This depression is similar to the Great Panic of 1873; The US and Europe are heading towards deflation, tens of millions will never work again. "It is the victory of an orthodoxy [..] whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times. Recessions are common; depressions are rare. As far as I can tell, there were only two eras in economic history that were widely described as “depressions” at the time: the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of 1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of 1929-31. Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses. We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression.

NATO Insists All Slain Were 'Insurgents' NATO forces issued another of their usual “successful raid” reports last night, saying that a pre-dawn raid on Monday left eight insurgents, including “a Taliban commander” killed in an attack on two compounds in Kandahar City. The deputy provincial police chief, Mohammad Shah Farooqi, tells a far different story, however, saying that NATO forces raided a pair of homes in the major southern city and that there was no evidence at all that any of the eight slain were involved in any “anti-government activities.” The Hindu: Police official says eight Afghan civilians killed in NATO raid. PressTV: US-led forces kill 8 Afghan civilians.

Airport body scanners emit radiation up to 20 times more powerful than previously thought, a scientist has warned. Dr David Brenner, head of the centre for radiological research at Columbia University in New York, said Government scientists had not taken into account the concentration of the radiation on the skin. He said it raised concerns about a potentially greater risk of cancer than previously realised. Dr Brenner, who is from Liverpool, said children and passengers with genetic mutations - around one in 20 of the population - were most at risk because they are less able to repair X-ray damage to their cells.

Europe has signed a deal to hand over all bank transaction data to the US in order to help the ongoing war on terrorism YOU. The SWIFT agreement was signed yesterday in Brussels by Spanish minister for home affairs Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba and the US embassy's economic economic officer to the EU, Michael Dodman. Rubalcaba welcomed the "excellent agreement", which he said had been reached after discussions with the European Parliament. The treaty must now be approved by the European Parliament. Assuming it does pass it will be in force for five years. IT gives the US Treasury access to bank transactions although there is now some filtering at the European end. The agreement will be overseen by Europol. The Swift agreement was first approved in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. It lapsed in February after the European Parliament rejected an earlier draft.

Just before sunset on April 10, 2006, a DC-9 jet landed at the international airport in the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, 500 miles east of Mexico City. As soldiers on the ground approached the plane, the crew tried to shoo them away, saying there was a dangerous oil leak. So the troops grew suspicious and searched the jet. They found 128 black suitcases, packed with 5.7 tons of cocaine, valued at $100 million. The stash was supposed to have been delivered from Caracas to drug traffickers in Toluca, near Mexico City, Mexican prosecutors later found. Law enforcement officials also discovered something else. The smugglers had bought the DC-9 with laundered funds they transferred through two of the biggest banks in the U.S.: Wachovia Corp. and Bank of America Corp., Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its August 2010 issue.

By failing to distinguish between a boycott of settlements and that of Israel itself, the initiators of the bill are demonstrating that they are not "protectors of Israel" but promoters of a "Greater Israel". A new "anti-boycott bill", the third in a series of proposed laws that aim to curtail the ability of civil society to criticise Israeli government policy, will punish Israelis or foreign nationals who initiate or promote a boycott of Israel. The bill not only prohibits boycotts of legal Israeli institutions, but also of settlement activities and products. It seeks to impose fines on Israelis who "promote boycotts" and transfer the fines to boycotted organisations. It will impose a 10-year entry ban on foreign residents engaging in boycotts, and forbid them to carry out any economic activities in Israel.

Bethlehem - Ma'an - The Turkish humanitarian group IHH has released an assessment of the flotilla mission last month in which nine activists died when Israeli forces raided the vessel in international waters. "This operation was hostile from the very beginning, directed towards killing and killing as many as possible. Israeli soldiers did not open fire on the ships as a warning. They opened fire to kill," the report stated. Israel listed IHH as a terrorist organization shortly following the raid on 31 May. Eurasia Review: Israeli Investigation Of Gaza Flotilla In Disarray.

Petraeus received fawning praise from Democratic and Republican senators alike. He was rapidly confirmed by the Armed Services Committee Tuesday afternoon and is expected to be confirmed by the full Senate on Wednesday. In the week since the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his replacement by Petraeus, it has become clear that the shift in command is bound up with a decision to significantly step up the killing and wounding of Afghan civilians in an effort to crush the massive popular support for anti-US insurgents.

Venezuela's legislature has voted to nationalize 11 oil rigs owned by the US firm Helmerich & Payne. The rigs, located in Monagas, Anzoategui and Zulia states, will be taken over by state oil giant Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the official news agency AVN said. PDVSA had asked the legislature controlled by supporters of leftist President Hugo Chavez to take over the rigs after the US firm declined to negotiate a new service contract, unlike 32 other foreign firms. The oil giant is South America's top oil producer. Since 2007 Caracas has nationalized companies in industries from oil to utilities, to telecoms, cement, steel and banking.

We’ve been busy. Yesterday, Braden was rounded up at Queen and Spadina along with hundreds of other people, and I was detained and searched by police. My camera gear is damaged after the police left it sitting in the rain while they searched me. We have piles of photos, audio, and video to sort through, and we’ll be posting it all here in the next couple of days. I also have more information to go along with my photos, including notes and recorded interviews. Be sure to check back soon. In the meantime, here are some more shots from yesterday. You Tube: Police open fire on peaceful protesters at G20 (with rubber bullets)

WSWS: The mass repression at the G20 summit in Toronto. The violence and repression carried out this past weekend by the authorities in Toronto, where the G20 summit was taking place, was worthy of a police state. An army of security officers, both in uniform and undercover, took over the downtown portion of Toronto, a major world city, creating conditions of “martial law,” in the words of a columnist for the right-wing Toronto Sun. The police operation was used to violently repress an overwhelmingly peaceful protest by thousands of people opposed to the policies of the governments represented at the summit. Even prior to the demonstration, police preemptively arrested alleged leaders of the protest. The massive state operation was a brazen assault on basic free speech and assembly rights.

UN human rights rapporteur says forcible transfer of four Palestinians from East Jerusalem would break international law. Israel's intention to expel four Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem to the West Bank could constitute a war crime, a UN human rights expert charged on Tuesday. Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, said the move was part of a Israeli push to remove Palestinians from East Jerusalem. Falk also criticized Israel's plan to demolish some 20 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, calling it illegal and saying it reflected its systematic bid to drive Palestinians out of the holy city.

The demographic crisis which imperils Europe’s future also threatens the United States of America, a fact illustrated by this week’s news that European Americans will become a minority among newborn children in that nation next year. The US Census Bureau’s (USCB) latest report announced that non-white births accounted for 48.6 percent of the children born in America between July 2008 and July 2009, gaining ground from 46.8 percent two years earlier. This trajectory means that non-white births will pass European-American births within the next year. In addition, the median age of the white population is older than that of non-whites. This means that a larger number of non-white immigrant women are of childbearing age, a situation aggravated by the fact that Third World populations tend to have much higher reproduction rates than Europeans.

Chomsky On Israeli Criminal Aggression: Hijacking boats in international waters and killing passengers is, of course, a serious crime. The editors of the London Guardian are quite right to say that "If an armed group of Somali pirates had yesterday boarded six vessels on the high seas, killing at least 10 passengers and injuring many more, a NATO taskforce would today be heading for the Somali coast." It is worth bearing in mind that the crime is nothing new. For decades, Israel has been hijacking boats in international waters between Cyprus and Lebanon, killing or kidnapping passengers, sometimes bringing them to prisons in Israel including secret prison/torture chambers, sometimes holding them as hostages for many years. Israel assumes that it can carry out such crimes with impunity because the US tolerates them and Europe generally follows the US lead. Much the same is true of Israel's pretext for its latest crime: that the Freedom Flotilla was bringing materials that could be used for bunkers for rockets. Putting aside the absurdity, if Israel were interested in stopping Hamas rockets it knows exactly how to proceed: accept Hamas offers for a cease-fire.

In June 2008, Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement. The Israeli government formally acknowledges that until Israel broke the agreeement on November 4, invading Gaza and killing half a dozen Hamas activists, Hamas did not fire a single rocket. Hamas offered to renew the cease-fire. The Israeli cabinet considered the offer and rejected it, preferring to launch its murderous and destructive Operation Cast Lead on December 27. Evidently, there is no justification for the use of force "in self-defense" unless peaceful means have been exhausted. In this case they were not even tried, although — or perhaps because—there was every reason to suppose that they would succeed. Operation Cast Lead is therefore sheer criminal aggression, with no credible pretext, and the same is true of Israel's current resort to force. The siege of Gaza itself does not have the slightest credible pretext. It was imposed by the US and Israel in January 2006 to punish Palestinians because they voted "the wrong way" in a free election, and it was sharply intensified in July 2007 when Hamas blocked a US-Israeli attempt to overthrow the elected government in a military coup, installing Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan. The siege is savage and cruel, designed to keep the caged animals barely alive so as to fend off international protest, but hardly more than that. It is the latest stage of long-standing Israeli plans, backed by the US, to separate Gaza from the West Bank. These are only the bare outlines of very ugly policies, in which Egypt is complicit as well.

The official story of Dr David Kelly is that he took his own life in an Oxfordshire wood by overdosing on painkillers and cutting his left wrist with a pruning knife. He was said to be devastated after being unmasked as the source of the BBC’s claim that the Government had ‘sexed up’ the case for war in Iraq. A subsequent official inquiry led by Lord Hutton into the circumstances leading to the death came to the unequivocal conclusion that Kelly committed suicide. Yet suspicions of foul play still hang heavy over the death of the weapons expert whose body was found seven years ago next month in one of the most notorious episodes of Tony Blair’s premiership.

Official documents point the finger at the US and 14 other European countries for equipping former Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons, says a top Iranian official. Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council Saeid Jalili said those weapons were used by the former Baghdad regime, including in the 1987 gas attack on the northwestern Iranian city of Sardasht and in another chemical strike on the northern Iraqi city of Halabcha in 1988. Referring to Saddam Hussein's repeated use of chemical arms against Iran during his eight-year imposed war on the Islamic Republic in the 80's, the senior official underscored the international community should call for the United States together with the 14 European governments to stand trial for supplying chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein. Jalili was speaking at a conference in Tehran on Tuesday June 29, marking the day, 23 years ago, when the former Iraqi regime launched a deadly gas attack on the northwestern Iranian city of Sardasht. Many of the survivors are still suffering from very serious health conditions, including severe respiratory problems and skin disorders.

Police officers stopped a teenage photographer from taking pictures of an Armed Forces Day parade - and then claimed they did not need a law to detain him. Jules Mattsson, a 16-year-old freelancer from Hackney, east London, was photographing police cadets on Saturday when he was ordered to stop and give his personal details by an adult cadet officer who claimed he needed parental permission to capture images of the cadets. After arguing his rights in a series of protracted legal debates with officers, the sixth former says he was pushed down a set of stairs and detained for breaching the peace until the parade passed. He is now considering taking legal action against the Met which has often been criticised for its heavy handed approach towards photographers in the capital.

Police officers in Chechnya have been firing paintballs at Chechen women with uncovered hair; the policemen drive by in cars with tinted windows and shoot the women in the face and neck as they're walking down the street. Following the initial attacks last week, fliers from the shooters appeared in the Chechen city of Gudermes warning that if women didn't cover themselves the paintballers would resort to "tougher measures." The fliers also admonished, "Isn't it nasty for you, while dressed defiantly, with your head uncovered, to hear various obscene 'compliments' and proposals? Think again!" This infuriating and degrading development — shooting women with paint?! — is one result of Russia's cold bargain with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a Chechen rebel-turned-Kremlin-loyalist. Trying to maintain control over Chechnya and quash any separatist uprisings, Russia has essentially allowed Kadryov to run the Chechen republic according to his version of Islamic law.

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt — The photographs have spread online and in the press: a before-and-after montage showing a handsome young man smiling in a gray hoodie on one side and a battered and bloodied corpse on the other. His eyes are rolled back in his head, mouth agape and his lower lip ripped half off his face. His name was Khaled Said, age 28. His murder on June 6 — allegedly at the hands of undercover police — is causing a political uproar that has brought thousands into the streets here in recent weeks to demand justice for the man now known as “the emergency law martyr.” His death is Egypt’s latest — and largest — rallying cry for critics of 82-year-old President Hosni Mubarak, the country’s feared security services and the state of emergency that has granted both near limitless power since 1981.

With Gen. Stanley McChrystal now just a memory and General David Petraeus looking to continue roughly the same strategy in Afghanistan, the upcoming vote on $33 billion in emergency funding for the war has put a renewed focus on the July 2011 drawdown date. For the Obama Administration, it is a date they would just as soon forget, and a promise, though only a few months old, they wish they hadn’t made. The war is going even worse now than it was a year ago, and there is little hope for the immediate or even long-term future, though officials maintain they intend to stay in the nation until some ill-defined victory is achieved.

[Editor's Comment:] Afghanistan is not a country. It is a conglomerate of tribes since time immemorial and will continue to be so, well beyond the foreseeable future. The masters of war probably knew this much even before they attacked this godforsaken territory. We don't think this "war" was meant to be "winnable". Nor is it a problem for the occupying power that it at some point could be considered to be "lost". It was neither meant to be won or lost. Whatever we want to call this "war", it fundamentally was meant to be an occupation, an endless one at that. -That is, it was, and still is, meant to last until all the resources have been looted and until the territory has outlived its strategic usefulness to the people who started it. There will be no withdrawal until then. The occupation will undoubtedly outlast us all. There will be no peace in Afghanistan in our lifetime(s).

When Elena Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School, her mishandling of a plagiarism case cost an innocent person his job while allowing the plagiarist, Professor Alan Dershowitz, to escape punishment. Dershowitz has said that when Kagan was dean “it was a golden age” and “a very good time for the faculty.” The Senate and the public deserve to know about the dark side of that “golden age.” In 2003, an untenured professor at DePaul University named Norman Finkelstein accused Dershowitz of plagiarism. Dean Kagan ordered an investigation the following year. The investigation completely cleared Dershowitz, concluding that no plagiarism had occurred. You Tube: Kagan: its Fine if The Law Bans Books Because Government Won't Really Enforce It. [Please also check out the comments to this video -they're interesting.]

Officials say that Netanyahu is refusing to seriously address a number of core issues, allowing the already slow-moving talks to turn into a glacial paced act of futility. The potential borders of a future Palestinian state have been one matter Netanyahu has refused to touch. Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren has conceded that tensions with the US have “gone beyond a crisis that eventually passes” and says that the two nations are increasingly “drifting apart.” It seems as these tensions rise the prospect of the US-brokered peace talks going anywhere are looking increasingly remote.

MP Jamal Al-Khudari, the head of the popular committee against the siege, has said that the Israeli occupation authority (IOA) was still barring the entry of 3500 commodities into the Gaza Strip. He said in a report published on Sunday that the IOA allowed only 10% of goods that were previously banned from entering Gaza, describing the IOA talk about easing the siege as mere propaganda and means to deceive the world and is contrary to what is happening on the ground. The lawmaker noted that in the first week the IOA opened two commercial crossings out of four, which were all completely closed, then it opened one crossing for a couple of days while the fourth was only partially opened. There is no real end to the siege without opening all commercial crossings on permanent basis, allowing influx of all types of goods, opening a safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank, and finally allowing a sea route between Gaza and the outside world under European supervision, Khudari elaborated. AWIP/Jonathan Cook: “Let them eat coriander!” Blockade “eased” as Gaza starves more slowly.

7,300 Palestinians, including 17 legislators and two former ministers, are currently detained in about 20 Israeli prisons, a report says. Hundreds of them have never been charged [by the Zionists' cangaroo courts] or put on trial. Among the detained are 33 women, nearly 300 children, 296 administrative detainees, and dozens of political leaders, Palestinian researcher Abdul Nasser Farawna said in a report issued on Monday. Farawana, who specializes in detainee affairs, said that 1,500 of them are ill and need urgent medical attention and dozens need surgeries and hospitalization, but no action has been taken by the Israeli authorities. The detainees are held in about twenty prisons and detention and interrogation centers, mainly in Ramon, Shatta, Galboa, Asqalan, Hadarim, Al-Damoun, Be'er Sheva, Ofer, Majoddo, and the Negev detention camp, he added. He went on to say that 83 percent of the detainees are from the West Bank, 10.6 percent are from Gaza, while the rest are Arab residents of Israel and other Arab nationals. [Learn Peace: The fourth Geneva Convention ("Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War") covers all individuals "who do not belong to the armed forces, take no part in the hostilities and find themselves in the hands of the Enemy or an Occupying Power".]

Around 950 people have been killed in more than 100 CIA drone strikes in Pakistan since August 2008. Missiles fired by a US drone have killed at least six people in Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt where pro-Taliban militants mujahideens are believed to be holed up. CIA-operated drones on Tuesday struck a compound in Karikot village which allegedly belonged to a militant commander, AFP quoted a senior Pakistani security official as saying on condition of anonymity. The missiles landed about 10 kilometers (six miles) southwest of Wana, the main town in the troubled South Waziristan district. "Six militants have died in the attack and at least two were wounded," the official said, adding that the attack had destroyed the building believed to be owned by militant leader Maulana Halimullah. Officials in Wana also confirmed the attack, but said the death toll might rise. 27 Jun 2010 : AWIP: US drone strike kills 6 in Pakistan

PressTV: US drone strike leaves 6 dead US drones have shelled a house allegedly owned by militants in North Waziristan, killing six in the latest attack on Pakistan's tribal areas. The attack took place in Khel village, some 25 kilometers west of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan, AFP quoted Pakistani officials as saying. The officials said "suspected" Afghan warlord Hafiz Gul Bahadur, who is believed to have led up to 2,000 fighters in attacks against US-led forces over the border in Afghanistan, had allegedly rented the compound. "Two US drones fired four missiles, we have reports that six militants civilians have been killed," a senior security official collaborator in Peshawar said.

[April 24, 2010:] AWIP: US drone kills seven PEOPLE in NW Pakistan: security officials:

A US drone fired three missiles into a militant compound in Pakistan's tribal area near the Afghan border on Saturday, killing seven militants people, security officials said. The strike took place at 9:00 pm (1600 GMT) in Marsikhel area, 20 kilometres (12 miles) east of Miranshah, the main town of North Waziristan, which is known as a hub for Taliban and Al-Qaeda linked militants [Justification post factum for state terrorism.] The nationalities of the seven dead were not immediately clear, a senior Pakistani security official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

STATE TERROR: US drone attack kills 5 PEOPLE in Pakistan: At least five people have been killed in a US drone attack in the troubled North Waziristan tribal region of Pakistan on the Afghan border. Several more people were injured when two missiles hit a nearby compound in Boya village, located about 20 kilometers (12 miles) west of Miranshah. Since last year, the US has carried out many such attacks on Pakistan's tribal areas. Washington claims its airstrikes target militants. Most of the attacks, however, have killed civilians. AWIP: 11th Drone Strike of 2010: Latest US Attack Kills Six in North Waziristan: AFP: 11 killed in US missile strikes in NW Pakistan: officials. AntiWar: US Drone Fired Missile Into a Crowd of "Suspects," Killing 13 Afghans. TANSW: Pakistan Taliban deny US drone strike killed top leader. [This comes on top of this] Nobel Peace Prize winner Kills at Least 15 in North Waziristan [and this] Civilians Slain as Latest US Drone Strike on North Waziristan, Kills Five [and this] US Drones Kill 12 in North Waziristan: Third TERROR Strike in 24 Hours in Tribal Area [and this] U.S. Drones Kill 15 People Near Border in Pakistan [and summing up all of 2009, this:] 44 US drone hits in Pakistan killed 700 civilians in 2009. + AWIP: No assent given to US drone attacks: Pakistan. The Guardian: The 'Obama doctrine': kill, don't detain -George Bush left a big problem in the shape of Guantánamo. The solution? Don't capture bad guys, assassinate by drone. PressTV: Suspected US drone strikes kill eight in north-west Pakistan. PressTV: In Pakistan, death toll from US drone attack hits 8 Yahoo: US drone kills seven PEOPLE in NW Pakistan: security officials.