of federal policy toward Indians came when her family ended up in a housing project after a government relocation project, took Indian issues to the White House and met with three presidents. She earned a reputation for facing conflict head-on. As the first female chief of the Cherokees, from 1985 to 1995, Mankiller led the tribe in tripling its enrollment, doubling employment and building new health centers and children's programs.

Precious Metal Commodity traders from J.P. Morgan’s [Chase] investment bank are using the bank’s massive market share to periodically and in an artificial manner, drive down the price of silver via shorts. This allows the House of Morgan to buttress their physical Silver reserves, as according to some current estimates silver is leveraged at a rate of 100 to 1, meaning that for every ounce of actual silver, there exist 100 paper claims, in a manner similar to the practice of fractional reserve banking1. Moreover, it allows the House of Morgan to reap additional massive profits off the backs of those caught outside of the short-loop in silver, but even this is not the endgame.

The United States on Monday dismissed Iran's plans to hold a nuclear disarmament conference, saying it needed only to "look in the mirror" if it was serious about the issue. Iran announced Sunday it would hold a disarmament conference days after next week's nuclear security summit in Washington and said China, which has resisted new sanctions against the Islamic regime, would attend. "If Iran is interested in strengthening the non-proliferation regime, it can start by looking in the mirror," State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told reporters.

Nick Berg, CIA infiltrator at the Univ. of Oklahoma, bought the 9/11 hijacker's airline ticket from an OU library computer terminal. On 5/14/04, CNN reported that Moussaoui had used Berg's email account, when he was in Oklahoma. CNN then fabricated the remainder of the story. Ever since his decapitation in Iraq last spring, I have suspected that Nick Berg was a CIA-sponsored infiltrator at the University of Oklahoma, and was the one who bought the 9/11 hijacker's airline ticket from an OU library computer terminal. I believe the CIA set him up to be killed in Iraq, so the secret would die with him. Another very important fact supporting this suspicion came to mind today. On May 14, 2004, CNN reported that Moussaoui had used Berg's email account and password, when he was in Norman, Oklahoma. Apparently the FBI discovered Berg's information on his computer hard drive when they searched it in the fall of 2001.

A supertanker carrying about US$160 million of crude oil from Iraq to the United States is believed to have been hijacked by Somali pirates, officials said, the latest high-value bargaining chip for the sea bandits. Similar seizures of oil supertankers in the waters off the coast of lawless Somalia have yielded ransoms as high as $5.5 million. A South Korean navy destroyer was rushing toward the supertanker but its highly volatile cargo prevents crews from carrying guns on board or even lighting cigarettes while on deck.

This video is a critique of catastrophic man-made global warming theory, based on presentation slides used in a series of public presentations and debates in late 2009 and early 2010. The author is Warren Meyer, author of the web site climate-skeptic.com.

While the world has almost certainly warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age in the early 19th century, and while it is fairly clear that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses may be responsible for some of this warming, climate alarmists are grossly overestimating the sensitivity of climate to CO2, and thus overestimating future man-made warming.

Roghun is the Tajik government's catchall solution to the slow pace of Tajikistan's development since the breakup of the Soviet Union almost 20 years ago. Under-investment and dependence on an ageing Soviet regional grid have caused chronic power-cuts that have affected every household, hospital, business and classroom in the country.

A floating boom will be used to contain any more oil that leaks from a coal carrier stranded on a shoal in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Salvage experts are aboard the Shen Neng 1, offshore from Rockhampton where it's being battered against the shoal it rammed at top speed on Saturday while about 30km off course.

Pope Benedict has acknowledged that the Roman Catholic Church is in "times of difficulty" but avoided direct comment on sex abuse, as the Vatican faced fresh criticism over a string of scandals. After a series of paedophile priest revelations cast a pall over the holiest week in the Christian calendar, the embattled pontiff spoke of priests' special responsibilities to society in an Easter Monday prayer.

British prime minister Gordon Brown defended his handling of the economic recovery overnight as he prepared to fire the starting gun on a general election that opinion polls suggest he could lose. Mr Brown is expected to visit the Queen on Tuesday (local time) to dissolve parliament and kick-start a month-long election campaign culminating on May 6 in what many predict will be a close-run battle. Campaigning has effectively been in full swing for weeks, but the looming official announcement will sharpen the fight in a contest where the Conservatives, led by David Cameron, are bidding to oust Labour from power after 13 years in opposition. The UK has edged out of its longest recession on record and the economy is set to dominate the campaign.

A major earthquake of 7.2 magnitude which struck at forty seconds after 3:40 p.m. PDT on Easter Sunday, April 4, 2010 was centered 39 miles (63 kilometers) SSE of Calexico, CA in the upper Baja California peninsula of Mexico, near the town of Guadalupe Victoria. There are reports of extensive damage to buildings in Mexicali and elsewhere within the northern Baja California peninsula of Mexico. Tremors from the quake lasted about forty seconds, rattling windows, knocking objects from shelves, and causing water main breaks and building cracks in San Diego, 140 miles to the north and west. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) seismologist Lucy Jones, over 20 million people in the U.S. and Mexico felt the quake.

Terminal 2 of San Diego International Airport (SAN) was briefly evacuated as a precation to give building engineers time to evaluate possible structural damage, after acoustic ceiling tiles came loose. Passengers who had already cleared TSA checkpoints were directed outside, a safe distance from the terminal, and later screened through security again.

The Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war has raised important questions about the creeping centralisation of power in the UK. Tony Blair's return from the dead this week, ostensibly to help Labour over the election, raises some interesting questions about his future. There are really three issues arising out of the Chilcot inquiry. The first is what happens if, in accordance with the known facts, the inquiry concludes that Blair committed the UK without consultation to a war in Iraq 11 months before the invasion; played down intelligence briefings that evidence of Saddam's WMD was sporadic and patchy; invented or inflated claims to show that the threat was much greater than he knew it to be; and tried to prevent the attorney general's judgment reaching the cabinet that the war was illegal without a second UN resolution and then leant on him to change his mind?