Trivial Number of Defectors, Many Rejoined Insurgency. As NATO looks to spend more than $1 billion in bribe money set aside for trying to lure Taliban fighters away from the insurgency and into supporting the Karzai government, a new report reveals how much success they’ve had so far. The report, by the Kabul-based Afghan Analysts Network, warns that the reintegration strategy is being run so poorly that it has only lured some 646 Taliban to defect, and only a handful of commanders.

Nick Clegg’s sudden forward sprint in the British elections has the political establishment in Britain in an uproar – and the Americans are suddenly noticing that they might have a slight problem on their hands. Obama ran as a committed interventionist, refusing to take an attack on Iran off the table, and emphasizing that he wanted to implement a "smarter" and stylistically more palatable — albeit no less energetic — brand of interventionism. Clegg, on the other hand, is explicitly offering British voters a real alternative to the "Atlanticist" policies loyally upheld by "New" Labor and the Conservatives, and that is a foreign policy that puts Britain, and British interests, first. He mocks the "lopsided asymmetrical" nature of the "special relationship," and descries "subservience" to Washington. His enemies characterize this as "anti-Americanism," as Gordon Brown did repeatedly during Thursday’s foreign policy debate, but as usual he misses the point: Clegg’s not "anti-" anything, he’s pro-British.

As the country's attention is directed to the Goldman-Sachs scandal, a much greater story lurks beneath the surface involving massive government corruption that makes Wall Street firms pale in comparison. The current government of the United States of America under the leadership of Barack Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress is the single most corrupt entity in the nation, worse than all of the private sector scandals combined. One would be hard-pressed to find an era of U.S history when government was any more corrupt than it is at present.

Jakarta Globe: The Goldman Probe Is a Smokescreen:

“The target now is Goldman Sachs. You distract the masses with a villain,” he said at the Asian Public Real Estate Association Forum in Singapore. Goldman’s leading role on Wall Street, coupled with massive paychecks to staff and bumper profits, make it an obvious target."

[Editor's Comment:] The above statements do not wash. Goldman Sachs is a villain for sure as is the US government. You only have to read THIS to see what Goldman Sachs is all about. -It isn't pretty!

Pajamas Media: Will Obama’s Goldman Sachs Attack Expose Al Gore? Or Other Dems?

About a decade ago, Goldman executives recognized that personal fortunes could be made with the invention of a carbon trading system through the passage of a U.S. cap-and-trade bill. This area was well suited to Goldman Sachs, the architects behind the complex world of futures trading and exotic derivatives.

Whether Wall Street colossus Goldman Sachs has committed a crime remains to be seen, but the investigation may well uncover the environmental lobby and its public figurehead. For nearly a decade, Goldman Sachs has been a quiet but major investor in cap and trade. And Goldman’s main investment partner has been Al Gore.

It is well documented that climate models have been abject failures as global predictive tools, and should not be relied upon by policy makers for global decisions. The newest research confirms that the models are also incorrect regarding regional predictions, including the Arctic area climate. AFP: Challenge to IPCC's Bangladesh climate predictions. WUWT: Earth gives us an Earth Day present: Arctic sea ice is highest for this date in 8 years.

The global banking elite are preparing to assault Americans with two huge new tax increases as President Obama contradicts the assurances of White House aides and his own campaign trail promise by asserting that a VAT tax is still on the table, as the IMF outlines a new tax on financial transactions that is being hailed as a blow to the banks yet represents another stealth tax on the people. “President Barack Obama suggested Wednesday that a new value-added tax on Americans is still on the table, seeming to show more openness to the idea than his aides have expressed in recent days,” reports the Associated Press. According to hate groups like the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose material is used to train police and federal authorities in America on who to target, getting upset about the fresh onslaught of pillaging you are about to suffer as it is openly announced means you’re an extremist, a racist, and possibly even a terrorist who should be silenced.

The prospect of the US moving forward with unilateral sanctions against Iran seems all but assured today, after the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that set up talks with the Senate on a finalized bill. With a vote of 403-11, the vote saw only seven Democrats and four Republicans oppose the measure. Three others voted “present.” The measure would attempt to block companies across the world from doing business with Iran in importing gasoline and other vital goods Iran does not produce domestically, a move with has been designed to “cripple” Iran’s economy in retaliation for refusing to abandon its civilian nuclear program. Though today’s vote was mostly procedural, it likely gives a good indication to what the final vote will look like.

US Vice President Joe Biden dismisses the notion that Israel might attack Iran, saying that Tel Aviv has agreed to await the outcome of new sanctions against Tehran. "Everyone from the Israeli prime minister straight through to the British prime minister to the president of Russia, everyone agrees the next step we should take is the UN sanction route," Biden told a program on ABC television on Thursday. Israel, which is the only entity in the Middle East that possesses nuclear weapons, has repeatedly voiced its determination to halt Iran's nuclear program, even through military means.

[Editor's Comment:] Biden's statement makes him the Neville Chamberlain of our time ("Peace for our time"). Israel is expansionist, nuclear armed and dangerous. Biden is a simpleton and his appeasement will of course not stop Israel from attacking Iran. The Israeli and the US governments will morph into some form of fascism, (Nazism v. 2.0), and will stop at nothing until they're destroyed by their own hubris, arrogance & greed. War seems inevitable. If it happens, few will survive to tell the story.

Map of secret US detention facilities around the world.

An offshore oil rig where fired raged for more than 24 hours following a massive explosion, has sunk in the Gulf of Mexico. The rig's sinking on Thursday raised fears of a major oil spill and dimmed hopes of finding alive 11 workers who are still missing after the blast. There are fears that more than 1.2 million litres of crude oil a day could pour into the water after the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon, a spill that could reach the coast of the US state of Louisiana, about 80km away. The rig was doing exploratory drilling off Louisiana when the explosion and fire occurred, sending a column of black smoke hundreds of metres in the air. Oil giant BP, which contracted the rig, said it has mobilised four aircraft that can spread chemicals to break up the oil and 32 vessels, including a big storage barge to suck up oil from the water. "It certainly has the potential to be a major spill," Dave Rainey, BP's vice-president for the Gulf of Mexico, said. Examiner: Earth Day deadly tragedy: Flaming oil rig sinks in Gulf of Mexico; 11 workers missing.

The case of the missing 92 CIA interrogation tapes would be a good subject for a modern day Agatha Christie mystery. Someone at the CIA decided the tapes had to be destroyed — even at the risk of an obstruction of justice charge — but no one's confessing. By now John Durham, the assistant U.S. attorney investigating the tapes' destruction, must be scratching his head wondering if everyone at the CIA was complicit.

[Editor's Comment:] Why the CIA Interrogation Tapes were destroyed? -Pretty obvious, isn't it? This dumb Time Magazine piece is typical of the MSM when they're in obfuscation/fire extinguishing mode. That's when they stoop to the level of talking about an "Agatha Christie mystery"...and about the CIA being "complicit".

People in the Media are rightly seen as being cowards -asking questions when facts and statements are called for ("Did the CIA want to destroy graphic evidence of sleep-deprivation or waterboarding?") But as far as we can tell, they mostly do this to take the mickey out of the explosive facts, to make them more innocuous, sort of. -Next thing you see is a cartoon they've made that shows a dead torture victim coming a live again doing a breakdance on Obama's desk in the Oval Office...or maybe Kentucky Fried will come up with a new product that the Media will promote...let's say The Abu Ghraib Fried____(fill in the blank yourself).

To set the matter straight: the CIA actually committed horrible crimes (still commits them), deliberately deleted the tapes and is guilty as hell and: covering them up (or "explaining" them and/or "analysing" them), the Media certainly are complicit in these crimes. And as for Agatha Christie thing? -There's no mystery here. None at all.

Antifascisme er ikke terrorisme. Det var det ikke under besættelsen, og det er det heller ikke i dag. To unge mænd, der har tilknytning til det antifascistiske miljø i København, sidder fængslet. Den ene har siddet i isolation i halvanden måned. Den anden blev fængslet i sidste uge. Og politiet antyder, at der er flere anholdelser på vej. De to er blandt andet sigtet efter den såkaldte milde terrorparagraf, som kan give op til seks års års fængsel. Paragraffen handler om støtte til grupper, der med magt forsøger at fremkalde forstyrrelse af samfundsordenen. Her henvises direkte til de to sigtedes tilknytning til Antifascistisk Aktion (AFA). Vi står midt i en alvorlig krise, hvor arbejderklassen er udset til at betale regningen for bankpakker og skattelettelser til de rige. Historien viser, at netop i sådan en situation har racistiske og fascistiske kræfter ekstra let spil. AWIP/Thomas Elholm: Terrorlister og retsstaten. AWIP/Patrick Mac Manus: Lovgivningen terroriserer de demokratiske rettigheder + 9 Theses: The Right to Rebellion.

Gary Jackson, the former president of Blackwater (you know, the guy facing a slew of felony charges, including conspiring to falsify documents and federal weapons charges), appeared in court this week where prosecutors accused him of running Blackwater with a “scofflaw” attitude. Joe Neff of the Raleigh News and Observer reveals this nugget: Jackson’s salary at Blackwater was a whopping $1.5 million a year. His severance package: $425,000 a year for 5 years. Oh, and here’s some caramel for your tasty apple: 90% of Blackwater’s revenue has come from the US government. Yeah, US taxpayers are really lucky to have been paying 90% of this guy’s $1.5 million salary. That’s about what the average US general makes, right? Not even close.

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev’s claims that Israel had not officially rejected a US demand for a settlement freeze in occupied East Jerusalem was quickly negated today when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on national television, did exactly that. “I am saying one thing. There will be no freeze in Jerusalem,” Netanyahu declared, adding that he considered any precondition for peace talks to be unacceptable.

The criminal treatment of animals by the IDF and the jewish squatters is not directed at the animals per se, but is part of their strategy of genocide and ethnic cleansing against us Palestinians. The animals, donkeys, mulis, sheep, goats, chicken, dogs, cats … are kept by their owners as part of their business. They represent work resources, food, the livelihood of these farmers and their families. The purpose of “arresting” (holding for ransom), stealing, killing these animals and to destroy or poison artesian wells is to ruinate their owners. One the animals have been exterminated and the wells poisoned or destroyed, these farmers are expelled from their lands, which are duly declared “military zone” by the IDF or the thieves from the so-called civil administration.

It was an early morning, farmers relieved to have harvested the 6 dunam (1 dunam is roughly 1000 square metres) field of lentils planted 5 months ago in Al Faraheen borderlands. The village, east of Khan Younis, includes land cut off to farmers by the Israeli-imposed "buffer zone". That technically 300 metre no-go zone stretching south to north along Gaza’s border with Israel actually extends far beyond the few hundred metres, up to 2 km in some areas where Palestinian civilians have been shot, injured or killed, by Israeli soldiers while on their land. Abu Qater Tabbash has 100 dunams of land he can no longer access, he says, because it lies in the buffer zone. The land he worked today, along with 5 women from his family, is rented land. Their crop will not pay off, but it will provide lentils for the family and hay for their animals.

The creators of TV show South Park have been warned by Islamists they could face violent retribution for depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit. A posting on the website of the US-based group, Revolution Muslim, threatened creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker saying they would 'probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh'. The reference was to The Dutch film-maker who was shot and stabbed to death in 2004 by an Islamist angered by his film about Muslim women.

BRUSSELS, April 22 (Reuters) - Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme's government collapsed on Thursday after the Flemish liberal party pulled out of his five-month-old coalition, causing a crisis that could damage its fragile economy. Leterme, 49, tendered his government's resignation to King Albert after an emergency cabinet meeting, but the monarch did not immediately decide whether to accept it. "The king and the prime minister jointly underlined that, in the current circumstances, a political crisis would be inopportune and would seriously damage both the economic and social well-being of the citizens and the role of Belgium in Europe," the palace said in a written statement. Political analysts said Leterme might be persuaded to stay on. Otherwise parliament would have to be dissolved and an election held within 40 days.

A law making Belgium Europe’s first country to ban the burka was scuppered at the last moment yesterday after the collapse of the coalition government. MPs were hours from voting on proposals to outlaw full face veils when parliament was thrown into disarray with the resignation of prime minister Yves Leterme after only five months in office. AWIP: Jail or fines if Belgium's burqa ban made law + Video.

Five Israelis, including a retired army general, have been charged with running a human organ sales ring that ensnared dozens of potential victims. Court papers say the ring exploited the desperate condition of sick people, calling it a “form of modern slavery”. Police said the traffickers allegedly offered up to €70,000 per kidney but in at least two cases did not pay the donors.

Identified in the lawsuit as "John Doe 16" of Illinois, he wrote a March 5, 1995, letter to then-Vatican Secretary of State Angelo Sodano alleging that Rev. Lawrence Murphy molested him for years. Previously, it was believed that the Vatican first learned of the allegations against Murphy in a July 1996 letter from Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland. Murphy, who died in 1998, is accused of sexually abusing some 200 boys at the school in the state of Wisconsin from 1950 to 1974. His case drew renewed scrutiny after the recent release of documents suggesting that a Vatican office led by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — now the Pope — failed to aggressively discipline Murphy.

The U.S. military launched the mysterious X-37B unmanned winged spacecraft last night - but what America plans to do with it there is anyone's guess. The mission has been wrapped in secrecy from the get-go. The Air Force said the launch was a success but would give no details of the mission's progress.