The five permanent members of the UN Security Council have said they are committed to making the Middle East a nuclear weapons-free zone – a move which would ultimately force Israel to scrap any nuclear weapons it has. In a statement in New York on Wednesday, China, France, Russia, the US and UK reaffirmed their backing for a 1995 resolution on the issue. The backing from the so-called P5 members of the Security Council - all of them states with nuclear weapons - came as the UN hosts a conference aimed at strengthening the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). My Catbird Seat: Words of wisdom: Mohammed ElBaradei on the Iranian nuclear issue.

GREAT HUMOR FROM IRAN: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's President, has denied reports that Osama bin Laden is in Tehran and insisted that the al-Qaeda leader is, in fact, in the US capital of Washington. "Rest assured that he's in Washington. I think there's a high chance he's there," the Iranian leader told ABC television in an interview. Without backing up the claim, the Iranian leader said he had "heard" that bin Laden was in the US capital. "Yes, I did. He's there. Because he was a previous partner of Mr. Bush," he said referring to former President George W. Bush. "They were colleagues, in fact, in the old days. You know that. They were in the oil business together. They worked together. Mr bin Laden never co-operated with Iran but he co-operated with Mr. Bush," Mr Ahmadinejad said. He added that, at any rate, US officials ought to know the extremist Islamic leaders whereabouts. AWIP: Ahmadinejad's take on ties with US (Video). + Usama Bin Laden Is Living Comfortably in Iran, "Documentary" Asserts.

Voters in the United Kingdom are casting their ballots in a general election, in what opinion polls have suggested will be one of the closest races in recent years. Voting began at 06:00 GMT on Thursday and exit polls likely to be broadcast immediately after polling stations close at 21:00 GMT will give the first indication of the outcome. Opinion polls during the campaign indicated that the opposition Conservatives, led by David Cameron, had a slight advantage over the ruling Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats. WSWS: Today’s general election in Britain [is] a political fraud.

British Petroleum's (BP's) Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling site is near a circulating current in the Gulf of Mexico called the Loop Current. There are strong indications from scientific observations and tracking of the oil leak (both the surface slick and oil rising from the seabed) that the oil from the well blowout will enter the Gulf Stream in the next few days via the Loop Current. How and why this can happen is described in a short video produced by The University of South Florida College of Marine Science Ocean Circulation Group (OCG/CMS/USF) showing the affecting Gulf currents and the trajectory of the oil: ( animation here ) PressTV: BP cautions against bid to stop oil leak. Consortium News: BP Flouted US Safety Rules.

WSWS: Obama sheltered BP's Deepwater Horizon rig from regulatory requirement. Last year the Obama administration granted oil giant BP a special exemption from a legal requirement that it produce a detailed environmental impact study on the possible effects of its Deepwater Horizon drilling operation in the Gulf of Mexico, an article Wednesday in the Washington Post reveals.

Federal documents show that the Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service (MMS) gave BP a "categorical exclusion" on April 6, 2009 to commence drilling with Deepwater Horizon even though it had not produced the impact study required by a law known as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The report would have included probable ecological consequences in the event of a spill.

As the oil continues to spew forth from a hole in the ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico, Americans have turned their shock into a renewed call for energy and climate legislation. Majority Leader Harry Reid has said the BP offshore oil spill should accelerate the passage of new energy policy. To that end, Senator Reid has stated, "We have to take care of this issue. Alternative energy is what we need to move to as rapidly as we can." Reid has also announced that he will move forward on energy and climate legislation before tackling immigration -- an issue many feared would put an energy bill on the back-burner again.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says countries that possess nuclear weapons cannot pass judgment on Tehran's nuclear program. "The fact that some nuclear-armed countries seek to stop Iran's peaceful nuclear program violates the NPT and international law. They cannot deprive Iran of its legal rights through threats or pressure," Ahmadinejad told ABC on Wednesday on the sidelines of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference, which is currently underway in New York. He said that it is "discriminatory" to allow a country to manufacture nuclear weapons while other nations are denied the right to use nuclear technology meant for peaceful purposes. The NPT requires all nuclear weapons states to dismantle their nuclear weapons, so everyone is wondering why these weapons have not been eradicated, Ahmadinejad noted.

[Right on the heels of the false flag Times Square incident involving a Pakistani "suspect", the CIA now gets the git-go to assassinate anyone, anywhere in Pakistan, no holds barred:] The CIA has received authorization to target a wider range of targets in Pakistan by its drone-guided missiles, despite national discontent on growing civilian death toll. The US will expand its drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal regions, including low-level fighters whose identities may not be known, US officials said Wednesday, quoted in a Reuters report. The report says the targets include what has been described as 'all militants'. The US drone strikes began to expand under former President George Bush and have further intensified under President Barack Obama. AntiWar: US [says it] Sees NY Attack as Pakistani Taliban Retaliation for Drone Strikes. CBS News: Pakistan Taliban: Faisal Shahzad Not One of Us.

[Editor's Comment:]"Washington claims the strikes are vital in protecting foreign troops in the region and that the targets are selected with "extreme care"." -Not so. The best protection for the troops is to pull out and go home. Simple as that. Moreover, these killings usually are indiscriminate and they are indiscriminate for a reason: they're meant to spread fear and to induce submission. This is state terrorism. -So they're not being selected with "extreme care", hardly any care at all in fact.

But that's not our main point. It is important to understand, like our readers already do, that the US has no right whatever to attack Pakistan in the first place. These assassinations also are totally illegitimate. They are crimes. -War crimes in an undeclared and unprovoked war against Pakistan. We do believe however that the US government shall have to answer for this someday. What goes around comes around. -It is good that it is so.

Critics are accusing the Harper government of ideologically driven intimidation for cutting funding to women's groups even as it prepares to champion maternal health at next month's G8 Summit. The Conservatives have axed funding for up to 14 women's groups in the past two weeks. News of the cuts surfaced a day after Tory Senator Nancy Ruth warned aid groups that they risk a backlash from the government if they don't "shut the fuck up" on the government's refusal to include abortion in the G8 plan.

Our research findings challenge the basic assumptions of the State Department's Fifth U.S. Climate Action Report (CAR 2010). The alarming forecasts of dangerous manmade global warming are not the product of proper scientific evidence-based forecasting methods. Furthermore, there have been no validation studies to support a belief that the forecasting procedures used were nevertheless appropriate for the situation. As a consequence, alarming forecasts of global warming are merely the opinions of some scientists and, for a situation as complicated and poorly understood as global climate, such opinions are unlikely to be as accurate as forecasts that global temperatures will remain much the same as they have been over recent years. Using proper forecasting procedures we predict that the global warming alarm will prove false and that government actions in response to the alarm will be shown to have been harmful.

Police raid family home in Columbia, MO. Shoot two dogs as 7 year old child watches. Find small amount of marijuana and charge parents with "child endangerment". This video shows a search warrant served by the Columbia Mo. police department. The cops bust in this guys house in the middle of the night and shoot his two dogs (one a pit bull that was caged in the kitchen and the other a Corgi) with children in the home. it turns out that rather than a big time drug dealer, this guy had a small pipe with some resin in it, a grinder, and what the cops here call "a small amount of marijuana" (meaning less than a few grams). We here in Comlumbia want everyone to know what kind of police department we have here, check out our "finest" in action.

[The video] is horrifying, but I’d urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years—cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime. Video of SWAT Raid on Missouri Family

Interrogators had free hand to terrify detainees, Khadr hearing told --'We could do basically anything to scare the prisoners,' former interrogator - nicknamed 'Monster' - says 05 May 2010 Military interrogators at Bagram prison were under enormous pressure to extract information from detainees and had a free hand to terrify detainees into confessing, a Damien Corsetti, a former interrogator who knew Omar Khadr said Wednesday. "We could do basically anything to scare the prisoners," he said... Mr. Corsetti, a huge man nicknamed 'Monster' at Bagram was the first witness called by Mr. Khadr’s defence team at the pre-trial hearings. Mr. Khadr, now 23, was a 15-year-old when he was captured after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002 in which a U.S. special forces solider was killed. AWIP/Chris Floyd: It's Not Dark Yet, But It's Gettin' There.

The poster says: "Tonight fascism will die".

They've emptied their bank accounts, abandoned vacations and started taking the bus. Now, they fear for their jobs: The Greeks bemoan the difficult crisis that has taken over their country. Above all, they feel humiliated by Germany. Although the EU and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have agreed to float Greece a €110 billion ($145 billion) loan over the next three years so the country can avoid bankruptcy, feelings of self-worth among the Greeks have fallen precipitously. In particular, Greeks were appalled by Merkel's stalling and reluctance prior to the bailout agreement reached last weekend.

Many Greeks are worried that things might get a lot worse. For a while now, they haven't placed any trust in the banks, either. In recent months, businesses and private individuals have withdrawn roughly €10 billion from Greek banks, preferring to either hide their money at home or transfer it to foreign banks. What angers [many] is that Greek citizens now have to take the fall for the false deficit statistics fabricated by the previous government. BBC: Merkel in March: Greece has not asked for financial support and the stability of the eurozone is "assured".

Citizens For Legitimate Government: Bring Greece Here! -Sick of bailouts, corporaterrorist trolls, Wall Street casinos, banking maggots and politicians who are hand-maidens of same? We need *vigorous,* active protests *here* in the US! Why aren't US citizens 'taking it to the streets,' as they are in Athens? We, too, will not continue to be cowed by these corporate dirt-bags and their political puppets! Let's bring Greece here!

According to a May 3, 2010, online report from People magazine, country singer Chely Wright, on the eve of releasing her new album and memoir, has revealed she's gay. Named Best New Female Vocalist in 1995 at the ACM Awards, Wright, 39, reportedly shares the news in more detail in this Friday's print edition of the magazine. However, per People's teaser report via the Web, the Kansas City, Mo., native said she hid her sexual orientation, because the country music community isn't accepting of such realities.