Al-Mizan centre for human rights issued its quarterly report on the Israeli violations of international humanitarian law against the Gaza people during the first three months of 2010. The center said that 13 Gazans were killed by the IOF during the reporting period and 62 others were injured, 11 of them were children. In addition, the IOF kidnapped 45 Gazans, 21 of them were fishermen and others were civilians collecting the rubble of destroyed structures in Gaza, according to the report. It showed that the IOF bulldozers leveled 30 dunums of lands and destroyed 14 houses during 13 incursions into the Strip.

The report also affirmed that that the IOF continued its attacks on Palestinians particularly near the eastern and northern Gaza borders with Israel, which is an area inside Gaza that Israel declared as a security buffer zone. Al-Mizan center's investigations indicate that the IOF always fires at any Palestinian near the eastern and northern borders and claims that its troops fire on Palestinians only when they are 300 meters from the border fence, but many attacks occurred when civilians were more than a kilometer from the borderline.

Campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs employees to President Obama are nearly seven times as much as President Bush received from Enron workers, according to numbers on OpenSecrets.org. President Bush's connections to Enron were well-hyped during the company's accounting debacle that rippled through the economy. Time magazine even had an article called, "Bush's Enron Problem." The Associated Press ran with the headline, "Bush-backing Enron makes big money off crisis." David Callaway wrote that Enron for Bush was worse than Whitewater for Clinton.

The Observer: Now we know the truth. The financial meltdown wasn't a mistake –IT WAS A CON:

The global financial crisis, it is now clear, was caused not just by the bankers' colossal mismanagement. No, it was due also to the new financial complexity offering up the opportunity for widespread, systemic fraud...

Beneath the complexity, the charges are all rooted in the same phenomenon – deception. Somebody, somewhere, was knowingly fooled by banks and bankers – sometimes governments over tax, sometimes regulators and investors over the probity of balance sheets and profits and sometimes, as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) says in Goldman's case, by creating a scheme to enrich one favoured investor at the expense of others – including, via RBS, the British [and U.S.] taxpayer.

Dear Andrea Merkel,
I read in the news that your German government has fined Bishop Richard Williamson 10,000 Euros for "partial Holocaust denial." According to reports, the 10,000 Euros fine reflects Williamson's public statement that he believes that "200,000 to 300,000 Jews died in Nazi concentration camps" rather than the widely touted figure of six million.

According to the dw-world.de report, you stated that the pope must "'clarify unambiguously that there can be no denying' that the Nazis killed six million Jews." So I am writing to tell you that as a Muslim and a nonbeliever in both papal infallibility and Zionist historiography, I am not going to endorse the six million figure even if the Pope threatens me with hellfire and damnation. After reading three books on the issue--Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust, Shermer's Denying History, and Dalton's Debating the Holocaust--I am now prepared to state that I find pre-eminent Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg's estimate of 5.1 million Jewish Holocaust victims a more reasonable estimate. AWIP: Bishop Williamson on trial in Germany for Holocaust denial.

A former Canadian Armed Forces’ interpreter has charged that Canada’s military handed over Afghan detainees whom it deemed uncooperative to the Afghan secret police so that information could be beaten out of them through torture. Testifying before a House of Commons committee last week, Ahmadshah Malgarai said he “saw Canadian military intelligence sending detainees to the NDS [Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security] when the detainees did not tell them what they expected to hear.” “If the [Canadian] interrogator thought a detainee was lying, the military sent him to NDS for more questions, Afghan style. Translation: abuse and torture.”

Wikileaks Claims Facebook Deleted Their Fan Page Because They "Promote Illegal Acts". Wikileaks Claims Facebook Deleted Their Fan Page Because They "Promote Illegal Acts"Secret-sharing website Wikileaks is at it again, tweeting allegations against people who have pissed them off. Previously, it was Robert Gates, whom they called a "liar". Tonight, it's Facebook, which Wikileaks claims deleted its 30,000 member-strong fan club. (Wikileaks—which was, of course, the outfit which leaked that infamous helicopter video —tweeted this a few moments ago.)

Google reveals government data requests and censorship. Brazil tops the list with 3,663 data requests while the US made 3,580 and the UK came a distant third with 1,166. Just last month the internet giant pulled its search engine out of China over online censorship issues. Google said it cannot provide statistics on requests from China which are regarded as state secrets. Brazil was also made the highest number of requests to Google to remove content with 291 calls between July and December 2009. In second place was Germany with 188, India with 142 and the US with 123 requests.

Federal security workers are now free to snoop through more than just your undergarments and luggage at the airport. Thanks to a recent series of federal court decisions, the digital belongings of international fliers are now open for inspection. This includes reading the saved e-mails on your laptop, scanning the address book on your iPhone or BlackBerry and closely scrutinizing your digital vacation snapshots.

The Space Shuttle Discovery returned safely to Earth on Tuesday after completing a 15-day resupply mission to the International Space Station, the 131st trip of the shuttle program. Discovery and its seven astronauts glided to a smooth landing at 9:08 am local time at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The shuttle and crew returned from a 10-day stay at the space station, a $100 billion project of 16 nations that has been under construction since 1998.

Mohammed Abu Jerrad, 12, works with his older brother and 4 others to gather their wheat. Although it is still somewhat early for harvesting, the family hopes to harvest their 5 dunams quickly, preferring the early harvest over the possibility that Israeli soldiers will demolish or lit afire their crops, as they have routinely done in the past. [One such incident occured in Johr Ad Dik last May, when Israeli soldiers shot incendiary devices into ripe wheat and barley fields, setting nearly 3 km, 200 dunams, of crops and fruit trees afire.]

Abu Jerrad’s 5 dunams lie roughly just over 300 metres from the border, along which Israeli military tower and remote controlled machine gun towers loom. From these towers, Israeli soldiers regularly shoot on farmers, workers gathering rubble and scrap metal for construction uses, and civilians on the land. This plot of wheat is on rented land.

“We grow it to feed our sheep and goats,” Abu Jerrad says of his 150 animals.
“This morning when we came here to work the Israelis began shooting, so we left,” he says.
“Yes, Mohammed was with us,” he answers of the 12 year old helping him.
“Sometimes they even shoot at the sheep,” he adds. “Are they afraid of the sheep?” he jokes.

A team of 20 Sherpa mountaineers plans to remove bodies of climbers who died in Mount Everest's "death zone," a treacherous stretch that has claimed some 300 lives since 1953, the team leader said Monday. The team also aims to remove tons of garbage left behind on the slopes under a Nepalese government program to clean up the popular tourist destination. The 20 Sherpas plan to begin the expedition May 1 and set up camp at the South Col, 26,240 feet (8,000 meters) above sea level, team leader Namgyal said. Just above the South Col is the "death zone" area known as the toughest stretch for climbers because of low oxygen levels and rough terrain.

In this image taken [at] (14:45 CET) by ESA’s Envisat satellite, a heavy plume of ash from the Eyjafjallajoekull Volcano is seen travelling in a roughly southeasterly direction. The volcano has been emitting steam and ash since its recent eruptions began on 20 March, and as observable, the emissions continue. The plume, visible in brownish-grey, is approximately 400 km long. Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer instrument (MERIS) acquired this image on 19 April, while working in Full Resolution Mode to provide a spatial resolution of 300 m. The Guardian: Iceland volcano: the key questions answered. NZ Herald: Mountain has long and hot history.

Israel pressured to get rid of its nukes: US, Britain and France may back Egypt's call for a nuclear-free Middle East. The 189 signatories to the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) will meet at UN headquarters in New York for a conference next month on the troubled pact whose credibility, analysts say, has been harmed by the atomic programs of Iran and North Korea and the failure of the big nuclear powers to disarm. Israel, like India and Pakistan, never signed the treaty and is not officially attending the conference. The Jewish state is presumed to have a sizable nuclear arsenal, although it has never confirmed or denied having atomic weapons.

NOT FOR SENSITIVE SOULS!